Handle with Care: Authority and Diplomacy from Dante to Spenser [Conference and Edited Collection]

Venue: Liverpool Hope University

Date: 4-5 July 2009

Keynote Speaker: Professor John Watkins (University of Minnesota)

Abstracts are sought for a proposed panel for the 11th Annual Conference of the Modernist Studies Association in Montreal, Canada, November 5-8, 2009.

The conference website is available at http://msa.press.jhu.edu/conferences/msa11/index.html.

Modernist In/Hospitality

Religion and Literature: "Migration, Diaspora, and Identity." In the self-identity of many religious groups, the historical experience of diaspora is an important theme. War, persecution and famine have driven groups across every continent in search of peace, freedom and homeland. How does the ancestral memory of diaspora color the self-identity and story of a contemporary people? How do the themes of chosenness, promise and homeland affect a people's current story about themselves, in both individual and group tellings? Where do the descendants of diaspora belong? Send 250-word proposals by April 30 to Bobbi Dykema Katsanis, Graduate Theological Union, rdykema@ses.gtu.edu. M/MLA 2009 Convention Nov.

MODERN MAGAZINES:

To mark the inauguration of the new biannual Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, this MSA Conference panel calls for papers presenting new work on modern magazines. Papers are encouraged to address the relationship between or among various forms of modernism in magazines ranging from approximately 1885 to 1950. Examples might include the relationship between textual and visual languages of modernism, and/or between magazines as a modern mass-mediated genre and new forms of social identity structured around gender, professional status, or class.

Please send a 300 word abstract and a brief CV by 1 May to Christopher Reed, Penn State University (creed@psu.edu)

In Capital: Volume One, Karl Marx writes that the commodity fetish develops when we "bring the products of our labour into relation with each other as values." In the process, we convert "every product into a social hieroglyphic. Later on, we try to decipher the hieroglyphic, to get behind the secret of our own social products; for to stamp an object of utility as a value, is just as much a social product as language." In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as disintegrating social structures allowed for new understandings of class-based identities, the hieroglyphic messages of commodities contribute to the construction of systems of social value.

Teaching Science Fiction: History, Theory and Text

Edited by Geetha B. and Amit Sarwal

Collections and collecting occupy an important place in the development of modern culture, both at the personal and communal level. "Who collects?", "what does s/he collect?", "why does s/he do it?", and "what meanings are assigned to the act of collecting?" are questions which have significant implications for the construction of individual and communal identities, and in which the fields of aesthetics, ethics, politics, and erotics inter-cross. The next number of the journal "La Habana elegante" will include a special dossier with reflections on the topic of collecting, and it invites authors from the fields of literature, history, cultural studies, and other areas to send essays for their review, before the deadline of June 30, 2009.

For the College English Association's session at SAMLA, we are seeking papers exploring the power dynamic that exists between those in authority and those who are subjected to their rule, as represented in contemporary works of literature and/or film. By May 21, 2009, please submit abstracts of no more than 250 words to Carol Osborne, Coastal Carolina University, at osborne@coastal.edu. All presenters must be members of both CEA and the South Atlantic Modern Language Association at the time of the conference, which will be held November 6-8 in Atlanta, Georgia.

European Journal of English Studies, Vol. 15
Matter and Material Culture
Deadline for proposals: 13 November 2009

Guest Editors: Maurizio Calbi & Marilena Parlati.

Cultural materialism has been adding much to our knowledge and understanding of the ways in which culture is informed by and conformed to and with matter, and so have the numerous analyses and histories of material culture from fields as varied as sociology, anthropology, museum studies, consumer studies, and so forth.

Updated CFP: Medieval TV Collection (proposals by 7/15/09)
ESSAYS ARE STILL BEING ACCEPTED FOR THE FOLLOWING:

GETTING MEDIEVAL ON TV: TELEVISUAL REPRESENTATIONS OF MEDIEVAL THEMES FROM ROAR TO THE TUDORS
ORGANIZED BY THE SOCIETY FOR THE STUDY OF POPULAR CULTURE AND THE MIDDLE AGES
PROPOSALS BY 7/15/09

You are invited to contribute to an edited volume entitled "The Literary Menagerie." The last decade has seen an intensive scholarly engagement with the question of the human-non-human animal relation, including its artistic and literary representation. This foundational scholarship has made it possible to pursue more focused areas of inquiry. One such area is suggested by Randy Malamud in his "Becoming Animal": "art has the potential to present a valuable . . . account of what it is like to be a different animal from ourselves" (7). Art makes it possible for us to imagine ourselves into another being and also to discover other ways of being human.

To mark the inauguration of the new biannual Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, this panel calls for papers presenting new work on modern magazines. Papers are encouraged to address the relationship between or among various forms of modernism in magazines ranging from approximately 1885 to 1950. Examples might include the relationship between textual and visual languages of modernism, and/or between magazines as a modern mass-mediated genre and new forms of social identity structured around gender, professional status, or class.
Please send a 300 word abstract and a brief CV by 1 May to Christopher Reed, Penn State University (creed@psu.edu)

We are now accepting submissions for a collection of stories, essays, and poems for a proposed book on comparative American spatial concepts, partially titled "Stories the Land Holds." The editors are looking for texts variously addressing "stories in the land." What are the stories the land tells? Vine Deloria has warned us of problems that result from a perspective that is not fundamentally spatial, and such has been the case for current problems that range from ecological disaster to fanatical environmentalism and bundled mortgages. We believe that these complex and problematic American events can be understood more fully from a Native American perspective.

CFP: Gender, Sport, and the Olympics (deadline: May 15, 2009)

The editors of /thirdspace: a journal of feminist theory and culture/ invite submissions for our forthcoming issue on gender, sport, and the Olympics.

Prompted by the upcoming 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, we are interested in exploring the central role which gender and sexuality play in shaping ideas about athleticism, sport culture, and the body, and the significant ways in which athletic events such as the Olympics work to transform conceptions of public space, national boundaries and identities, and gendered self-presentations and performances. This issue invites contributions on: