american

In the Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan redefines the domestic space and the feminine laborassociated with it as a dynamic space where Chinese-American women reshape their identities, preserve their cultures, and share their stories of traumas. bell hooks’ assertion that “homeplace" was the one site where one could freely confront the issue of humanization” provides a productive framework for understanding how kitchens and acts of cooking become spaces of healing, survival, and female agency in women’s writing. By doing these, they try to assert a form of power, and agency that subverts the traditional notion of the domestic space(as an inferior space that is away from history), and the feminine labor associated with it.

The editors are seeking 750-word abstracts of talks for a symposium at UCLA, February 5, 2027, on “The Great American Novel: A Twenty-First-Century Reckoning.” Early-career scholars as well as tenured faculty are encouraged to apply. Transportation and lodging costs will be provided. While there is a long and thriving history of debates about the GAN, we favor topics and approaches that highlight theoretical and critical concerns that reach beyond the discussion of any single text to consider broader theoretical, political, and aesthetic stakes.  Accepted speakers will be asked to revise and expand their presentations into articles to be considered for publication in a special issue of ALH.

Workshop at the Renaissaince Society of America's annual meeting (Philadelphia. March 11-13, 2027)

Abstract 

In the United States, our lives are marked by an abundance of convenience. From fresh produce year-round to two-day shipping, convenient choices feel soft, easy, and frictionless, as they have specifically been engineered to feel. Until relatively recently, it has been possible to maintain a cultural and systemic sense of alienation that makes the cost of our convenience invisible to us—to localize all of the necessary precarity and exploitation for convenience “somewhere else,” (often in the Global South) and then to ignore it. 

The idea of home is curious concept for African Americans. Though integral to the development and sustainability of the United States, the social death and cultural trauma of slavery render this country inhospitable to Black bodies and the psyches that inhabit them. African Americans are both at home and homeless. This tenuousness places them in a liminal space in which identity is simultaneously self-asserted and assigned, multifaceted, while limited, a fount of agency and a tool for impotence. The intersectional nature of Black femininity further complicates notions of identity and American hospitality. Black men have unsuccessfully employed patriarchy as an intraracial tool to combat the aforementioned social death.

Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas (father as well as son), William Wordsworth, Percy B. Shelley, Friedrich Hölderlin, G.W.F. Hegel… The list of writers from the era conventionally identified as “Romantic” to have become enthusiastic about the French Revolution could keep on going indefinitely. In fact, ever since the outbreak of the American Revolution in 1765, through the French and the Haitian Revolutions throughout the 1790’s, all the way to 1848, the year that de-politicized Charles Baudelaire (according to his letter from May 5, 1852 to Narcisse Ancelle), literary production seems to have been inseparable from the process of building after and thinking social revolution.

The E. E. Cummings Society and the Society’s journal, Spring, invite abstracts for 20-minute papers for the 54th annual Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900, Feb. 18-20, 2027, at the University of Louisville (https://events.louisville.edu/conferences/list-conferences/louisville-conference-literature-and-culture).

Call for Papers | Society of Early Americanists

American Literature Association | “The American Novel: Forms, Genres, and Traditions”

November 5–7, 2026 | Santa Fe, NM

The Novel in/and Early America

For this upcoming ALA Symposium, the SEA invites papers and presentations that deal with any aspect of “The American Novel: Forms, Genres, and Traditions” prior to (approximately) 1830. Topics might include (but are not limited to):

The year 2027 will mark the 50th anniversary of the controversial publication of Robert Coover’s The Public Burning. Both to celebrate the event and question its legacy, an international symposium will take place on 10-11 June 2027 in Paris, at Campus Condorcet. The call for papers is available here: https://publicburning50.sciencesconf.org/

Abstracts (300 to 350 words) together with a short biographical note should be sent by October 1st 2026 to the following address: publicburning50@sciencesconf.org

Keynote speakers: Alexandra Kleeman and Mark Doten

International Conference

Vladimir Nabokov: Contemporary Reception and Creative Legacy

April 28-30, 2027

Bordeaux Montaigne University

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Vladimir Nabokov’s passing, the French Vladimir Nabokov Society, in collaboration with the University of Bordeaux-Montaigne and the International Vladimir Nabokov Society, organizes its 10th International Conference, to be held April 28-30, 2027 in Bordeaux, France.

In her foundational text Immigrant Acts, cultural theorist Lisa Lowe argues that the Asian immigrant exists as a “perpetual foreigner within the body politic,” a figure through whom the nation-state defines its own boundaries and citizenship. For Lowe, Asian American cultural production emerges precisely from this “distance from the national culture,” serving as a site that critiques the state’s false promises of universal inclusion.

Haunted Thresholds:

The Southern Gothic in Comparative Perspective 

South Atlantic Modern Language Association (SAMLA) 2026
Conference Dates: November 5–7, 2026
Location: Wyndham Atlanta Buckhead Hotel and Conference Center, Atlanta, Georgia

Contact: stacy.stingle@gmail.com

Haunted Thresholds: The Southern Gothic in Comparative Perspective

We invite you to submit an abstract and bio for the panel “Yesteryear: Cultural and Literary Possibilities”. We are seeking papers that address Caro Claire Burke’s breakout debut novel Yesteryear and its implications on literature and current American culture. How does Burke address established literary conventions? How might one conceive of the evocative narrative style of this novel? How does Burke conceptualize the conscription of motherhood, suppressed queerness, and conservative Christianity? How might the work fit into literary genealogies of sanity, purity, racial prejudice, and womanhood? Proposals should include a title, abstract,  your name, and affiliation.

The 1995 film Smoke, directed by Wayne Wang, features characters who band together by frequenting a corner cigar store in Brooklyn. Paul Auster, who wrote the screenplay, once described the community his characters created as a “little universe for themselves that is not determined by blood or the past.”