Feeling brown, being down. Feeling down, being brown. As we understand it, brown indexes operations of law, affect, sexuality, relation, empire(s), capital. Brown can function as an accusation or a convenience. Brown can name shades and fantasy. This proposed seminar considers when brown as an analytic becomes useful and may be used to do the work of relation, inquiry, theory—and when brown does not work.

This new edited volume ( a companion to WOKE SHAKESPEARE) aims to explore some of the most recent conversations about teaching and performing Shakespeare in the age of woke cultural politics and social justice. In the context of media hostility and panic, what are the challenges faced by new audiences and learners? How should Shakespeare be positioned in the twenty-first century cultural landscape? Is it still possible to have a civilized conversation about Shakespearean scholarship, pedagogy and performance?

Shakespeare’s plays have never been far from political and cultural controversy. Today, Shakespeare still sits at the centre of the cultural establishment. However, this canonical status is under renewed attack from critics and detractors.

Building on conversations and topic connections from the 2023 Convention, this panel invokes the 2024 conference theme surplus in regards to witches and depictions of the occult. All too often, witches were history’s unwanted women, defying cultural and social norms in ways that were determined to be in excess of what was conventional. What does it mean that these narratives of witches, both real and fictional, have been told and retold such that the witch is now a near constant presence in popular culture, literature, museums, and local histories? Does this exposure enhance what we know about witches in society and their histories or futures, or does this exposure complicate and possibly dilute their historical, social, or gendered power?

Deleuze notes in Negotiations that he did not have the chance to write “the book [he’d] like to have done about literature” (143) as he had done for other artforms like cinema and painting. Following Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of great thinkers who “lay out a new plane of immanence” and “draw up a new image of thought” to “change how we think” (What Is Philosophy 51), this seminar takes up Deleuze’s desire for new images of thought focused explicitly on literature. This seminar invites participants to consider the relation between Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy and commentary on art (e.g., painting, cinema, and literature) and a variety of literary writers to establish new ways of thinking and navigating within literature.

Call for Papers for volume 16, n° 1(33)/ 2024: Digital Methods and Fields: Feminist Perspectives

Guest editors:

Audrey BANEYX, Research Engineer, Médialab, Sciences Po, France, audrey.baneyx@sciencespo.fr 

Hélène BOURDELOIE, Associate professor, CIS (CNRS) & LabSIC, Université Sorbonne Paris Nord, France, Helene.Bourdeloie@univ-Paris13.fr 

Mélanie LALLET, Associate professor, UCO Nantes, Arènes, CHUS & Irméccen, France, melanie.lallet@yahoo.fr

Any philosophical consideration of the current zeitgeist requires an assessment of the quasi-object ( Latour 1993) constellation of Artificial Intelligence and its affordances without giving in to either knee-jerk optimism or unchanneled pessimism. For if doomsday was indeed near (as social media discourses want us to believe), and human labour progressively redundant to the machinations of human-made artificial intelligence, what is the limit case scenario, which makes such a provocation real, tangible and material beyond fatalistic projections of obsolescence? How does that reconfigure the idea of the Human as both the object and subject of cybernetic capital?

Novels and literary works that adapt Classical figures and text continue to be very popular, such as Natalie Haynes’s A Thousand Ships, Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls and The Women of Troy, Madeline Miller’s Circe, Ali Smith’s Girl Meets Boy, and others demonstrate. Many of these retellings focus on Classical women, putting these characters at the center of the narratives. These relatively recent works show one way in which the Classical tradition can still be relevant, especially as it adapts to and includes new histories, viewpoints, and situations.

The Mystery & Detective Fiction Area of the Popular Culture Association invites proposals for our annual conference to be held March 27-30, 2024, in Chicago, Illinois.

ACLA Annual Conference, March 14-17 2024, Montreal, Quebec

Guest Editors: Susannah B. Mintz (Skidmore College) and Mark Osteen (Loyola University Maryland)

I am inviting abstracts for the Northeast MLA conference to be held in Boson from March 7-10, 2024. 

Call for Papers: Citizenship Teaching & Learning 

Special Issue: 'Citizenship Education and Social Action: Towards Emancipatory Education’

Guest Editors:

Vanja Lozic (vanja.lozic@mau.se)

Saila Poulter (saila.poulter@helsinki.fi)

Deadline for online abstract submissions: 31 December 2023

Notification by: 31 January 2023

Article publication: July 2025

View the full call here>>

Well, children, where there is so much racket there must be something out of kilter. I think that 'twixt the negroes of the South and the women at the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what's all this here talking about?

Through the centuries, humans have often shaped their social life by fictional moments and by taking part in fictional events: carnivals, representations, role plays, society plays, structured and semi-structured collective and singular moments where strictly coded contexts organize specific worlds and cultural dimensions. Play, in its wide acception and in its nature of artificial and coded mechanism, reflects historically the symbolic work by which human societies have elaborated, explained and organized the world.