online conferences

ACLA: GROWING UP IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH: CHILDREN AGENCY AND WORLD-MAKING IN CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

Title: Beyond Backwardness: Revisiting Rural Spaces as Sites of Resistance, Renewal, and Radical Potential Organizers: David Delgado López (Visiting Assistant Professor, Carleton College), Kelly Ferguson (Assistant Professor, Miami University), Brittany Frodge (Lecturer, Ohio State University) Description: Due to varied complex historical processes such as industrialization, urbanization, and colonization, the rural has often been articulated in literature and other cultural products as an underdeveloped space tied to the past that can only progress through civilizing acts of modernization; Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s Facundo or Civilization and Barbarism (Argentina, 1845), Camilo José

Please consider submitting a proposal for our third edition of “American Afterlives” @ the 52nd annual Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture, February 17-18, 2025 (virtual) and February 20-22, 2025 (in person).

The LCLC seeks submissions for “American Afterlives,” a dedicated panel stream that crosses the pre-1900/post-1900 divide. Presentations will focus on ways of rethinking the chronologies by which we structure stories and studies about American literature and culture. Previous panels and papers have considered aesthetic experiments and traditions, remediations of early American texts, speculative and historical fiction, cultural histories of technology, and more.

Please note that abstract submissions must be sent through the ACLA submission portal online. For details, see the seminar posting on the ACLA website: https://www.acla.org/comparative-literature-and-politics-detranslation 

The 2025 annual meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association will be held virtually, May 29-June 1, 2025.

RT: Gone Too Soon: Sunsetting and Transitioning Digital Projects (sponsored by the Digital Humanities Caucus) [ID 96]

South-South Connections in the Eighteenth Century (sponsored by the Race & Empire Caucus) [ID 95]
Co-chairs: Jeremy Chow, Bucknell University, j.chow@bucknell.edu, Mona Narain, Texas Christian University, m.narain@tcu.edu

We are proposing an ACLA Seminar to convene, for the first time, the interdisciplinary community of scholars working on or in the spirit of J.L. Austin (1911–1960). Though widely, albeit often begrudgingly, acknowledged as an important twentieth-century philosopher, Austin is unique among this rarified class of thinkers in several unfortunate ways: he is the progenitor of no noteworthy schools, there are no chaired positions named for him, and until recently there were no collections of essays about his work and even fewer conferences about his legacy. Yet, many scholars owe a debt to Austin, and there have been signs recently of a more pronounced reemergence of interest in him.

Weeks after the death of Nobel Prize-winning author Alice Munro this year, her daughter Andrea Skinner disclosed the longstanding sexual abuse she'd suffered as a child at the hands of her stepfather, Munro’s husband, Gerald Fremlin—abuse about which Munro had known and stayed silent. The disclosure is but the latest revelation to throw into question the legacy of a revered cultural icon. Neil Gaiman, Louis CK, Jean Vanier, and Avital Ronell are only a few public figures to be reassessed in recent years in the wake of accounts of sexual abuse.

2024-2025 Illinois Medieval Association Symposium

November 8, 2024

Online and completely free

Submission Deadline: October 15

The Illinois Medieval Association is now accepting proposals for our annual Halloween session: Medieval Monstrosities. This session is part of our annual Symposium, which runs online throughout the year. Topics are open to any work being done on the monstrous, supernatural, strange, and/or bizarre. The session will be free and online, and papers presented at the session are eligible for submission to Essays in Medieval Studies, IMA's annual proceedings volume.

Please submit an abstract and bio on the ACLA Portal link by October 14, 2024 https://www.acla.org/node/add/paper?destination=/interdisciplinary-study-homemaking-mapping-places-routines-memories-and-locales-we-call-home&seminar=47603  We welcome papers that reflect on the diverse, layered, and fluid representations of homemaking for a seminar focused on three key thematic units: Homemaking: Spaces, Architecture, and Urban Geographies; Mapping the Everyday: Visual Arts, Objects, and Media; Gendered Spatial Configurations.

In 1931, Antonin Artaud envisioned a radically innovative form of theatre after witnessing a performance by a Balinese troupe at the Colonial Exposition in Paris. While this event is widely acknowledged among arts and humanities scholars, its specific details – such as the precise content of the performance and the identities of the performers – are overlooked, thus exemplifying the ambivalent nature of the circulation of performing arts from colonized and/ or marginalized regions. Throughout history, how have conflicting global power structures and unequal socio-political conditions shaped the flow, interpretation, and reception of works, artists, aesthetics and practices from the so-called peripheries in Europe and the United States?

In an ideal situation, learning leads to knowledge and knowledge raises awareness. Set within the context of the past, this simple statement leads us to consider a range of different questions. How did medieval and early modern people learn and what did they learn? How did they teach and what did they teach? Who was taught and who was not? Who decided what was to be taught? Such questions, among others, help us understand the process of how learning and knowledge was acquired in the premodern world. But it also helps us better appreciate what we know about the premodern world and what people were trying to achieve when they set out to gain knowledge about their world and the society they lived in.

47th Comparative Drama Conference

July 9-11, 2025

London, England

Dear Colleagues, 

We are pleased to announce that the Comparative Drama Conference 2025 will be hosted by the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA) and will be held in Europe for the first time in its near 50-year history. 

This panel addresses the emerging diasporic consciousness that accompanied the movement of people and changes in ecologies in the eighteenth century. Extending last year’s two-part roundtable “Eighteenth Century in Motion” to the question of Diaspora, participants are invited to consider questions including but not limited to:

While the ‘diasporic eighteenth century’ offers proliferating instances of movement, what are some ways to simultaneously consider communities and people subjected to increased physical, discursive, and representational confinement?

What are some circumatlantic relations that the diasporic eighteenth century allows us to consider?