ecocriticism and environmental studies

Animals and Animality Across the Humanities and Social Sciences
Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference, June 26-27, 2010, Queen's University (Kingston, Ontario)
Keynote: Carol Adams

CFP: 38th Annual Medieval Studies Workshop, University of British Columbia [repost]

Vancouver, Canada, 13-14 November 2009

Writing the World: Representation of the

Cultural, Political and Natural World in Medieval and Renaissance Europe

http://ubc2009medieval.blogspot.com/

'What can we know of the world? What quantity of space can our eyes hope to take in between our birth and our death? How many square centimetres of Planet Earth will the soles of our feet have touched?' (Georges Perec, Species of Spaces, p. 78).

11th Global Conference
Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness

Monday 15th March - Thursday 18th March 2010
Salzburg, Austria

Call for Papers
This inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary conference seeks to examine and explore issues surrounding evil and human wickedness. Papers, presentations, reports and workshops are invited on issues on or broadly related to any of the following themes:

Jennifer Neville's "Representations of the Natural World in Old English Poetry" and Gillian Rudd's "Greenery: Ecocritical Readings of Late Medieval English Literature" are examples of the growing interest in ecocritical readings of medieval literature. The ways medieval writers thought about and interacted with nature and wilderness are important and relevant in regard to other conceptual frames and formulations that governed medieval thought and behavior. Papers in this panel will address the representations of nature in medieval texts as they pertained to and promoted political ideologies and programs of instruction or colonization. Papers on English and Continental literature are welcome.

In The Dialectic of Enlightenment (Dialektik der Aufklärung, 1944) Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno invoked the voyage of Odysseus—especially his encounter with the Sirens—as a sustained metaphor for the emergence of the "subject" of knowledge, judgment, and discourse out of the mythic substratum of Homeric poetry. The authors understood Odysseus to be an emblem of the modern bourgeois individual, comparable to the Socratic "self" derided by Friedrich Nietzsche and designated by Max Weber as the calculating ratiocinator who gave us "progress" in its various forms: capitalist, socialist, technocratic, and utilitarian. The Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School which the authors founded was designed to provide a groundbreaking position.

We are seeking short anecdotes for inclusion in a forthcoming book (Tentative Title: Publishing for Profit and Promotion) addressing publishing and professional development opportunities for non-tenured faculty (graduate students, part-time faculty, adjuncts, assistant professors, academic professionals, lecturers, and other contingent faculty). We invite stories that share:

Plenary Speakers:

Bernard Stiegler, Director of the Department of Cultural Development at the Centre Georges-Pompidou and Director of the Institut de Recherche et d'Innovation (IRI)

David Wills (University at Albany-SUNY)

Joanna Zylinska (Goldsmiths College, University of London)

Call for Papers

MLA 2011: Los Angeles, January 6-9, 2011

Landscape and Identity in the U.S. South

Greetings fellow scholars,

This is a call for papers 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 polyvalent agencies at play within the construction of contemporary American Identity.

We are also strongly requesting cover art submissions that best exemplify the theme. Cover art open to drawing, painting, photography, and digital art. Limited color or mono-chrome are preferred. Please submit .TIFF FILES ONLY @ 800 dpi to the email address below.

Some matters to consider:

'Tools of the Sacred, Techniques of the Secular:
Awakening, Epiphany, Apocalypse and Doubt in
Contemporary English-Language Verse'

Université Libre de Bruxelles

First Call for Papers

(Brussels, 4 to 7 May 2010)

As a medium reaching far back into past millennia, poetry not only has its roots in music, dance, and the organic rhythms of the breath, but also in ritual, liturgy, healing and the sacred. From its inception, poetry has indeed been deeply intertwined with the religious—i.e. with that which, in the etymological sense of 'religare,' yokes different dimensions to one another and ties back the visible to the invisible, the 'relative' to the 'absolute.'

Call for Proposals
Food Theory
Pre/Text A Journal of Rhetorical Theory (http://www.pre-text.com/pt/)
Guest Editors Jeff Rice and Jenny Rice

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THE CARTOGRAPHICAL NECESSITY OF EXILE

Derek Walcott identified a cartographical necessity of exile in his 1984 collection of poetry, Midsummer, when he wrote:

So, however far you have travelled, your
steps make more holes and the mesh is multiplied –
… exiles must make their own maps

This panel seeks to take account of the humanities' recent engagement with the sciences, an engagement that puts aside the hermeneutics of suspicion in favor of the appropriation and transformation of scientific knowledge. Beyond science studies and its demystification of objectivity, fields such as affect theory and ecocriticism, temporality studies and new media philosophy, biopolitics and animal studies bring the methodologies of literary studies to scientific objects and scientific methodologies to literary objects. This panel will consider the terms of these engagements. What are the points of convergence between literary and scientific theories? What does literary theory have to offer to the sciences in return?

Food and Culture
31st Annual Conference February 10-13, 2010
Southwest/Texas Popular and American Culture Association
http://swtxpca.org/
Submission Deadline: 10/1/09, Priority Registration Deadline 11/1/09

Conference Hotel:
Hyatt Regency Albuquerque
330 Tijeras
Albuquerque, NM 87102
505-842-1234

The Food and Culture Area of the Southwest/ Texas Popular and American Culture Association invites panels and papers for their annual conference at the Hyatt Regency Albuquerque, February 10-13. Please submit abstracts and proposed panels by October 1, 2009. Possible topics include, but are not limited to: