american

ABSTRACTS DUE MAY 1.   

Constant transformation has been the norm in the new digital media environment since its inception. During the 2020 health crisis, the impact of this ever-changing digital world in our daily lives has been especially notable. Due to quarantine measures, the only opportunity to interact with friends and to consume culture was to rely on social networks, streaming services and video conferencing softwares. Web-based cultural activities have affected people’s relationships with cyberspace: many have visited museums, seen award ceremonies, and even been to concerts online. In other words, we are never disconnected from the Internet (DeNardis 2020). 

ATDS and MLA
Washington DC
6-9 January 2022

Teaching American Literature: A Journal of Theory and Practice, is currently accepting submissions for our Winter 2021 issue: Teaching Western and Native American Literature, to be guest edited by Susan M. Stone, author of works on 19th-century regionalism, gender, and Native American literature and culture.

Deadline is April 1, 2021

Call for Papers

MLA 2022 in Washington DC (hopefully!)

Poe scholars and Poe aficionados are always talking about Poe and always reading and rereading his works. He is ubiquitous—in print, film, popular culture, and all over the internet. His online presence increased even more in the late winter and early spring of 2020 as the world wrestled with the COVID-19 pandemic. For those of us who teach Poe and those of us who write about him, doing so in 2020 and 2021 seems more timely than ever, but it also feels different.

From its beginnings, speculative fiction across different media and genres has combined imaginaries of social and political organization with issues of gender and violence. Thomas More’s Utopia (1551), for example, imagined an egalitarian society that remained strictly patriarchal and a perfect government that ensured prosperity and peace by fighting preventive wars, administering capital punishment to adulterers, endorsing corporal punishment for unruly women and children, and encouraging (assisted) suicide. Whether we consider literary texts, film, TV series, comics, or other forms of cultural expression, contemporary speculative fiction continues to discuss (state-)violence and the gendered nature of socio-political relations.

“Collection Cultures”: Midwest Modern Language Association Convention. Milwaukee, Wisconsin, November 4-7, 2021. The MMLA’s permanent section on American Literature After 1870 invites papers which, building on the conference theme, examine the topic of “cultures of collectivity” in American novels, poetry, and/or other kinds of texts, artwork, or cultural endeavors. Particularly invited are papers which explore cultures of collectors and collections.

Keynote Speakers

Dr. Long T. Bui, Associate Professor of Global and International Studies, the University of California at Irvine 

Dr. Patricia Pelley, Associate Professor of History, Texas Tech University

Dr. Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, Professor of English and Asian American Studies, the University of Texas at Austin

Special Guest Speaker

Ms. Callie Wright, Education Director, Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund

Call for Papers: “Collectivity in Reception Studies.” Sponsored by the Reception Study Society

Midwest Modern Language Association Convention, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, November 4-7, 2021

“Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive”

– Ursula K. Le Guin

Special Issue: New York City between Change and Changelessness: Representations and Perceptions of the City in Literature and Culture. December 2021

Deadline: 15 September 2021

Circuitous Channels: The Communications Circuit at 40

Robert Darnton’s “communications circuit,” proposed in his field-defining 1982 essay “What Is the History of Books?”, has become one of book history’s foundational paradigms. Since 1982, the “communications circuit” has been endlessly reprinted, debated, revised, and amended; it has become a touchstone heuristic for more articles, books, and papers than it is possible to list.

Critical Insights: Amy Tan

 “Writing is an extreme privilege but it’s also a gift.  It’s a gift to yourself and it’s a gift of giving a story to someone.”

From Alice Walker’s womanism to bell hooks’ oppositional gaze, Black girls’ rebellion inspires concepts and theoretical approaches that aid in understanding the lives of girls and women.  These theorizations—and Black girls’ actions—counter dominant narratives and distortions of Black girlhood. Despite censoring, surveilling, and policing, Black girls find creative ways to assert and insert  themselves in spaces where their behavior may be considered “deviant,” “rebellious,” or “womanish. ”They often engage in what Aimee Meredith Cox calls shapeshifting to “ confront, challenge, invert, unsettle, and expose the material impact of systemic oppression”(7).