September 16-17, 2011, at Baruch College, New York

The main focus of this conference will be the journalism of Rebecca West. We invite papers that analyze any aspect of West's journalistic oeuvre, but encourage especially contributions that investigate the idea of power-state power, patriarchal power, empire, God, and literary authorities. Any approach, including rhetorical analysis, political history, ideological critique, feminism, biography, and intertextuality are welcome. We also plan to organize at least one panel on approaches to the new collection of West's non-fiction prose The Essential Rebecca West (2010). Papers on other topics will also be considered, especially those exploring the nexus between West's fiction and non-fiction.

Game studies is quickly emerging as a popular, interdisciplinary field within the humanities and social sciences, yet medieval scholars are still only beginning to explore the relationship between recreational games and literature from a literary or cultural context. This session seeks to broaden this field of study by focusing on depictions of games and gaming in medieval literature and their relation to recreation in the Middle Ages.

Katherine Philips has experienced something of a Renaissance. Lauded in her own time as "the matchless Orinda," she was dismissed for several centuries as a minor poet. In the past twenty-five years this has begun to change, as feminist and queer scholars especially have turned to Philips to reexamine and reimagine woman's place in the cultural landscape of late-seventeenth-century England. While interest in Philips has continued to grow exponentially, helping to transform the way we do literary history and theory, there is yet to be a collection of essays that demonstrates the vast import of the author's life and works.

Rachel Carson's "A Fable for Tomorrow," Edward Abbey's Good News, Scott Russell Sanders's Terrarium—these are science fiction works written by writers whom we most often identify as canonical environmentalist figures. Science fiction authors often address important issues of environmental concern in their works, and exploring these works is an important and growing effort in ecocritical literary and film criticism. But why might environmentalist writers be attracted to science fiction to the extent that the genre's narrative devices (extrapolation, cognitive estrangement, etc.) frequently show up in their writing, or to the extent that some have even written genre science fiction?

"Travel Narratives and Alterity" Mona Narain, Dept. of English, Texas Christian University,
TCU Box 297270, Fort Worth TX 76129; Tel: (817) 257-7248; Fax: (817) 257- 6238;
E-mail: M.Narain@tcu.edu. Deadline September 15th, 2010

The third annual Liberal Arts Conference at Auburn Montgomery invites panel and paper proposals on the literature of the American South.  Topics might include:

The Victorian Network (ISSN 2042-616X), an online journal dedicated to publishing and promoting the best postgraduate work in Victorian Studies, is recruiting a Submissions Editor. We are looking for a dedicated doctoral student in the first or second year of a PhD in Victorian Studies who is interested in gaining experience and developing career-relevant skills in the publishing process.

The Submissions Editor is an executive member of the Editorial Board, involved in all stages of the publishing process and in charge of managing submissions and liaising with authors.

Representing the Holocaust in an Age of Globalization

The Memory and Narrative series, currently published by Transaction (based at Rutgers University), emerged from the highly acclaimed International Yearbook for Oral History and Life Stories. To date, the series comprises 14 volumes, constituting an interdisciplinary forum that stimulates debate on a wide range of theoretical and methodological issues relating to memory and narrative. 


The series editors invite proposals for a forthcoming volume entitled Representing the Holocaust in an Age of Globalization

Representing the Holocaust in an Age of Globalization

The modern slang term 'cougar' originally had derogatory connotations, mainly connected with the age disparity of the man she was pursuing. However, more recently, the term has turned positive, often celebrating that disparity rather than condemning it. These dual implications existed for "medieval cougars" as well. Medieval literature has numerous instances of older women pursuing younger men, and these relationships inherently disrupt traditional norms and gender expectations--the older women were usually married or widows, giving them wealth and status, and their pursuit of younger men problematizes traditional dynamics of dominance and submission.

The 13th annual Graduate Student Conference hosted by the Comparative Literature and Hispanic Studies programs at the University of Western Ontario will take place on March 17-19, 2011. We welcome proposals that explore "EMERGENCE/IES" from a variety of theoretical, disciplinary and critical perspectives. This conference will examine the theme of emergent/emerging/potentially emerging/surfacing realities and non-realities in language, literature, film, popular culture, theory and cultural studies.

The Department of English at Texas Southern University will host the Thirteenth Annual Interdisciplinary McCleary Symposium, March 24-25, 2011, Houston, Texas.

The general topic for the conference encompasses "Intersections: Literature, History & Art/Science & Technology."

In light of our current moment marked by economic collapse, heightened political paranoia, racial profiling, and ubiquitous surveillance, this conference wishes to highlight the connection between states of crisis and the wider social question of the prison as a space of social production. "Discipline" as such does not simply imply policies that police subjects, but rather policies that produce them — not just in "correctional facilities," but also in the discourses and practices appropriated by universities, workplaces, hospitals, and bureaucracies. In this regard, we seek to question the normalization of the prison as a model for social relations between classes, sexes, races, and other subjectivities.

The reciprocal relationship of literature and the city reveals a complexity of urban life that has given rise to literary imagery and themes that define our understanding of the city. Novelists and poets contrast ideal cities with earthly cities, culture with nature, the mechanical with the organic, and the city with nature. These writers embrace our ambivalence toward the city that captivates but threatens, excites but intimidates, showing us the potential for greatness along with the fear of failure.

This panel seeks papers that examine historical or literary families that do not conform to emergent models of domesticity, or domestic arrangements that are not bound by marriage and consanguinity. Building on recent studies that question traditional assumptions about the history and origins of the nuclear family, the panel might consider some of the following questions: What do irregular or alternative family arrangements have to tell us about the development of domesticity or about the prospects for alternate forms of sociality? How do alternate visions of family life critique emergent models of the domestic family? How might alternate familial configurations contest patriarchies traditional or new?