theory

Call for Papers: Special Issue, The Comparatist

Topic: Anger

General Editor: Zahi Zalloua (Whitman College)

International Conference

Heidelberg, 11-12 April 2024

From Thoreau’s description of “vast, Titanic, inhuman nature” to Timothy Morton’s hyperobjects, scale has long been an epistemological tool for theorizing the relationship between nature and humanity. This tool has taken on special significance in the age of global anthropogenic climate change as artists and scholars struggle to give form to such enormous, widely dispersed upheaval as it slowly but persistently creeps into view. In the light of drowning major cities and intensifying weather events, we are left with the evergreen question: “what is to be done?” What role, if any, can literature play in the comprehension of and adaptation to such a brave new world? What interdisciplinary connections can be adopted to make art a more transformative force?

Global Authoritarianisms and the Arts
12th Annual Shifting Tides Anxious Borders Conference
Hosted by the English Department, Binghamton University–SUNY

Date of Conference: April 29, 2023
Keynote Speaker: Dr. Jini Kim Watson, NYU

Literary, theoretical, and philosophical engagements with “the everyday” have a broad, transhistorical scope—from stoic philosophy to canonical hours, or medieval books of precepts; from Locke and Kant in the eighteenth century to Wittgenstein, Austin, and the ordinary language philosophy of the early twentieth century; from Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau to Toril Moi and Stanley Cavell; from considerations of the realist novel of the nineteenth century to the modernist novel of the twentieth (and beyond). 

Conference Date: 19th May 2023, University College Dublin

---DEADLINE EXTENDED TO 10th MARCH 2023---

"This workshop highlights pedagogical practices that seek to transform Feminist and Queer Studies classrooms into radical and liberatory spaces for decolonial thought and practice. Even as we emphasize intersectionality in our classes, women of color or queer of color critiques are largely offered after—and as correctives to—a canon where whiteness is default and invisible. As a result, these institutionalized canons, which naturalize whiteness alongside colonial conceptions of gender, retain their primacy of thought. How can we instead design our courses to center the coloniality of knowledge and the coloniality of gender? How do we put to practice a pedagogy that takes to heart the work of Lugones, Mohanty, Munoz, and hooks, among others?" 

 2023 Call for Proposals

Annual Conference of the Peace and Justice Studies Association

The Art and Science of Peace: Building Positive Peace in the Twenty-first Century

[To view this CFP as a PDF for easy downloading]

September 15-17, 2023 | Iowa State University (Ames, IA)

The New Daydream Imaginary – On the Ethico-Aesthetics of Spontaneous and Non-productive Thought

Simon Fraser University — School for the Contemporary Arts, 16-17 June 2023

The John Clare Society of North America invites paper proposals for its guaranteed panel at the Modern Language Association Convention in Philadelphia, January 4-7th, 2024. Scholarship on any aspect of Clare’s poetry, prose, life, and/or sphere of influence. Send abstract and short bio by 17 March 2023 to Erica McAlpine at erica.mcalpine@ell.ox.ac.uk

The Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University is pleased to announce its annual Graduate Student Conference to be held on 20th and 21st of April, 2023. This conference is a space for graduate scholars, activists, artists, and others to think through and confront colonial systems.

Our conference this year is interested in “Decolonizing Cartographies” – or, stated broadly, how do we challenge colonial regimes of knowledge and the ways they divide the world.

The relationship between Black women and the archive has long been fraught. We invite 250-word proposals for papers that probe Black women writers' literary and/or theoretical negotiations with these realities.

Please submit a 250-word abstract and a short bio by March 15th, 2023, to N. Morris Johnson at nmmorris@buffalo.edu. For more information about the MLA conference, please visit https://www.mla.org/Convention/MLA-2024/Presidential-Theme-for-the-2024-Convention

In times of crisis—war, pandemic, severe disruptions of supply chains, climate apocalypse, systemic erasure of reproductive autonomy—there might seem to be no meaningful distinction between the extraordinary and the ordinary. Yet after the cultural emphasis on catastrophe in the last few years, a return to the ordinary is overdue. What role can critical thought on ordinary language, affect, and aesthetics now play in interrogating the evolving concept of ordinariness, imagining alternative ordinaries, and expanding our geographies and objects of study? Additionally, what are the limits of critical theory for understanding and communicating about ordinary experience?

Recent work like George Edmondson’s The Neighboring Text or Seeta Chaganti’s Strange Footing models close engagement with medieval manuscripts that offers new modes of experiencing literature beyond the historically positivist, empirically material, or hermeneutically suspicious, either by recognizing the limitations of theoretical lenses or by approaching language beyond information. This session asks how looking at the character of the medieval text on the manuscript page–its calligraphy, titles, rubrics, initials, performance cues, polysemy–might allow us to consider anew readers’ encounters, medieval and modern, with that text.