travel writing

Existing scholarship in Asian (North) American Literature has long examined travel narratives about Asian travelers within immigrant or diasporic paradigms: Sau-ling Wong famously establishes the Necessity/Extravagance framework in understanding transpacific mobility by early Asian American immigrants (1993), whereas Chih-ming Wang reads the autobiographical travelogues by diasporic Vietnamese American writers as “homecoming stories” (2013), and Patricia Chu interprets them as “return narratives” deploying acts of countermemory and postmemory to address racial melancholia (2019).

“Global Early Modern Environmental Crises: Modes of Extraction, Settler Colonialism, and Empire” 

The Forum on Seventeenth-Century English Studies (LLC 17th-Century English) is putting together a guaranteed MLA panel for the 2027 Annual Convention in Los Angeles, CA, USA (7-10 January) on global early modern environmental crises with a focus on human interactions with the earth tied to imperial pursuits, settler colonialism, conflicts in worldviews, and methods of extraction. We hope to feature scholars with expertise in different linguistic traditions to foster cross-cultural discussions. 

Possible topics include but are not limited to: 

For the 150th anniversary of Harriet Martineau’s death, the Martineau Society will be hosting its annual conference in conjunction with the University of Cumbria, Ambleside Campus, in Ambleside, England. The Martineau Society conference is an interdisciplinary conference that focuses on the lives, work, and contributions of the Martineau family, including its two most famous and influential members, Harriet Martineau (1802-1876) and James Martineau (1805-1900). Harriet Martineau resided in the Lake District for much of her later years, from 1845 until her death in 1876.