gender studies and sexuality

Comhfhios Boston College

February 17, 2024

Connolly House, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA

The Irish Studies Graduate Students of Boston College, in conjunction with the Irish Studies Program, are pleased to host the seventh annual Comhfhios Boston College conference. Comhfhios (pronounced “co-is”) meaning “knowledge together,” or “open to all knowledge,” invites emerging scholars in all Irish Studies fields to gather in Boston. 

International Seminar

Imaginary Communities:

Reading, Writing and Translating Early Modern Women’s Fiction

University of Huelva, Spain

17-18 October, 2024

Gender-based violence is a worldwide issue with an extended past that is predominantly an outcome of social norms and power disparities. In countries as different as Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Nicaragua, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe, studies find that violence is frequently viewed as physical chastisement—the husband’s right to ‘correct’ an erring wife (Heise 1999). Unfortunately, it is one of many societal concerns that literature has long addressed. According to the analysis of a report by CARE and International Rescue, gender-based violence has arisen amid the pandemic and quarantines (Haneef and Kalyanpur 2020).

The Margaret Fuller Society will sponsor two panels on relationality at the 35th Annual Conference of the American Literature Association, to be held 23–26 May 2024 at The Palmer House Hilton in Chicago. Please help circulate our CFPs far and wide across your circles of shared interest.

Send 250-word proposals (indicating AV needs) that respond to the calls below, along with brief biographical statements, to Jana Argersinger, 1st Vice President, at argerj@gmail.com. Submissions from graduate students and folks in non-academic fields are very welcome.

Panel Title: Carson McCullers and Embodied Difference

The Carson McCullers Society, in conjunction with The Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians (Columbus State University), invites proposals for a panel at the 35th Annual Conference of the American Literature Association (ALA), May 23-26, 2024, The Palmer House Hilton, 17 East Monroe, Chicago, IL 60603.

Cather and the Readerly Imagination

In her own time as in ours, Willa Cather’s books created vibrant and varied communities of readers. Cather’s literary works detail numerous acts of reading, and she herself was an avid reader with an acute awareness of the reading public. The 69th Annual Willa Cather Spring Conference seeks to celebrate and explore both the act of reading Cather and the presence of reading and readers within Cather’s fiction and letters. 

The directors invite papers on a variety of topics related to Cather, readers, and reading, including but not limited to the following areas.

• Representations of readers and reading in Cather’s novels and short stories

What is left of myths in contemporary arts and literature?

As founding narratives or idealized representations of historical figures, myths have, from time immemorial, tied humans together, creating communities that grow into organized societies. They have therefore become the safeguards of a vision of History that the arts and literature have ceaselessly spun into stories, in order to better transgress, deconstruct or simply revisit an ever-changing mythos. Contemporary stories reshape the contours of an all-too-often glorified past and they question our cultural heritage at the same time as rekindling it.

The Game Studies area of the National Popular Culture Association and the American Culture Association Conference invites proposals for papers and panels on games and game studies for the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association National Conference to be held on March 27-30, 2024, in Chicago, IL.

I. Topics of Interest

The organizers seek proposals and papers covering all aspects of gaming, gaming culture and game studies. Proposals can address any game medium (computer, social, console, tabletop, etc.) and all theoretical and methodological approaches are welcome.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

DEADLINE EXTENDED TO 12/15/2023!!!

Send proposals to rhetoricandmemes@gmail.com

Themed issue of Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa, Volume 36, Issue 2 (2024)

Link to the CFP: https://bit.ly/_RCWR

Issue Editor

Goutam Karmakar, Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Germany; University of the Western Cape, South Africa
goutamkrmkr@gmail.com

The PopMeC Research Blog (https://popmec.hypotheses.org/, ISSN 2660-8839) is a peer-reviewed academic blog publishing short articles on a rolling basis.

ECRs and PGR students are very welcome to send their papers, as well as scholars at any stage of their career.

Full papers (about 3000 words, bibliographic references excluded) on topics related with popular culture, including (but not limited to):

>       the representation of specific ethnic / religious / gender / etc. groups in the US popular media and culture (including mainstream, alternative, and self-representations)

The primary aim of this edited volume is to explore the word ‘Literature’ in the age of AI. Etymologically, the Latin word litteratura is derived from littera (Latin) meaning the ‘smallest element of alphabetical writing’ (Klarer 1). The word ‘literature,’ then means, any writing e.g., a medical prescription, usage instruction written on the bottle of shampoo or maybe a cautionary warning on the packet of cigarettes. To specify the particular type of literature we use the term ‘Creative Literature’ (called the Literature of Power by Rees).

“Evolving Forms”

University of Iowa, 19-21 April 2024

What cultural objects and phenomena are designated to be ugly, bad, unacceptable, and monstrous, especially in relation to gender, sexuality, disability, race, class, and caste? Whose histories are marginalized or overlooked because of their perceived bad taste, abject existence, and the taint they leave on supposedly beautiful, grand narratives of nationhood, well-being, or progress? How do kitsch, camp, and excess function in the realms of activism in contemporary politics? How do nasty, revulsive art, literature, and performances act as sites that engender questions that push boundaries of societal mores and cultural hierarchies?