Borderlands: Reimagining the Medieval Periphery

MEST Symposium, Indiana University Bloomington

April 11-12

Keynote: Dr. Dorsey Armstrong (Purdue University)

The Middle Ages and our study of it are defined by borderlands. To better understand and enrich our knowledge of the medieval world, this conference asks us to consider what lies at its peripheries and what happens when we attend carefully to these “borderlands.” 

Potential panels might consider:

Global Historical Fictions

Defining historical fictions as encompassing of many media forms, this book series invites contributions that consider the multiple ways in which we shape history for diverse purposes, and that investigate popular history in a variety of contexts, and modes.

We are pleased to invite you to submit your original research articles and review papers in the forthcoming special issue of Anglica Wratislaviensia devoted to the concept of companionship in its various social, technological, historical manifestations.

Literary forms like the poems, novels, and short stories are often understood to be stand-ins for political resistance in critical theoretical debates especially since the dominance of post-al theories within literature departments. For literary forms emerging in the peripheries of the literary world system yoked by the global literary marketplace, the signification of resistance acts as a marker of value. This is superimposed on the idea of literary forms emerging from the peripheral locales of the literary world system that are read as derivative and mimetic of literary forms emerging from the core of the same system.

The publication of Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism in 1957, in some ways, marked the end of New Criticism. The two approaches—structuralism and New Criticism—represent two ways of seeing texts as unities, yet produce entirely different views on key issues, such as how texts might be grouped together, the importance of historical context to the literary text, and the role of broader cultural systems in shaping a text’s meaning. We might wonder now whether or not these issues and ideas from New Criticism and structuralism, rooted in mid-20th century literary theory, continue to offer valuable insights and methodologies.

With the changing social realities alongside rapid innovation in science and technology, there is a sharp paradigm shift in academia in terms of research, especially in humanities. This shift can be considered a radical change in the core concepts. It is imperative to absorb the very meaning of paradigm shift. The term paradigm shift was coined by Thomas Kuhn in his 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in the context of revolutions in natural science. What is remarkable about Khun’s thought process is that in his book, Kuhn propounded the idea that theories have a social character and approaches them as social constructions that contain historical traces of the time and place in which they were generated.

Steve Tomasula: The Art of Representation

June 12 and 13 2025, The University of Chicago in Paris, in the presence of the author

Keynote speakers: David Banash (Western Illinois University), Mary K. Holland (State University of New York, New Paltz)

Organized jointly by several institutions (Université Paris Cité, Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis, Sorbonne Université, Université de Rennes, Université de Rouen, Université de Strasbourg), this is the first international conference devoted to the work of Steve Tomasula.

I'm writing to share the CFPs for the two Eudora Welty Society sessions that will be featured at the 2025 American Literature Association Conference in Boston at the Westin Copley Place (May 21-24, 2025). ******************** 1. Welty’s Sheltered Daring and Furtive FeminismEudora Welty concludes her literary autobiography One Writer’s Beginnings with the self-summation, “[a]s you have seen, I am a writer who came of a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring comes from within” (104).

This is a Call for Papers for a special issue of the online open-access double-blind peer-reviewed journal [Inter]sections, titled Laughing in the Face of Evil: Humorous Perspectives on Perpetrators in Contemporary American Literature and Popular Culture. We invite papers that ask what humor can contribute to our understanding of perpetrators by examining a selection of works from contemporary American literature and popular culture. Does humor help demythologize certain perpetrators whose international fame turned them into quasi-mythical figures? Can the ownership of humorous content about a traumatic situation or process endured by a specific marginalized community be transferred to other communities?

The way we imagine, represent, and signify the relations between empire and environment significantly shapes contemporary discourses on climate change, development, and globalization. Colonial and neoliberal legacies produce a “combined and uneven development” of the world system, resulting in hierarchies of metropolitan and peripheral relations. The elemental composition of environments (such as air, water, soil, and fire) in literary and cultural forms maps the intensification of these uneven relations under the capitalist mode of production. Jason Moore argues that the economy and environment are not independent of each other and posits that capitalism is a way of organizing nature (2015).

Conference online: 17-18 October 2024

Scientific Committee:

Professor Wojciech Owczarski – University of Gdańsk, Poland

Dr. Ricardo Rato Rodrigues –  Maria Curie-Sklodowska University, Poland

CFP:

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Since coalescing into a formal discipline in the 1970s, Translation Studies has both hinged upon and facilitated conversations about power. For better or for worse, the movement of a text from one form into another necessitates reflection upon hierarchy, periphery, and justice. From Spivak's native informant, to Chamberlain's feminist critiques of canonical translation theory, to Venuti's identification of translation as a seeking of utopia, analyses of the connection between (dis)empowerment and translation abound. However, what happens to and with translation when disempowered actors seek agency? How can translation be examined, utilized, and conceptualized when disempowerment demands revolution?

HENRY MILLER'S PLACE IN THE 21ST CENTURY

From 16-19 October of 2025, Nexus: The International Henry Miller Journal and the

Henry Miller MemorialLibrary will host aconference at Asilomar in Pacific Grove,

California, with an excursion to the Henry MillerMemorial Library in Big Sur. We will

examine Miller in light of contemporary thinking, asking the question: Is Henry

Miller relevant today?

Although presentations on any aspect of Miller's writing, artwork, and life are

welcomed, the conference organizers particularlyencourage consideration of the

theme of Miller's place in the 21st Century.

Topics for presentations might include, but are not limited to:

Speculative fiction creators regularly interrogate the question of who/what is entitled to human rights. As the created, grown, augmented, and manufactured beings of imagination become more sentient, is it ethical to maintain them as labor-saving devices or will they start to become entitled to, or even demand, rights? Is there a Posthuman Rights Movement in our future or a post “human rights” movement? How will this movement accommodate already-existing arguments for the rights of non-human beings, such as the rights of animals, corporations, and even fetuses, while accounting for humans who are not entitled to human rights? Does one need a human-ish form to deserve rights including around one’s labor?