The editors of this collection seek essays that explore how notions of sociability and cosmopolitanism were articulated in a variety of national contexts during the long eighteenth century. We are particularly interested in soliciting studies that focus upon traditions typically overlooked by scholars of the Enlightenment.

Historians are now familiar with the explosion of intellectual fervor during the long eighteenth century in such diverse locations as Naples, Koenigsberg, Edinburgh, and London. While the scholarly task of recovering the contours of debates along the "periphery" of the Enlightenment has made great progress, there are still a number of glaring lacunas to be filled. The study of notions of sociability is one such field.

Rice Graduate Symposium
October 2-3, 2009
Rice University, Houston, TX

Call For Papers
Submission Deadline: July 1, 2009

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Sharon Marcus; Professor of Literature, Columbia University

As the citizen of the nation becomes the consumer of the multinational corporation, our roles as inhabitants of space become increasingly complicated. Our literature, our faith, our bodies all speak to the different ways that we find to occupy the shifting territories of the postmodern landscape. Looking both to the past and future can help us to discover the real and imagined ways our cultures can develop in more richly and defined ways.

In current debates about the War in Iraq, it has become commonplace for politicians and journalists to conjure the specter of the Vietnam War as a means of quantifying the impact of the current war in American culture and throughout the world. Surprisingly, though, few have scrutinized these comparisons to examine the differences between the popular music of the Vietnam era and the music of the current post-9/11 era. While the Vietnam era found countless bands and musicians responding in protest to that war, there has arguably been a significantly smaller amount of contemporary musicians who have taken overt stances, in their music, about the politics of post-9/11 life, in America and elsewhere.

"LITERATURE AND FILM" 2nd International Graduate Conference (Istanbul University, Istanbul, Turkey, November 2009)

Call for Papers:
Critical Theory: The Text and the World
September 17th 2009, University of Exeter
Keynote Speaker: Professor Colin MacCabe

Critical Theory: The Text and the World is a one-day Postgraduate conference designed to provide a venue for students and early-career academics to explore a multitude of critical approaches to literary and filmic texts. This event will provide a collaborative research forum which can direct contemporary debates in critical theory towards concrete socio-political issues. These issues include climate change, the global economic crisis and the war on terror.

Long marginalized as either not "literary" or conservatively pandering to bourgeois or other established interests, the genre of detective fiction has continued to defy doomsayers through its continued evolution, being produced by writers from a variety of backgrounds and likewise being set in a variety of milieux and so problematizing different sets of rules, conventions, and moral and other judgments. But what has been the cost or other outcome of this evolution? Has the genre truly become more inclusive, or has this rather happened through the hegemonization and repackaging of previously excluded authors, like various new voices from Asia, Latin America, and Africa?

Betrayal/Tradimento
Italian Department, Rutgers University
November 6-7, 2009
KEYNOTE SPEAKER: Roberto Dainotto, Duke University