The concept of virtual worlds, while not new, has become a normalized part of 21st-century consciousness. Once a realm reserved for playful escape, “dissolv[ing] the constraints of the anchored world so that we can lift anchor—not to drift aimlessly without point, but to explore anchorage in ever-new places” (Heim, 1993), virtual spaces have taken center stage in our everyday lives. Our meeting places, our workplaces, our places of learning, even the places where we unite to break bread have shifted from the physical realm to the virtual. Children in particular have felt the seismic cultural shift from in-person to virtual interaction, as it has fundamentally changed the way they play, learn, and grow.

“The End of the Human(ities)”

In The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois explained that the problem of the color line was a problem of (meta)physical and educational implications for those who “still seek, the freedom of life and limb, the freedom to work and think.” Du Bois’s “freedom” connected the liberation of the body, soul, and mind—the desire to live and learn unbounded—to the human. He introduced a quandary still relevant today: To think and be human is to think about how to study life through the “humanities.”

Subtitled “Surplus Data,” the Winter 2022 issue of Critical Inquiry began by proclaiming that, “It is no longer enough to say that data is big. Data is now in a state of surplus” (Halprin et al. 197). As private and state actors rush to generate ever more surplus surveillance data about consumer-citizens and workers across domains of life, literary scholars are compelled to question how this data is made meaningful and by whom. After all, data never speaks for itself; it must be assigned value and transformed into narratives. These surveillance stories often reify “identities of suspicion” (Monahan), marking marginalized people as themselves surplus subjects.

Call for Chapters

Narratives of Confinement in American Literature and Popular Culture

The Representation of Famines in Indian literatures

The Proposed work will be submitted to Routledge under its ongoing series “South Asian Literature in Focus”

According to the UN Refugee Agency, “[A] famine is a situation in which a substantial proportion of the population of a country or region is unable to access adequate food, resulting in widespread acute malnutrition and loss of life by starvation and disease.” Famines have played a vital role in shaping the world’s demography. Some examples of devastating famines that brought extreme changes in the demography are as follows:

 This panel is interested in the mediation of popular visual idioms in North American Indigenous contemporary art. Imagined as a "shared language," pop culture offers Indigenous artists a set of mediums, forms, and figures for representing shared experiences of survivance across disparate and distinct transnational and tribal contexts. Prior to its “discovery” and appropriation by metropolitan modernists in the 1920s and 1930s, Indigenous material culture circulated commercially in the early 1900s. Creators of this material culture navigated market appetites by introducing innovative designs often through new mediums.

The Northeast Popular/American Culture Association (NEPCA) The Body, Fashion, and Popular Culture Area invites submissions for NEPCA’s annual conferenceto be held online October 12 – October 14, 2023, via the Zoom platform.

 In alignment with this subject matter area at the national level:

Please consider submitting an abstract for the NeMLA session "Romantic Religions: Re-evaluating Secularism in the Romantic Era" (55th Annual NeMLA Convention March 7th in Boston, MA). The deadline for submissions is September 30, 2023. You can submit an abstract for this session here: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/20719

Session Abstract: How does our understanding of religion in the Romantic era shape our interpretation and evaluation of Romantic thought and literature? How might we reconsider Romantic literature within the contexts of religious surplus in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries?

They Live: Female Monsters and Their Impact on the Frankenstein Tradition

Sponsored by the Monsters & the Monstrous Area of the Northeast Popular Culture Association

Organized by Michael A. Torregrossa

Call for Papers - Please Submit Proposals by 30 September 2023

55th Annual Convention of Northeast Modern Language Association

Sheraton Boston Hotel (Boston, MA)

On-site event: 7-10 March 2024

See the shared Google Doc for the full call with a list of bibliographic resources on the topic: https://tinyurl.com/They-Live-NeMLA-2024.  

Special Issue of Nineteenth Century Studies:

Blackness, Race, and Racism in Nineteenth-Century Studies

deadline for submission: August 15, 2024

full name(s)/name of organization:

Wendy Castenell and A. Maggie Hazard co-editors/Nineteenth-Century Studies

contact email(s): wcastenell@wlu.edu; ahazar1@saic.edu; TBD

The Societas Ovidiana welcomes proposals for a virtual roundtable to be held at the International Congress of Medieval Studies (ICMS) at Kalamazoo, May 9-11 2024.

This roundtable invites short presentations based on concrete studies of particular manuscripts (or sets of manuscripts) containing works by, or in any way involving, Ovid.

The Shelley Conference 2024

Posthumous Poems, Posthumous Collaborations

Keats House Museum, London, 28-29 June 2024

Two years after the death of Percy Bysshe Shelley in the summer of 1822, Mary Shelley, after a painstaking editorial process, published Posthumous Poems (1824). The volume contained much of Shelley’s major poetry, including the hitherto unpublished ‘Julian and Maddalo’, together with translations of Goethe and Calderón, and unfinished compositions such as ‘The Triumph of Life’ and ‘Charles the First’. 

Comics Get Medieval 2023: New Work on the Comics Medium in Medieval Studies (virtual)

Call for Papers - Please Submit Proposals by 15 August 2023

The Medieval in Cyberspace: 2023 International Conference for the Study of Medievalism

The UNICORN Castle (https://unicorn-castle.org/)

Online event: Thursday, 26 October, through Saturday, 28 October, 2023

Comics Get Medieval 2023: New Work on the Comics Medium in Medieval Studies (virtual)

Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Comics Project

Organizers: Michael A. Torregrossa, Richard Scott Nokes, and Carl Sell

In the realm of literature, grief and loss have always occupied a profound space, weaving their intricate threads through the narratives of countless tales. From the ancient Greek tragedies to contemporary works, the exploration of human suffering and its aftermath has captivated the imaginations of readers and critics alike. However, delving deeper into the recesses of these literary landscapes, we encounter a concept that extends beyond the boundaries of ordinary grief—a surplus of grief that emerges, often unyielding and overwhelming, in the face of profound loss and trauma.