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Trauma-Informed Approaches to Academia- NeMLA 2021 Philadelphia March 13-15 2021 Deadline for submission September 30, 2020
NeMLA 2021: Philadelphia, PA. March 11-14, 2021
As we move forward in this new normal, there is an urgent need, at both national and global levels, for critical investigations into the humanistic, scientific, and social scientific impacts of the coronavirus, both societally and in academia. It’s possible, likely even, that your current research and teaching focuses are not directly related to epidemiology. Regardless, your research and/or teaching has undoubtedly been affected by the pandemic. Now is a key moment to lean into the many robust opportunities for teaching developments and enhancements.
NeMLA 2021: Philadelphia, PA. March 11-14, 2021
Modernism/modernity Print Plus cluster on Whiteness
Contacts: Jennifer Nesbitt (jpn12@psu.edu) and Sonita Sarker (sarker@macalester.edu)
Timeline:
The COVID-19 pivot from face to face to remote or digital instruction affected every teacher and student across the world. This roundtable invites participants to reflect and discuss teaching in the current moment, as well as during the unplanned (February-April) 2020 pivot.
This panel will consider the cases of writers who have used their platforms to create fictions of self—to misrepresent, self-justify, even blatantly lie about their own lives and realities. The panel is open to considering any act of writing sociopathy, from memoir (e.g., M.E. Thomas’s 2013 Confessions of a Sociopath or Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal) to fictional works that inhabit the minds of sociopaths (e.g., A Clockwork Orange, Gone Girl) to literary fakers (e.g., James Frey, Danny Santiago, JT LeRoy, Caroline Calloway). Is writing in itself an act of misrepresentation bordering on psychopathy?
In video games such as Life is Strange, the Witcher series, and Telltale’s The Walking Dead, multiple story choices are offered that are the purview not of the protagonist but of the player, who may be forced to choose from a limited set of outcomes but is still in control of the narrative’s pace and flow. Unlike traditional narratives in which the writer is in control of the characters’ choices and their outcomes, video game narratives involve the participant in an interactive shared story with multiple possibilities.
In the 1930s and ‘40s, crime fiction was often published on cheap paper made of wood pulp, and this reputation as faintly disreputable has stayed with it, pursuing it into creative writing classes in which “genre-writing” has traditionally been discouraged. This panel invites creative writers as well as literary scholars to consider crime writing—true crime, mystery and detective fiction, suspense fiction, and film or television drama—in the context of creative writing pedagogy. Is crime writing inherently disreputable? Does this genre have a place in the creative writing classroom?
One immediate side-effect of the current ominous economic climate and general uncertainty of our times has been a downturn in traditional publishing. Even before the COVID-19 crisis, consolidation of publishing houses, the closure of brick-and-mortar bookshops, and the supremacy of Amazon had begun to permanently alter the way creative writing is published. At the same time, creative content on the internet has never been so abundant, with poetry, film, and fiction being shared and streamed in ways that create a flourishing if generally nonremunerative cultural climate. This panel looks at options available to creative writers in the wake of the decline of traditional publishing options.
While it is too soon to fully assess the extent to which the COVID-19 pandemic will stand as a watershed in global human life, creative writers as canaries in the cultural coalmine will be among the first to try to render it comprehensible and are already responding to the seismic shifts. The unexpected changes the pandemic has created have altered all of the processes that sustain human life, the social practices and interactions that are the mainstay of poetry, fiction, and drama, perhaps permanently. Enforced social isolation has caused people from all strata of society to contemplate what it means to be engaged in human culture while at the same time facing the possibility of sudden and random mortality, even mass extinction.
While universities have long been a space for cultivating generations of academics, researchers, and intellectuals, they have never been exempt from the dynamics of power that underlie any institution based on interpersonal relations. Recent strides at improving inclusivity—for example: greater diversity among faculty and student populations, or increasing numbers of sociopolitically- and culturally-cognizant programs—belie the reality that universities operate along ideological lines that can (re)produce inequities and social hierarchies.
In an age of Twitter rants, allegations of fake news, and increasingly bitter partisan divides, what happens to the novel or poem? Does literary material have to engage with the political? And if it doesn’t, must the political be read between its lines? What are the possibilities for creative work in an era that is increasingly in a state of emergency? This panel asks creative writers to consider the question of political and literary engagement in our political age. Writers of all modalities and genres are encouraged to explore these questions in the context of their own work. This panel asks creative writers to consider the question of a political literary engagement in our political age. Writers of all modalities and genres are welcome.
While the overarching narrative that frames scholarship on body modification seems to reduce it—especially in the case of tattoos—into what Matthew Lodder calls a “chronological tourism,” that is, that every tattoo merely speaks of “internal truths” that chronicle milestones in one’s personal mythmaking (as a response to questions like “What does your tattoo mean? What were you going through when you got it?”), such a view eschews the discursive potential of body modification as a social act in favour of pure radical individualism.
The convergence of critical masculinity studies with postcolonial theory aims, at its core, to interrogate discourses that created hegemonic and binary categories that in turn became eventual grounds for the historical racialization of gender and sexuality, as well as the gendering and sexualization of race. Taking the image of “palimpsest” as its semantic inspiration, this session seeks to problematize the layerings and shifting stratigraphies of power that obscure, erase, or overwrite the specific historical, cultural, and political experiences that underpin notions of Asian masculinity and male identity as represented in various forms of literature and media.
This panel seeks papers on narrativizations of mental health, "madness," and neurodivergence in the fiction of women and non-binary people. As Baerman, Herman et al have noted, “madness has been an important thematic pawn in many literary texts” (2009, 283).
Research articles are being invited for a peer reviewed edited book to be published by a reputed publisher tentatively in 2020.
Pandemics, Theatre and Performance: Perspectives and Possibilities
Call For Papers
José Esteban Muñoz’s ground-breaking work Cruising Utopia has sought to unite scholarship from the disparate fields of queer and utopian studies by contending that “queerness is primarily about futurity and hope” and “queerness is always on the horizon” (Muñoz 11). Aside from this, it has also powerfully contested the academic pessimism toward utopian political idealism that was becoming a dominant feature in queer theory at this time. Drawing on Muñoz’s work, this panel invites paper abstracts about queer utopias and queer utopian possibility demonstrated in literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Several Romantic artists and, in particular, writers focused on historical events that brought the Americas on the forefront of the European imagination. Certainly, many Italian writers looked at what then still was the New World with a prismatic approach, either because they were writing on historical events that occurred in North America (especially the formation of the United States) or because they were looking at the independence wars fought in South America; either because the Americas offered shelter to the exiles, or because they provided new ground for thinking about the relationship between nature and culture.
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
Abstracts due July 15, 2020
The Graduate School Press of Syracuse University invites submissions for a contributed volume titled A Quit Lit Reader, to be published by the Graduate School Press and distributed by Syracuse University Press. The editors welcome contributions from graduate students, faculty, and administrators working within academia, while especially seeking reflections of those pursuing careers mostly or wholly outside it.
Special-Issue Proposal Guidelines
Papers on Language and Literature is seeking proposals for special issues on subjects including but not limited to
Digital Humanities
Film
Literary Translation
Print Culture
PLL is a generalist publication that is committed to publishing work on a variety of literatures, languages, and chronological periods. We accept proposals year-round. We are a quarterly and expect to publish a special issue once a year, every year. The specific volume and issue will be determined later, depending on the editors’ schedule.
CALL FOR PROPOSALS
“Trans Media Pedagogy”
Journal of Cinema and Media Studies Teaching Dossier section
Edited by Dr. Dan Vena (Carleton University/ Queen’s University) and Dr. Nael Bhanji (Trent University)
Label Me Latina/o is an online, refereed international e-journal that focuses on Latino Literary Production in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The journal invites scholarly essays focusing on these writers for its biannual publication.
Vernon Press invites chapter proposals on the theme: “A Hero Will Endure”: Essays at the Twentieth Anniversary of Gladiator for an edited collection.
Martin M. Winkler edited a collection about Gladiator regarding its historical and media aspects. There are also several single essays about psychological (Skweres), political, or cultural issues related to the film. Nevertheless, there have been no other collections on the cultural and social impact of the film since its release. The twentieth anniversay has just passed, and the time is right for presenting new insights about this award-winning film.
Specific topics that the editor is seeking to round out the collection include:
What makes us happy and content in our life? Some people may point to fabulous fame, fortune, or money. Some may say that the key to happiness are interpersonal relationships. But what if someone is alone? Is loneliness really disastrous? Are there any benefits of loneliness? Can loneliness become an epidemic? In order to answer such questions, during our conference we will have to concentrate on many particular issues. Thus, we are interested in all aspects of loneliness in the past and in the present-day world.
Study abroad is frequently imagined as a transformative endeavor during a student’s university experience. Students often begin their studies with a tentative roadmap of courses guided by their future career goals, and, if the stars align, they will study abroad in their third or fourth year. Studying abroad is often encouraged in foreign language programs, but is traditionally framed as a parallel experience to their at-home semester. While of course the linguistic, cultural, intellectual and personal benefits of this experience have always been recognized to be invaluable, the long-lasting impact of the study abroad path is often not fully optimized.
Beyond Crisis: Raymond Williams and the present conjuncture
A special issue of Coils of the Serpent: Journal for the Study of Contemporary Power
Guest Editors: Victoria Allen (Kiel) and Harald Pittel (Potsdam)
CFP: Media, Materiality and EmergencyThe deadline for full submissions is extended to 31st July 2020 (for submission in Nov 2020)
MAST: The Journal of Media Art Study and Theory
Guest editor: Timothy Barker (University of Glasgow)
In what ways do questions of materiality matter in a time of crisis? What does it mean to explore the matter of things at a time when we are threatened with the annihilation of that matter, its disappearance, or its disintegration? In this issue, MAST journal seeks to answer and further explore these questions through essays from arts practitioners and theorists.
for more details please see: http://mast-nemla.org/cfp-issue-2/
SPECIAL ISSUE - CALL FOR PAPERS
Ex-Centric Narratives: Journal of Anglophone Literature, Culture and Media
(Special Issue 5, Dec. 2021)
SPECIAL THEME:
Religion, Mobilities and Belonging
in Contemporary Anglophone Literature and Film/TV Series Production
SPECIAL ISSUE GUEST EDITORS:
Dr. Efthymia-Lydia Roupakia, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
Ever since Charles Taylor (A Secular Age) and Talal Asad (Formations of the Secular) questioned the supremacy of secularization, scholars in the fields of philosophy, sociology, and anthropology have used post-secularism to analyze gender, state violence, religion, pain, the senses, and more. This perspective has helped us to consider how secularization has been accepted as normative and inevitable, and how it functions as a disciplinary apparatus or as a constructed ideology.
This edited collection will be published by Cambridge Scholars in late 2020. The volume invites essays that focus on literary or other cultural texts that use the graveyard as a liminal space within which received narratives and social values can be challenged, and new and empowering perspectives on the present articulated. Essays in the volume will examine the use of liminality as a vehicle for social critique, paying particular attention to the ways in which liminal spaces facilitate the construction of alternative perspectives.
A Chapter should be no longer than 6000 words, and should be original and previously unpublished.