ecocriticism and environmental studies

I posted before in January about seeking submissions for an upcoming book collection on the personal impact of globally significant traumatic events, such as disasters or epidemics, on the work of mothering and on mothers' feelings about that work. Just a reminder that the deadline is now three weeks away:

RE(VIEWING) THE LANDSCAPE OF VISUAL RHETORIC: TOPICS IN VISUAL RHETORIC
The SAMLA special session on visual rhetoric welcomes paper, panel, and performance proposals on topics that deal with all aspects of visual rhetoric, such as visual culture and the Web; teaching visual rhetoric in the classroom; image use in blogs; exploring identities with visual rhetoric; visual rhetoric in student writing; (re)presentations of the body; visual rhetoric in politics; visual rhetoric of physical spaces; visual rhetoric and environmental issues; and other relevant topics.

"The Future ain't what it used to be" is the seventh annual Postgraduate Conference held by the English Programme, University of Dundee. It will investigate questions such as: how have perspectives of the future changed over time, how is the future perceived in literature and the media today, and how do representations of the past help us to imagine the future? Proposals should be 300 words long, for papers lasting 20 minutes. The deadline for proposals is 15th May 2009.

For more information contact Laura Findlay (l.f.findlay@dundee.ac.uk), or go to www.dundee.ac.uk/english/index.htm

M/MLA conference, Nov. 12 - 15, 2009
Title: Violent Migrations
Chair/Organizer: Trisha Brady
Affiliation: S.U.N.Y. at Buffalo, Dept. of English
Email: tmbrady@buffalo.edu

New Clear Forms is an international 2-day conference to be held at the University of Glasgow on 11th and 12th September 2009. It aims to explore the poetic responses to national and international affairs of this era, in a bid to further understand the deep and complex relations between propaganda and private consciousness, rebellion and art, nation and self.

We are currently inviting proposals for 20-minute papers that reflect on these themes. Topics may include but are by no means limited to:

This panel invites papers that engage with narratives that problematize the dominant American narrative of migration into the "savage" West. For instance, In Jim Jarmusch's 1995 film Dead Man, the Native American Xebeche is captured and shipped east by railroad caged as an animal in a sort of counter-migration, even as European settlers travel west into the territories from which his relatives are being displaced. Of particular interest are papers that explore the relationship between suffering, objectified, or commodified bodies and American landscape.

The 10th Annual New Voices Graduate Student Conference focuses on representations of the Apocalypse as they manifest throughout history, across cultures, and in language. The conference committee invites papers dealing with any aspect of mankind's conception of the End-of-Days. Individual papers or panel proposals may center upon any time period and any culture or people. They may furthermore draw thematically from such academic disciplines as literary criticism and theory, poetry, fiction, philosophy, religious studies, medieval and renaissance studies, art history, biblical history, cultural geography, and folklore.

SAMLA 2009

Reading Ethics in the 21 Century

Call for Papers

Since Aristotle the understanding of ethics as a branch of philosophy has been defined as a pragmatic rather than a theoretical field: ethics does not simply involve a discussion of virtues, but the practice of "virtual activities." It is concerned, as Sartre later insists, with living "in the world," where one has the individual moral responsibility for the other and for the political structure of society. The personal responsibility to act "ethically" in this case is made possible by the essential freedom of choice of each individual.

Call for papers and panel proposals.
All disciplines invited.

Re-Viewing Black Mountain College
An International Conference
October 9-11, 2009

The legacy of Black Mountain College continues to influence contemporary culture in multiple realms. This conference aims to investigate its history as well as the multiple paths of influence, actual and possible, identifiable in the contemporary world and beyond.

Co-hosted by The Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, and
The University of North Carolina, Asheville

Session Title: Teaching Language and Literature
Open Topic

We welcome papers that deal with any and all issues related to the teaching of language and literature. Proposals may be related to issues such as the language of gender, comics as literature, or teaching new media, but this is not required. Send your inspiring ideas!

By May 1st, please submit proposals of no more than 150 words by email – preferred – to luria@mailbox.sc.edu or by post to University of South Carolina, Arts Institute, Attention: Rachel Luria, 1212 Greene Street/228 Sumwalt, Columbia, SC 29208

The theme of this year's issue is Consuming Cultures. We are accepting submissions of articles, essays, creative work, reviews, and art that explore the ideologies, politics, and cultures of consumption fairly broadly. The deadline for submissions is June 15, 2009. Questions and submissions can be sent to disclosurejournal@gmail.com.

The Jewish Woman and her Body
Youngstown State University, Youngstown, Ohio
March 7-9, 2010

Call for Papers deadline: October 1, 2009

Since Eve, the woman and her body have had a central position in Jewish tradition. Experiences such as childbirth, violence, sexuality, hunger, infertility, and aging have preoccupied Jewish life. Representations of the female body in Jewish texts include idealization, restriction, and objectification. This interdisciplinary conference will explore real and imagined constructions of the Jewish woman and her body.

Proposals from all disciplinary approaches, historical periods and geographical locations are welcome.

Shifting Spatialities: The Dynamic Boundaries of Place and Space

Rice Graduate Symposium
October 2-3, 2009
Rice University, Houston, TX

Call For Papers
Submission Deadline: July 1, 2009

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Sharon Marcus; Professor of Literature, Columbia University

As the citizen of the nation becomes the consumer of the multinational corporation, our roles as inhabitants of space become increasingly complicated. Our literature, our faith, our bodies all speak to the different ways that we find to occupy the shifting territories of the postmodern landscape. Looking both to the past and future can help us to discover the real and imagined ways our cultures can develop in more richly and defined ways.

There seem to be two ideas regarding what is called "creative," "expressive," or "personal" writing in composition discourses. In one view, creative writing is seen as the work of the lone genius, who creates the Literature studied by English departments. Such a view, while having fallen out of favor in composition studies, is still considered viable in creative writing departments. Furthermore, as Susan Miller argues, it continues to haunt composition in the form of the split between composition and literature departments, and student writing and "real" writing. In the other view, creative writing is deemed overly subjective, apolitical, and generally inconsequential.