american

Photo-Texts and the Mapping of American Lives

Panel CFP for American Literature Association, San Diego, May 21-24, 2020

From How the Other Half Lives to Humans of New York, American authors have long interwoven photos and writing to theorize and map the modern United States and the people who inhabit it. Scholars such as Sara Blair have analyzed how place-based photo-texts produce “emergent iconograph[ies] of modern experience” (How the Other Half Looks), while others, like Jeff Allred and Joseph Entin, have suggested how modernist photo-texts offer new ways of conceptualizing crossovers between realism and modernism, the political meanings and effects of documentary, and the ethics of the gaze. 

Self-Promotion and Self-Aggrandizement: Accelerating Literary Legacy through Nonfiction

AMSA 2020:“Masculinities in Transition”

University of Northern Colorado, Greeley, Colorado

The University of Northern Colorado recognizes that UNC occupies the land of the Ute, Cheyenne, and Arapaho peoples. Further, we acknowledge that 48 tribes have historic ties to the space that now claims the state of Colorado.

DATES: March 19-22, 2020

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION: DEC 1st, 2019

The 2020 Sam Femiano Lecture in Men’s Studies to be given by Dr. Miriam Abelson

American Literature Association
San Diego, CA May 21-24

Religion and Utopia in American Literature

Recent scholarship excavates the politics of religions in American literature but has largely left untreated the utopian quality of religion. In many literary texts, religion provides bases for imagining new social relations. Reading religion as utopian invites us to look anew at the multivalent relations between religion and politics in American literature.

Academics, journalists, NGOs, and institutions of global governance increasingly speak of ‘environmental migrants’ and ‘climate refugees.’ But what separates an environmental migrant or climate refugee from another migrant, refugee, or asylum-seeker? If the focus is on the prefix, our primary legal framework for making sense of cross-border migration—the United Nations 1951 Refugee Convention and 1967 Protocol—does not acknowledge the effects of climate change as a legitimate ground for refugee status.