travel writing

Accounts of migration and displacement often focus on the bounded terrains of specific cities and the navigation of certain rooted sites, places of origin and/or destination. At the same time, cartographic and spatial terminology (e.g. “mapping,” “space,” “place,” “orientation”) are used in increasingly metaphorical ways, at the possible expense of more historical and/or materialist approaches to theorizing the global, the planetary, and the transnational. This panel invites contributors to examine the affective as well as material dimensions of being ‘in transit,’ the enabling condition of more familiar narrative tropes of exile, migration, travel and displacement.

A one-day seminar hosted by the Centre for Travel Writing Studies, Nottingham Trent University, in collaboration with the Network for American Periodical Studies.

Friday 22nd September 2017, Nottingham Trent University, Clifton Campus

Deadline for proposals extended: 28th July 2017

Keynote speaker: Professor Andrew Thacker (Nottingham Trent University)

Organisers: Dr Victoria Bazin (Northumbria University); Dr Rebecca Butler (Nottingham Trent University); Dr Sue Currell (Sussex University); Prof Tim Youngs (Nottingham Trent University)

Confirmed speakers include Dr Claire Lindsay (UCL) and Dr Rachel Farebrother (Swansea University)

International Symposium

Bielefeld University (Germany), 13-14 April 2018

Interest in Balkan Studies, especially among scholars from the Balkans, has increased considerably. Being such a unique region, the Balkans have stirred the imagination of writers, travelers, scholars and the like. The aim of the conference is to gather together scholars from the Balkan region and worldwide who share an interest in Balkan studies. The conference promises to offer multidisciplinary perspectives in various fields of Balkan studies, namely in literature, cultural and language studies. It will be open to complementary and alternative ideas and interpretations. One of the main ambitions will be tackling taboo topics with the intention to overcome any forms of ordinary fanaticism, bias, fabricated antagonism, prejudices and stereotypes.

Co-editors Dave Buchanan (MacEwan University), editor of Pennell’s A Canterbury Pilgrimage and An Italian Pilgrimage (University of Alberta Press, 2015), and Kimberly Morse Jones (Sweet Briar College), author of Elizabeth Robins Pennell, Nineteenth-Century Pioneer of Modern Art Criticism (Ashgate, 2015), are seeking proposals for interdisciplinary essays on the work and life of Elizabeth Robins Pennell, the American-born, London-based journalist and author who published (or co-published) over twenty books and hundreds of periodical articles between the early 1880s and 1930.

The presiding officer invites submissions of short works of literary nonfiction, memoir, or other sorts of creative nonfiction (such as the lyric essay) that can be presented in a twenty minute segment of the panel. Both established and emerging writers are welcome.

Please submit proposals via the online system by June 26, 2017. The PAMLA 2017 Conference will be held at the lovely Chaminade University of Honolulu (with the official conference hotel being the Ala Moana) from Friday, November 10 to Sunday, November 12. This year’s conference theme is “The Sense of Sight: Visuality, Visibility, and Ways of Seeing.”

This panel seeks any and all papers on Western American Literature in relation to this year's theme of sight, visuality, and ways of seeing. 

Individual paper presentations will be between 15 and 20 minutes long. Please submit proposals via the online system by June 26, 2017. The PAMLA 2017 Conference will be held at the lovely Chaminade University of Honolulu (with the official conference hotel being the Ala Moana) from Friday, November 10 to Sunday, November 12.

Paper proposals must be made via our online system found here:

The PG CWWN (Postgraduate Contemporary Women’s Writing Network) are delighted to announce our next biennial conference, Fast Forward: Women’s Writing in the 21st Century, to be held at Sheffield Hallam University on 8th-9th September 2017.

Fast Forward: Women’s Writing in the 21st Century

“The past is always tense, the future perfect.” (Zadie Smith)

Transcending Borders and Boundaries through the Act of Writing

Part travelogue, part professional reflection, this book will be a peer-reviewed anthology of original composition--narratives, interviews, field observations, formal academic writing--about teaching outside one’s country of origin as a person of African descent. The book seeks to augment the voices--and use print publication to promote the career advancement--of black educators who may otherwise not have access to either. In addition to parity, the publication will celebrate the unique perspectives and creative problem-solving that evolve from Africana or black cultural ways of knowing and teaching in intercultural context. Topical considerations may include a variety of impressions about instruction, pedagogy, and institutional leadership.

The Two Canaries of Climate Change -

Island and Polar Places

Call for Papers

South Pacific Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies Conference

14th - 16th February 2018

UNE FutureCampus, Parramatta, NSW

The editors of MFS seek essays that engage with the concept of inter-imperiality, as developed in the recent PMLA “Theories and Methodologies” cluster (March 2015) and elsewhere. The global turn in literary and cultural studies, although productive, sometimes elides the post/colonial, economic, and other historical or geopolitical conditions of literary-cultural production. We solicit essays that offset this tendency by reading literary-cultural texts within an inter-imperial framework.

Eleventh Annual Ozarks Studies Symposium, 2017

Call for Proposals

The Ozarks Studies Committee of Missouri State University-West Plains seeks proposals for its 11th annual symposium to be held in the West Plains Civic Center on September 22 and 23, 2017.

A.K. Ramanujan in a poem entitled “Small-scale Reflections on a Great House” had mused, “Sometimes I think that nothing/that ever comes into this house/goes out. Things come in every day/to lose themselves among other things/lost long ago among/other things lost long ago”. The description may seem oddly apt for the field of postcolonial studies which continues to search for new shores even as some of the concerns of the past begin to fade with inevitable processes of history. Even as the field remains committed to a quest for emancipation from violence and discrimination and deprivation, caused by the forces of race, class, gender, sexuality and a number of other factors, the modalities continue to change and the boundaries begin to blur.