popular culture

We're looking for a third panelist for a proposed special session centering around Southern Literature and the 1930s. Judged "the Nation's No. 1 economic problem" by the National Emergency Council's Report on Southern Economic Conditions in the South, the South was particularly vulnerable to the dislocations of the Great Depression. However, even as tropes of the South's economic backwardness were employed to propel economic reform, Southern intellectuals - notably the Fugitive Agrarians - resisted such efforts, valorizing the region's agrarian economic base and sought to maintain the South's organic, communal society as a bulwark against industrialization.

The African Studies area of the Midwest Popular Culture Association seeks panel and paper proposals for the annual Midwest Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association conference, this year to be held at the Book Cadillac Westin in Detroit, MI from Friday 30 October to Sunday 1 November.

The area seeks papers whose topics address any aspect of popular culture on the African continent. Topics might address, but are not in any way limited to:
- Literature
- Film or media
- Theatre and performance
- Music
- Visual art
- Pedagogy and education

CFP: Modernist Studies Association 2009
MSA 11: The Languages of Modernism

Montréal, Québec, Canada, 
November 5-8, 2009

Wordless Modernism: Grammars of the Sensible

"Is there, we ask, some secret language which we feel and see, but never speak, …any characteristic which thought possesses that can be rendered visible without the help of words?"
— Virginia Woolf, "The Cinema" (1926)

Proposals are invited that explore connections between Victorian and Caribbean novels that have not heretofore been put in conversation with each other. Proposals should be 300 words and submitted by 4/30/09 to Marc Muneal, Emory University (mmuneal@emory.edu).

"Lost" Multicontributor Collection

One of the most remarkable television series in recent years has been ABC's "Lost." Beginning with an archetypal premise of castaways stranded on an island, the show has evolved into a complex network of obscure connections, esoteric mysteries, literary and pop cultural allusions, and baroque experiments in narrative temporality. The defining feature of the show is its atmosphere of radical suggestibility; the narrative and thematic strands of the story continually run away into hyper-interpretability in a way that invites not only the kind of internet speculation which has flourished around the show, but also the application of more theoretically informed critical examination.

We are currently accepting proposals for essays to be included in an edited collection tentatively titled Literature and Joss Whedon's Angel, which focuses specifically on the literary traditions and influences that shape and are reflected in the series. Our goal is to bring together a collection of essays that work primarily with Angel as a text to be addressed in the wider field of narrative and literature, since critical analysis of visual narratives in our culture is often related to our literary history and cultural consciousness. Often, our criteria for evaluating the quality of television draw heavily on the complexities of narrative structures and the reimagining of traditional tales or storytelling techniques.

Call for Contributors: Film, Disney, Diversity (collection)

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

Rebecca Flynn and Salvatore Musumeci are seeking proposals for a new collection of essays entitled Spaces of Consumption and Disposable Culture: A Material Dialogue in Medieval Europe (c.1100-1500). This volume will explore the ways in which private or public acts of consumption during the medieval period define relationships between people and the spaces they inhabit. Proposals concerning the use/consumption of material goods (culture) and how such consumptions relate to gender and power will be of particular interest. We would like the essays in this volume to cover but not necessarily be limited to the following:

Below please find the most recent call for papers for Puppetry International. My advance apologies for any cross-postings.
Best,
Dassia Posner
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Dassia N. Posner, Ph. D.
Postdoctoral Fellow
Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies
Harvard University
dassia2@gmail.com
dposner@fas.harvard.edu
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Call for Papers:

InterCulture is a peer-reviewed e-journal seeking academic papers (3,000 to 6,000 words), reviews (1,000 to 3,000 words) and creative work pertaining to the theme "Political Ecologies" (volume 6, issue 2) due on Monday, May 10, 2009.

Call for Papers: Captive Senses and Aesthetic Habits.
A joint graduate conference between English Language & Literature and Art History

Fourth Annual Graduate Conference ~ October 8-9, 2009
The University of Chicago

But what sort of sense is constitutive of the everydayness? Surely this sense includes not sense so much as sensuousness, . . . a knowledge that lies as much in the objects and spaces of observation as in the body and mind of the observer.
– Michael Taussig, "Tactility and Distraction"

Constellations: Of Comparative Literature and the New Humanities

October 16-18, 2009
Hosted By:
The Department of Comparative Literature
Emory University

With a Two Day Roundtable Featuring:
Geoffrey Bennington, Eduardo Cadava, Cathy Caruth, Peggy Kamuf, Thomas Keenan, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

A newly formed panel entitled Modernism/Postmodernism, to be held at the annual PAMLA conference in San Francisco (11/6-11/7/09), seeks papers of 15-20 minutes. The field is relatively open, though papers on poetry or narrative that deal specifically with modernist/postmodernist aesthetics and/or politics are particularly sought. Deadline for submissions is 3/30/09. Please submit a 50-word abstract and 200-word proposal directly to the PAMLA online submission tool at www.pamla.org. Direct inquiries to amymrobbins@gmail.com.

The &Now Conference explores intersections between creative and critical praxes, examines innovative and experimental acts of writing, and advances a serious inquiry into theories of language.

PLEASE SUBMIT….

Critical papers, criti-fictional presentations, fiction readings,
performance pieces (digital, sound, and otherwise), electronic and
multimedia projects, and cross genre work of all kinds. Pieces that
address linguistic transgressions, the limits of genre, or works that promote interdisciplinary explorations are particularly encouraged.

Proposals can be for individual readings, critical panels, creative
panels, and/or roundtable discussions.