cultural studies and historical approaches

Developing a discussion initiated in the recently-published Literary Geographies 6(1), the journal’s editors seek contributions to an expanded ‘Thinking Space’ section on ‘Literary Geographies in Isolation’ planned for the December issue. We are interested in receiving shorter submissions of 1500-3000 words, including the more personal, polemical or impressionistic. Topics might include, but are not limited to:

• armchair tourism in lockdown

• reading as virtual fieldwork

Special Issue "Contemporary British Culture and Neoliberalism"

52nd Northeast Modern Language Association Convention

March 11-14, 2020, Philadelphia

This panel explores how strategies for reading the Bible shaped literary output during the 16th and 17th centuries. Recent criticism in the field of book history details the reading practices that evolved in response to the Reformation’s call for direct engagement with vernacular scripture. This panel aims to bring fresh thinking in the history of the book into conversation with the perennial topic of the Bible in and as literature, offering new insight into how biblical reading became literary production in this period.

In the Arcades Project, Benjamin wrote that it is from the gates of the imagination that lovers and friends draw their energies. Over the past few decades, scholarship has been ever more inclined to treat the imagination not as false or unreal, but as an embodied, affective, and fluid mode of creating meaning and experiencing the world. The concept of bodily imaginaries in queer and feminist studies, for instance, seeks to overcome the strict duality between imagination and the body: as Maggie Nelson points out in The Argonauts, “in the field of gender, there is no charting where the external and the internal begin and end.”

Full Abstract of Panel:  “Solidarity”, an abstract, almost unattainable ideal in higher education, often parades around as a tangible intention, as if it were an easily attainable concept. Wear a solidarity pin! Put a union sticker on your car! John W. Curtis, Director of Research and Public Policy for the American Association of University Professors, states that, “Change does require commitment and shared activism." This panel aims to explore tangible strategies at achieving and fostering solidarity and to offer insight into what commitment to shared activism could potentially look like, particularly in representing women’s, gender, and LGBTQ experiences.