Margaret Atwood’s works are replete with significant spaces: the forest in which Lucy disappears in “Death by Landscape,” Iris’s mansion in the fictional Port Ticonderoga of The Blind Assassin, Offred’s room, haunted by the Offreds who came before her, in The Handmaid’s Tale, Aunt Lydia’s hiding place in Ardua Hall in The Testaments, the rooftop gardens of the MaddAddam trilogy, Kinnear’s basement in Alias Grace, and more. We’re in a Renaissance of Atwood scholarship, prompted in part by contemporary parallels to the events in her dystopias and to the Hulu and Netflix adaptations of The Handmaid’s Tale and Alias Grace, respectively.

We are seeking proposals for an edited collection tentatively titled Television Comedy & Cultural Crisis. Chapters should focus on a specific television series, and address how that series engages with the discourse of a particular cultural crisis through comedy. The function of comedy should be foregrounded, as the collection will be held together through the central question of how humor acts as space through which we can resist normative ways of thinking about these cultural crises. 

Contributors might consider humorous depictions of, but are not limited to:

• The afterlife/faith

• Environmentalism/climate crisis

The Fury of Achilles: The Faces of War

International Conference

29 and 30 September 2022

University of Aveiro

http://furiadeaquiles.web.ua.pt/index.php/presentation-2/ 

The International Conference “The Fury of Achilles: The Faces of War” will be held in the Department of Languages and Cultures of the University of Aveiro, Portugal, on 29 and 30 September 2022. It will be a presential event.

Book editor: Roshni Sengupta

Both “culture” and “people” are largely undefined and inherently diverse forms, susceptible to malleability and appropriation to suit different agendas. Considering popular culture as a field of struggle leads us to a distinction between popular forms of control as well as participation. Popular culture therefore remains tied to questions of representation, enactment, regulation and control. Reading the form requires the deployment of modes such as symbols and codes (semiotics), apparatus of production (political economy approach), audience and consumer response as well as through studies of the social life of cultural forms and their political frames.

2022 Conference

“Futures”

2022 Meeting of the Society for Comparative Literature and the Arts

October 6-8, 2022

Xavier University

Cincinnati, Ohio

Keynote Speaker: Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Afrofuturist Film Director 

Call for Proposals

In the inaugural issue of The Global South, Arif Dirlik notes the fundamental instability of the journal’s core concept: “like all geographical designations of ideological and political spaces and projects,” the geography of the Global South “is much more complicated than the term suggests, and subject to change over time.” “[T]he ‘South’ of the contemporary world,” Dirlik reminds us, “may be significantly different in its composition and territorial spread than the South” of past historical moments.

Issue 9.2 Culinary Cultures on the Move

Edited by Krishnendu Ray (NYU), Jooyeon Rhee (PSU), and Tina Chen (PSU)

verge@psu.edu | Extended Deadline | May 15, 2022

Department of English

Jadavpur University

Presents

“Queer Political Assemblages 2.0”

7 March 2022

Co-ordinated by:

Dr. Kaustav Bakshi, Associate Professor, Department of English, Jadavpur University

“Queer Political Assemblages”, a national students’ seminar, is a platform for conferring on diverse issues related to the intersectionality of sexuality identity politics, as the name clearly suggests. After a year’s break, the seminar is being revived, though in an online mode. This year’s theme is “Queer homing desires”.

Call for papers

The Pennsylvania College English Association (PCEA) invites proposals from faculty members, graduate students, and independent scholars for its 2022 Annual Conference on the theme of recovering lost writers and lost texts. We are especially interested in recovering marginalized voices, finding reasons for their disappearance, and charting a path to bring their writing and lives back into the light of current scholarship. Lost or forgotten work by canonical authors would also be welcome subjects of literary inquiry as part of this call, as would be papers that trace the evolution of a literary text from manuscript to magazine publication to book form if the changes are radical.

Reconfiguring Digital Spaces: GLO Conference 2022

If the pandemic has taught us anything, it is that we have become painfully aware of how highly dependent we are on networked computers in most facets of our everyday lives. Shuffling from Zoomiverse to Metaverse and everything in between, computers remain the focal point of interactivity in life, entertainment, scholarship, and labor as in-person activities become increasingly constricted. Alternatives must be found; and even though dreams of totally transferring consciousnesses to digital avatars remain deeply rooted in the literary cyberpunk imaginaries of the 1980s and 90s, the pandemic brings us closer to realizing them in surprising ways.

This traditional session format welcomes submissions on representations of caregiving in literature, film, and/or popular media with an Ethics of Care focus. Abstracts addressing the conference theme ("Change") are especially welcome. By July 1, please submit a 250-word abstract, a brief bio or CV, and any A/V or scheduling requests to Chris Gabbard, University of North Florida, at cgabbard@unf.edu

Extended for Abstracts until April, 9, 2022: Voicing the Less Dead: Unheard, Unseen, Unknown, an edited collection (in-process)

LCCT 2022: Call for Presentations

The Call for Presentations is now open for the 9th annual London Conference in Critical Thought (LCCT), hosted and supported by the School of Law at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Description & Requirements:

 We invite 200-word abstracts for papers that explore the construction/theorization/rethinking/deconstruction/rise/success of South Asian Diaspora who leave the 'origin' of their forefathers and settle or are born elsewhere.

Preference will be given to a scholar working on Nepali/Bhutanese/Bangladeshi/Maldives Diaspora Literature.