religion

The Journal of Festive Studies, a new peer-reviewed journal published on H-Celebration, invites submissions for its first issue, scheduled for March 2018.

The journal’s stated aim is to draw together all academics who share an interest in festivities, including but not limited to holiday celebrations, family rituals, carnivals, religious feasts, processions and parades, and civic commemorations.

In keeping with the MMLA conference theme, “Arts and Activism,” the Religion and Literature permanent section welcomes proposals that address works and writers who explore the ways in which religion and activism intersect. Papers may ask questions such as (but not limited to): How do writers address the social and/or political forces that encourage either religious conversion or loss of faith? How do writers examine radical disbelief? What are the influences of religious conservatism on social movements? How do religious movements shape secular culture and vice versa? How do religious movements influence secular social and civil rights movements and vice versa? How do race, ethnicity, gender and/or sexuality influence religious activist movements?

exCommunicated, the publication of the International Society for Heresy Studies, is looking for contributions from writers and academics on the subjects of heresy, blasphemy, and non-belief. An international, interdisciplinary, and non-sectarian academic organization, the ISHS is committed to investigating the subject of heresy as broadly defined, across disciplines including history, literature, religious studies, theology, sociology, anthropology, art history, gender studies, cultural studies, area studies, and other subjects. Since the organization’s founding in 2014, it has held two successful international conferences and  released five issues of exCommunicated.

In The Islamic Lineage of American Literary Culture (Oxford UP, 2016), Jeffery Einboden writes that his "excavat[ion]" of "Arabic and Persion precedents that shaped U.S. authorial lives and letters" rests on the ongoing "remappings of U.S. literary origins" which have redefinined the ways we think about authorship, nation-states, and literary texts in the wake of the transnational turn.

This international symposium is an exploration of non-industrial cultures from both the Old World and the New World, with special focus on the significance of monumental building. Megaliths, mounds, kivas and cairns: monumental ceremonial and ritual spaces are hallmarks of human development that predate agriculture and technology.  Researchers from around the world will explore the traditions of various Indigenous people in pursuit of a better understanding of how civilization got on its current path.