science and culture

Saturday 4th April 2020 - Sunday 5th April 2020
Lisbon, Portugal

Every day we move through spaces that have been constructed or delineated somehow to be significant. We recognise and —consciously or unconsciously — react to this significance on a daily or hourly basis, and we draw from a cultural well of knowledge in order to do so.

Roundtable CFP

Annual Northeast Modern Language Association

51st Annual Convention

Boston MA, March 5th - 8th, 2020

Mariott Copley Place

Host Institution: Boston University

Jesuits in Science Fiction: From James Blish & Walter Miller Jr. to Today

Oil is everywhere, and that fact about the material world is generating more and more interest in a range of fields.

Looking for more submissions!

Please submit proposals of 250 words to Carolin Boettcher at cbottche@ucsd.edu by September 15, 2019.

(E)motion in Changing Worlds

Thessaloniki, Greece, 14-16 May, 2020

Deadline: 20 October 2019

Call for Papers

The Department of English Literature of the School of English at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, in collaboration with the Hellenic Association for the Study of English (HASE), invite scholars to submit proposals for the international conference (E)motion in Changing Worlds to be held in Thessaloniki, 14-16 May, 2020.

Language has always played a key role in the shaping and sharing of identities. Not only does it have the power to create community among people coming from different geographical locations, but most importantly it influences the way we perceive and make sense of the world. For these reasons, the use of language in science fiction —a genre that offers a critical space for "registering tensions related to the defining of national identity and the modernization process" (Ferreira, 2011)— is important as it enables readers to explore alternative realities. This could also be said about speculative fiction. Thus, this panel addresses concerns over reinvented identities through science fiction and across historical periods.

The MOSF Journal of Science Fiction is accepting submissions for a special issue on environmental studies and science fiction to be released in the summer of 2020. 

A decade ago, Dipesh Chakrabarty declared in “The Climate of History: Four Theses” that understanding climate change required a transformation in our concept of history. This seminar poses history as a limit-problem for contemporary literary and critical responses to climate change. How do existing responses, in light of their various theoretical provenances, contend with a phenomenon whose nature is diachronically outside an anthropocentric critical framework and irreducible to the terms and temporalities of human history, economics, and social structuration?  Under the heading “speculative ecology,” our panel aims to bring together literary, theoretical, and historical responses to the ecological crisis of our time.

"Decay Theory" Scholars have recently turned to processes of decay as a way to theorize what has been excluded or marginalized in totalizing formulations of capital, the Anthropocene, and the global. From within these fissures, explorations of decay emerge to challenge hegemonic political orders, tropes of human’s ecological dominance, and ontological or aesthetic stasis. This seminar will bring together these emergent disciplinary perspectives to begin theorizing how decay might reshape our scholarly methods and archives. Decay, we contend, is especially useful to think with because it spans the symbolic (e.g. Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay) and the material (e.g.

51st Northeast Modern Language Association Convention

March 5-8, 2020

Boston, MA

By the turn of the twentieth century, the ‘new astronomy’ had developed into a proper scientific discipline, with its own sets of instruments, its own journals, its own jargon, and its own interpretative authority. With the acceleration of new discoveries and insights into stellar phenomena, the emerging mass media ensured that this astronomical knowledge fascinated an even wider audience in the late 19th and early 20th century. At the same time, literature across Europe responded to the fascinating astronomical developments in a variety of modes, styles, and genres.

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Louise LePage, Lecturer in Theatre (University of York)

Following two successful conferences in the UK, at Royal Holloway, University of London and in Arizona, at Arizona State University, in 2014 and 2015 respectively, Stage the Future returns to the UK for its third conference on science fiction theatre on 6-7 December 2019. We welcome papers, panels, and performances that examine and explore the unique attributes live performance offers to science fiction and those that science fiction offers to live performance.

In 2016 Amitav Ghosh threw down a gauntlet: realism, he asserted, is not adequate to the task of representing climate change. As per the subtitle of The Great Derangement, it is “the unthinkable” both in our recent Holocene past and in the genre of realism. Shortly after, Jesse Oak Taylor called out Ghosh’s dismissal of realism on b2o’s blog while advocating other kinds of serious fiction, like modernism and magical realism, as capable of representing climate change. Most recently, Elizabeth DeLoughrey has asserted that allegory is the form par excellence for representing the Anthropocene.

With the invention of photography in the mid-19th century, reality no longer depended on the autonomous interpretation of the subject's view, but was instead objectively perceived and recognizable. Contrary to painting, photography fueled changes in perception and perceived reality by realistically reproducing the object as it exists. Now, the 21st century stands under the aegis of the image, a culture dominated by pictures, visual simulations, illusions, copies, and reproductions—creating an inflection point where visual paradigms compete with and even threaten traditional practices.