modernist studies

The Executive Committee of the Twelfth Annual Graduate Symposium on Women's and Gender History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is pleased to announce a call for papers. The Symposium, which is the capstone event of the History Department's Women's History month celebration, is scheduled for March 3-5, 2011. To celebrate and encourage further work in the field of women's and gender history, we invite submissions from graduate students from any institution and discipline. The Symposium organizers welcome individual papers on any topic in the field of women's and gender history. Papers submitted as a panel will be judged individually. Preference will be given to scholars who did not present at last year's Symposium.

The University of Houston is known as one of the most ethnically diverse research universities in the United States. With that in mind, the graduate English department is currently seeking submissions about the impact of America's cultural, religious, gender, economic, and racial diversity on American literature post WWII - present. We welcome abstracts from experienced academics, undergraduate, and graduate students in all areas of study, including but not limited to: literature, languages, pedagogy, rhetoric and composition, creative writing, cultural, film, theater, comparative, gender, religion, and interdisciplinary studies.

This year's guest speaker will be Dr. Robert Donahoo of Sam Houston State University.

42nd Annual Convention, Northeast Modern Language Association
April 7-10, 2011
Rutgers University
New Brunswick, NJ

The received wisdom tells us that the modernization of American culture and society was contingent upon its secularization. And yet, when we look to both canonical works of American modernism and to contributions to the "cultural front," we find an abiding concern for the religious that troubles this dominant narrative. This panel seeks to reexamine the multivalent modernist concern for the religious in order to reassess its place in early 20th century American literature and culture, to analyze the myth of the 'secular age,' and to determine the place of religion in the conflict between capital and labor.

This panel examines the critics and critical projects that grew out of modernism through a transnational lens that attends to intellectual exchange with East Asia. The study of modernism's interaction with East Asian culture often focuses on the activity of modernist artists, such as Ezra Pound's incorporation of the sinograph into his poetics. Additionally, many early twentieth century critics, who took modernist art and literature as their focus, were also drawn to East Asian culture. I.A. Richards, for example, set up the Orthological Institute of China in Beijing, and his protégé, William Empson, taught in Japan before moving on to the University of Peking.

At our second annual Association of English Graduate Students Symposium, we wish to explore the many ways that identity manifests itself as an object for study. The concept of identity permeates every text, from its narrator's organizing gaze to the genre in which it is catalogued. Indeed, we invite you to question the term "text" itself, as "text" has come to be identified as anything from a novel to a Facebook page to a film.