rhetoric and composition

The 18th Annual 18th- and 19th-Century British Women Writers Conference
Texas A&M University
College Station, TX

"Journeys"
April 8-11, 2010

Keynote Speakers: Kate Flint and Felicity A. Nussbaum
Plenary Panel Speakers: Mary E. Fissell, Jillian Heydt-Stevenson, and Erika Rappaport

Call for Papers

This year's conference will explore the abundant varieties of journeys found in 18th- and 19th-century British women's writing. We encourage interdisciplinary considerations of topics such as migration, travel, exile, exploration, tourism, border crossing, religion, travel writing, art, fantasy, children's literature and more.

We are seeking short anecdotes for inclusion in a forthcoming book (Tentative Title: Publishing for Profit and Promotion) addressing publishing and professional development opportunities for non-tenured faculty (graduate students, part-time faculty, adjuncts, assistant professors, academic professionals, lecturers, and other contingent faculty). We invite stories that share:

Glossing is Glorious.
A Ring of Commentary, A Roundtable Discussion

We seek presentations for a roundtable discussion to be held at the
45th International Congress on Medieval Studies, May 13-16, 2010

Medieval commentary offers a synthetic textual form that urges an inquiry into the practice, ethics, poetics, and philosophy of commentary. The intricacies of the dialogue between reader and the text, the interplay among layers of commentary, even the very visual form of the text that resists, not only hierarchy, but which also challenges the reader to approach the process of interpretation with care and a poetics of being, render commentary a multi-dimensional genre.

Greetings fellow scholars,

This is a call for papers for the fall 2009 Humanities Review, a literary journal for the St. John's University English Department in Queens, NY.

Our current theme focuses on the polyvalent agencies at play within the construction of contemporary American Identity.

We are also strongly requesting cover art submissions that best exemplify the theme. Cover art open to drawing, painting, photography, and digital art. Limited color or mono-chrome are preferred. Please submit .TIFF FILES ONLY @ 800 dpi to the email address below.

Some matters to consider:

We are welcoming graduate and undergraduate student papers or full panel proposals that address any area of literature (British, American, world, colonial and post-colonial, medieval, modern, contemporary, etc.), rhetoric, composition, or pedagogical studies. Please submit a 250-300 word abstract to xialpha.utc.conference@gmail.com. Submissions must include name, institutional affiliation, student status (graduate or undergraduate), contact information (name, phone number, address, email address), and a list of any audio/visual equipment needed for your presentation. Presentation time should be limited to 20 minutes (usually about ten pages). Abstracts should be received by August 31, 2009.

The fifth annual Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee seeks submissions for "Obsolescence," a graduate student conference to be held February 13-15, 2010, in conjunction with the Center for 21st Century Studies and its research theme for 2009-2011: "Figuring Place and Time."

The recent focus within Composition Studies on the Writing About Writing approach (introduced by Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs) has raised important questions regarding many elements of Composition pedagogy. Composition specialists across the country, including but not limited to Writing Program Administrators, have begun considering the impact of this approach on both a global level, such as the place of writing within the overall university curriculum, and more locally, including considerations such as reading and writing assignments in the classroom. Working within that context, this panel looks at the types of writing that can and perhaps should be assigned to college composition students across all levels of a vertical writing curriculum.

The December, 2009 issue of Studies in the Humanities is seeking essay submissions for a special issue on the subject of "Theoretical Perspectives on Women in Higher Education." The editors will cast their net widely: we will seek thesis-driven, innovative essays about women and their experience as students, administrators, and faculty in Normal Schools, colleges, seminaries, and universities that examine pedagogical, scholarly, and research practices in light of (but not to exclusive to) cultural, feminist, gender, historical, rhetorical, and socio-political epistemologies.

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You carry away with you a part of me reflected in you…
I am not different from you. I dreamed you, I wished for your existence.
-Nin
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All topics relevant to Women's Studies are appropriate for placement in this area and at this conference. The organization is interdisciplinary and the conference offers an opportunity to work across and within traditional disciplinary boundaries.

Call for Papers: Rhetoric/Composition/Play: How Electronic Games Mediate Composition Theory and Practice (and Vice Versa)

Computer and video games continue to inundate the entertainment market, and culture along with it. Traditional text games, adventure games, first-person shooters, the immersive worlds of role-playing games (massively multiplayer or otherwise), simulations, "casual" games such as solitaire, and even web advertisements posing as games have formed a landscape rich with opportunities to examine composition-rhetoric's history, theory, pedagogy, and practice, where scholars can use, examine, and imagine the impact of games and gaming on writing.

UPDATE: Call for Editors: Red Feather Journal: an International Journal of Children's Media Culture (www.redfeatherjournal.org)

Due to the wonderful response, our Editorial Board is now complete and we are suspending our call for Board members at this time.

REMINDER DEADLINE 8/15

"These academics' arguments seem sound as far as they go..." –Infinite Jest

The critical discussion of David Foster Wallace has thus far been limited to a few aspects of his most popular works. Our conference seeks to expand the response beyond the popular imagination's categories of "difficult," "postmodern," and "genius," and beyond the author's own articulation of his project as a response to irony. We invite a reconsideration of Wallace with an emphasis on new perspectives of his entire oeuvre.

Despite significant instructional counsel against disclosure of personal trauma, students in writing classrooms regularly choose to represent traumatic experiences in composition. This roundtable at the Spring 2010 Montreal NEMLA conference solicits reflection and inquiry on the presence of trauma, especially in composition courses. Please send 150 word abstract to jtietjen@massbay.edu by September 15.