Can We Be More Than the Middle Ages? Medievalism Studies and Medieval Studies (Roundtable)

52nd Annual Convention of the Northeast Modern Language Association

Marriott Downtown Philadelphia, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, from 11-14 March 2021

Paper abstracts are due by 30 September 2020

Session organized by Michael A. Torregrossa and Carl B. Sell and sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture.

This panel aims to explore the machinic metaphor in the Italian and European literary, cinematographic, and philosophical panorama of the 20th century. Since the Industrial Revolution, machines have established themselves as a crucial, pervasive, and unavoidable presence of individual life and collective existence. The disturbing and fascinating vitality of the machine has shaped all social, political, and economic relationships. Even the literary, cinematographic, and philosophical space was crossed by the new myth of the machine and met its complexity: it refused or exalted it, let itself be inspired by it, analyzed its profound meaning.

No event since the recent millennium, itself an “event” only in the sense created by expectationalism, with Y2K being a paradigmatic “non-event,” has activated apocalyptic sensibilities to the extent that COVID-19 has done.  Its impact has been global, multifarious, and multivalent.  In many places, it has impacted every area of life, and there are very few places where it has not spread: as of June 4, 2020, the only nations reporting no COVID-19 cases were various Pacific islands, Turkmenistan, and North Korea.  In distinction to previous pandemics with cultural impact, the most recent of any significance being the HIV/AIDS pandemic, COVID-19 has been swift and pervasive, without immediate association to any specific sub-population or vectors beyond the

Creating Texts, Breaking the Rules: Galdosian Narratives (at SAMLA 92) 

“The interactions that make us sick also constitute us as a community. Disease emergence dramatizes the dilemma that inspires the most basic human narratives: the necessity and danger of human contact.” Priscilla Ward, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative. Duke UP, 2008.

Gender and Death in the Late Middle Ages and Early Modernity 

Gender and Death in the late middle ages and early modernity

Call for proposals on how the category of gender survived, disappeared or was transformed in contact with death in the late medieval and early modern period.

This panel at the 2021 NeMLA convention in Philadelphia, "Making Lit Lit: Forging Connections Between Student Experiences and Literature," will consider how to apply current pedagogical best practices to make literature and culture classes more relevant and engaging, and as a result, more fruitful.
 Presentations--which do not have to be read papers--can be on pedagogical innovations that have been researched and/or implemented in the literature and culture classroom, as well as on applied linguistics or other pedagogical studies that were not specifically on the teaching of literature and culture but could be applied to it (such as those on motivation/investment, needs analysis, TBLT, project-based learning, etc.).

The experience of growing up in Latin America for the past two centuries has been marked by constant negotiations with precarity, postcoloniality and multiple forms of violence. Numerous literary and audiovisual productions have drawn attention to this issue. In this session, we invite critical examinations of coming-of-age narratives and bildungsroman dealing with bi-cultural or multi-cultural identities, picaresque and heterodox processes of learning, non hetero-normative sexualities, as well as other alternative processes of development and growth.

Ọyẹ: Journal of Language, Literature and Popular Culture is an academic journal domiciled in the Department of English and Literary Studies of the Federal University, Oye-Ekiti, Ekiti State, Nigeria. It seeks to publish insightful research from established and emerging scholars on all aspects of English Language, Literature and Popular Culture, especially as they relate to Africa and to the Black Diaspora.

For its third edition which will be published in December 2020, Ọyẹ will be focusing on the language, literature and popular culture of Ekiti State.

We are especially interested in submissions with an interdisciplinary focus. Papers might examine, but are not limited to the following issues:

Call for Abstracts: Representations of Refugee, Migrant, and Displaced Motherhood in a Global Context

Seeking abstracts or unpublished chapters looking at literary accounts of Latina and/or Indigenous motherhood experiences in the context of migration and displacement to fill a gap in scholarly edited collection. 

Please submit a 250-400 word abstract of your chapter and a 50-word bio by June 20, 2019.

Accepted and complete chapters due 15 August 2019 (6,000 words maximum with MLA format and references) 

52nd Northeast Modern Language Association Convention

March 11-14, 2021 / Philadelphia, PA

South Atlantic Modern Language Association Annual Conference, November 13-15, 2020. Originally scheduled for Jacksonville, FL, and now will be fully online.

Articles in about 4000(four thousand words) are invited from faculties, academicians, scholars and activists for the inaugural issue of a peer reviewed journal called Social Currents. The issue will feature articles on the Covid-19 pandemic and what this means for a society, culture and nation. Have we learnt new lessons or should we go about doing what we always aspire and do-a technocracy irreverent to human history and its complex interlinking with the environment. While doctors and nurses are at the forefront of the battle against the pandemic, are we somehow ignoring the sanitation workers or such men and women who have been traditionally marginalized and do not figure in our ideas of societal growth?

Situations: Cultural Studies in the Asian Context

Special Issue for Fall 2021: Performing Translation

Call for Papers

The “Performing Translation” special issue of Situations: Cultural Studies in the Asian Context brings together two keywords that have helped shape discourse on transnational cultural studies in the twenty-first century: performance and translation. Both concepts understand culture as fluid, shifting, and constantly on the move. Both are predicated on cultural encounter and exchange. Both performance and translation are iterative acts that challenge the notion of an original.