Social Networks, Communities, and/or Public Service

_Proteus: A Journal of Ideas_ seeks submissions that explore themes relating to social networks, communities, and/or public service for an upcoming issue titled Building and Strengthening Communities and Social Networks. We are soliciting a wide range of articles and creative works—including broad theoretical inquiries, individual case studies, traditional scholarly articles, and works of creative nonfiction. Theme-related photographs, poetry, and creative writing are welcome.

Sixty years after its initial publication, thanks to Constance Brode and Sheila Malovany Chevallier, Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex has been newly translated and unabridged for the first time in English. How does this new translation provide fresh insights into this canonical text? How might it influence women's studies today? This roundtable panel invites abstracts on the evaluation of de Beauvoir's work and on the impact of the new translation on feminism and gender studies. Send abstracts in body of email to Denise Feldman (df@berkeleycollege.edu) with The Second Sex in subject line.

Deadline: September 30, 2010

Please include with your abstract:

Eighteenth-Century Women and Popular Culture

This panel invites papers that examine how literary texts perform knowledge, and how literature becomes an object of scholarly knowledge in a variety of disciplinary settings. Panelists might address literary representations of the cleric, the virtuoso, or the pedant; the use of scholarly paratexts (the gloss, the appendix, the footnote); or, more broadly, the influence of disciplinarity and professionalization on the literary text. For more information, see below.

Send abstracts to Sean Barry, sean.barry@rutgers.edu, and John Savarese, john.savarese@rutgers.edu, by 9/30/10.

NeMLA 2011: New Brunswick, NJ, April 7-10, 2011.

Theorizing the Victorian Novel

This session will explore the ways in which literary theory can be helpful in illuminating Victorian novels and those accompanying social contexts and issues that we find in the Victorian age. How might Victorian novels in turn be helpful in illuminating different schools of theory? 250 words abstract by Sept. 30, 2010. Send to Robert Lougy, Penn State University, RXL1@psu.edu.

Literary Dress: Fashioning the Fictional Self

Fashion, fabricate, artifice, make-up: all these terms have a double valence. Each term in noun form denotes a prosthetic application of something foreign atop something natural (usually a human body) with the intention of concealing or enhancing the natural item beneath. Each term in verb form, though, carries a connotation of constitution and creation: a sense of literal "becoming," or even investiture. In some way, these terms gesture towards the ephemeral, frivolous, and the temporary AND towards a sense of ontological making.

This book is a two volume series of essays telling stories of the ways in which music has propelled resistance and revolutionary movements in the United States and around the world from the gospel music of slavery in the antebellum South to anti-apartheid freedom songs in South Africa.
The two-volume series will illustrate a consistent pattern of musical influence on political resistance movements by providing accounts describing a vast array of musical styles from diverse parts of the world. One volume will cover movements in the U.S. and the other will have an international focus. The purpose of this series is to encompass a wide perspective on the role of music in political activism.