From the time government agencies and the press reported the emergence of a novel corona virus in late 2019, there has been a fundamental shift in the way we congregate, communicate, and educate across the world. Artists and educators have been called upon to reinvent their practice seemingly overnight. While we struggle to balance our personal health and wellness, our community contributions remain as vital as ever. In tribute to this reinvention, ArtsPraxis invites you to share your scholarship, practice, and praxis. As we’ve asked before, we welcome teachers, drama therapists, applied theatre practitioners, theatre-makers, performance artists, and scholars to offer vocabularies, ideas, strategies, practices, measures, and outcomes.

Submissions Information: We seek papers for a panel titled "Critical Approaches to Tradition and Innovation in Graduate Humanities Education" to be held at the Northeast Modern Language Association's 52nd annual convention in Philadelphia, PA, March 11-14, 2021. Please submit abstracts of 300 words here: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/18735. For questions or concerns, please contact Jo Grim at jcg314@lehigh.edu or Sam Sorensen at sms416@lehigh.edu. We look forward to reviewing your proposals!  

Call for Papers

Democratizing Knowledge: Examining Archives in the Post-custodial Era 
November 7th, 2020 at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey

Can We Be More Than the Middle Ages? Medievalism Studies and Medieval Studies (Roundtable)

52nd Annual Convention of the Northeast Modern Language Association

Marriott Downtown Philadelphia, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, from 11-14 March 2021

Paper abstracts are due by 30 September 2020

Session organized by Michael A. Torregrossa and Carl B. Sell and sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture.

This panel aims to explore the machinic metaphor in the Italian and European literary, cinematographic, and philosophical panorama of the 20th century. Since the Industrial Revolution, machines have established themselves as a crucial, pervasive, and unavoidable presence of individual life and collective existence. The disturbing and fascinating vitality of the machine has shaped all social, political, and economic relationships. Even the literary, cinematographic, and philosophical space was crossed by the new myth of the machine and met its complexity: it refused or exalted it, let itself be inspired by it, analyzed its profound meaning.

No event since the recent millennium, itself an “event” only in the sense created by expectationalism, with Y2K being a paradigmatic “non-event,” has activated apocalyptic sensibilities to the extent that COVID-19 has done.  Its impact has been global, multifarious, and multivalent.  In many places, it has impacted every area of life, and there are very few places where it has not spread: as of June 4, 2020, the only nations reporting no COVID-19 cases were various Pacific islands, Turkmenistan, and North Korea.  In distinction to previous pandemics with cultural impact, the most recent of any significance being the HIV/AIDS pandemic, COVID-19 has been swift and pervasive, without immediate association to any specific sub-population or vectors beyond the

Creating Texts, Breaking the Rules: Galdosian Narratives (at SAMLA 92) 

“The interactions that make us sick also constitute us as a community. Disease emergence dramatizes the dilemma that inspires the most basic human narratives: the necessity and danger of human contact.” Priscilla Ward, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative. Duke UP, 2008.

Gender and Death in the Late Middle Ages and Early Modernity 

Gender and Death in the late middle ages and early modernity

Call for proposals on how the category of gender survived, disappeared or was transformed in contact with death in the late medieval and early modern period.

Resources for American Literary Study, the leading journal of archival and bibliographical scholarship in American literature, is inviting submissions for upcoming issues. Covering all periods of American literature, RALS welcomes both traditional and digital approaches to archival and bibliographical analysis. 

Founded in 1971, RALS remains the only major scholarly periodical of its kind. Each issue includes, in addition to archival and bibliographical research, related book reviews and a unique “Prospects” essay that identifies new directions in the study of major authors. Our editorial board consists of leading scholars from an array of fields and subfields in American literary study.

Growing up in Latin America is an experience that has been marked by constant negotiations with precarity, (post)coloniality and multiple forms of violence. Numerous literary and audiovisual productions have drawn attention to this issue, which has also elicited significant academic interest. In this edited volume, we invite critical examinations of 20th and 21stcenturies coming-of-age narratives and Bildungsroman dealing with bi-cultural or multi-cultural identities, picaresque and heterodox processes of learning, non hetero-normative sexualities, as well as other alternative processes of development and growth.

The question of cosmopolitanism has been crucial to the literatures of Latin America during the 20th and 21st centuries. At the turn of the past century modernistas and vanguardistas proposed innovative views of cultural cosmopolitanism that traced the geopolitical shifts of the continent. Later, as Magical Realism became a global phenomenon, this originally Latin American aesthetics would come to be celebrated as the literary language of the postcolonial world (Bhabha).

Recently, in an epic #Verzuz battle organized by producer Swizz Beatz and rapper-producer Timbaland, the Grammy-Award winning singers Erykah Badu and Jill Scott appeared on Instagram live. Therein Scott invoked Langston Hughes as an inspirational artist, pointing to the poet’s continued popularity in the twenty-first century, especially during #Covid19. For countless African Americans, the death tolls from the virus, inadequate health care, unemployment, and white supremacist bigotry epitomize Hughes’s notion of the dream deferred. Video footage released May 26, 2020, showed officer Derek Chauvin of the Minneapolis Police Department kneeling on Floyd’s neck for at least seven minutes in broad daylight. Floyd died afterward.

This session proposes a re-examination of the undergraduate student writer's concept of agency during times of crisis. We aim to expand our critical understanding of what it means to teach students in a way that empowers, offers agency, and acknowledges the voice of the student during times of crisis, whether such crisis is a result of a global pandemic such as Covid-19, national issues such as police brutality, or the result of a personal struggle such as anxiety or loss and, thus, we welcome contributions that address agency, empowerment, and voice from a variety of academic perspectives.