Writers inherit much from their families: stories, material wealth, trauma, discipline, genetic traits, knowledge, and other legacies. What do we do with this heritage and how do we make it our own in our original creative productions? Will the legacy become a heirloom seed that produces exquisite blooms or a hereditary disorder that wilts inspiration on the vine? Bestselling memoirists Mary Karr, Sherman Alexie, Ocean Vuong, and many others have famously shaped family trauma into achingly poignant works of art, begging us to ask if such pain is a necessary ingredient of their success.

CALL FOR APPLICATIONS

The Bibliographical Society of America’s New Scholars Program promotes the work of scholars new to bibliography, broadly defined to include the creation, production, publication, distribution, reception, transmission, and subsequent history of all textual artifacts. This includes manuscript, print, and digital media, from clay and stone to laptops and iPads. 

The New Scholars award is $1,000, with a $500 travel stipend. Three awards are made each year as part of a two-pronged program:

1.     New Scholars present fifteen-minute talks on their current, unpublished bibliographical research during a program preceding the Society’s Annual Meeting, held each January.

Girl, Interrupted. Crank. Thirteen Reasons Why. Wintergirls. It’s Kind of a Funny Story. Turtles All the Way Down. Amidst a preponderance of "mental illness novels" marketed toward a young-adult audience, we are left wondering: where's the Madness?

With multiple college and secondary foreign language programs closed or downsized in recent years, many educators have come to see explicit advocacy strategies and community outreach initiatives as indispensable components of their professional lives that will keep their programs alive. One such strategy is building reliable student pipelines all through K-16 levels.

Partnerships between colleges and schools have the potential to strengthen foreign language programs on both sides of the collaboration by

CFP: Queer and Femme Gazes in AfroAsian Visual Culture (edited volume)

 Rebecca Kumar and Seulghee Lee, eds.

2021 marks the 10th anniversary of Allison Hawthorne Deming and Lauret Savoy’s The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity, and the Natural World.  The essays that Deming and Savoy collect in this important anthology all seek to expand traditional understandings of nature writing and environmental thought by reflecting on “how identity and place, human history and ‘natural’ history, power and silence, and social injustice and environmental degradation are fundamentally linked” (10).

Trauma when remains unresolved can end up causing more harm than one can imagine. Trauma can be caused by the most insignificant of incidents that happen in a person’s life. But how far have we come in understanding the trope of trauma? How do we talk about it with proper sensitivity? How much do we push before a past trauma breaks us again? In these trying times when solidarity and care are the only ways to make the world a more humane space to sustain within, how shall we treat the trauma of our loved ones and fellow human beings? How do we realize that the shame associated with trauma is but extreme societal conditioning? How do we unlearn the social stigma related to trauma? How does trauma force us to alter our memories as a defense mechanism?

The 2016 Henry James Review forum issue (37.3) on “Illness, age, and death” brought into sharp focus, as Susan M. Griffin wrote in her introduction to the issue, that “Illness, age, and death preoccupy Henry James from the beginning to the end of his writing life” (205). At the same time, the prevalence of illness, age, and death shows that health and happiness held an important place in James’s life as well. His father’s theology framed human existence as “naturally bound to the pursuit of happiness,” as he wrote in Society the Redeemed Form of Man (207). Henry James’s physical ailments motivated him to seek healthy living habits, from horseback riding and spa treatments, to walking and bicycling, to Fletcherizing, for example.

PenumbraOnline Call for Reviews (Books, Films, Television, and Media)

Since 1989, Penumbra has published the artistic and literary talents of students and creatives regionally, nationally, and internationally. As a publication, Penumbra is unique; its student-led staff personally solicits, selects, and edits its content and design. PenumbraOnline.org, our online publication, is just as committed to receiving submissions from a diverse range of writers.

The ‘little apparatus’: 100 years of 9.5mm film

16, 17, 18 June 2022

University of Southampton

An international conference hosted in person and online by the Department of Film Studies’  ‘Centre For International Film Research’ at the University of Southampton.

How have British and American institutions shaped Anglophone literatures across the 20th and into the 21st centuries? In the decades accompanying decolonization, London and New York remain literary capitals by dint of their concentration of literary capital: the infrastructure of publishers and periodicals, agencies and awards that—staffed by professional readers—support (and distort) the creative act. Centers of cultural gravity, they continue to set standards and bestow prestige, offering more reliable access to readers and remuneration, acting on the materials of writers and manuscripts drawn from around the world.

53rd NeMLA Annual Convention - Baltimore, Maryland, 10-13 March, 2022

The theme of ghostliness is often present in modernist literature and boundaries between life and death are very often blurred. What can the recurrent invocation of spectrality say about modernism and modernists? How do modernist authors represent their characters who dwell a death in life (or a life in death)?

Submissions are invited for "Hunger & Thirst: Narrating Environmental Crisis through Food and Water," a panel session at the 2022 NEMLA conference. NEMLA will meet in Baltimore, MD on March 10-13, 2022. 

Session Description:

What is the approach of postcolonial women writers to issues of home and multiple belongings? How do they narrate the encounter with estrangement and familiarity?