ecocriticism and environmental studies

The group "Colporteurs" is pleased to announce their annual conference, which will be held on Wednesday, 23 September 2009 at the Department of Italian Studies in Bologna University, Italy.
The chosen subject has been inspired from the theme of this year's PhD. seminar in "Modern, comparative and Postcolonial literatures", entitled "Declensions of space".

L.M. Montgomery and the Matter of Nature
9th International Conference
University of Prince Edward Island
23-27 June 2010

Call For Papers: Deadline Extended to August 10, 2009

Eighth Native American Symposium and Film Festival:
Images, Imaginations, and Beyond

Submission is invited for papers that examine issues on postcolonial and transnational studies from a variety of perspectives and disciplines. Possible topics may include colonial discourse, gender, ethnicity, nation, migration, ecocriticism, tourism, popular culture and others. Papers address theoretical dialogues between postcolonial studies and transnational studies or focus on geocultural areas are also welcomed.
Accepted papers will be published in a special issue of Manusya, a leading English-language journal based in Bangkok and sponsored by Thailand Research Fund. Papers should be between 5,000-6,000 words in length with an abstract.
Extended deadline for submission: September, 2009

Announcing The 31st Annual
Mid-America Theatre Conference
Hyatt Regency Cleveland at the Arcade
Cleveland, Ohio
March 4-7, 2010

Going Public

Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is Form: Buddhism and American Poetry
41st Annual Convention, Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)
April 7-11, 2010
Montreal, Quebec

Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is Form: Buddhism and American Poetry

NEW: Conference website: www.mod-utopia.bham.ac.uk

Modernism and Utopia: Convergences in the Arts

Confirmed plenary speakers:

Doug Mao, Johns Hopkins University
Patrick Parrinder, University of Reading

Proposals are invited for 20-minute conference presentations that consider modernism in relation to utopia and utopianism, in written, visual, aural, and plastic media.

The aim of the conference is to encourage debate between and across disciplines with a focus on the varied historical, cultural, technological, and intellectual settings in which the modernism-utopia nexus might be clarified and explained.

Red Feather Journal is a new online, international, interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed, English-language journal that provides a forum for scholars and professionals to interrogate representations of children in all aspects of visual media: film, television, the Internet, video gaming, advertisements, etc. Red Feather Journal's premier issue is scheduled for release February, 2010. We are currently seeking editorial board members who are interested in the ongoing discourse about children and children's media culture. We invite scholars and professionals from all disciplines who possess excellent writing skills, who are able to meet deadlines, participate in a timely manner in the peer-review process, and creatively contribute to the journal to apply.

NIES and Uppsala University are pleased to sponsor a major interdisciplinary research symposium featuring 30 researchers from 10 countries representing more than a dozen academic disciplines.

Counter Nature(s) Poster:
http://www.cemus.uu.se/counter-nature.jpg

Confirmed keynote speakers include:

• Lawrence Buell, Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature, Harvard University, USA

• Ursula Heise, Professor of American and European Literature and Director of the Program in Modern Thought and Literature, Stanford University, USA

CFP: Popular Culture and the Classroom
SWTX PCA/ACA February 2010
Papers (panelists) needed to examine role of popular culture in today's classrooms (which includes secondary classrooms or college classrooms) at the Southwest and Texas Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Annual Conference, Feb. 10-13, 2010 in Albuquerque, NM (Hyatt Regency Hotel, Albuquerque).

Here's a quick test for today's educators:
Facebook, "American Idol." "Lady Gaga, "Jon and Kate Plus Eight," "Lost." Ipods. Celebrity Weddings and Break-ups. "Twilight," Twitter, Instant Messaging, Reality Television. Superhero Films. Comic Books and Graphic Novels. X-Box. "LOL and IM Speak" Cell phones. Text messaging. Advertising and Stereotypes.

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.

Panel to be included at 'The Postcolonial Human': A Conference at the Institute for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, University of Leeds
Thursday 24 – Friday 25 September 2009

Margaret Fuller's bicentennial approaches in 2010, and plans for celebration affirm her arrival (or return) as a member of the American transcendentalist "pantheon." But scholarship on the formative and reformative influence of other women on the movement has only recently begun to quicken. Recognizing this new wave of exploration and following a line of inquiry suggested by ESQ's 2003 special issue, "Reexamining the American Renaissance," the editors of the journal and guest editor Phyllis Cole invite submissions for a substantial thematic issue that will broadly conceptualize the role of women in the origin and evolution of transcendentalist thought and action.

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.