The year 2022 will mark the first centenary of the ‘annus mirabilis’ of British modernism, the year 1922, which saw the simultaneous publication of Virginia Woolf’s first experimental novel, Jacob’s Room, of James Joyce’s Ulysses, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, R.M. Rilke’s Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus.

MMLA’s permanent African American Literature section invites papers that examine the way black writers use black aesthetics in their work(s) to promote a “cultural ensemble” as Fred Moten notes. With the 2022 MMLA theme of “Post-Now,” this section is concerned with how black writers use aesthetics to shape and/or reshape the resistance that blackness brings. American Blackness, of course, begins through the resistance of the object and the irruption or interruption of personhood and subjectivity. Even through, or perhaps because of, this resistance, blackness maintains a collective being. As such, I invite works that are concerned with how black writers use: music, art, violence, movement, language, communication, sex, etc.

The 54th annual meeting of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association will take place in person in Salt Lake City, June 16-18, 2022 on the theme of “Navigating Medieval Spaces: Real and Imagined.” 

The conference will be held at the University of Utah, with remote options available for those who cannot travel. In addition to regular sessions and a keynote address, events will include a plenary session highlighting some of the Marriott Library's rare books and manuscripts. We are excited to host a variety of events this year ranging from works-in-progress workshops and pedagogy panels to research presentations.  

This call is for critical essays for a proposed edited volume centering on the iconic television show The Golden Girls for Routledge’s Advances in Pop Culture series.

Carceral Shakespeare
Edited Collection, Call for Papers

Shakespeare has been in American prisons over the last forty years, in arts programs and college-in-prison classrooms. Even as the landscape of incarceration has shifted—from the War on Drugs to the Fair Sentencing Act, from prison reform to prison abolition—Shakespeare programs have endured. While attention to these programs often reduce them to methods of “reform” and “rehabilitation,” these narratives of redemption do not capture the complexity of what it means to engage with Shakespeare inside the carceral system.

Those of you in the United Kingdom might
be interested in a couple of free training
events being offered in the cities of
Leicester and Leeds. They are called
"Quantitative Methods for Literary and
Historical Scholarship -- in Theory and
Practice":

http://cts.dmu.ac.uk/events/QMLHS

Older women have traditionally been portrayed negatively in folklore, fairy tales, literature and film, for example. Images of witches, evil stepmothers, shrivelled, bitter 'spinsters', and vindictive, bullying women abusing positions of power are rife in Western culture. Yet, perhaps things are changing. A new emphasis on the need to discuss and understand the menopause seems to be at the heart of this. This conference examines historical representations of the 'crone' in relation to crime and Gothic narratives. But it also looks ahead and globally to examine other types of discourses and representations.

The Literary Encyclopedia at www.litencyc.com is looking for qualified writers to enhance its coverage of postwar and contemporary American poetry. Following is a list of poets and/or movements for whom/which we are seeking introductory essays of ca. 2500 words covering biography and historical context and giving a brief overview of relevant works. The list below is not comprehensive or final, and new proposals of writers/works/context essays that are not currently listed in our database are also welcome.

A key part of colonizing in the U.S. South depended on the rhetoric of health, such as Ponce de Leon’s mythical fountain of youth and nineteenth-century boosterism claiming Florida as the “winter sanitarium of the country” (qtd in Knight 5). The semi-tropical warmth of the South invited justifications for intrusion and settlement, and for the environmental destruction necessary to transform a place “heavy with the poisons of malaria” into something habitable for white Europeans. Yet, beneath this rhetoric, we find evidence that ties the South to a history of public health disasters, especially the mistreatment and abuse of people with disabilities.

DHSI Conference and Colloquium 2022

Proposals are now being accepted for presentations at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) 2022 – Online Edition Conference & Colloquium.

Since 2009, the DHSI Conference & Colloquium has been a valued part of the annual Digital Humanities Summer Institute. It offers an opportunity to present diverse, dynamic digital humanities research and projects within an engaging, collegial audience that actively fosters the ethos of the greater DHSI community.

Science fiction (and its cousin genres, fantasy and horror) have long explored what it means to explore the unknown. In particular, some of SF’s familiar narratives have pondered life beyond our world, grappled with the vast expanse of the universe and the many things to be discovered there, and tackled complicated meetings with other beings and other ways of life. Beyond the SF bubble, fantasy has imagined entire worlds and wondered at a cosmos of gods and magic; meanwhile, horror has teased at the edges of its genre cousins, offering disturbing visions of space and other forms of travel and exploration in which the unknown is often waiting with jaws wide open.

CFP: British Association for Victorian Studies - Annual Conference

1-3 September 2022, University of Birmingham

In 1931, Langston Hughes embarked on a tour of the southern United States, reading his poetry mostly at HBCUs in the age of Jim Crow. His goal was two-fold: he was both answering Mary McLeod Bethune’s suggestion that “people need poetry” and developing a formula for “making poetry pay.” As the Great Depression dragged on and the Scottsboro case lay heavy on his mind, Hughes understood the importance of art and the artist in providing perspective and spiritual strength to the community, but he also labored under hostile conditions that complicated every aspect of his journey.

The editors of Tinakori: Critical Journal of the Katherine Mansfield Society are seeking scholarly essays for publication in the sixth volume of the journal. Essays that address any aspect of Mansfield and her writing will be considered. Tinakori is committed to publishing innovative and rigorous research into one of the most significant women authors of the early twentieth century. It is an official online series recognised by the British Library with its own ISSN number: ISSN 2514-6106.