MELUS in Indianapolis: Crossings and Crossroads

April 8-11, 2021

Keynote Speakers

Poet: Kevin Young

Critic: Elvira Pulitano, Professor of Ethnic Studies, Calpoly University (California Polytechnical University)

In the recent years, foreign language teaching has advocated for an increasingly intermedial and interdisciplinary approach, one that enables instructors to expand course materials and integrate a wide array of popular and current cultural products. Advanced courses in literature and culture can develop curricula that more liberally incorporate popular culture into teaching. Yet intermediate courses must combine cultural components with the introduction or the review of grammar structures. This session seeks contributions that address the following: What are the challenges of transitioning from grammar-based to culture-based instruction in intermediate language classes?

Call for Papers for ‘ICMA Student Committee’ Session Proposal

International Medieval Congress (IMC 2021) 5-8 July 2021, University of Leeds

Seeing Climate through Medieval Art and Architecture

The Institute of Gender Studies at the University of Chester, UK, is delighted to announce the fifth biennial TALKING BODIES conference, 28th – 31st July 2021.

https://www1.chester.ac.uk/institute-gender-studies/talking-bodies-2021-conference/aboutFurther information:

Call for Proposals

Masculinities, Sexualities and Esotericism

Special issue in Correspondences

 Guest editors: Tanya Cheadle (University of Glasgow) and Christine Ferguson (University of Stirling)

Historical Fictions Research Network 2021

Online conference (Zoom)

18th-21st February 2021

Theme:  Remembering Catastrophe

Care to join us in an edited volume? When Beacon Press published Rashid Khalildi's Iron Cage, an early review described it as "at heart a historical essay" (New York Times, 7 October 2006), suggesting that it was, "more ... analysis than an exercise in original research." 

Apart from the recent exhibition and attending catalogue for the 2018 Cooper-Hewitt exhibition, Senses: Design Beyond Vision, which focused on countless objects, and Diana Fuss’ compelling The Sense of an Interior(2004) which explores the specific rooms of four giant literary figures from the nineteenth century, a sustained investigation of the complex relationships between the senses and interior design remains elusive. Yet, despite this absence countless are the examples and vantage points from which to explore a constellation of interior design practices, theories and uses that have taken the five senses (sight, touch, smell, taste and hearing) into consideration.

The MLA Convention (virtual, Jan 7-10, 2021) has opened up last-minute slots for proposed sessions discussing the events of summer 2020. The session organizer invites contributions for 15-minute papers that engage one or more intersections of Black studies, sexuality studies, Black feminist criticism, visual cultural studies, and surveillance studies. Full session description here:

The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives, currently under contract with Routledge, presents a transnational and interdisciplinary study of refugee narratives. In response to the oversaturation of sociological, governmental, and journalistic narratives about refugees, this anthology features academic essays that examine the narratives refugees tell to, for, and about themselves. Engaging a rich variety of genres—fiction, autobiography, prose, poetry, graphic novels, film, photography, performance, social media—the chapters will analyze how conditions of forced displacement and encounters with different asylum regimes shape, but do not circumscribe, the form and content of refugee cultural productions.

In his Defence of Poetry, composed in 1821, Percy Shelley asserts the central importance of the poet—a  general term he uses to include creative artists of all types—to the continuing development of civilization, even in the midst of the Industrial Revolution and the associated celebration of the sciences and technology. In praising the poet as the “unacknowledged legislator of the world,” Shelley sounded a call that still resonates two hundred years later, as the importance of the humanities relative to STEM programs continually becomes debated.  Of course, Shelley’s views on poetry were by no means representative of the period.

In recent years, virtual reality (VR) has emerged as a new frontier of innovation and experimentation within what is known as “immersive entertainment” — gaming, art, museum exhibitions, TV and cinema. The proliferation on the market of new headsets (from the expensive HTC VIVE and Oculus to the popular Google Cardbox), the spread of platforms, apps and also VR cinemas around the world, and the inclusion of VR productions in international film festivals (e.g. Sundance, Tribeca, Venice) are trends demonstrating that VR is no longer just a fascinating 1980s-inspired literary or cinematic subject (from Tron to the Matrix trilogy, to the recent Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One).

The arcade.

Maybe it makes you think of neon flashing lights and cacophonies of strange sounds, or maybe your mind immediately jumps to visions of Pac-Man and Space Invaders. Maybe the word conjures nostalgia for childhood friendships and fun, as seen in Stranger Things. Perhaps your imagination wanders to the pachinko parlors of Tokyo. Or maybe you go to the traditional origins of the word, seeing the covered walkways of seventeenth-century French architecture or the contemporary covered markets of Santiago. Maybe the arcade, for you, remains linked to the theories of Walter Benjamin, prompting reflection on consumption and capitalism.

The Hemlow Prize in Burney Studies 

The Burney Society invites submissions for the Hemlow Prize in Burney Studies, named in honour of the late Joyce Hemlow, Greenshields Professor of English at McGill University, whose biography of Frances Burney and edition of her journals and letters are among the foundational works of eighteenth-century literary scholarship.