Please consider submitting a proposal for our third edition of “American Afterlives” @ the 52nd annual Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture, February 17-18, 2025 (virtual) and February 20-22, 2025 (in person).

The LCLC seeks submissions for “American Afterlives,” a dedicated panel stream that crosses the pre-1900/post-1900 divide. Presentations will focus on ways of rethinking the chronologies by which we structure stories and studies about American literature and culture. Previous panels and papers have considered aesthetic experiments and traditions, remediations of early American texts, speculative and historical fiction, cultural histories of technology, and more.

How should we understand the relationship between land and trauma? In what senses can we think of a landscape as traumatic or traumatized? There are the traumas that may happen upon a landscape through the dispossession of peoples from a piece of land or through war and destruction. There is the direct harm done to a landscape that might not even have human occupants on it through the effects of pollution or clearcutting. And there are the transformations that landscapes go through when storms, wildfires, and floods happen upon them. Are these also types of trauma? How shall we distinguish between different kinds of events? How shall we identify the traumatized parties? Can a landscape itself be traumatized or only its inhabitants?

Focusing on the intersection of theory and practice, this panel calls for contemporary discussions of “theory in the flesh,” i.e., theory considering the material conditions of existence. While the panel is particularly interested in women of color writing, other engagements with the place of material reality in academia will be considered.

Conference dates: March 6-9, 2025

Conference location: Philadelphia, Pennsylvia (IN PERSON ONLY)

Deadline for abstracts: October 15, 2024 (EXTENDED)

Submit through: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21014

Contact panel chair for inquiries: Noah Gallego (California State Polytechnic University, Pomona) @ noahrgallego@gmail.com 

We are constantly engaged in processes of reading. We read literary texts, historical sources, films and other media, political moods and affects, and shifting social formations. Amongst the plethora of reading strategies available to us, close reading is perhaps the most widely known and most accepted one in literary studies (cf. I.A. Richards and William Empson). Other approaches to texts include ‘paranoid’ and ‘reparative reading’ (Sedgwick 1997), ‘distant reading’ (Moretti 2000), ‘wide reading’ (Hallet 2010), and ‘surface reading’ (Best and Marcus 2009), to name just a few. More recent research has examined intermedial reading practices (Rippl 2015), the reading of affects (Brinkema 2014), and non/institutional readers (Emre 2017). 

Call for Papers for an Edited Book

Virtual Reality Literature

Ratul Nandi and Anik Sarkar

NeMLA meets next during the centennial of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and the sesquicentennial of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina’s initial serialization. Central to both storylines is their eponymous characters’ differing relationships to suicide. From a less literary perspective, the moment comes relatively quick on the heels of the US Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, on June 24, 2022, undermining reproductive rights by undermining substantive due process rights generally, and so also euthanasic rights. The convergence is an auspicious occasion to explore women’s historical, literary, and philosophical perspectives on suicide.

All disciplines, methods, and perspectives welcome.

Famed and enigmatic filmmaker Terrence Malick’s remarkable filmography turned fifty recently. It begins with Badlands, that is, which appeared on October 15, 1973, followed five years later by Days of Heaven (1978). He returns after a twenty-five year hiatus with a triptych of literary and historical adaptations, including The Thin Red Line (1998), The New World (2005), and The Tree of Life (2011).

The Environmental Humanities is currently experiencing an unprecedented influx of creative and critical works from writers of Indigenous literature. This literary revolution, closely linked to climate change and environmental discourse, is a contributing factor, and writers are at the forefront of this contemporary debate. This session offers a unique opportunity for presenters to contribute to a significant academic debate by exploring paradigm shifts in Indigenous environmental discourse. The works will delve into the intersection of gender, class, race, and the Anthropocene, offering a comprehensive understanding.

Climate and the Limits of Narratability

A panel to be pitched for inclusion in the 2025 conference of the International Society for the Study of Narrative in Miami, April 2–6, 2025.

Organizer: Daniel Aureliano Newman, University of Toronto

New Writing: the International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing (Routledge) seeks high quality articles, as well as creative work 

Articles submitted might focus on any aspect of Creative Writing Studies, including, for example:

• Creative Writing in universities and colleges
• pedagogy, practice or research topics
• the processes of creative writers, their drafts and completed works
• the history of particular writing forms
• analysis of particular creative works

Submission length is open. 

Embodying the Resolution: Storytelling and Performance for Social Resilience

(A Creative Panel Session of 56th NeMLA Annual Convention| March 6-9, 2025| Philadelphia, PA)

Abstract submission link: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21022

NEMLA 2025 theme is "(R)EVOLUTION”, submission deadline (UPDATED): October 15, 2024

CALL FOR PAPERS

Henry James and the Archive

The Henry James Review invites essays between 1,000 and 12,500 words on any aspect of Henry James studies and archives for a special fall 2025 forum issue on “Henry James and the Archive.” 

Topics could include, for example:

• Using archives for Henry James scholarship

• Changes in how we understand the nature of the Henry James archive

• New archival sources for Henry James scholarship

Ìrìnkèrindò: A Journal of African Migration

(http://www.africamigration.com)

Organizes

A One-Day Virtual Conference on

Navigating the Sahara Desert: African Migrants’ Precarious Journeys and Restricted Mobilities

-January 18, 2025-

Concept Note: