“Paper or plastic?” Sustainably sourced or affordably manufactured? Organic or GMO? Every day, consumers are faced with small decisions marketed to make a big impact. ​​Choosing either paper or plastic puts the onus onto the shoulders of the customer rather than acknowledging that regardless of whether or not you leave the store with a paper bag, it’s the planned obsolescence of what’s inside the bag that’s left unaddressed. Opting out of paper billing feels great, until you realize that the WiFi bill’s gone up and an electric bill leaves you contemplating if your LED bulbs are a sustainability placebo. 

Book Title: Pathographical Ecopoetics 

Editors: Jayjit Sarkar & Anik Sarkar

The proposed book looks for chapters exploring the contemporary Pulitzer Prize winning American women-authored plays and their engagement with post-millennial cultural dynamics. This volume / book wants to showcase women playwrights’ responses to and shaping the cultural landscape of American society of the 21st century. By examining themes, characters, narratives, and dramatic techniques, the chapters want to address a nuanced understanding of how American women drama reflects and challenges the complexities of changing times of the society.

Chapters proposals invited on the following plays and themes:

SCMLA – Fall 2024 

Hotel Monteleone

New Orleans

September 19-21, 2024

Proposal submissions for the Interdisciplinary Studies panel at South Central Modern Language Associations 81st Anniversary conference are currently being accepted. We encourage graduate students at the MA and PhD level to submit as well. A variety of approaches and topics may be submitted for this panel. 

The conference will be held in New Orleans, Lousisiana, at the Hotel Monteleone. Details can be found at https://www.southcentralmla.org/conference/

History is frequently at the heart of how people view themselves and others in modern culture. The construction of the self in political, social, religious, and other spheres often exhibits an “instrumental” use of history in Nietzsche’s terms (a category also taken up by others, notably Foucault, Trouillot, and, more recently, implicitly in Priya Satia in Time’s Monster). The past is not simply a narrative of meaning connecting causality, leading from former times to the present, but it is also a means of crafting and molding a particular moment. In other words, the present is in the past. Perceptions of history are finding footing in modern causes and are proving to be instrumental for predetermined ends. 

Devils and Justified Sinners

An online conference on 24th and 25th August 2024 to mark the 200th anniversary of the publication of James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

The conference is entirely online and is open to scholars and experts from around the world.

Date: June 19, 2024 

Location: online

The idea of “middle-ness” can suggest stability—the center of an object is less likely to break than its edges. It can also suggest the opposite: something in a state of change can be said to be in “the middle”—neither one thing nor another. Mythcon 53, located in the middle of the continental U.S., welcomes papers exploring the concept of “middle-ness” as it is worked out in fantasy, science fiction, and related genres. Paper topics can cover a wide range of possibilities, including but not limited to the following:

Dominant queer and trans studies frameworks still tend to see visibility as a ‘trap’. We invite 200-word abstracts for a special session to be proposed for the 2025 MLA convention that will offer a more complex picture, specifying and historicizing the changing meanings of visibility in queer and trans representation. Please send 200-word abstracts and short bio notes to Guy Davidson and Ben Nichols (guy@uow.edu.au, ben.nichols@manchester.ac.uk) by 18th March 2024.

This guaranteed panel brings the multitude of disabled characters in Dostoevsky's work -- including those with physical dis/abilities, chronic illnesses, emotional-cognitive differences, or the deaf, blind, or non-verbal -- into conversation with the growing fields of Disability Studies and Critical Medical Humanities within Slavic Studies. In light of the Presidential Theme of Visibility, we urge scholars to go beyond abstraction and metaphor, examining the political positions, socio-economic worldviews, and existential stakes that shaped how disability and the disabled were framed in Dostoevsky's oeuvre.

Dickens remains one of the most visible Anglophone authors, with his fiction adapted regularly for the stage and screen and frequently taught and discussed by scholars. His hypercanonicity has also inspired more diverse, ephemeral forms of engagement across a range of cultural contexts, from popular visual and material cultures, through to literary tourism and festivals, and on to the practices of collectors and fans in both analogue and online contexts. This session invites contributions that analyse an aspect or aspects of this vast and still relatively underexplored terrain.

Title: African Language, Literature, and Culture Since 1990: Exploring the Dynamic Role of AAVE

Abstract:

How are poets, novelists, filmmakers, and other artists reconfiguring the Western genre? How do 21st century Westerns challenge the genre's enduring exclusions and myths? What do indigenous, queer, feminist, Black, and Asian-American Westerns make visible?

Please send a 200-word proposals and brief bio

The MLA Language Change Forum is seeking papers that analyze any aspect of discourse and/or language change related to the rise of populism from any field or methodological approach, whether in the U.S. context or beyond. Please submit a 300-word abstract for consideration. 

 Conference Title: Modern Languages Association Annual Conference

Conference Dates: January 9-12, 2025

Conference Location: New Orleans, LA

Contact Information: Laura Francis, Cornell U (lrf62@cornell.edu)