cultural studies and historical approaches

“Living fame no fortune can confound”: Richard Barnfield’s Legacy
Sapienza University of Rome, 9-10 February 2023

Co-organized by:

Camilla Caporicci (University of Perugia)
Fabio Ciambella (Sapienza University of Rome)
Cristiano Ragni (University of Verona)

Confirmed keynote speakers:

Tania Demetriou (University of Cambridge)
Andrew Hadfield (University of Sussex)

As more climate doomsday predictions continue to surface from scientists, journalists, and scholars, the fight to combat global climate collapse can sometimes feel hopeless—petrified by the saturation of negative affects in literary, theoretical, and cultural production. While continuing with neoliberal business-as-usual is untenable, scholars have begun to recognize that doom and gloom predictions alone actually make individuals less likely to act.

With the turn towards extractivism and energy as objects for critical inquiry, minerals and fossil fuels have become crucial additions to categories of cultural, political, and materialist analyses. The international workshop Archives of the Planetary Mine will explore the intersections between culture, materiality, politics, energy consumption, and extractivism across the Americas, throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Its purpose is to address the geohistorical magnitudes of energy consumption and critical engagements with the logic of extraction as a condition of possibility for cultural production.

Is the UK a country of immigration? British immigration historian Panikos Panayi says yes. Although its history and founding are not comparable to that of the United States, which is synonymous with the history of immigration, the history of Britain is also not unrelated to immigration. On the contrary, for the past 200 years, immigration has been a major driving force in history, leading to significant changes in British society. In the context of the dissolution of the British Empire and the decline of the British economy after World War II, Englishness has emerged as a public concern by British people who ask themselves, “What is British?” or “What is English?”.

Resilience and Resistance: Embracing Disability Narratives in Nineteenth-Century Fiction proposes a space for scholars to present research on disability studies and narrative agency in British fiction from the period. Disability studies is concerned with altering the contemporary political landscape to procure protections for disabled individuals and communities, question structures which uphold barriers to equal access, and challenge ideologies of ability that affirm ableist notions of social participation. Disability studies also challenges individuals and scholars to analyze the historical, literary, medical, and social understandings of disability to dismantle ableist structures.

Call for Papers
Historical Fictions Research Network Online Conference
(17 to 19 February 2023, Zoom)

The Historical Fictions Research Network (see https://historicalfictionsresearch.org/) aims to create a place for the discussion of all aspects of the construction of the historical narrative. The focus of the conference is the way we construct history, the narratives and fictions people assemble and how. We welcome both academic and practitioner presentations.

This panel invites interdisciplinary proposals that bring to attention the multiple, contradictory, and shifting approaches that encompass the studies of the Southwest Asia North Africa (SWANA) region. The overarching aim of this panel is to shed light on the theoretical and political significance of intersectionality for critical engagement with the SWANA region. We invite contributions examining how the relationalities of bodies, cultures, and cultural productions in the SWANA region and its diasporas shape discourses across nations, re(li)gions, and languages as they converge and diverge in their religious, racial, ethnic, and gender*sexuality-based identities.

PopCRN (UNE’s Popular Culture Research Network) hosting a virtual symposium exploring uniforms in popular culture to be held online on Thursday 20th April 2023.

This symposium aims to interrogate the ways that uniforms are used to in popular culture. We invite papers which examine uniforms of every type, from the formal to the informal, from military to sports and school uniforms. We welcome papers from researchers across the academic spectrum and encourage papers from postgraduate researchers and early career researchers. Presenters will have the opportunity to publish a refereed journal articles in a special symposium edition of Clothing Cultures.

Topics can include, but are not restricted to:

Editor: Dr Alice Equestri, University of Padua (alice.equestri@unipd.it)

Publisher: international academic press to be confirmed

Deadline for submitting chapter proposals (400 words): July 31, 2022
Notification of acceptance: September 1, 2022
Provisional deadline for essay submission (6000-8000 words): April 30, 2023

Papers are sought for a volume that critically examines – and advances our knowledge of – manifestations of intellectual disability in early modern English and European literature and culture (c. 1500-1700). The collection will be submitted to an international academic publisher.

Call for abstracts for a volume of critical essays: “Disability’s Hidden Twin: Discourses of Care and Dependency in Literature”

Volume editors: Talia Schaffer (English, Graduate Center and Queens College, CUNY) and Chris Gabbard (English, Univ. of North Florida)

We are calling for abstracts for papers examining Anglophone imaginative literature (precluding memoirs) that engages in some fashion with care ethics and disability theory. We are seeking a range of representation from different eras and regions.

Modern Canadian poets and authors of fiction have incorporated aspects of First Nation cultures and characters in a range of works. In some cases portraits of First Nation individuals and communities are central to these literary works while in others they are less prominent. What are the similarities and differences between the depictions of First Nation peoples? Are the literary treatments of them reliable? What may we learn about Canadian historical and political realities in Canada, as well as gender roles, from these portrayals? Please submit 200-word abstracts through your new or previous user account by going to https://www.buffalo.edu/nemla.html and following the links.

NeMLA 2023: Niagara Falls, NY. March 23-26, 2023.

As a reminder, the BSA New Scholars Program deadline is September 3. If you were contemplating applying, but haven’t yet, we strongly encourage you to do so!  CFA: BSA NEW SCHOLARS PROGRAM (DEADLINE SEPTEMBER 3) The Bibliographical Society of America’s New Scholars Program promotes the work of scholars new to bibliography, broadly defined to include the creation, production, publication, distribution, reception, transmission, and subsequent history of all textual artifacts.

We invite abstracts for chapters of previously unpublished and original work to be included in the new Routledge Companion to Global Women’s Writing, which is under contract to be published in July 2024 as part of the Routledge Literature Companions series.