american

Giant Steps: Coltrane, Space, and Innovation

The Savoy Ballroom in New York, Preservation Hall in New Orleans, the intersection of 12th Street and Vine in Kansas City, and the Green Mill on Chicago’s North Side all stand as cradles for jazz tradition.

How does one site those spaces though that have housed jazz innovations, like 1511 North 33rd in Philadelphia, John Coltrane’s Strawberry Mansion?Where are the places that jazz can call home? Improvisations and experimentation certainly, but what spaces and which places make those transitions in the artform, its delivery, and reception?

Call for Papers, Creative Writing: Non-Fiction at CEA 2021

April 8-10, 2021 | Birmingham, Alabama

Sheraton Hotel, Birmingham | 2101 Richard Arrington Jr Blvd N, Birmingham, AL 35203

The College English Association, a gathering of scholar-teachers in English studies, welcomes proposals for presentations of Creative Writing: Non-Fiction for our 52nd annual conference. Submit your proposal at www.cea-web.org

This panel seeks to investigate cross-cultural and intercultural exchanges in British literature produced by men and women who traveled to and from the Americas (North, Central, and South) during the long 19th century (1750-1900). It provides a critical examination of the ideological underpinnings and socio-political reasoning for the production of British travel narratives as well as the effects they had on the construction of identity, race, and gender in American and British territories during this period. In doing so, we hope to challenge established academic disciplinary boundaries and provide new insights into the intricate relationships between transatlantic literature, identity, and politics.

This panel will consider Jennifer Egan’s work in light of the post-90s literary and cultural movements emerging after postmodernism. While these contemporary trends have different names and aims (post-postmodernism, metamodernism, new sincerity, post-irony, digimodernism, performatism, the neoliberal novel, and many more), they all attempt to critique and move beyond postmodernism in some concentrated way. We invite papers that locate and complicate Egan’s work in relation to these contemporary movements.

ennifer Egan will be the convention's keynote speaker this year.

Last year, the Irish Association for American Studies’ Postgraduate Symposium, titled “The Land of the Unfree”, sought to interrogate the legitimacy of democracy in America. One year on, in the midst of a global pandemic, this legitimacy has not only been interrogated, but put on trial.

Negotiating Identity: Racialization and Belonging in Asian American and Latinx Discourses

NeMLA 2021: Philadelphia, PA. March 11-14, 2021

Description:

2020 Siegel McDaniel Award for Graduate Research on Philip Roth

The annual Siegel/McDaniel Award, sponsored by the Philip Roth Society, recognizes high-quality graduate student papers written within the past year on any aspect of Philip Roth’s work.

To be considered for the award, eligible graduate students have two options:

1. They can submit a clean copy of their 10-15 page essay, double-spaced, in 12 point Times New Roman font to Maggie McKinley, the Philip Roth Society Program Director, at mmckinle@harpercollege.edu.

In anticipation of the 20th anniversary of the anthology Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (PSU Press 2005), co-editors Marjorie Maddox and Jerry Wemple request submissions of 1-3 poems from poets currently living in or deeply connected to the state of Pennsylvania. Organized geographically and tentatively entitled Keystone Poets: Reflections on the Commonwealth, this collection of new poems will explore the hometowns, history, traditions, and culture of the Commonwealth. We expect some poems may highlight significant Pennsylvania events of the last twenty years. All poems should contain a strong sense of place. Submissions of poems of any length are allowed, with a preference for shorter works. Previously published poems are acceptable.

Call for Papers

Special Issue, Mississippi Quarterly: Mass Incarceration in the U.S. South

Guest editors, Katie Owens-Murphy and Jeanine Weekes-Schroer

If you are Black, you were born in jail, in the North as well as the South. Stop talking about the South. As long as you are south of the Canadian border, you’re South.

 ~Malcolm X

Over the past few decades, the vast early American field has recognized the significance of women’s writing in the formation of an early American history and culture. Through their letters, diary entries, and commonplace books, just to name a few, early American women have demonstrated their participation in the political and social movements that were essential to the country’s founding. Therefore, this panel seeks submissions that considers how eighteenth, and nineteenth American women’s writing contributed to the history and mythology of the founding moment in Philadelphia. Literature will be broadly interpreted and include poetry, fiction, essays, diaries, and letters.

Commitment—a concept which names the title of Theodor Adorno’s 1962 critique of a text’s thematic engagement with politics—entails a work’s capacity to mark a site of historical intervention. “When I am committed,” says Jean-Paul Sartre, “I reveal the situation by the very intention of changing it…I strike at its very heart, I transfix it, and I display it in full view…with every word that I utter, I involve myself a little more in the world." For scholars of the modernist documentary, commitment serves as a starting point for attempts to better understand the historical import of literary experiments in reportage.

The website devoted to Muriel Rukeyser invites submission of short essays (for instance on individual poems); blogs (on any topic related to Rukeyser); approaches to teaching Rukeyser's work; creative work inspired by Rukeyser; and reviews of recent works on or related to the poet's life and work.  We are also interested in discussions/summaries of dissertation research, interesting archival finds, visual material, etc.

For inquiries, please contact Elisabeth Daumer at edaumer@emich.edu and visit the website at http://murielrukeyser.emuenglish.org/.

CFP for a panel on Grace Kelly at NeMLA, Philadelphia, March 11-14, 2021. (Virtual participation possible.)

“Disinformation” emerged from the Soviet intelligence bureaucracy during the Cold War as a tactic for managing perception and consensus through the media. Rather than refuting or suppressing ideas that undermined the state agenda, false information and simulated events were disseminated to destabilize the positive character of truth itself.