Old age and aging are biological as well as sociocultural constructs and processes; they cannot be completely separated, but rather they influence each other and get interrelated with the passing of time. As sociocultural constructs, old age, aging and their definition are not immovable concepts and, in fact, vary depending on the different historical, social and cultural contexts.   Likewise, the definition and organization of each of the population groups by age are not fixed. For example, for decades, 65+ has been agreed upon by the UN and the WHO, among others, as the beginning of old age; however, market studies propose 50+ and establish two groups: 50+ seniors and 75+ seniors.

Body Augmentation: Possibilities of Identities and Technology in/of Video Games

A MultiPlay Network Conference, October 28th, 2024

Abstracts due: 30 August 2024

As is tradition for MultiPlay, we have a special horror related conference for the end of October. This time we are focusing on the monstrous (and liberational!) possibilities of body augmentation through video games. We welcome abstracts from utopian and dystopian perspectives, on the real life hardware capabilities or upon representations of augmentation within games.

This roundtable session will discuss mindfulness practices that instructors of writing and literature can incorporate into classrooms, and it will focus especially on the implications of mindfulness for the humanities and for its/their roles in education and society in honoring human, cultural, and global diversity in all its dimensions, enacting equity and inclusivity, and affecting change.

Anticipated Publication: Volume 5, November 2025

Guest Editors: CarrieLynn D. Reinhard, Christopher J. Olson, and Hannah Steele

Purpose: Articles that explore the intersection of queer studies and professional wrestling studies to address a scholarship gap on the application of queer theory to explore professional wrestling individuals, texts, practices, and fandoms.

Submissions: Seeking empirical articles aligned with the special issue’s purpose that may include, but is not limited to, the following topics:

Call for Essays

Studies in Memory of Donald C. Baker (1928-2019)

Call for essays for a book on the late medievalist Donald C. Baker who left us in 2019.

Donald C. Baker taught English Literature at the University of Colorado, Boulder, for twenty years then pursued teaching opportunities in Finland, England, Tunisia, Jordan, and Macau. 

Donald C. Baker published or co-published a variety of books and articles (in PMLA, Studia Neophilologica, Speculum, Studies in Philology, Philological Quarterly, The Literary)  on Geoffrey Chaucer and Beowulf in particular.

All forms of liteary studies (around 6,000 words using APA style) are welcome.

“Austin Clarke, Black Studies and Black Diasporic Memory”

Conference Dates: September 26 - 27, 2024,

Deadline for abstracts: July 31, 2024

Notification of decisions by: August 15, 2024

Co-organizers: Ronald Cummings (McMaster University), Darcy Ballantyne (Toronto Metropolitan University), 

Keynote Speaker: Rinaldo Walcott, 

Professor and Chair in Africana and American Studies, University at Buffalo

Call for Book Chapters: Class Conflict in 21st Century Science Fiction Film

CFP CLOSED! - THANK YOU FOR YOUR INTEREST!

Under Strong Interest by McFarland’s Critical Explorations in Science Fiction and Fantasy series

Editors’ Introduction

2027 would mark 80 years of the Partition of the Indian subcontinent of 1947. For South Asia, independence from over two centuries of British rule in 1947 was accompanied by a violent and bloody partition - a territorial division of two provinces of British India, Punjab and Bengal  - on the basis of religious majority, which led to a million people dead in bloody communal riots and fifteen million people uprooted and displaced across the newly-formed borders.

Maryse Condé’s œuvre has tremendously impacted our understanding of the French Caribbean and Africa, but also of postcolonial France and the Americas as a whole. In a sense, she is truly « a writer for our times, » as the title of a recent tribute in Paris suggested. 

This panel includes various African American writers who used literature, art, history, or social scientific writings to oppose faulty presentations of an inferior tertium quid, i.e., subhuman capability. This panel welcomes review of writers and artists alike who endeavored through artistic, literary, historical, musical, filmic, or other means to contend with pseudo social scientific Untermensch designation. Writings and other media at various times and through varying genres and artistic forms, fashioned to make a case for full cultural and intellect parity.

Recent developments in generative artificial intelligence (AI) are currently transforming literary and visual studies—raising issues that range from copyright infringement; to human-computer interaction and collaboration; to the inspirations for human creativity. More broadly, this new technology can lead us to reconsider key issues in the fields of education, media, visual arts, music—and the future of the humanities.

The last twenty years have marked a wave of renewed interest in social reproduction theory, from the republication of work associated with the 1970s Wages for Housework campaign from theorists like Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James, and Silvia Federici, to new works by Federici and a host of new thinkers focused on questions of social reproduction including Kathi Weeks, Nancy Fraser, Sophie Lewis, M.E. O’Brien, and Premilla Nadasen. Lewis, O'Brien, and Weeks have helped return attention to Marx and Engels's call for "the abolition of the family," and elaborated the history and scope of this demand for social revolution.

CFP Convalescence in 19th- and 20th-century anglophone literature

26-27 June 2025, CRINI, Nantes Université & Daulat Ram College, Delhi University

Organisers: Leslie de Bont, Aude Petit-Marquis, Sanna Melin Schyllert, Deepshikha Mahanta Bortamuly, Violina Borah

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism seeks original, well-researched, and intellectually rigorous papers about texts from any time period and literary tradition. We are now accepting submissions for the Fall 2024 issue. Submissions are due by September 22, 2024.