The Humanities Education and Research Association invites 250-word proposals for papers, panels, roundtables, and workshops for inclusion in its conference to be held in El Paso, Texas on March 11-13, 2010. The conference theme is "Intersections: Mind, Body, Time, Space." Papers should be planned for twenty minutes. Panels, roundtables, and workshops should be planned for an hour and thirty minutes. HERA invites proposals from all areas of the humanities including art, art history, dance, English, film, foreign languages, history, interdisciplinary studies, music, philosophy, religious studies, and theater. Interdisciplinary and intercultural approaches are of special interest. The deadline for submitting proposals is November 1, 2009.

In her 2008 article "Queering Ecocultural Studies," Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands appeals for "a critical practice of ecocultural analysis that challenges […] the ways in which natural and ecological relations have been read and organized to normalize and naturalize power." Queer ecology, at its core, challenges the binary of natural/unnatural, which has sought to diminish both queerness and the more-than-human world. This panel, in the spirit of promoting and continuing the discourse from the NEMLA 2009 Queer Ecocriticism and Theory panel, will examine the state of the academic field of queer ecocriticism and the modes of inquiry prompted by the blending of sexuality studies, queer theory, and ecocriticism.

We are accepting submissions for a collection of stories, essays, and poems for a proposed book on comparative American spatial concepts, partially titled "Stories the Land Holds." The editors are looking for texts variously addressing "stories in the land," from origin stories, fiction, creative non-fiction, essays, etc. What are the stories the land tells? Vine Deloria has warned us of problems that result from a perspective that is not fundamentally spatial, and such has been the case for current problems that range from ecological disaster to fanatical environmentalism and bundled mortgages. We believe that these complex and problematic American events can be understood more fully from a Native American perspective.

This article explores the process of individuation in the first novel by Doris Lessing, Grass is Singing. The novel through its circular narration from collective perspective of its protagonist's murder to individual account of her personal life and then again to the collective one, completes an indictment of its central character's life, Mary Turner, in the center of a closed white colonial society in southern Africa in which the linked discourses of class, race , and gender bring her into exclusion, isolation, break down, and finally to death, hindering self-acknowledgement and affirmation.

The Philip Roth Society is sponsoring a panel at this year's 38th annual Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900, to be held at the University of Louisville, February 18-20.

Proposals of no more than 250 words are invited for 20-minute papers on any aspect of Roth's work. Please send your proposals by email to d.brauner@reading.ac.uk, remembering to include details of your university affiliation/status. Proposals must reach me by September 4th.