theory

Location and Dates

• Hosted by University of North Alabama and Athens State University
• Location: University of North Alabama, Florence, Alabama
• February 20-22, 2025
• Deadline for proposals: October 24th, 2024
• Proposal Form: https://southeasternwritingcenter.wildapricot.org/submitaproposal 

Conference Theme: Leading from the Center

Call for submissions in all areas of narrative theory and studies

Storyworlds is an interdisciplinary journal of narrative studies. We publish cutting-edge research on storytelling practices across times, cultures, and media. The journal foregrounds research questions that cut across established disciplines and seeks to promote the understanding of narrative and storytelling as worldmaking—and worldbreaking—practices. 

Our general issues support the publication of research in all areas relating to narrative studies, including, but not limited to:

Culture and Dialogue

Call for Contributions to Special Issue, “Cultural and Ethical Shifts in Digital Parenting”

Guest Editor: Suyasha Singh Isser, Amity University, Noida

The Charles Olson Society and the Jonathan Bayliss Society are pleased to announce a collaborative panel to be held at the upcoming American Literature Association Conference in Boston, May 21-24, 2025. This panel will focus on writers who were inspired by Gloucester, Massachusetts and Cape Ann. The richness of Cape Ann, its history, people, and geography, deeply influenced poets Charles Olson and Vincent Ferrini as well as novelist Jonathan Bayliss. How did these figures incorporate Gloucester’s geography, history, population, ecology, or other distinct elements in their work? How does place influence and determine the nature of a poet’s or novelist’s writing?

Despite its long and varied history, the infamous subgenre of body horror didn’t gain critical currency until the 1986 January/February volume of the journal Screen. Indeed, it was in this special issue on the “textuality of contemporary horror” that body horror emerged as an object worthy of scholarly attention. We now find ourselves with nearly forty years of distance from this moment in horror criticism, all the while body horror has remained as a key subgeneric tendency within the horror genre with exciting new and (un)timely directions having been explored by directors and authors such as Julia Ducournau, Jordan Peele, and Brian Evenson.

Literary forms like the poems, novels, and short stories are often understood to be stand-ins for political resistance in critical theoretical debates especially since the dominance of post-al theories within literature departments. For literary forms emerging in the peripheries of the literary world system yoked by the global literary marketplace, the signification of resistance acts as a marker of value. This is superimposed on the idea of literary forms emerging from the peripheral locales of the literary world system that are read as derivative and mimetic of literary forms emerging from the core of the same system.

The Charles Olson Society will sponsor a session at the annual American Literature Association Conference, to be held in Boston, May 21-24. We are interested in abstracts that examine the influence of Charles Olson and/or other Black Mountain Poets on poetic practices and on subsequent generations of poets. A variety of poets took up the innovative ideas of figures like Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, John Wieners, Ed Dorn and others associated with Black Mountain. How have the practices of this fundamentally important school of poetics been extended, transformed, and/or resisted by poets from subsequent generations?

Writing has always been one step in the future. From emojis to slang to song, writing has momentum, and it is up to us - as artists, researchers and educators - to find ways of moving with it. In the light of emerging concerns about technology’s cultural impact, and the changing relevance of traditional writing techniques, how might our practices and pedagogies adapt to this shifting interdisciplinarity? What might this look like in contexts where writing exists alongside other forms of artistic communication, such as classrooms, institutions and interdisciplinary practices? How do preexisting notions of art and writing change as technologies and platforms demand new forms of engagement?

Here come the clowns: critical essays on the circus of popular culture

AI and the Humanities: An Interdisciplinary Symposium

Date and Location: April 16-18, 2025 at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois

Abstracts: 150 word abstracts are due November 1, 2024. Send to Dr. Katherine Ellison at keellis@ilstu.edu

Description:

This panel will consider Black diasporic literary and/or legal texts in relation to the interdisciplinary field of ‘Law and Literature.’ An emphasis will be placed on the relations and intersections of race, class, and gender, and the historical experience of capitalist modernity, as well as materialist approaches employing ‘world-literary’ perspectives.

Abstract:

See ACLA (American Comparative Literature Association) listing for submission portal: https://www.acla.org/giving-literature-criticism-politics

Paper proposals cannot be accepted via email.

ACLA conference will take place May 29–June 1, 2025, via Zoom.

The Game Studies area of the National Popular Culture Association and the American Culture Association Conference invites proposals for papers and panels on games and game studies for the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association National Conference to be held on April 16-19, 2025, in New Orleans. The deadline for proposals is November 30th.

I. Topics of Interest

The organizers seek proposals and papers covering all aspects of gaming, gaming culture and game studies. Proposals can address any game medium (computer, social, console, tabletop, etc.) and all theoretical and methodological approaches are welcome. Please see our Facebook group for our mission announcement.

In the wake of neoliberalism, academia is increasingly being turned into a market imperative, marked by the rising global popularity of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) courses and the concomitant reduction in funding for humanities departments. This situation presents a crisis for the Humanities and the values and forms of knowledge it stands for. This crisis is manifesting itself in ways such as the persistent gap among disciplines as well as between scholarship and lived experiences. The breakdown of disciplinary boundaries and the consequent intermingling of Humanities and Sciences has led to the rise of new knowledge systems.