interdisciplinary

NEW (final) deadline for submissions for the "Shakespeare In (and Out of) Love" Area at the 2010 Film & History Conference: Representations of Love in Film and Television: September 15, 2010.

The conference will be held at the Hyatt Regency Milwaukee between November 11 and November 14, 2010. For more information, go to www.uwosh.edu/filmandhistory.

From Blanche Dubois' Belle Reve to Esperanza Cordero's house on Mango Street, houses—and the affiliated, if more abstract, idea of home—figure prominently in 20th century American literature and film. The 20th century, after all, is characterized by both inter- and intra-national migrations which have, invariably, entailed the loss of one home, followed by the acquisition of another. Moreover, the 20th century has seen a steady increase in both actual home ownership and the imaginative importance of owning a home. At the start of the 20th century, 46.5% of Americans—less than one in two—were homeowners but, by 2000, that number had risen to 66.2%, or two in three.

Call for Papers

The Films of Kathryn Bigelow

42nd Annual Convention, Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)
April 7-10, 2011
New Brunswick, NJ – Hyatt New Brunswick
Host Institution: Rutgers University

This panel will examine the ways in which Victorian Sensation Fiction interacted with Modernity. We will ask: How did the genre anticipate and respond to late 19th century Parliamentary activity? In what ways did sensation fiction challenge or reflect evolving ideas about gender and identity? Panelists will interrogate sensation fiction's relationship to art and aestheticism movements, advances in technologies including "iron horses," commercial culture, and Modernity's historical and political events, including Britain's empire project. We will discuss the ways in which sensation fiction seeded later literary movements such as the "New Woman" novels.

Call for Papers

Session: The Ecogothic in Italian Literature and Culture

Seeking two proposals for a multi-disciplinary collection of essays on Conan. I already have the book contract and need the essays to round the manuscript out.

Here are some potential topics, but I am open to good ideas not on the list:

Conan after de Camp and Carter
The Conan industry
Feminist approaches to Conan
Appropriation of Conan in rock/heavy metal
Conan the television show
Masculinity/Male studies and barbarism

Essays should be in the 8000-10000 word range. An agreed-upon style manual will be send to all contributors.

Writing Into the Profession:
Enacting and Exploring Roles of the English Scholar
Saturday, September 25 2010

For its fifth annual interdisciplinary conference in English studies, we at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro's English Graduate Student Association ask you to join us as we work to build a community of graduate scholars. Our conference provides forums for ongoing research in a non-threatening and receptive academic environment. Additionally, the Writing into the Profession conference brings graduate scholars into contact with established professionals who can answer questions about best practices, research methods, and the field of English Studies.

Sven Birkerts identifies language erosion as one of the morbid symptoms of the electronic age: "Syntactical masonry is already a dying art; simple linguistic pre-fab is the norm. Ambiguity, paradox, irony, subtlety, and wit – fast disappearing. In their place, the simple 'vision thing.'" The popularity of James Cameron's Avatar may prove the worldwide spread of this morbid symptom.

The Worlds of V.S. Naipaul Panel invites you to submit an abstract. This panel is a part of the Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) Convention, April 7-10, 2011, New Brunswick, New Jersey.

The status of genre writing has been redefined for us in the work of Gunther Kress. Kress reminds us that writing involves more than the alphabetic notion that we write poems, stories, plays and essays. In fact, communication is large, contains multitudes, to paraphrase Whitman; it involves visual and aural elements as well as traditional writing. As a result, even those of us who have not technologized our classes have felt the need to revise our courses (and our assignments) accordingly to include more and more of what our students bring with them as prior knowledge and experience to our classes. There is new teaching to be done, and we must bring forward a new era of instruction in creative writing.

From John Milton to Aphra Behn to Oscar Wilde to Angela Y. Davis, a striking number of writers have experienced some sort of imprisonment. This panel seeks papers on the role of prisons in textual and literary creation. Some of the questions we wish to address include: What are the various prison experiences across time periods--the gaol, the bridewell, the convent, the workhouse-prison, the psychiatric hospital--and how does each serve as a site of cultural production? How does the prison intersect with issues of gender, class, and nation? How does prison writing fit with other generic forms? Which genres of writing emerged from imprisonment? How do writers figure their incarceration--as periods of dispossession, withdrawal, renewal, or triumph?

I am pleased to announce the publication of the third volume of "Ravenna", an online interdisciplinary journal devoted to the relationship between nineteenth-century Britain and Italy. "Ravenna" is edited by Elisa Bizzotto and Luca Caddia and published by Steven Halliwell at The Rivendale Press as one of THE OSCHOLARS group of fin de siècle journals under the general editorship of David Charles Rose.

http://www.oscholars.com/Ravenna/Ravenna3/toc.htm

This issue includes the following articles:

- Fabio Camilletti, "Veils. A Reading of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's 'St. Agnes of Intercession'";

Creator of Tracy Beaker and one of Britain's top writers for children, there's hardly a young person in the UK that hasn't heard of Jacqueline Wilson. The most borrowed author in Britain's libraries, over 30 million copies of Wilson's books have been sold in the UK alone and they have been translated into 34 different languages. Amongst her awards are the Smarties Prize, the Guardian Children's Fiction Award and the Royal TV Society Best Children's Fiction Award. Jacqueline was Children's Laureate from 2005-07 and was awarded an OBE in 2002 for services to literacy in schools. In 2008 she became Dame Jacqueline Wilson when she was awarded a DBE.

The American Name Society (ANS), a professional organization devoted to the study of names and their role in society, invites précis and abstracts for papers and program suggestions for its annual meeting to be held in conjunction with the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), the American Dialect Society (ADS), and other allied, professional organizations. The 2011 meeting will be at the Hilton Pittsburgh, January 6-9, 2011.