ecocriticism and environmental studies

The recent economic crisis coincides with flourishing of new realism across different media in Europe and North America [Frazen's The Corrections in literature (2001), Audaird's The Prophet (2008) in film, Simon and Burns' The Wire (2002-2008) in television]. This realism distinguishes itself by an extensive preoccupation with poverty, migration, crime and urban violence while it stylistically appropriates violence as a commentary on the disposability of bodies under neo-liberal economy. The time seems ripe to explore what kind of realism is being produced in our historical moment. This seminar explores the prospects and limits of realism as a narrative mode that reflects on the contemporary capitalism, its trajectory, moments of crisis and recovery.

CSU Fullerton's Annual Graduate Conference, February 5-6, 2010
The Acacia Group at Cal State Fullerton, an organization of English graduate students and faculty members committed to developing student scholastic advancement while fostering a strong sense of academic community, is currently accepting proposals for its annual graduate conference.

While the Acacia Conference is organized to meet the needs of graduate students and faculty, we welcome contributions from academics at all levels.

The Drawn Map.
March 13-14, 2010
Northeastern University's
English Graduate Student Association
Call for Papers

Keynote Speaker:
Professor Martin Brückner,
University of Delaware

Faculty Speaker: Professor Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Northeastern University

& Professionalization Roundtable:
"Mapping the Archive"

We live in a world that is dominated by fear. We are increasingly afraid to walk in our city streets, populated as they are by feral youths, drug-dealers and surveillance cameras. The threat of global warming and climate change is ever-present, and accompanied by the even greater fear that we'll be too late to do anything about it. Then of course there's terror: frightened of a Taliban invasion, apparently, we are still fighting in Afghanistan after eight years and pursuing a worldwide "war on terror". And if that's not enough, we are becoming ever more afraid of alcohol, of food, of being too fat, of being too thin; and afraid even of sex.

Watermark, an annual scholarly journal published by graduate students in the Department of English at California State University, Long Beach, is now seeking papers for our fourth volume to be published in May 2010.

Watermark is dedicated to publishing original critical and theoretical papers concerned with literature of all genres and periods, as well as papers representing current issues in the fields of rhetoric and composition. As this journal is intended to provide a forum for emerging voices, only student work will be considered.

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

The Portland Center for Public Humanities

Second Annual International Conference on:
"Understanding Sustainability: Perspectives from the Humanities"

May 20-22, 2010
Portland State University
Portland, Oregon

Keynote Speakers:

Call for Papers

International Conference

** CINEMA AND LANDSCAPE**

University of Sheffield
United Kingdom

April 16-18, 2010

Following the publication of a major new edited book in Winter 2009, Cinema and Landscape (Intellect, 2009), featuring essays by notable film scholars from around the world, an international conference is to be held on the subject of cinema and landscape.

The conference will be hosted at the University of Sheffield, April 16-18 2010, with the aim of exploring the intersection between Film, Film Culture, Landscape, Place and Geography.

Proposals** (a 150 word abstract) are very welcome for:

Literature is related to everyday life in a subtle way. Everyday life often manifests itself as the textual Other outside the major narrative thrust, and, therefore, receives scant critical attention in literary studies. In fact everyday life can be seen as an arena of two-way negotiation: it is where power reproduces itself in daily practice, but it is also where both personal and collective creativity intervenes in the reproduction of power. Moreover, everyday life often emerges, becomes visible, or acquires meaning through its engagement with other social categories—gender, race, class, ethnicity, nature, and so on, whose different relations with dominant regimes of power call for different strategies of everyday life practices.

A few spots are available for the "Sacred Nature to Environmental Policies" workshop at the annual congress of the French American Studies Association in Grenoble, France, May 27-29, 2010 – deadline November 20, 2009

From Sacred Nature to Environmental Policies

The "breakage" of language, and the breakdown of communication that may ensue from this breakage, marks the borderlines between personal, social and cultural difference, but the defamiliarization and fragmentation of the self that this breakage may effect can also produce new visions of the self/other relationship and new communicative possibilities. The poet John Hollander begins a poem with the line, "nothing makes something happen." Language's failures and silences have been used as a starting place for epistemological possibility and recovery in literature from pre- to post-modernity, and are a main emphasis of writers as diverse as George Herbert, Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, Dionne Brand, and Judith Butler.

Hybrid Realism?

Call for Papers and Proposed Sessions
34th Annual Conference
The International Association for Philosophy and Literature
to be held at the University of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada,
24-30 May 2010
Topic: CULTURES OF DIFFERENCES: national / indigenous / historical

For submissions and more information, please visit http://www.iapl.info/
Deadline for Submissions: 30 November 2009.

In the wake of the digital revolution and globalisation policies the whole world is witnessing formation of certain conditions which are having and will continue to have tremendous impact on the production, reproduction, access, dissemination and appreciation of visual arts. While the old art forms and artworks are being revisited and reproduced in wholly new ways and for a variety of purposes, new types in the forms of digital arts are surfacing not only on the internet but also every place of our visual culture. The place and workplace of the artist also has undergone a radical change.

CALL FOR PROPOSALS
Conference: "Health, Embodiment, and Visual Culture: Engaging Publics and Pedagogies"

November 19-20, 2010
McMaster University
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

Conference Co-Chairs:
Sarah Brophy, Associate Professor, Department of English and Cultural Studies, McMaster University
Janice Hladki, Associate Professor, School of the Arts, McMaster University

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS: January 15, 2010