Moving from silence into speech is for the oppressed, the colonized, the exploited, and those who stand and struggle side by side, a gesture of defiance that heals, that makes new life, and new growth possible. It is that act of speech, of “talking back” that is no mere gesture of empty words, that is the expression of moving from object to subject, that is the liberated voice.’

bell hooks, “Talking Back.” Discourse (1986), p. 128. 

The 121st Annual PAMLA Conference

The PAMLA 2024 Conference will be held at the Margaritaville Resort in Palm Springs, California (formerly the Riviera Resort, a favorite hangout of Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., and other Hollywood and musical stars) between Thursday, November 7 and Sunday, November 10, 2024.

The 2024 PAMLA Conference is being held entirely in-person. We won’t be having any virtual or hybrid sessions or papers.

Women and Turkish Shakespeares (Edited Volume)

Contact email: turkishshakespeares@gmail.com 

Call for Chapters

Turkey has a long tradition of reading, translating and staging William Shakespeare’s plays as part of the country’s modernisation process. Yet, this long tradition has remained relatively obscure for the majority of both Turkish and non-Turkish academic and non-academic circles.

The Shakespeare session at the RMMLA Conference 2024 is currently accepting submissions for papers on all topics related to Shakespeare. Submissions from Ph.D. candidates and early career scholars are especially encouraged.

The Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association (RMMLA) is a non-profit membership organization, established in 1947, that promotes the study and teaching of language, literature, and culture. The Secretariat and Directorate of the RMMLA is hosted by the University of Wyoming and maintains The Rocky Mountain Review, a scholarly journal included in the JSTOR project and ProjectMUSE at Johns Hopkins University.

Call for Papers:

Race & Queer, Trans, and Reproductive Rights

“When we are talking about gender and sexual politics…I’m not convinced we need to invent any trans or gender-based rubrics to understand the space or to mobilize against it. The existing critical rubrics of race and empire and racial governance would already encompass and analyze perfectly well what is going on and also provide us with a different political grammar of political solidarity and history.”

-Jules Gill Peterson, “Critical Race Theory Today” JCRI Vol 9 No 2, 2022.

Shifting – or transforming – between states of being is a feature of human and animal societies as well as of the wider living world and the cosmos. This act of shifting is experienced through both natural and unnatural processes and can be seen in all areas of life, from the reproductive cycles of organisms, to epochal changes undergone by entire societies, and everything in between. But transformations can also refer to distortions of reality, both deliberate and accidental, magical or real, as much as they can reflect genuine changes to an individual, an institution, a landscape, or even a society.

This special forum links processes of Asian American racialization with the reception and circulation of Asian religio-philosophy in the US. In doing so, this forum builds on the foundation laid by a previous special forum titled Redefining the American in Asian American Studies, published in JTAS in 2012.

ANNE ALOMBERT   FABIENNE BRUGÈRE   RYSZARD KLUSZCZYŃSKI   EDUARDO KAC 

Conference Dates: Thursday 13 and Friday 14 March 2025

Location: Le Mans University, France (https://maps.app.goo.gl/nrrshiTddgof53vB7)

Keywords: W. Somerset Maugham, Popular, Middlebrow and High Culture, Literary Criticism, Colonialism, Travel Studies, Gender Studies, Biography, Adaptations, Translations, Cultural Transfers, Propaganda

Conference Format: In-person, but videoconference will be possible in specific cases

Conference Languages: English; French a possibility for a limited number of papers

Conference Website: https://maugham-le-mans.sciencesconf.org

Proposals are invited for Some Circumstance of the Text, a planned collection of essays to memorialize and celebrate William Proctor Williams (1939–2023), whose more than half-century of scholarship, teaching, mentoring, and reviewing has made a profound and lasting contribution to the fields of early modern English literature and drama, Shakespeare studies, textual criticism, bibliography, and book history.

Proposed essays should draw upon, build upon, or engage with William’s ideas across any of the subjects in which he worked, including but not limited to:

“Reading for Wellness”

Taking inspiration from the in/of that joins Health and Humanities in this year’s conference theme, this panel seeks papers that broadly consider the relationship between the short story form and wellbeing.   

Individual and Collective Wellbeing

Claims made for the humanness of the short story form – its capacity to capture, condense, and convey essential elements if not the Truth of human experience – take on added urgency in an age increasingly characterized as inhuman.   

Submissions to this panel, then, might

ALA Symposium “American Poetry”American Poetry

November 7-9, 2024
Drury Plaza Hotel in Santa Fe
828 Paseo de Peralta Santa Fe, NM 87501

Conference Director:
Richard Flynn, Georgia Southern University

Keynote Speaker:
Karen L. Kilcup
University of North Carolina, Greensboro

Conference Fee: $175

The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual is the leading venue for the critical reassessment of Eliot’s life and work in light of the ongoing publication of his letters, critical volumes of his complete prose, the 2015 edition of his complete poems, and the forthcoming critical edition of his plays.

All critical approaches are welcome, as are essays pertaining to any aspect of Eliot’s work as a poet, critic, playwright, editor, foremost exemplar of modernism, or his influence on twentieth-century and contemporary literature and culture.

As historian Kim E. Nielson argues in A Disability History of the United States, the health of the body became metaphorically linked to the health of the nation in the early national period. The nationalist rhetoric of the healthy body politic led to the marginalization of individuals seen as occupying “deficient” or dependent bodies.  This panel seeks to explore this dynamic from the perspective of those excluded by this rhetoric. Papers focused on artists, writers, and other art producers who experienced disability during the era are welcome. How did these figures respond to the nationalist mythos, and how did they envision themselves with respect to the body politic?