Jennifer C. Garlen and Anissa M. Graham, editors of Kermit Culture: Critical Perspectives on Jim Henson's Muppets (McFarland, 2009), seek proposals for essays to be included in a companion volume, tentatively titled, Fraggle Rock to Farscape: Essays on the Worlds of Jim Henson. Interested individuals should note the following guidelines.

We invite submissions for a forthcoming edited collection on superhero films and TV shows, which is currently under contract for publication. The last decade witnessed the emergence of some of the most commercially successful superhero films in the history of film as well as popular TV shows, which focus on people with extraordinary powers, such as Smallvile and Heroes, for example.

The deadline is fast approaching to submit your proposals for the 10th annual Louisiana Conference on Literature, Language, and Culture by the October 31st deadline. This year's theme is North and South: Constructing and/or Crossing the Cultural, Geo-Political or Metaphorical Divide.

There have been lots of new updates and plans made for this year's conference, including: keynote speakers Dr. Gerald Graft and Dr. Cathy Birkenstein, a night at the renowned music venue the Blue Moon Saloon included in your registration, an authentic cajun dinner at Randol's, and, of course, special guest Speaker Sandra Cisneros, author of "The House on Mango Street".

When a collective memory of trauma transcends its directly affected community to be taken up by others, it can be said to be "cosmopolitan" (Levy and Sznaider) or "multidirectional" (Rothberg). The concept of a travelling or a genuinely "cosmopolitan" memory is compelling. Indeed, how a memory of trauma travels across cultures, and develops in time as a shared or borrowed memory is a topic that necessitates further discussion. Like Edward Said's notion of "travelling theory," the transition of a memory from a specific context into a new setting or across a transnational space has significant theoretical and pragmatic consequences.

Apocalypse, post-apocalypse, atomic and nuclear narratives have increasingly shifted from the science fiction genre to pervade American literature as a whole. Authors such as Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo and Cormac McCarthy, among others, consider historical or imagined catastrophes that usher in new sensibilities, while simultaneously shattering connections to the past. Traditionally, apocalypse narratives attempt to assert order and coherence where none previously existed. Does apocalypse literature still presume control over disaster? What has apocalypse literature come to signify in the U.S.? What does apocalypse literature offer? How have imagined or real endings come to be portrayed in American literature?

Precarious Spaces: (Dis-) Locating Gender

The 18th Annual Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender and Women's Studies Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference at the University of Rochester
March 24th & 25th, 2011
Keynote Speaker:
*Laura Kipnis*
Professor of Radio/Television/Film, Northwestern University

June 9-12, 201
Yale University, New Haven, CT.
Sponsored by The Thomas Hardy Association
and
The Yale Center for British Art

Papers and proposals are solicited on any aspect of the poetry, fiction, drama, or other writings of Thomas Hardy. Possible topics might include (but are not limited to):

• Hardy and Electronic/Visual Media
• Hardy and Ecocriticism
• Hardy and Cosmology
• Hardy and the Fin de Siècle
• Hardy and Psychology
• Hardy and Modernism
• Hardy and Culture
• Hardy and the Short Story
• Hardy and Drama
• Hardy and Music
• Hardy and War
• Hardy and his Circle
• Global Hardy