The title of this panel does not refer to the several trips Melville took during his lifetime, or to the many voyages depicted in his novels. It evokes, rather, the influential essays "Traveling Theory" (1983) and "Traveling Theory Reconsidered" (1994), in which the late Edward Said argued that a text's movement from its point of origin to other geographical locales and historical situations is never a facile process. As a text is unhinged, transferred, translated, and institutionalized in a new setting, explained Said, it meets changing conditions of acceptance and unexpected forms of resistance. On the one hand, its movement may tame the force that was provoked by its original circumstances and render it subdued and sterile.

Deadline for Abstracts: 1 March 2011
Deadline for Submissions: 1 January 2012

Proposals are invited for a panel to be entitled "Documentary Techniques in Pornographic Film and Video" to be proposed for Visible Evidence 18, which is being held at New York University from August 11-14, 2011 (check out the conference website at: http://visibleevidence.org/). This particular panel of three presenters will explore a recent and profound trend that appears across pornographic genres: the emphasis on capturing "real" sex through narrative techniques typically found in the documentary film tradition.

For the April 2011 edition of Modern Horizons we invite essays that explore the various intellectual, artistic, emotional, and political manifestations of kitsch in our time.

In our current culture, the word 'kitsch' has come to be associated often with tacky souvenirs and cheap trinkets. However, there is a thicker sense given to the word by various thinkers and authors in the twentieth century, even if it is regularly connected with an idea of culture.

Call for Papers: Pedagogies and the Profession

PCA/ACA & Southwest/Texas Popular Culture and American Culture Associations Joint Conference
April 20-23, 2011
San Antonio, TX
http://www.swtxpca.org

Proposal submission deadline: December 15, 2010

Conference hotel: Marriott Rivercenter San Antonio
101 Bowie Street
San Antonio, Texas 78205 USA
Phone: 1-210-223-1000

The Great War: From Memory to History

An Inter-disciplinary Conference at The University of Western Ontario

10-12 November, 2011

There are now only a handful of surviving veterans of the Great War. Within a few years, we will lose even those who lived through the war as children on the home front. At that point, the war will pass from memory to history. This critical transition is at the heart of an international conference that seeks to examine the experience of the Great War from a wide range of disciplines and perspectives, including the humanities, the social sciences, and the arts.

A series of questions guide our discussions:

African American Soundscapes and Sound Theory