twentieth century and beyond

CALL FOR PAPERS

Step right up! Circus and sideshow have long occupied a distinctive place within popular culture, functioning as community sites for entertainment, business, logistics, spectacle, performance, and insider culture. Circus and sideshow continually shape how we view the extraordinary. 

This is a final call for papers for the Journal of Beat Studies' 14th volume, welcoming new and renewed contributions on any Beat Generation or Beat Generation-adjacent relevant subject (including the New York School, Black Mountain College, San Francisco Renaissance, Umbra Writers Workshop, etc.). The journal is interested in essays that reconsider familiar figures, recover overlooked ones, and explore the connections as well as any frictions between these overlapping scenes and their legacies.

As human rights institutions and legal frameworks are discredited, defunded, dismantled, and openly ignored across multiple national contexts, the question of what literature has to do with rights returns with new urgency. This moment demands new ways of thinking about these problems. This seminar responds by turning to the many literary traditions from the Global South and postcolonial contexts in which writers have narrated human rights and personhood on their own cultural terms and grounds.

As part of the 54th annual Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture, the Charles Olson Society invites papers on the theme of “Black Mountain Poetry and the Arts.” Working amidst the rich, interdisciplinary atmosphere of Black Mountain College and The Black Mountain Review, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, and many others developed their conceptions of projectivist poetics in tandem with colleagues in painting, music, and dance. As multimedia events like the first “Happening,” which featured poetry by Olson, readings by M.C.

European modernism often imagined aesthetic form as a way to overcome mediation: to make alienated experience, fragmented sociality, or absent truth appear immediately whole or present. At the same time, Edward Said identifies one of the core mechanisms of imperial representation as how it effaces its own mediation of the Orient, as if representation delivered “presence” rather than “re-presence.” This panel explores to what extent the modernist fantasy of formal immediacy was historically enabled by a fantasy of immediacy built into Orientalist representation.

Primary Area / Secondary AreaGlobal Anglophone ModalityIn Person Only: The session will be held fully in person at the hotel. No remote presentations will be included. Chair(s)Roma Lucarelli (University of Minnesota Twin Cities) Abstract

As artificial intelligence rapidly reshapes cultural, educational, and creative institutions, the field of Black theatre confronts a familiar set of questions in a newly technological register: Who creates knowledge, who benefits from it, who gets remembered, and whose labor remains obscured? Public conversations about AI often proceed as though these technologies have arrived without history, entering an empty landscape awaiting innovation. Yet Black theatre has long grappled with questions of representation, embodiment, archives, intellectual inheritance, collective memory, labor, and futurity.

This MLA just-in-time panel explores the evolving status of non-binariness in trans studies and beyond. Following Marquis Bey’s Nonbinary Life, we ask: Is non-binariness an emancipatory narrative? What are its critical potentialities and limitations? Send 150-200 word abstracts + bio to m.stekl@colostate.edu by 8/21. (The MLA will take place in Los Angeles from 7 to 10 January 2027.)

CALL FOR PAPERS — NeMLA 2027 Seminar

Salve Regina University, Newport, RI | March 6–9, 2027

Untameable Texts: The Eternal Return of Indigenous Cosmogonies and Their Myths

 27th & 28th May 2027 (In-Person, Newcastle University, UK) Since their inception, video games have been defined by, and grounded in, space and place: from the maze in The Temple of Rom (1982) to the Hyrulian depths in Tears of the Kingdom (2023), from the Holy Land of the Crusades in Assassin’s Creed (2007) to the noirish city of Detroit: Become Human (2018), and from the farms of Stardew Valley (2016) to the depths of Hell in Hades (2020), video games have been concerned with the relationship between the player-character, place, mobility, and game-play mechanics.  This conference asks how place and space have been represented in and mobilised in video games: we are interested in spaces of imagina

Mediapolis Themed Dossier: “Urban Deathscapes: Media, Spaces of Death, and the Contemporary City” (Vol. 11, No. 3)

Edited by: Susana Viegas (NOVA FCSH)