Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies

Vol. 49 No. 2 | September 2023

Call for Papers

The Rise of Profilicity (Profile-Based Identity):

Literature and Theory in the Twenty-First Century

Guest Editors

Hans-Georg Moeller (University of Macau)

Paul D’Ambrosio (East China Normal University)

[EXTENDED] Call for Papers

Focused Issue Theme: 

Newtrospection: Reverse-Engineering Modernity in South Korean Speculative Fiction

Focused Issue planned for early 2023

EXTENDED Proposal submission deadline: June 30, 2022

Paper submission deadline: August 31, 2022

Percival Everett is among the most significant and prolific living contemporary American writers. The author of over twenty novels, four short-story collections, five volumes of poetry, and a children’s book, Everett is famed for his versatility and range while retaining a distinctly recognizable style. His prose oeuvre includes masterful satires as well as unconventional takes on genre fiction, profound explorations of personal tragedy as well as playful metafictional experiments, stories of the rural as well as the cosmopolitan, bitter critiques of American injustices past and present as well as absurd tall tales. Everett also, of course, has a distinguished career in the academy as a Professor of English at the University of Southern California.

The theme for the 87th Annual Conference of the Indiana College English Association is "The Impacts of Education." 

“There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.” – Socrates

Women and their bodies share a close connection with (im)purity, filth, and dirt as unavoidable elements in their routines of care and caring. It could be said that the words like filth, dirt are loaded with colonial meanings and can become extremely complicated when understood from the socio-cultural-political lens. Through the postcolonial appropriations, these meanings have subsequently contributed to the patriarchal assumptions and gendered ideas of women’s roles, especially, in handling filth and dirt, in their daily duties of selfless care, nursing, cooking, cleaning, and mothering.

The Burney Journal

Call for Submissions

Volume 19

The Burney Journal is now accepting submissions for volume 19, to be published in 2023, and for subsequent issues to be published annually. A peer-reviewed publication of the Burney Society, The Burney Journal is available in print and indexed online by EBSCO Host and MLA International Bibliography.

NeMLA 2023: Niagara Falls, NY. March 23-26, 2023.

As we continue to transition our daily lives “back to normal”—or rather to our understanding of “normal” from a pre-pandemic perspective—how do we negotiate the lessons learned during the pandemic? Quarantine, lockdown, self-isolation, social distancing, and the many other necessary health measures we have taken, currently take, and may continue to take, have forced a reconsideration of how we work and how we teach. What are our key pedagogical takeaways to help build and foster resiliency during these times?

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.

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. 

CALL FOR PAPERS: 

LIFE WRITING AS WORLD LITERATURE (book)

Deadline for abstracts: July 1, 2022Deadline for final essays: January 1, 2023

The series Literatures as World Literature by Bloomsbury Publishing aims to “take a novel approach to world literature by analyzing specific constellations — according to language, nation, form, or theme — of literary texts and authors in their own world-literary dimensions.” https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/series/literatures-as-world-literature/

Disruption and Its Discontents: Ethics, Politics, and Epistemology of Disruptive Technology

A two-day symposium hosted by Academic Writing Lab (AWL) and Dept. Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH), IIIT- Delhi
August 19-20, 2022

 I am recruiting contributors for a collection of scholarly essays with the working title Starcrossed Century: Astrology in Global Society from World War One to Covid. The book is designed to address the identification of the history of astrology with "premodern" history. The historiography of astrology is very active and intellectually exciting, but it focuses almost entirely on the period before 1800. Yet never have there been more astrological believers and practitioners than today.

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?