Panel Title: Anthropology of Literature: Negotiating Cultural Paradigms

Convenors: Dr. Kalindi Sharma, Assistant Professor, IHBAS

Email: kalindi1sharma@gmail.com;  kalindi.ihbas@delhi.gov.in

Co- Convenor: Dr. Debashree Sinha, Assistant Professor (English), Deshbandhu College, University of Delhi

Email: sinhadebashree5@gmail.com

Discussant: Prof. Indranil Acharya, Professor & Head of the Department (English), Vidyasagar University

Demystifying Mystic Falls: Race and Racism in The Vampire Diaries Franchise

From the time it premiered on The CW in 2009, The Vampire Diaries was duly castigated in the media for uncritically tiptoeing around Civil War “lost cause” mythology and overtly tokenizing its Black characters. As the public later learned, minoritized actors were also treated poorly behind the scenes. Still, the series became a cultural juggernaut, boasting two successful spin-offs (The Originals and Legacies), reviving the book series on which the show was based, and inspiring a cottage industry of franchise-related institutions and conventions that, as of 2023, is just beginning to take off.

The Northeast Popular Culture Association welcomes proposals in the area of Health, Disease and Popular Culture for its hybrid conference to be held from Thursday, October 12-Saturday, October 14, 2023.  Virtual sessions will take place on Thursday evening and Friday mornings via Zoom and in-person sessions will take place on Friday evening and Saturday morning at Nichols College. 

Current Chair: Julia Brown, Stony Brook University, julia.r.brown@stonybrook.edu

Rivers and Journeys: Discovering New Selves and New Tropes

This panel is part of the NEMLA conference taking place in Boston March 7-10, 2024.
It seeks to analyze the development of urban cultures in France while taking into account the impact of postcolonial studies since 2005, the year of the "urban riots". It also aims to discuss the political aspect of urban culture as well as the influence of American culture on French production.

Possible themes include:

· Urban literature and "banlieue" culture

· The literary aspect of French rap

· Urban culture and postcolonial studies

· French Caribbean rap

· Urban culture and social activism

· The American influence

· Global "Francophone" hip-hop

For presentation at the NeMLA conference in March of 2024:

Critics frequently frame American literary regionalism in geographical terms, whether by emphasizing a region’s spatial boundedness or emphasizing components of regionalist writing that stretch across space and scale. A similar negotiation of spatial scales from the proximate to the planetary has come to characterize recent conversations about climate change in the environmental humanities—for example in the work of Timothy Clark, Benjamin Morgan, and Elizabeth DeLoughrey. Regionalism’s engagements with place, scale, ecology, and everyday atmospheres make it a potentially generative form for representing climate, and yet few scholarly treatments have investigated the interconnections between American literary regionalism and climatic thought.

Literature and Life Writing
Midwest Regional Meeting of the Conference on Christianity and Literature
October 23-24, 2023
Wheaton College 

This conference brings together scholars of Christianity and literature with contemporary writers of spiritual memoir to celebrate religious life writing and consider the forms, features, and thematic possibilities within the range of associated genres. How do literary works and forms shape portrayals of spiritual life? What might literature accomplish in the spiritual life within writer and reader? How might the literary space of religiously inflected life writing offer particular theological content? 

South Atlantic Modern Language Association’s 95th Conference:

Pre-1900 American Literature Panel: “Writing with Security and Insecurity in Early America.” 

One interpretation of the NeMLA 2024 theme of Surplus centers on embodiment, and the transatlantic long nineteenth century was arguably a key historical moment for envisioning material embodiment in terms of surplus, or lack thereof. Representation of both individual and corporate embodiment often turned to material resources like food to express approval or disapproval for various bodies’ relationships to each other. As David J. Hutson argues, during the nineteenth century “body weight was allowed to hold multiple symbolic positions, with thinness and fatness understood as both positive and negative” (2017).

Conference online (via Zoom)

27-28 July 2023

CFP:

​In our postmodern world there are a lot of questions that should be re-considered and re-defined. What does it mean to fight against colonialism and racism in the world of migration crisis and xenophobic attitudes towards minorities? What does it mean to be a postcommunist country in the face of the common nostalgia for order and rules? How is it possible to have a national identity being aware of the relative character of every national feature?

Horror has been analyzed in literature and film endlessly. But in this modern age of surplus, more niche and obscure mediums for horror have been taking the reigns. With so much media at our fingertips and so readily accessible, film and literature are influenced by independent creations. Video games, web Alternate Reality Games (ARGs), music, Internet culture, and international media have led to the development and evolution of American mainstream horror in the past couple of years. More traditional outlets for terror like books and movies have become stale and formulaic due to Capitalism, restricted to producing what is only guaranteed to be profitable, causing the traditional mediums to take note of these newer forms of scary storytelling.

Is there such thing as too much memory? According to nineteenth-century French psychologists, there is, which is how they coined the term “hypermnesia,” or “the disease of too much memory” (Michael Roth). As Michael Roth has usefully charted, a “typical” or normal” memory, then, would be one that brings order, allowing for a clear link between the past and present that consequently allows for “possible futures.” In contrast, surplus memory becomes an “agent of disorder” that overwhelms the present.

Invite to submit to an upcoming in-person conference session, "Rethinking Critical Thinking and the Humanities."  (October 2023, Portland OR; PAMLA)

Dear colleague,

I have organized a round-table session to be held at the PAMLA 120th Annual Conference (Portland, OR) – October 26-29, 2023.