The Body Studies Journal (bodystudiesjournal.org, ISSN 2642-9772), a peer-reviewed, open access journal for the inter-/trans-disciplinary field of Body Studies, welcomes submissions for its third issue.  

Coronavirus, the brutal murders of George Floyd and so many other innocent Black people, and the Black Lives Matters movement have indelibly marked how 2020 will be recorded in history.  All of these revolutionary social, medical, cultural and historical movements intersect with the body.  The Body Studies Journal specifically invites papers that focus on the events of 2020.

In the early stage of the COVID-19 outbreak, a common practice for many western media was to revisit an old orientalist habit to equate eastern culinary customs to primitiveness, eagerly reporting on Chinese “omnivorous markets” and “culinary adventurism” as a likely cause of the pandemic. Western disdain for extremely omnivorous eastern eating habits is not new to medievalists, nor is it a distinctively modern phenomenon. Such disdain for “oriental” eating habits focuses on the purportedly unclean, unethical, underdeveloped ways of eating everything, including whatever is tabooed for a Latin Christian to eat.

                            Reading Gandhi Today: Critical Perspectives and Approaches

The Fourth Faulkner Studies in the UK Colloquium:

Faulkner, Transgressive Fiction, Postmodernism

January 29th and 30th, 2021, online via Zoom

With keynote addresses by:

Dr Phillip Gordon (author of Gay Faulkner: Uncovering a Homosexual Presence in Yoknapatawpha and Beyond [University Press of Mississippi, 2019])

 and 

Climate change is an important issue that has become a frequent topic in twentieth as well as twenty-first century literature and film. From science fiction of the past to the present-day speculative fiction, this roundtable presents an opportunity to provide and study examples both past and present regarding climate change issues in literature and film. Dystopias written by international writers reflect the world-wide concern regarding climate change. For example, novelists such as British-born Maggie Gee’s The Flood or French-born Pierre Boulle’s La Planète des singes[The Planet of the Apes] speculate on the possibility of climate changes causing devastating destruction.

The focus of this panel is to assess and illustrate the potential or possibility regarding the influence of mental disorders on various notable writers. Whether related to bipolar disorder, post-partum depression, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder [PTSD], or some other form of clinical depression, melancholia has appeared throughout literature. For example, how is bipolarism reflected in some of Anne Sexton’s award winning poetry? What effects of Sylvia Plath’s clinical depression are evident in her writing? How does the father’s suicide of eight-year-old Ernest Hemingway possibly influence the dangerous, life-threatening choices Ernest made in his adult life?

Viral Memes : Research and Reflections on the Coronapocalypse

Following the 1st international Virtual  Colloqium  "Re-thinking Marginalized Identities in Pandemics” on July 27, 2020, the second session will be scheduled for either the e

You are cordially invited to join us at the Shakespeare Association of America's 2021 conference in Austin, Texas, 31 March - 3 April 2021  Seminar: Embodying Differences in Global Shakespearean Performance The ethics of embodied difference intersect with global frames for filming and performing Shakespeare in the twenty-first century. How do categories of race, gender, sexuality, and disability put pressure on artists’ and audiences’ claims about ethical and political gains of global Shakespeare? This seminar invites contributions that examine identity politics in the production and global reception of adaptations. 
Alexa Alice Joubin (George Washington University)
Elizabeth Pentland (York University)

Hamlet and the North: Origins, Exchanges and Appropriations The story of Shakespeare’s Nordic play is also, inevitably, one of cultural exchanges before, during and after the early modern period. From its origins in Nordic tradition to its re-introduction in the Nordic countries through Shakespeare’s play, the story of Hamlet from the middle ages to present time is inextricably bound up with Nordic history and culture. This conference, co-hosted by the Nordic Shakespeare Society and the Early Modern Seminar at the University of Gothenburg, is the first to explore the specific Nordic dimensions of Hamlet.

British ‘Fictions of Class’ since 1945 – Revitalising Class in the Twenty-First Century

Workshop – University of Siegen, Germany – 18-19 June 2021

From arborescence to the rhizome, plants have long served as models for thinking in philosophy, biology, and the arts. In recent years, scholars including Michael Marder, Catriona Sandilands, and Jeffrey Nealon have brought renewed attention to the agency and dynamism of the vegetal, at the same time that the future of plant life has come to be at risk in the wake of climate change and the impending collapse of ecosystems. This panel invites papers that explore ways of thinking about and with plants in the shadow of the Anthropocene. How do writers and visual artists, past and present, help us renegotiate our relationship to the vegetal today?

While it is considered dubious to anthropomorphize animals to learn about them, learning with animals asks scholars to consider both animal and human ways of being and knowing, as well as where those epistemologies might overlap or diverge. Attempting to learn with animals requires consideration of the value of anthropomorphization. Drawing on the burgeoning field of animal studies, we invite literary scholars to consider how literature imagines animals and their ways of being and knowing—whether alternate or familiar.

Whether we consider the high fantasy of Lewis and Tolkien or the contemporary rise in historical fiction set during the Middle Ages, it must be acknowledged that medievalists (and scholars more generally) have long been linked with creative writing. In an era of academia where the traditional university job is far from assured and where representations of the Middle Ages are co-opted by white nationalists, we must acknowledge the wider benefits and contributions of the humanities, while promoting a diverse picture of the Middle Ages. It is more important than ever that the scholastic community embrace its creative side.