american

"Moveable Feasts: Biblical Allusions and Uses of the Spiritual in Welty’s Work":

Panel at American Literature Association Annual Conference May 26-29, 2027 in Boston

The Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University is thrilled to host the 12th annual Post45 Graduate Symposium on March 4-6, 2027.

The Post45 Graduate Symposium seeks graduate-level works-in-progress related to post-1945 media, arts, literature, textual or visual objects, digital platforms, politics, and culture. We welcome submissions that expand our conception of objects and meaning-making post-1945 or place them in comparative, transnational, or hemispheric frames. We especially welcome contributions that foreground the importance of race, gender, class, and sexuality to post-45 studies. 

From Being to Becoming: Voicing Ecological Belonging through Multispecies Ethnography and Nonhuman Agency in Swapped and Migration

[1]Smrity Dey, [2]Dr Punyashree Panda

                                                                 Abstract

Marking thirty years since the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, often remembered in South Korea as the “IMF crisis,” this panel reflects on contested forms of Korean and Korean/American belonging in its aftermath. The IMF crisis was not only a national economic crisis that profoundly reshaped South Korea’s economy and social formations; it also precipitated movements of Korean people beyond their homes, producing family separation and forced movement. Nearly thirty years later, Korean diasporic cultural forms increasingly reckon with the crisis and its repercussions, with Min Jin Lee’s forthcoming novel American Hagwon (2026) also taking up this historical context.

CFP: International Connections and Disconnections in 1950s Literature and Culture

Online symposium: February 19, 2027.

In Asian context, the Cold War has not ended but became an ongoing structural condition that determines the social, political, and economic dimensions of everyday lives. The unresolved nature of the war has also left traces on a personal level, expressing through one's body, psyche, and their intimate relations. The Korean War (1950-present) as a proxy war between the two global superpowers, for example, has been continuing as manifested on multiple levels, and it keeps bringing back the traumatic past into the present while challenging the authoritarian interpretation of the war as "The Forgotten War". This session will discuss Cold War narratives that are written from the vantage point of those who have been living through the imperialist war violence.

Panel: Precarious and Obsolete Spaces in the Novel

We form strong attachments with the spaces we inhabit, which shape us as we shape them. Spaces house our memories, provide opportunities for encounters, and alter our individual and collective identities. But what happens when these locations deteriorate, become obsolete, or disappear entirely? This panel invites papers considering representations of neglected, abandoned, or otherwise ephemeral spaces in novels from any period or location. We welcome papers on places and spaces of any scale: buildings, towns and cities, landscapes, even nations and worlds.  

Conference Location: University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC

March 6-9, 2027
Newport, RI
Convention Site: Salve Regina University

With the arrival of the New Woman at the end of the nineteenth century also came the modernist novel. The beginning of the twentieth century constitutes a period when women struggled with social expectations but decided to leave their own drawing rooms and discover the world; to be power brokers, instead of passive observers; and to gradually move from their interiority to making history. By comparing novels of women writers, both in the US and abroad, this panel attempts to find, in their similarities and differences, the real issues that women faced at the turn of the century, in novels that transitioned from realism and naturalism to modernism.

James Baldwin and the Work of Witnessing, Teaching, and Public Intellectualism

I am seeking James Baldwin scholars and contributors to a forthcoming/newly completed Baldwin anthology who are interested in participating as virtual guest lecturers in my Fall 2026 course, ENG 393: Special Topics: James Baldwin, at Philander Smith University, an HBCU in Little Rock, Arkansas.

The idea of hospitality as a simple, symmetrical exchange of welcome becomes fraught in the context of travel to the various places associated with the African Diaspora. For example, in Lose Your Mother, Sadiya Hartman considers the symbolic loss of a homeland and the sense of relation between her and the people of Ghana. Like many other African Americans, she questions whether a connection to Africa is real or just a necessary fiction. Her narrative marks the loss of identifiable origins or homeland as the primal loss for African Americans. The loss of this connection creates issues of subjectivity for the African diasporic community in general and for individuals who intimately feel this loss.

Call for Papers (CFP)18th SAAS Conference: Negotiating Identity and Power: Resistance, Rebellion, and Resilience in U.S. Literature and CultureUniversidad de Oviedo, Spain | March 15–17, 2027Panel Title:Speculative Ontologies: The Posthuman, the Eerie, and Cultural Memory in US Media and NarrativesPanel Chairs:

Call for papers, international conference, University of Nantes, 24 and 25 March 2027

The Subversive Work of Gayl Jones Beyond Borders: Rediscovering a “Liberating Voice” of the Black Atlantic World

The precarity of a volatile political environment, economic distress, unchecked genocide, and a global pandemic have pushed many Americans to the brink of late capitalist fatalism, dissociation, or gallows humor. In Rethinking Therapeutic Culture (2015), Timothy Aubry and Trysh Travis draw attention to our cultural “therapeutic orientation” that is so ubiquitous, we hardly notice it, as most Americans attempt to seek some kind of mental health support (1). Therapeutic culture perpetuates the mythos that self requires cultivation and improvement: “its economic, ethical, intellectual, and emotional possibilities are not predetermined by heredity or inherited social position” (5).