Since antiquity, cities have been pivotal elements in collective and personal histories. As physical and imagined spaces, they have fostered narratives of grandeur and downfall, center and periphery, democracy and imperialism, temporality and spirituality.

The conception and depiction of the city have evolved across time and space, providing different models of social and cultural relations, influencing aesthetic conventions, and generating particular emotions and values, often in contrast with other geographic settings or forms of communal living.

Catherine Malabou places her signature concept of “plasticity” within the material encounters between the Kantian, Hegelian, and Derridean threads of the continental philosophical tradition and emerging developments in neuroscience, epigenesis, and political organization. Her recent work has demonstrated the relevance of these encounters to fields as diverse as trauma studies, gender and queer studies, hermeneutics, anarchism, postcolonialism, artificial intelligence, evolution, anthropogenic climate change, sexuality, and affect studies, to name just a few.

It is a commonly adopted procedure within postcolonial studies to situate literary objects of the colony in relation to the cultural heritage of the colonizer. Whether read under the “writing back” rubric, or as instances of “hybridity” and “creolization,” postcolonial texts are commonly conceived in terms of an exchange taking place between center and periphery. But recent work on “the global cold war” (Westad 2005) promises to overturn conventional protocol. As a result of this paradigm, we have begun to view the postwar years as characterized by a global contest between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

Hello from Nanditha Narayanamoorthy and Yvonne Eadon, postdoctoral research scholars from the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP) at UNC Chapel Hill. We are looking to convene a 6-paper panel for the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender & Queer Studies Interest Group at the International Communication Association (ICA) 2023 in Toronto. 

2023 marks the 400th anniversary of Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, known as the First Folio, published in 1623. It included 36 plays, some of which had not been published before. On the website of The Folger Shakespeare Library readers are invited to “learn more about Shakespeare’s language, life, and the world he knew,” suggesting that we might be able to unlock, or at least better understand, Shakespeare’s works by studying what he and his contemporaries not only read but also saw or heard.

Literature, art, and scholarship can challenge social structures that underpin injustice and create spaces where love and care can flourish. Yet they can also spectacularize, universalize, or appropriate lived experiences.

Following on our inaugural meeting in April 2022, we are thrilled to announce that the Anne Lister Society will reconvenefor its second conference, 31 Mar -- 1 Apr 2023, in Halifax, U.K.

Launched in the summer of 2020, the Society aims to foster knowledge of Lister’s extraordinary life and writings and to interpret her legacy. It seeks to nourish conversation among scholars and to build conversations between scholars and Lister’s wider readership and expanding network of invested enthusiasts. By encouraging research and greater understanding of her way of inhabiting the world, the Society aims to establish and sustain Anne Lister’s place — both in the cultural tradition and for the future.

CFP: Journal of Class & Culture special edition: Class and Contemporary UK Film and Television.

The Journal of Class & Culture is a peer-reviewed journal bringing a cultural dimension to the analysis of class, and a class optic to the understanding of culture. This special edition follows on from a conference in July and focusses on class and contemporary UK film and television. Papers are invited that explore the intersection of capital, contemporary UK film and tv, and class-orientated research within contexts of production, formal qualities, and consumption.

Boundaries and Margins in Fantasy 

10th - 12th May 2023

University of Glasgow Online Conference

The Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic is pleased to announce a call for papers for Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations (GIFCon) 2023 with the theme of 'Boundaries and Margins'. 

Carrie Paechter, in her article “Rethinking the possibilities for hegemonic femininity: Exploring a Gramscian framework” (2018)6, discusses the challenges and possibilities of conjuring a space where the discursive model of feminine essentialism can be better perceived as a binary opposite of hegemonic masculinity and patriarchal oppression. A few popular generic spaces within the mediascape, where machismo claims a front row within the psyche of the audience, have hitherto been dominated by male leads. Since the early 2000s, media representation has been witnessing a tangible shift with the emergence of female leads. The characters played by women started appearing more convincing.

Following a ceremony (winter 2021) in which Barbados officially removed Queen Elizabeth II as head of state, Prince William and Kate Middleton visited Jamaica. They were met with protestors calling for apologies and reparations from the British Crown. At least five other former British colonies besides Jamaica, including Belize, the Bahamas, Grenada, Antigua and Barbuda, and St. Kitts and Nevis have also indicated a desire to sever direct relationships with the British Monarchy. Considering 2023 marks the 210th anniversary of Edward Long’s death, the author of the famous three-volume History of Jamaica (1774), how might we read Long’s illustrated book when the British Caribbean seems less British?

This seminar asks, what knowledges are produced through scholarly, pedagogical, and creative engagements with electricity?

This panel aims to bring together the theoretical, methodological and political concerns of literary animal studies and postcolonial studies. As theoretical frameworks, the intersection of the two is not always free of contention. For instance, certain seminal postcolonial texts such as Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth have been noted to affirm a strongly humanist position in advancing the political project of reclaiming the humanity of the racialized, colonized subject. Nevertheless, the last decade has seen the growth of a significant body of work in literary studies and other disciplines that considers multispecies entanglements from postcolonial perspectives.

CFP: Spatial Innovations in Rhetoric and Writing (edited collection)