Refocus: The Films of Gurinder Chadha

Diaspora and Cultural Negotiations

Contact Email: shilpa.literature@gmail.com

Deadline for abstracts: November 30th 2017

Over the past two decades, a preponderance of Man Booker Prize winning novels (and even short-listees) have restored to life vanished worlds, suggesting that the appeal of the past persists in contemporary Anglophone fiction. This roundtable seeks to showcase contemporary historical fiction written since 2000 in the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth. If historical novels represent sites of contested memory or cultural trauma, then which critical junctures do these recent novels depict? Possible areas of exploration might include wartime novels post-Pat Barker, the evolution of neo-Victorianism, the roles of pastiche and parody, the status of historical metafiction, and the new directions taken by novels from the Antipodes.

Short form CFP:

This panel examines links between literary and ecological form across the Atlantic in the long eighteenth century. Formal experimentation is often taken as analogue for political critique, but in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, these critiques tend to be sited within specific locales.  What literary shifts are enabled or enforced by divergent ecological sites? What new perspectives on formal innovation become available when we view the plantation through the lens of the garden, and vice versa?

Send abstracts of 300 words to Kate McIntyre (krm2152@columbia.edu) and MC Hyland (mch454@nyu.edu) by September 30, 2017.

In her essay,"The Times We’re in: Queer Feminist Criticism and the Reparative ‘Turn,'" Robyn Weigman discusses recent feminist theorizations of affect and time:  "with so much in flux and with governments, like people, finding themselves awash in everyday attrition, scholarship that seeks to analyse the condition of the present – both its political comportment and its historical theorisation – has proliferated under a different set of terms: debt, crisis, precarity, bare life, biopolitics, neoliberalism, and empire." Wiegman states that much of this "scholarship attends to the condition of the present through the converging analytics of affect and time" (5).

The Carson McCullers Society seeks abstracts on the theme of "Byways in Carson McCullers Scholarship" for the biennial Society for the Study of Southern Literature conference in Austin, TX this February 15-18, 2018. The theme is deliberately broad but especially invites papers on McCullers' literary and biographical engagements with the U.S. military, non-southern characters in her oeuvre, and how her travels and readings abroad, including in Rome and New York, influenced her work. If interested, please send a 250-word abstract and short bio to Society Vice President Isadora J. Wagner (iwagner@go.olemiss.edu) by Thursday, September 7th. Other paper topics related to McCullers will also be considered.

CFP: QUEER TOLKIEN STUDIES

Paper Session(s) and Roundtable

For

PCA/ACA 2018 NATIONAL CONFERENCE

J.W. MARRIOTT INDIANAPOLIS DOWNTOWN, INDIANAPOLIS, IN

           MARCH 28-31, 2018

http://pcaaca.org/national-conference/

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION: SEPTEMBER 28, 2017

These sessions will be co-sponsored by the Gay, Lesbian, and Queer Studies and the Tolkien Studies areas: