Call for Book Reviews

Submit abstracts here: https://tinyurl.com/3muvywvt.

We are pleased to announce a call for book reviews.

We invite book reviews (700 - 1,200 words) on work on the following topics but not limited to:

In November 2022, the University of California participated in the largest strike in higher education when 48,000 graduate workers, post-docs, and academic researchers went on strike to advocate for their collective labor needs. Following this collaborative framework, we seek presentations focused on coalition building to address labor issues impacting graduate students in literature and languages across institutions. 

Potential paper might address, but are not limited to, the following: 

• Unionization efforts and graduate labor strikes and resistance; 

• Collective bargaining success and struggles;

PUBLICATION: Edited Collection of Essays

An international biannual print and online publication of the American Studies Association of Turkey, the Journal of American Studies of Turkey operates with a double-blind peer review system and publishes work (in English) on American literature, history, art, music, film, popular culture, institutions, politics, economics, geography and related subjects.
The Editorial Board welcomes articles which cross conventional borders between academic disciplines, as well as comparative studies of the United States. 

Deadline for abstracts: Tuesday, April 30, 2024

Conference Date(s): Thursday-Sunday, November 6-10, 2024 

Conference Location: Palm Springs, California

Format: In Person (no virtual option available!!) 

Submit abstracts via: https://pamla.ballastacademic.com 

Contact for Inquiries: Noah Gallego @noahrgallego@gmail.com, cc: Rachel Birke @ rbirk001@g.ucla.edu 

The idea of “middle-ness” can suggest stability—the center of an object is less likely to break than its edges. It can also suggest the opposite: something in a state of change can be said to be in “the middle”—neither one thing nor another. Mythcon 53, located in the middle of the continental U.S., welcomes papers exploring the concept of “middle-ness” as it is worked out in fantasy, science fiction, and related genres. Paper topics can cover a wide range of possibilities, including but not limited to the following:

Dominant queer and trans studies frameworks still tend to see visibility as a ‘trap’. We invite 200-word abstracts for a special session to be proposed for the 2025 MLA convention that will offer a more complex picture, specifying and historicizing the changing meanings of visibility in queer and trans representation. Please send 200-word abstracts and short bio notes to Guy Davidson and Ben Nichols (guy@uow.edu.au, ben.nichols@manchester.ac.uk) by 18th March 2024.

This guaranteed panel brings the multitude of disabled characters in Dostoevsky's work -- including those with physical dis/abilities, chronic illnesses, emotional-cognitive differences, or the deaf, blind, or non-verbal -- into conversation with the growing fields of Disability Studies and Critical Medical Humanities within Slavic Studies. In light of the Presidential Theme of Visibility, we urge scholars to go beyond abstraction and metaphor, examining the political positions, socio-economic worldviews, and existential stakes that shaped how disability and the disabled were framed in Dostoevsky's oeuvre.

Dickens remains one of the most visible Anglophone authors, with his fiction adapted regularly for the stage and screen and frequently taught and discussed by scholars. His hypercanonicity has also inspired more diverse, ephemeral forms of engagement across a range of cultural contexts, from popular visual and material cultures, through to literary tourism and festivals, and on to the practices of collectors and fans in both analogue and online contexts. This session invites contributions that analyse an aspect or aspects of this vast and still relatively underexplored terrain.

Title: African Language, Literature, and Culture Since 1990: Exploring the Dynamic Role of AAVE

Abstract:

The 16th Annual Louisiana Studies Conference will be held September 14, 2024, at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana. The conference committee is now accepting presentation proposals for the upcoming conference. Presentation proposals on any aspect of the 2024 conference theme “Lyrical Louisiana,” as well as creative texts by, about, and/or for Louisiana and Louisianans, are sought for this year’s conference.

The MLA forum on Religion and Literature invites paper proposals for a panel on religion, literature, and climate. How do ancient and contemporary literary texts both represent and engender climate crisis denialism, climate lament, and climate hope as a function of religious imaginations and literary practice? Submit 250-word abstracts and CVs.

The MLA Language Change Forum is seeking papers that document changes in the (in)visibility of minoritized speakers. Topics may include but are not limited to issues of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and marginalized linguistic varieties across fields and pedagogies. Please submit a 300 word abstract for consideration. 

Conference Dates: January 9-12, 2025

Conference Location: New Orleans, LA

Contact Information: Laura Francis, Cornell U (lrf62@cornell.edu)

This panel investigates “gratuitousness” as a key term for thinking about contemporary culture and aesthetics. To call an artwork gratuitous is to protest against its supposedly needless excesses – yet how does this square with the needlessness that arguably defines the aesthetic realm in the first place? Is the concept of gratuitousness a product of economic austerity? How might a sense of gratuitousness be produced by diminished faculties of attention? Possible lines of inquiry include