Within the genres of science fiction as well as in poetry and drama, scenarios of dystopic presentations are frequently reversed to reveal a more hopeful denouement. The focus of this year’s convention is Resilience which is identified on the NeMLA website as “an anchor term for critical and creative work that explores how we bear up under trauma,” amongst other critical issues in the world. Literature has been utilized as a means of explaining difficult issues and often works through a myriad of complications, revealing resilience as well as offering a glimmer of hope.  How do these writers achieve their encouraging shift from sometimes desolation and seeming hopelessness to a more hopeful viewpoint? Are there parallel constructs?

Multisensuality Through History and Across Media

International Scientific Conference

When: November 17-18, 2022

Where: Online (Zoom)

CALL FOR PAPERS

Reconfiguring Corporeality in 21st Century

How would it be possible to think the reality of the mind, of the I-subject, without a lived body?

—    Husserl

In concert with the theme of the 2023 NeMLA annual convention, “Resilience,” this panel will consider in what forms sustainability and resilience (broadly conceived) appear in the literature and philosophy of ancien régime France. In the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, France and Europe more broadly faced a variety of social, political, economic, and environmental crises, from the brutal Wars of Religion in the sixteenth century, to the “Little Ice Age” climatic downturn that affected agricultural production, to more international disputes, political uprisings like the Fronde, the 1720 outbreak of plague in Marseille, and the Lisbon earthquake of 1755.

CALL FOR EXPRESSIONS OF INTEREST: DIGITAL DICKENS There has been a growing number of online projects in Dickens studies over the past few years, but discussion of the role Digital Humanities has to play in Dickens scholarship (and vice versa) has been limited so far to conference papers and individual articles.

We are seeking contributors for an edited collection of scholarly essays on these recent changes in the complexity of time-travel media (film, television, gaming, or literature). Submissions that are interdisciplinary in theory and method are welcome, especially those in popular culture, science fiction, fantasy, genre studies, critical media studies, narratology, etc. Abstracts and papers discussing recent time-travel media, approximately within the last decade, may include but are not limited to research concerning narrative structure, theme, genre, reception, comprehension, and other relevant topics.

Tramp Press (f. 2014) is one of the leading voices in independent publishing, launching well-known writers from Ireland and beyond such as Sara Baume and Emilie Pine, and reissuing impactful past women writers. A globally-minded local press, Tramp’s list queries fixed ideas of “Irish” writing and of what can constitute the contemporary. 

We have always lived with trauma, but how do we embrace trauma into our lives and create a meaningful life in the world we live in?

In recent years, critical considerations of aesthetics or beauty have been de-emphasized in literary criticism. There is a certain taboo about the notion of beauty, as Elaine Scarry has neatly pointed out: “many people have either actively advocated a taboo on beauty or passively omitted it from their vocabulary, even when thinking and writing about beautiful objects such as painting and poems” (117). There has been many talks about how aesthetics demeans a work’s values—serving as Bourgeois distractions from the real social issues we face, which rightfully remains as an important critical consideration.

The 14th Annual Louisiana Studies Conference will be held September 16-17, 2022, at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana. The conference committee is now accepting presentation proposals for the upcoming conference. Presentation proposals on any aspect of the 2022 conference theme “Supernatural Louisiana,” as well as creative texts by, about, and/or for Louisiana and Louisianans, are sought for this year’s conference.

“That’s a Take”: The International Television Commercial as Short Film is a two-day, virtual conference that engages interdisciplinary scholarship from any critical/methodological perspective examining the international television commercial production as a short film narrative. As examined in Consuming Images: Film Art and the American Television Commercial (Edinburgh University Press, 2020) which established the complex vitality of the television commercial both as a short film and as an art form, the television commercial has an aesthetic and historical dynamic linking it directly to cinematic and media cultures.

What does it mean to write and think about nature? Do language, thought, and mimesis ultimately have the capacity to impact (and possibly cultivate) our natural environments, and do these environments in turn have the capacity to impact (and possibly cultivate) our words and ideas? Taking such questions as a starting point, this panel aims to explore how the relationship between the human community and the environment has occupied a central space within literature and thought across various epochs and epistemological arenas. 

In “Where Would We Be? Legacies, Roll Calls, and the Teaching of Writing in HBCUs (2021),” Beverly Moss asserts that “Black rhetorical excellence has thrived at HBCUs. Pedagogical and scholarly creativity in the teaching of writing has excelled” (146). However, it is her critical question that anchors this proposal: “where would we, in composition studies, be without writing and rhetoric faculty who have taught or currently teach at HBCUs and/or scholars in the field who are alumni of HBCUs?” (145). The creation of the HBCU Symposium on Rhetoric and Composition in 2016 helped to bring some of these contributions from the margins into the center of conversations about the teaching of writing that happens on HBCU campuses across the country.

In her most recent book, Posthuman Feminism, Rosi Braidotti calls on posthumanist educators to develop “an affirmative ethics that acknowledges the shared desire of all entities to persevere in their collaborative interdependence and to increase it for the common good” (118). She advocates for pedagogical praxis as a methodological innovation (and challenge) that draws on new materialism as a foundational theory and carnal empiricism as a method.

We hope to consider the following questions with a collaborative group of participants:

*What are concrete, shareable ways to put posthumanist/feminist/new materialist theory into practice (praxis) in the everyday higher ed classroom?

Who Was that Masked Woman? Representations of Women Vigilantes and Outlaws in Popular Media from Reconstruction to the Great Depression

We are looking for two chapters to complete a manuscript currently in development with a publisher.  We invite chapter proposals for a collection of critical essays that examine how women vigilantes, anti-heroines, and outlaws were represented in movie serials, radio dramas, films, comics, and pulp fiction in America at the turn of the century.