Fandom today is often entangled with digital platforms, which offer spaces and features that make some aspects of fan culture more widely accessible amid increasingly globalized communities and models of consumption. Fans are perceived to be early adopters of new technologies, particularly those that provide space for gathering and community building. Likewise, many types of fan works, fan labor, and fandom participation depend on certain platforms for hosting, sharing, distributing, and discussing such content. However, fans also have complicated relationships with platforms, whether because their needs and uses are in conflict with other stakeholders or because platforms can generate and challenge notions of access, accountability, and community.

The Charles Olson Society will sponsor a session at the annual American Literature Association Conference, to be held in Boston, May 25-28. We are interested in abstracts that examine the influence of Charles Olson and/or other Black Mountain Poets on poetic practices and their developments up to the present. A variety of poets took up the innovative practices of figures like Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Ed Dorn, Robert Duncan, John Wieners, and others associated with Black Mountain. How have the practices of this fundamentally important school of poetics been extended, transformed, and/or resisted by other poets?

Gender Studies Area

April 5-8, 2023

San Antonio, TX

The Gender Studies area of the Popular Culture Association explores a broad range of intersections between gender and popular culture, whether within popular culture texts or practices.

Re-Africanizing Local Culture: Language and Identity Politics in African Literature

 Call for Papers

Draft Proposal by Dr. Najib Mokhtari, UIR-Center for Global Studies

Co-edited with Dr. Richard Oko Ajah, University of Uyo, Nigeria

The Ralph Waldo Emerson Society will sponsor a panel at the 82nd Annual Gathering of the Thoreau Society—exploring the themes of Thoreau, politics, and extinction—to be held July12-16, 2023, in Concord, MA.

“Fates, Fortunes, and Resources in the Postbellum Republic”

Sneaker Studies: A Call for Papers

Sneakers have constituted one of the most significant cultural phenomena in recent history, and yet they have not garnered sustained attention by scholars of humanities and cultural studies. This project, an online sneaker archive will consider how specific shoes have become icons of their historical eras. This is a second call for papers this time with a more focused question.  We are interested in studies of specific athletes as pitchmen and their changing relationship with signature shoes or shoe lines. 

The goal of this seminar is to provide a forum in which to discuss how TV shows (reality shows, true crime shows, documentary broadcasts, docufictions, and web series) bridge the gap between factual knowledge and myths, and how it facilitates the transfer of ordinary knowledge into the implausible, especially in Iberia and Latin America. Entertainment business and journalism intertwine to engage an audience oriented to the consumption of serialized narratives.

Call for Contributions

Hard Times Issue

Perspectives on Punishment and Decarceration: (The Need for) Recipes

edited by Paul McGuinness, Cornelia Wächter and Andrea Zittlau

American Academy of Religion - Western Region Annual Meeting 2023

University of California, Davis March 24-26, 2023

Call for Papers: The Role of Religion in Asian American Civil Rights Discourses

Panel: Asian American Religious Studies Unit

The human and plant relationship stretches back to the earliest of times, arguably 20,000 years ago when the prehistoric hunter-gatherers had not quite learned to domesticate the wild vegetal species that grew around them. Learning to domesticate the plants for their own use was a decisive moment that changed humans into an agricultural unit and left the promise of a quantum leap in human history. Indeed, for the last twenty millennia, humans and plants have co-evolved in such diverse but intimate ways that the history of one would be unthinkable without the history of the other.

"This is You Beyond You": Representing the Present through Speculative Futures

Seminar proposal for ACLA's annual meeting

https://www.acla.org/you-beyond-you-representing-present-through-specula...

"This is you beyond you. After and with the consequences of fracking past peak oil. After and with the defunding of the humanities. ... After the end of the world. After the ways we have been knowing the world" -- Pauline Gumbs, M Archive

“Tell me,” he says, “have you ever heard of something called a moon?” -- NK Jemisin, The Fifth Season

Rights and Responsibility in Jewish Tradition 

UCLA Department of Theater and the Center for Performance Studies present the 2023 Graduate Student Conference:

In Cahoots: Disciplinary Crossings and a Future for Performance Studies

Abstract Due: November 10th, 2022

Conference Dates: February 15-17, 2023

Emerson Society Panels ALA 2023

The Ralph Waldo Emerson Society will sponsor two panels at the 34th Annual Conference of the American Literature Association, to be held May 25–28, 2023, at the Westin Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston. Both panels will honor the contributions of the late professor Joel Myerson.

“Editing Emerson”