Stories about fairies and the fae have long populated the imagination of many cultures around the world. Fairy histories have been the focus of much scholarly debate, and so has the figure of the fairy as a cultural icon.

Fairies and the fae have also gained a noticeable importance in the 21st century, bringing with them an increased cultural focus on traditional beliefs and indigenous identities. Indeed, while the connection to the folkloristic and the literary remains strong—with the multiple re-incarnations Tinkerbell from Peter Pan taking centerstage here—fairies have also found renewed life in modern and contemporary re-imaginings.

From its beginnings, speculative fiction across different media and genres has combined imaginaries of social and political organization with issues of gender and violence. Thomas More’s Utopia (1551), for example, imagined an egalitarian society that remained strictly patriarchal and a perfect government that ensured prosperity and peace by fighting preventive wars, administering capital punishment to adulterers, endorsing corporal punishment for unruly women and children, and encouraging (assisted) suicide. Whether we consider literary texts, film, TV series, comics, or other forms of cultural expression, contemporary speculative fiction continues to discuss (state-)violence and the gendered nature of socio-political relations.

Conference: ASLE 2021

Panel: Ecomedia and Empire

In line with the 2022 Modern Language Association conference (6-9 January) theme of “Multilingualism”, this proposed special session invites papers that unthink literacies as they are represented in contemporary literature and culture, interrogates the enumerative approach towards languages that is seemingly implied in multi-lingualism, and the treatment of languages as discrete and distinct formations.

The Old English MLA forum and the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship are proposing a jointly-sponsored session on gendered violence in Old English literature. The last decades have witnessed an increased interest in research on the relationship between gender and violence in the Middle Ages, with new studies exploring the construction of gender through violence and women as its victims. Gender theory and feminist studies have done much to refine methodologies used in this research, especially in the late Middle Ages. Still, there is a great deal of work to be done in the area of gendered violence, in particular in the literature of the early English era.

Old English literature is rarely associated with hope – indeed, much of its poetry is littered with the ruins of lost peoples, frozen and desolate landscapes, meditations on the death of warriors, and ponderous reminders that everything in life is merely lent.

Ex-position is published twice a year by the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures of National Taiwan University. The journal is devoted to showcasing research in the critical humanities revolving around literary studies by scholars based in or interested in areas outside of the Western European/American world. The journal has worked with established and active scholars from around the world.

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“Measurement by Default”

Publication Date: June 2022 (Issue No. 47)

Submission Deadline: October 31, 2021 

'Nottingham Black Archive as Activism'

Panya Banjoko (Nottingham Black Archive / NTU)

Host: PPCRG New Directions 

Time: 16.30 (GMT) on Thursday, 11 March 2021

Venue: Microsoft Teams

Duration: 60 mins (including 20 mins Q&A)

How to join: Email ppcrg@ntu.ac.uk to request a joining link.

Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies

Vol. 47 No. 2 | September 2021

Call for Papers

Shakespeare and Translation

Guest editors

Jonathan Locke Hart (Shandong University) & I-Chun Wang (National Sun Yat-sen University)

Deadline for Submissions: April 15, 2021

The editors of the Edinburgh University Press series, Thinking Politics, are calling for expressions of interest from authors proposing books on a range of theoreticians and philosophers whose work:

• affects how we think about politics and the political
• responds to or challenges hegemonic intellectual formations 

The editors would like to commission titles on theoreticians and philophers whose positioning and thinking clearly reflects this subaltern or resistant stance.

This panel explores the “undisciplining” possibilities of challenging Anglocentric periodization in the scholarship on the global British empire. Submissions reframing Victorian/Modernist periodicities and/or foregrounding non-English texts, translation, multilingualism, and raciality are especially welcome. Please submit a 250-word abstract to anweshakundu@wustl.edu or oishanisengupta@gmail.com

This panel gathers papers that consider how literary urban studies might contribute to interdisciplinary scholarship on questions of equity, justice, and the material transformation of cities in the context of climate change, as they are expressed in the literature of any region worldwide or historical period. All cities are in the process of being unevenly and variously transformed by climate change. The World Bank estimates that Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia alone will generate 143 million climate migrants by 2050. Some global cities will dramatically expand to accommodate large populations of migrants.

Proposals sought for an MLA 2022 (Washington DC, 1/6-1/9) special session on academic fiction engaging with the politics of multilingualism thematically, formally, or otherwise. Regions and time periods are open, but comparative, intersectional, and/or interdisciplinary approaches are preferred. Submit 250-word abstracts and 150-word bios to Dr. Almas Khan at abkhan@stanfordalumni.org by March 20, 2021.

For more on next year's Modern Language Association conference theme, see https://www.mla.org/Convention/MLA-2022/2022-Presidential-Theme-Multilin...

CFP: Special Issue on East and Southeast Asian Literary and Cultural Studies for Rupkatha (indexed in Scopus, WoS, MLA). This special issue seeks original research focused on the cultures of East and/or Southeast Asia and their associated diasporic communities. This issue is committed to offering a platform to emerging voices; so we would particularly welcome submissions from early and mid-career scholars and advanced graduate students, more so if their work demonstrates an attempt to meaningfully engage with the concerns of the region by foregrounding methods that aim to problematize Eurocentric perspectives.