classical studies

Sanctity and Literature

A symposium to be held at the Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany,
12-13 November 2010

Keynote Speaker: Dr Anke Bernau (University of Manchester)

This panel explores the connections between reality and imagined or imaginary worlds by examining the ways in which sight, and in particular the seeing of things that are not present or do not exist, contributes to knowledge and understanding. The faculty of vision is often a metaphor for understanding and learning, and the mystical or otherworldly vision represents not only an explanation for the integration and processing of new information into an older worldview, but a metaphorical space in which personal growth can be demonstrated through "seeing" new connections and truths.

Death and Representation
Keynote Speaker: Dana Luciano, Georgetown University
Author of "Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America," winner of the 2008 MLA Prize for a First Book
Conference Date: March 26, 2010
Please submit abstracts (maximum 500 words) by November 15 via email to:
Jason Middleton, jmiddle2@mail.rochester.edu
Genevieve Guenther, vive@mail.rochester.edu

Battleground States 2010: War(s) and Peace will be held February 26th and 27th, 2010 on the Bowling Green State University campus. The Culture Club: Cultural Studies Scholars' Association hopes to elicit presenters who consider the conference theme from multiple perspectives and media. As our aim is to create a conference dedicated to interdisciplinarity, we invite proposals from graduate students, emerging and independent scholars, junior faculty, artists, activists, filmmakers, and educators.

34th Annual PAC Conference The College of Charleston—Charleston, S.C. 11-13 March 2010

"Literature as Bridge"

Call for Papers and Panels
The Philological Association of the Carolinas
(PAC) www.pachome.org

Email proposals along with a brief abstract and CV by 6 November 2009 to:

American / British Topics
Dr. Blake Hobby bhobby@unca.edu
Assistant Professor of Literature and Language University of North Carolina at Asheville

The fifth annual Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee seeks submissions for "Obsolescence," a graduate student conference to be held February 13-15, 2010, in conjunction with the Center for 21st Century Studies and its research theme for 2009-2011: "Figuring Place and Time."

45th Annual Comparative Literature Conference
California State University, Long Beach
"Visual Culture & Global Practices"
March 4-6, 2010
Plenary Speaker:
W. J. T. Mitchell, Prof. of English & Art History, University of Chicago

The contemporary situation in humanities and social sciences is often characterized by the so called "visual turn", or the increasing emphasis of theory on the power and scope of the visual in everyday life, science, literature, media and the arts. Visual Culture as well as the formation of the field of Visual Studies stems from this renewed focus upon pictoriality and the power of the image, and its expression through various linguistic, visual and media forms.

For Meaghan Morris "history is the name of the space where we define what matters." With this statement, Morris raised but certainly did not settle the nature of the relationship between history and cultural studies. For Morris, the parameters of contemporary culture and everyday life could only be appreciated by their relationship with the forces that shaped how they developed including economic, political and rhetorical factors. In other words, an historical contextualization of phenomena and events is necessary to understand the nuances of culture.

1st International Akşit Göktürk Conference
15-16 April 2010
Call for Papers

Deadline for Submissions: 22 January 2010

Greetings fellow scholars,

This is a CFP for the Fall 2009 Humanities Review, a literary journal for the St. John's University English Department in Queens, NY.

Our current theme focuses on the contemporary construction of American Identity.

We are also strongly requesting art submissions that best exemplify the theme. Limited color or mono-chrome are preferred. Please submit .TIFF FILES ONLY @ 800 dpi to the email address below.

Some matters to consider:

How has the social practice of culture formed / continue to form the ideological condition of "being American?" With that said, what does it mean to be an American in the 21st Century? What are the ontological pieces that plait our parsonage?

Guest Editor: Frank Stevenson
Deadline for Submissions: February 28, 2010
Website: http://www.concentric-literature.url.tw/

CFP: Transformations of Antiquity in the Long Eighteenth Century, Northeast Modern Language Association in Montréal, Quebec April 7-11, 2010. Abstract submission deadline: September 30, 2009

In her 2008 article "Queering Ecocultural Studies," Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands appeals for "a critical practice of ecocultural analysis that challenges […] the ways in which natural and ecological relations have been read and organized to normalize and naturalize power." Queer ecology, at its core, challenges the binary of natural/unnatural, which has sought to diminish both queerness and the more-than-human world. This panel, in the spirit of promoting and continuing the discourse from the NEMLA 2009 Queer Ecocriticism and Theory panel, will examine the state of the academic field of queer ecocriticism and the modes of inquiry prompted by the blending of sexuality studies, queer theory, and ecocriticism.

The University of Florida's 9th annual English Graduate Organization conference will explore nostalgia, focusing on the contradictory relations among desires for recovered pasts as well as deliberate attempts to manipulate the present through representations of the past. Of particular interest will be the extent to which both nostalgia and the desire for utopia are linked to historical trauma, as textual manifestations of an extratextual cause.