This special session panel, for the 2024 MLA in Philadelphia, PA, will reflect on how performativity, acting, and theatre appear in writing. When we consider the novel, especially, how does theatre show its impact on authors and how do authors invoke theatrical performance or acting in a non-visual form? For texts with visual components, such as manga or illustrated stories, how do the images interface with the text to create an experience of performance for readers? When we see the theatre itself appear in literature, what is its role? When we see an amateur performance, such as Lovers' Vows in Austen's Mansfield Park, what does that say about how theatre is constructed in Austen's understanding of society?

The last few years have seen a resurgence in conservative political activism concerned with protecting children from queer adults. Parents and politicians around the country are pushing to pass homophobic and transphobic legislation. These include, to name a few examples, laws being proposed to prohibit children from attending Drag shows, the “Don’t Say Gay Bill” in Florida, and most recently, DeSantis blaming queer theory for the rejection of a high school AP African American Studies course. These contemporary iterations, of course, have historical precedents: such as Anita Bryant’s “Save Our Children” or The Briggs Initiative to fire gay teachers.

The Board of Board Game Academics (BGA) is pleased to announce that we will hold our first annual academic conference. BGA is a new journal and conference dedicated to the exploration of critical issues within the distinct yet overlapping communities of tabletop board and role-playing games.

While these communities are expanding, players, creators, and scholars of tabletop board and role-playing games have traditionally been late to addressing and including diverse representations and perspectives.

For instance, production companies such as Wizards of the Coast (best known for Dungeons & Dragons) have been criticized for their continued celebration of oppressive ideological perspectives, systems, and governments.

Transgender Embodiment: 1400-1700

June 2nd 2023

University of York, UK (Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies)

Keynote: Prof Melissa Sanchez (University of Pennsylvania)

Crisis

The language of crisis suffuses current imaginings of past, present, and future. This symposium invites ambitious and expansive critical reflections on the concept of crisis and the postcolony across time and space. We welcome interdisciplinary provocations in the humanities, arts, and social sciences that offer the potential for thinking about crisis alongside forms of resilience, resistance, and collaboration.

Papers on any aspect of Thomas Hardy, poetry or prose, 19th or 20th century. Conference Dates: October 11-14, 2023. Conference Location: Denver, Colorado. Email abstracts or papers by April 1 to clay.daniel@utrgv.edu

MLA LLC (Languages, Literatures, and Cultures) 16th-Century English (D024)

 The MLA LLC Forum for Sixteenth-Century English Literature is sponsoring a guaranteed panel on “Disability Aesthetics in a Premodern Global Context” at the MLA 2024 conference in Philadelphia (4-7 Jan. 2024). We welcome submissions and inquiries from scholars at all career stages.

Call for Papers: How might we study disability aesthetics alongside histories of empire, settler colonialism, racial capitalism, etc.? How did global encounters shape depictions of dis/ability?

Send queries to Penelope Geng (pgeng@macalester.edu). 250-word abstracts due 28 Feb. 2023.

This panel investigates Italian American transnational and transgenerational depictions of memory and ethnic identity through visual culture. Our goal is to invite scholars to reflect on diverse media and forms of representation, drawing attention to artists, authors, and performers who used visual components to narrate their hybrid identities and relationships to trauma, diaspora, and postmemory. Names like Fasanella, B. Amore, DiSalvo, Stella, and Scanga, come to mind, as artists who gave form to visual tropes of memory narrating their experience as first and second generation Italian Americans. 

International Conference on Postcolonial Literary and
Cultural Signposts and Contemporary Interventions

Venue: Lady Brabourne College, Kolkata

Call for Papers

Unearthing

Past in Present and Future

Associative Interactions in the Orbit of Memory Studies

Deadline for Submissions: March 25, 2023

Concept Note

The 17th Biennial Communication Ethics Conference will be held virtually, June 6–8, 2023. The conference is sponsored by the Department of Communication & Rhetorical Studies and the Communication Ethics Institute at Duquesne University.

NOTE: The conference will take place entirely on Zoom. Access to the Zoom meeting will be provided in June.

At this three-day festival, writers, scholars, collectors, and fans will explore The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Written in 1900, Baum's fairy tale incorporated timeless life lessons, and his stories were ahead of their time.

As Oz magic continues far beyond Baum's lifetime, we benefit from fresh Oz interpretations in visual, performing, and literary art. Works like The Wiz, Wicked, Dorothy Must Die, and Amy Chu and Janet K. Lee's Sea Sirens reflect changes in American culture, while incorporating the non-traditional gender roles and diverse characters that Baum ingrained in Oz.

Proposals accepted February 10, 2023, and November 17, 2023

From moving statues to artificial animals to marionette performances, puppetry seems to have appeared in every sector of medieval and early modern European society. Jointed religious figures illustrated the liturgy, while dragon effigies processed through cities on feast days, and popular and courtly audiences enjoyed puppet shows of legendary and historical events. Despite the ubiquity of medieval and early modern puppets in Europe, scholarly consideration of these performing objects is often limited to case studies. Consideration of “puppetry” as a particular form with its own norms and commonalities is also uncommon, due in part to the marginal position of puppetry in Western culture.