Sesssion on the 2022 NeMLA Conference in Baltimore (March 10-13th)

Religious Futurisms: A Call for Papers

We are pleased to announce a call for papers for a forthcoming collection of essays on the broad topic of Religious Futurisms, to be edited by Sumeyra Buran Utku and Jim Clarke.

Religious Futurisms derives its intellectual inspiration from the emergence of Afrofuturism and other Alternative Futurisms as ideological and analytical frameworks in recent years. Religious Futurisms can manifest as ideology, criticality, prophecy, futurology, philosophy or artistic practice. They may be discerned in a wide range of forms, ranging from speculative theology to performative videogame interaction to abstract or polysemous imagery in visual art.

Queer Sahara | Queer Sonora

A Panel at the 53rd Annual Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) Convention

March 10-13, 2022 in Baltimore, Maryland

In this panel, we will consider shared connections across desert spaces in the queer imaginary, using the Sonoran Desert and the Sahara Desert as specific sites of comparison, reinvention, liberation, and self-definition. Rather than empty spaces or zones of death, these deserts and their vibrant ecosystems contain various well-established queer enclaves such as Palm Springs, California; Bisbee and Melrose (Phoenix), Arizona; and locales at the edge of the Sahara, such as Fes and Marrakesh, Morocco.

#MeToo and Contemporary Literary Studies: panel accepted for the 2022 NeMLA conference (March 10-13, 2022; Baltimore, MD)

JNR invites proposals for a special issue, edited by Lynsey McCulloch and Emily Winerock, on ‘Dance of the Northern Renaissance’. Dance was a key cultural practice of the early modern period: it was integral to theatrical representation; it was a significant element of court ritual; and it fulfilled an important social function. But how might we characterise the particular dance practices of Northern Europe? French, Spanish and Italian traditions have dominated histories of Renaissance dance. However, more recent accounts have challenged the conflation of North and South in discussions of early European dance, drawing attention to the myriad regional and national variations at work.

Mental health related challenges among graduate students have long been known as a serious concern across universities throughout the world. Findings from a recent survey of graduate students across numerous fields of study, countries, and institutions suggest that graduate students are over six times more likely to experience anxiety and depression than the general population (Evans et. al 2018). Women, LGBTQ students and graduate students from other, minoritized, underrepresented groups in universities are even more vulnerable to such issues.

How does one prepare for a comprehensive exam? Who would make for the best members of a dissertation committee, and how should one ask them for help? What kind of relationship should one have with other graduate students? How does one move from being an undergraduate to a graduate student?

Since 1989, Penumbra has published the artistic and literary talents of students and creatives regionally, nationally, and internationally and has strived to be a champion for writers of all ages and backgrounds. As a publication, Penumbra is unique; its student-led staff personally solicits, selects, and edits its content and design. This journal provides its staff with the unique opportunity to gain firsthand experience putting together both an online and print publication featuring fiction, nonfiction, poetry, hybrid, and art pieces. This year Penumbra is excited to share a new opportunity; Penumbra Press, a new branch of the Stanislaus State publication.

The fantasy of sentient machines serving humans’ desires and needs connects world cultures and media as the film & TV industry is eager to produce eye-catching visual narratives of indestructible cyborgs like Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) in the Terminator Series or selfless servants like Andrew Martin (Robert Williams) in Bicentennial Man. However spectacular these films are, they often leave us uncomfortable, wondering if bionic humans or AI-operated machines are here to destroy humanity. Could it be that humans deceive themselves into thinking that the creation of such posthuman beings will resolve the paradox of the ‘master and slave’ power dynamics?

Latin American Children’s Literature and Culture

Call for Papers

The range, audacity, and radical commitments of Alice Notley’s poetry are unmatched in contemporary literature. Having published continuously for over 50 years, Notley is one of the most important and celebrated American poets of the 20th and 21st centuries. This NeMLA roundtable aims to address the full scope of Notley’s writing and aesthetic activity from 1970 to the present, from the slant domesticity of her early volumes in the 1970s, to the investment in gendered urban publics in the 1980s, to an attention to environmental crisis in the early 1990s, to the more oracular interest in the relationship between “one” and “world” in recent volumes, in order to variously describe a poetics of care in Notley’s work.

Full CFP here: https://bevismanuscripts.wordpress.com/call-for-papers We warmly invite submissions for a workshop taking place in Düsseldorf 2-4 December 2021, hosted by Heinrich-Heine University. The multi-text manuscript was a key medium for disseminating popular narratives including romances and epic or hagiographical texts across the cultural and linguistic borders of late medieval Europe. The manuscripts that have survived from this period can therefore be read not only as windows into the literary, social and linguistic environment in which they were created, but also as cultural objects whose evolving contents shaped the adaptation and reception of the texts they contain.

In times marked by the growing and irreversible impact of global climate change, this panel welcomes contributions exploring the literary and artistic ideations of Francophone ecofutures within and across French-speaking spaces. Inspired by the recent publication boom of eco-oriented literary and philosophical works such as Leonora Miano’s Rouge impératrice, Malcom Ferdinand’s Pour une écologie décoloniale, and Felwine Sarr’s Afrotopia, this panel seeks to answer questions such as: how have Francophone visual and literary ecofictions imagined decolonial futures?

This panel asks a follow-up question to the so-called "urban turn" in the humanities and social sciences in recent years: what lies beyond or at the margins of the urban. The city itself has evolved into something that transgresses the traditional formations of the urban/rural, the fictional/material, the state/institutional, and the resistant/popular. By seeking to address the interrelation between the notions of the center and the peripheral within media urbanisms across the world, the panel aims to go beyond the binary of the center and the margin well as the urban and the non-urban, and in doing so, rethinks urban marginality as well as the processes that create it.