Guru Dutt’s films are integral to the golden age of Hindi cinema as they were both critical and commercial successes. In a short career spanning twenty years, Dutt has served as an actor, a director, and a producer. His versatility is testament to a deep understanding of every aspect of filmmaking. Critics contend that contradictory ideas coalesced in his movies. A prominent theme of nationalism is at the heart of Dutt’s oeuvre. While he set out to refashion Indian national identity, Dutt envisioned a utopia for the new nation. Ideologically, Dutt was influenced by Nehruvian socialism, which finds its expression in his selection of subjects and themes. His movies also critiqued the new nation’s failure to afford equal opportunities to every citizen.

This is a call for chapters on specific topics for The Palgrave Handbook of Shakespearean Biofiction, an edited collection which is under contract with Palgrave. The Handbook will be published in 2026. It will be the first book to comprehensively consider the history, state of the art, global cultures, and futures of Shakespeare biofiction; as such, it will be the definitive study of the topic, intervening at a critical juncture of development for this subject matter. Proposals are sought for the following chapters: 

INTERNATIONAL PSYCHOHISTORICAL ASSOCIATION’S 48th ANNUAL CONFERENCE

 MAY 23-25, 2025, VIRTUALLY ON ZOOM

THEME: IMAGINING BRIGHTER FUTURES FOR OUR DIVIDED WORLD: WHAT PSYCHOHISTORY CAN CONTRIBUTE

SUBTHEMES: Psychohistorical Insights On

Producer, director, and screenwriter Gregg Araki is a pivotal figure in independent film, known for his distinctive style and contributions to New Queer Cinema. Despite his inclusion in such cinematic movement thanks to The Living End (1992), and his rise to fame with the Teen Apocalypse Trilogy (1993-1997), Araki's explorations of a more mainstream style and his incursions in television directing have garnered little critical and academic attention, except for his 2004 adaptation of the novel Mysterious Skin and his win of the first ever Cannes Film Festival Queer Palm in 2010 for his film Kaboom.

Revista Hispánica Moderna is currently seeking special issue proposals. Special issues should explore innovative and significant topics within Hispanic Studies. The journal is particularly interested in proposals that cross temporalities and territories, transversally studying problems that question Modern and Early Modern fields and Iberian, Hispanic and Latin American cultures.

When proposing a Special Issue, please include:

Call for Papers for an Edited Collection on Elizabeth (“Lizzie”) Champney

Psychogeography: Liminal Loci and Haunted Haunts

The Area for Esotericism, Occultism, and Magic invites special panel presentation proposals on the subject of psychogeography to be included in its events at the 46th annual conference of the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association, held this February 19-22 in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Skenographia: Rethinking Design

Yale University Department of Comparative Literature Graduate Conference

March 28th, 2025

Keynote Speaker: Spyros Papapetros (Princeton University)

What sets a scene apart from a mere place or setting? Etymologically, the term resists simplification to a physical location or continuous action. It encompasses both the material apparatus of the stage and the events unfolding upon it. This oscillation— between object and subject, exterior and interior, self and world—forms a conceptual framework that this conference seeks to apply to the study of design.

Walt Whitman and Visual Culture
A special issue of The Walt Whitman Quarterly Review (Fall/Winter 1986-1987) first brought together nearly all the known photographs of Whitman, laying the foundation for the Walt Whitman Archive’s Gallery of Images. Whitman wrote about and sat for sculptors and painters, and he has been the inspiration for many art and film projects. In light of this and the recent publication of several illustrated editions of Whitman’s writings, the Whitman Studies Association invites proposals focused on Whitman and any aspect of visual culture. We seek presentations that explore and analyze Whitman and/or his writings in relation to:

Call for abstracts: Ecology and the Art(-ifice) of Attention

A special issue of the journal Environmental Philosophy

General aim of the Special Issue

Banaras Hindu University 

Two day National Seminar 

brat and it’s a conference but it’s still brat

Deadline for submissions: December 2nd, 2024

Conference date/time: February 8th, 2025, UC Berkeley (will be in hybrid format).

Names and affiliations: Paz Regueiro and Cory Nguyen, Department of Comparative Literature

Contact emails: paz_regueiro@berkeley.edu and corytnguyen@berkeley.edu 

“You wanna guess if I'm serious about this song.”

- Charli xcx, 2024. (“Guess”, 17th track on “brat and it's the same but there's three more songs so it's not”.)

In the last couple of decades, our embodied actions with others have become increasingly more fluid and disentangled from fixed/static contexts so much so that the materiality of social life has been filtered through texts produced in a variety of semiotic resources that bind people together while keeping them apart. By further blurring online/offline boundaries, the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated the long-lasting mediatization of social life leading to a reconceptualization of phenomena such as corporeality and matter and their relationship with both virtual and physical environments.

We welcome papers for our ECSAS panel on Muslim Counterpublics in the Indian Nation-state Public Sphere which will bring together emerging and advanced scholars of Muslim identity in South Asia in the context of the nation-state public sphere. We wish to explore the deep history and contemporary imaginings of Muslimness from the vantage point of songs, music and sound, literary studies, history, anthropology, dastangoi, oral historiography, and cinema. We aim to shed light on the multiperspectival and pan-national Muslim identification process as it also intersects with ideas of ideological homogenisation, modernity, and religious revivalism.