Feminisms and modernities have had a long and interlocked history. Now that we are, arguably, in a post-feminist, post-modern era, is it a fitting moment to stop and take stock of this critical encounter?
This provocation emerges out of a particular trajectory of debates, controversies and confrontations in gender studies over the past two decades. Judith Butler's Gender Trouble (1990) destabilised understandings of these interlocked categories about two decades after feminism emerged as a serious tool of critical inquiry. In 1990, also, Gayatri Spivak in The Postcolonial Critic re-located critical feminisms outside the Anglophone world.

This panel will explore the ways Spain and Portugal were "imagined" in Britain, the Americas, the Caribbean, or other cultures from which the Iberian peninsula was geographically isolated. Papers may approach the topic from a variety of disciplines, calling on resources such as travel narratives and journals by individuals, accounts in periodicals, or commentary on law, religion, or medicine. The working question is, how was Iberia imagined outside the peninsula?

250-word abstracts by 9/01/10. Electronic submissions preferred to broomej1@wpunj.edu .

Call for Papers
The Single Woman (roundtable session)
Annual Convention, Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)
April 7-10, 2011

2009 marked the 250th anniversary of the birth of the Scottish poet Robert Burns. In honour of the occasion, the Scottish government, in conjunction with Visit Scotland, declared 2009 to be the year of Homecoming in Scotland. Clearly, Burns continues to dominate the image of contemporary Scotland. But, despite, or perhaps because of this popular celebrity, Burns has, until very recently, been less enthusiastically received in the academy. In Scottish and Irish Romanticism , for example, Murray Pittock maps the "erasure of Robert Burns from the literary history of the Romantic period" over the last sixty years.

Dr Claire Nally and Dr Angela Smith have been asked by the publisher I.B.Tauris to edit a proposed series of high quality monographs (each about 70,000 words in length) under the general title of 'Gender in Fact and Fiction'. We would welcome abstracts from any interested academics under the following headings:

Single women
Witches
Neo-Victorian literature
Masculinities in fan culture
Sexualities.

Other topics will be considered. Please send us your abstract (about 200 words) by 30th September, 2010.

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This panel will explore those figurations of child that do not fit within the normative geography of child representation--what Jacqueline Rose refers to as the "impossibility" of childhood.

The transgressive child challenges deeply-held convictions about the naturalness of childhood, particularly as childlike bodies are defined as "vulnerable," "dependent," "innocent," and simultaneously asexual/heterosexual. Indeed, childhood is frequently haunted by the spectre of of its own failure, and this panel examines those troubling children who, by their transgression, trouble the boundaries of childhood.

As a genre, the short story cycle, or composite novel, has appealed for over 100 years to a wide range of American authors. The major characteristic of this genre is a collection of stories that are both interrelated and self-sufficient—what Madison Smartt Bell calls a "mosaic" quality that contributes to a holistic, yet fragmented "modular design." While critical attention to this genre has focused mostly on matters of either form or content, scholars have not usually considered the form's effect on the text's content, particularly related to gender identity formation.