The University of Idaho English Graduate Association is seeking submissions for our multidisciplinary conference, Storytelling: Narrating Agency. Historically, humans have attributed agency to human consciousness and intentionality, often to exert control over other entities. Narrating Agency is an exploration of the meaning of agency, and what/who can have it. Within and beyond humans, we wonder what has the capacity and drive to enact change? In the stories we read, tell, and see, who has the ability to take action and why? Who are the characters, elements, landscapes, and settings that drive change in our stories of the world around us?

Continuous human presence in Low Earth Orbit, increasing expansion of techno-scientific infrastructures beyond Earth, and the extractivist ambitions of the commercial 'New Space' sector call for a reconsideration of the conventional analytical frameworks used to describe emergent (extra)terrestrial political, ecological, and social processes. On these accelerating investments, Vidmar has stated “the interplay between natural and social phenomena in the highly contested yet vastly open-ended Universe gave rise to an ecology of (trans)planetary systems – biological, technological and intellectual” (Vidmar, 2020, EASST.net).

Guest-edited Issue of ASIATIC: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature (Scopus indexed; Q3)

This panel investigates Italian American transnational and transgenerational depictions of memory and ethnic identity through visual culture. Our goal is to invite scholars to reflect on diverse media and forms of representation, drawing attention to artists, authors, and performers who used visual components to narrate their hybrid identities and relationships to trauma, diaspora, and postmemory. Names like Fasanella, B. Amore, DiSalvo, Stella, and Scanga, come to mind, as artists who gave form to visual tropes of memory narrating their experience as first and second generation Italian Americans. 

Craft Critique Culture Conference: Emerald-Colored Glasses: An Environmental Vision

Call for Papers

The University of Iowa English Department invites proposals for its 2023 Annual Conference, Craft Critique Culture, to be held in person in Iowa City, IA. 

Event Dates: April 20-22, 2023

CRAFT CRITIQUE CULTURE is an interdisciplinary conference focusing on the intersections of critical and creative approaches to writing both within and beyond the academy.

Call for Papers and Applications

Considering Violence

International Conference at The Shirley and Leslie Porter School of Cultural Studies, 

Tel Aviv University,  June 18-19, 2023

This special session panel, for the 2024 MLA in Philadelphia, PA, will reflect on how performativity, acting, and theatre appear in writing. When we consider the novel, especially, how does theatre show its impact on authors and how do authors invoke theatrical performance or acting in a non-visual form? For texts with visual components, such as manga or illustrated stories, how do the images interface with the text to create an experience of performance for readers? When we see the theatre itself appear in literature, what is its role? When we see an amateur performance, such as Lovers' Vows in Austen's Mansfield Park, what does that say about how theatre is constructed in Austen's understanding of society?

The last few years have seen a resurgence in conservative political activism concerned with protecting children from queer adults. Parents and politicians around the country are pushing to pass homophobic and transphobic legislation. These include, to name a few examples, laws being proposed to prohibit children from attending Drag shows, the “Don’t Say Gay Bill” in Florida, and most recently, DeSantis blaming queer theory for the rejection of a high school AP African American Studies course. These contemporary iterations, of course, have historical precedents: such as Anita Bryant’s “Save Our Children” or The Briggs Initiative to fire gay teachers.

The Board of Board Game Academics (BGA) is pleased to announce that we will hold our first annual academic conference. BGA is a new journal and conference dedicated to the exploration of critical issues within the distinct yet overlapping communities of tabletop board and role-playing games.

While these communities are expanding, players, creators, and scholars of tabletop board and role-playing games have traditionally been late to addressing and including diverse representations and perspectives.

For instance, production companies such as Wizards of the Coast (best known for Dungeons & Dragons) have been criticized for their continued celebration of oppressive ideological perspectives, systems, and governments.

Transgender Embodiment: 1400-1700

June 2nd 2023

University of York, UK (Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies)

Keynote: Prof Melissa Sanchez (University of Pennsylvania)

Crisis

The language of crisis suffuses current imaginings of past, present, and future. This symposium invites ambitious and expansive critical reflections on the concept of crisis and the postcolony across time and space. We welcome interdisciplinary provocations in the humanities, arts, and social sciences that offer the potential for thinking about crisis alongside forms of resilience, resistance, and collaboration.

Papers on any aspect of Thomas Hardy, poetry or prose, 19th or 20th century. Conference Dates: October 11-14, 2023. Conference Location: Denver, Colorado. Email abstracts or papers by April 1 to clay.daniel@utrgv.edu

MLA LLC (Languages, Literatures, and Cultures) 16th-Century English (D024)

 The MLA LLC Forum for Sixteenth-Century English Literature is sponsoring a guaranteed panel on “Disability Aesthetics in a Premodern Global Context” at the MLA 2024 conference in Philadelphia (4-7 Jan. 2024). We welcome submissions and inquiries from scholars at all career stages.

Call for Papers: How might we study disability aesthetics alongside histories of empire, settler colonialism, racial capitalism, etc.? How did global encounters shape depictions of dis/ability?

Send queries to Penelope Geng (pgeng@macalester.edu). 250-word abstracts due 28 Feb. 2023.