bibliography and history of the book

Panel sponsored by the Women's and Gender Studies Caucus, NeMLA

March 6-9, 2025

CALL FOR PAPERS

Henry James and the Archive

The Henry James Review invites essays between 1,000 and 12,500 words on any aspect of Henry James studies and archives for a special fall 2025 forum issue on “Henry James and the Archive.” 

Topics could include, for example:

• Using archives for Henry James scholarship

• Changes in how we understand the nature of the Henry James archive

• New archival sources for Henry James scholarship

Congrès de l’Institut des Amériques

Campus Condorcet, Aubervilliers, October1-3, 2025

https://congresida2025.sciencesconf.org/resource/page/id/15

Workshop:

LITERARY AND ARTISTIC MAGAZINES IN THE AMERICAS IN THE 20TH CENTURY: A TRANSAMERICAN PERSPECTIVE

While the literary and artistic magazines from various regions of the Americas and the Caribbean have been the topic of books, monographs and case studies, often in connection with Europe —particularly since the “material turn” in the humanities— they have seldom been examined from a trans-American angle.

Modern Language Studies, the journal of the Northeast Modern Language Association, is seeking reviews for the summer 2025 issue. In recent years, the temperature has risen around free speech debates, and books on censorship and free speech come out with such frequency that it is hard to keep abreast of the new scholarship. I am interested in receiving reviews and review essays on academic books published in the last several years that are in some way related to free speech. The books to be reviewed can center on any historical, geographical, or disciplinary context, and the reviews and review essays can be written from (almost) any theoretical perspective.

Resources for American Literary Study, a peer-reviewed journal of archival and bibliographical scholarship published by Penn State UP, invites submissions for upcoming volumes. Covering all periods of American literature, Resources for American Literary Study welcomes both traditional and digital humanities approaches to archival discovery. The journal also publishes scholarly bibliographies and other bibliographical overviews. Typical contributions include newly discovered letters and documents, checklists of primary and/or secondary writings about American authors, and biographical and compositional studies drawn from archival materials.

The art of calligraphy, with its elegance, precision and expressive power holds a celebrated place among the arts of China, Japan and the Middle East, and is much studied as a result. Western calligraphy using the Roman-script, by contrast, is relatively neglected within academia.

However, given current interest in both drawing research and grapho-linguistics – the study of writing systems – the time is ripe to explore the fascinating intersection of visual art and written language with a scholarly volume on Western calligraphy studies, broadly defined.

“Invisible Secrets in Pre-1865 American Literature” (SAMLA) Recent scholarly approaches in antebellum American literature emphasizes the role of secrets and secrecy, as in Dominick Mastroianni’s Politics and Skepticism in Antebellum American Literature (2022); essays on secrecy in Emily Dickinson’s poetry (Jeffrey Simons, Paul Scott Derrick, 2011); and the secret lives of nineteenth-century literature (Harper, Dickinson, Melville, 2022) in digital media, as Kayla Shipp has argued. This panel explores the way that unstated ideas, points, or secrets are exchanged in antebellum American literature.

STAGING SILENCE FROM ANTIQUITY TO THE RENAISSANCE

3–4 July 2025 / St John’s College, Cambridge

This two-day, in-person conference will explore developing traditions of silence in dramatic texts from antiquity to the Renaissance. Papers are sought from scholars across a range of fields, including classical reception, comparative literature, and medieval and/or early modern English literature. Topics may include:

-       mute characters and/or characters who never appear on stage;

-       characters who gain or lose the power of speech (welcoming perspectives e.g. from disability studies);

Novels and Book History, an area of the Mid-Atlantic Popular & American Culture Association, is currently accepting proposals for the 2024 Mid-Atlantic Popular & American Culture Association (MAPACA) conference in Atlantic City, NJ to be held November 7-9, 2024. 

This area welcomes all explorations of the novel and/or the history of the book as they interact with American and/or popular culture. Subjects include genre fiction, authors and authorship, literary time periods, cultures, settings, reading, publishing, media studies, bookishness, and representations of books/reading in other media. 

The Rosemary VanArsdel Prize

The VanArsdel Prize is awarded annually to the best graduate student essay investigating Victorian periodicals and newspapers. The prize was established in 1990 to honor Rosemary VanArsdel, a founding member of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, whose groundbreaking research continues to shape the field of nineteenth-century periodical studies.

The winner of the VanArsdel Prize receives $500 and publication of their submission in Victorian Periodicals Review. 

Applications open May 1 and are due June 15.

Surveying the absence on her shelf where Elizabethan women’s writing ought to be, Virginia Woolf (in)famously dismissed the possibility of Shakespeare’s sister ever finding “a room of her own” to develop her voice. Recent decades of literary scholarship have shown the invention with which early modern women built out their own textual “rooms,” finding voice in surprising places and forms (even in silence, as Christina Luckyj heard [2002]), in visions of new political subjectivities (in a radically equal imaginary, as seen by Mihiko Suzuki [2003]), and through networks of overlooked community (in coteries and in letters, as traced by James Daybell [2006]).

Proposals are invited for Some Circumstance of the Text, a planned collection of essays to memorialize and celebrate William Proctor Williams (1939–2023), whose more than half-century of scholarship, teaching, mentoring, and reviewing has made a profound and lasting contribution to the fields of early modern English literature and drama, Shakespeare studies, textual criticism, bibliography, and book history.

Proposed essays should draw upon, build upon, or engage with William’s ideas across any of the subjects in which he worked, including but not limited to:

The Society for Textual Scholarship invites proposals for our 2024 conference hosted by the University of Tulsa, June 6-8, on the theme Text Under Pressure. The deadline for proposals is Monday, March 18.

Texts manifest many varieties of creative, social, and political pressure in their expressive content and form. But text is also often a matter of technological pressure: printing techniques rely on the pressure of a platen, roller, or squeegee; other recording and playback processes require the pressure of a stylus, a chisel, a nib, or the gentle pulse of a wifi wave. Such pressurized circumstances, symbolic and material, reveal core issues of textual production, circulation, reception, and contestation. 

MLA 2025, New Orleans (9-12 January)

The Forum on Seventeenth-Century English Studies (LLC 17th-Century English) invites submissions for a guaranteed session on “Early Modern Social Media.” We are particularly interested in research that addresses the power of both established and emerging media—ballads, pamphlets, newsletters, pasquinades, and so forth—to amplify the gravity of historical circumstances, harness public affect, and precipitate ideological shifts. Please send 250-word abstracts by 3/15/2024 to Carmen Nocentelli (nocent@unm.edu).