Major Minors: Neglected and New Issues in Literary Studies

The 22nd Annual Mardi Gras Conference at Louisiana State University

LSU Student Union

February 16th & 17th, 2012

Keynote Address by Meredith L McGill, Rutgers University

Session on how medieval writers employ the device of failed confessions or explore impediments to confession. For more, see: http://massmedieval.wordpress.com/ For the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan, USA.

This panel asks to question the relation between expression and language, between the image and the word using Godard's work. This young Turk of the New Wave or the philosopher king of cinema, besides tackling the question of politics and aesthetics, constantly constantly questions the relationship between images and language, a question that is crucial for cinema as well as for literature. From Nana's question in Vivre Sa Vie "Words should express exactly what one wants to say? Do they betray us?" to his Le Gai Savoir where the relation between image and words are questioned; from his extraordinary use of letters or words on filmic scenes to his separation of his films into book chapters, Godard experiments on language in its own limit.

Recently Shakespeare studies have taken a "natural" turn. With the advent of ecocriticism and posthumanist thinking, a "green Shakespeare" has begun to emerge. The purpose of this conference is to consider the construction, politics, and history of the trope of "nature," both in Shakespeare's works and in current Shakespeare scholarship. Papers for this conference may consider animal studies, early modern zoology, bio-politics, climate theory, geohumoralism, food, medicine, botany, demonology, and more. Our aim will be to discuss a variety of questions: What constitutes early modern environmental studies? How did early modern writers define "nature," as opposed to supernature, or preternature, or culture?

Call for Papers
Merchants of Menace: The Business of Horror Cinema

We invite conference papers on Marguerite Porete, her inquisition trial, and/or the Mirror of Simple Souls, for the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan, USA, on 10–13 May 2012.

For details, please see the Call for Papers available online at

A proposal consists of a 300-word abstract and the participant information form downloadable from

Call for Papers, Hawthorne's Humor

A special issue of the _Nathaniel Hawthorne Review_ is being planned on Hawthorne's humor, to be published in fal1, 2013. Essays (no longer than 9,000 words, WORD doc files) are invited for consideration on the following topics, although the list is not meant to be exhaustive.

Performing South Asia at Home and Abroad

South Asian Literary Association (SALA), Seattle 2012

Date: Wed., January 4, 2012 at 9:00am – Thurs., January 5, 2012 at 5:00pm

Venue: Hyatt Place Downtown, 110 6th Avenue North (at Denny Way)

Distinguished Keynote Speaker: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Distinguished Guest Author: Charles Johnson

Abstract Deadline: August 31, 2011

The Department of English Studies at Durham University invites submission of proposals for its session at the 47th International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan from May 10-13, 2012. The panel seeks proposals of 300-500 words with a working title and department affiliation by September 1, 2011. Participants will be contacted regardless of whether or not their proposal has been accepted. All proposals submitted but not accepted will be sent on to the general committee for consideration in one of the general sessions at Kalamazoo. The CfP is as follows:

Postcolonial England

CFP: Computers and Writing 2012
ArchiTEXTure: Composing and Constructing in Digital Spaces
http://chasslamp.chass.ncsu.edu/~cw2012/

North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC
Onsite Conference: Thursday, May 17, 2012 – Sunday, May 20, 2012
Proposal Submission Opens: September 1, 2011
Proposal Due Date: October 22, 2011 (before midnight EST)
Notifications of Acceptance: December 15, 2011
Registration Opens: January 15, 2012
Online Conference: Dates to be announced

Keynote Speakers: David Parry, Alex Reid, Anne Wysocki

Editing Old English: Ælfric's Lives of the Saints
Special Session at the 47th International Congress on Medieval Studies (May 2012)

2012 marks the 100-year anniversary of the death of W. W. Skeat, the eminent lexicographer and editor of Anglo-Saxon texts. Skeat is known among Ælfric scholars as the editor of the four-volume Lives of Saints (1881-1890). This edition has numerous limitations, including an incomplete scholarly apparatus, a dated translation, and infrequent availability. A new edition is needed - but what would it look like? Who would it be for?

This session will feature papers that examine Skeat's editorial choices and look towards what is needed for a future edition.

CFP for "Triumph in my Song": 18th & 19th Century African Atlantic Culture, History, & Performance to be held at: the University of Maryland, May 31-June 2, 2012

Panel Title: Ecstatic Performance at the Borders of Faith and Race

In Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov writes that "Sirin passed," "across the dark sky of exile" "like a meteor, and disappeared, leaving nothing much else behind him than a vague sense of uneasiness." While most would disagree that Nabokov disappeared or left nothing much behind him, many would agree that exile played a large role in his life and works. Even before he was forced to flee Russia, Nabokov's earliest poetry expressed the pain of exile and loss, a pain that would only intensify in the years to come.

Rural Geographies of Gender and Space, Britain 1840-1920

23rd September 2011, University of Warwick

*CFP DEADLINE EXTENDED– 15th August*

Whilst discussions of gender and space in the nineteenth-to early-twentieth century have typically focused on "women and the city", rural spaces offer equally productive contexts for exploring the intersections between gender and space in this period. As the socio-spatial relations of the country are impacted by the move into modernity, rural environments are revealed in literary and historical texts as sites of complex, contradictory and changing gendered codes.