Dear all,

The first issue of The Shakespeare Institute Review was successfully launched at the end of the recent BritGrad conference. The issue, which explores death and mortality in Shakespeare and showcases a marvellous range of contributions, can be found at this link: www.shakesreview.com . Following on from this, we warmly invite submissions for the second issue of the Review, an online academic journal to which postgraduate students of Shakespeare and related programmes are invited to contribute.

Ephemerality, Mutability, and Marginality:
Print Alteration and Literary Culture

In "An Atlas of World Cinema," Dudley Andrew states that though "we still parse the world by nations," "a wider conception of national image culture is around the corner, prophesied by phrases like 'rooted cosmopolitanism' and 'critical regionalism'." Taking up the directions in which Andrew sees the concept of national cinema opening up, this panel explores the borders of, and within, French cinema. It does so along two main strands. First, it examines the role and visibility of the French regions (or provinces) in French national cinema. French cinema for a long time having been concentrated in only a few places (especially Paris, Nice, Marseille), in recent decades more and more films have been set, shot and produced in the regions.

"Travelling Back": History and the Contemporary Moment in the Work of Dionne Brand
Seeking to celebrate Dionne Brand's keynote address at NeMLA 2013 – and to complement the "Caribbean Literature and History" roundtable – this panel will take up the ways that Brand brings history (or histories) into a critical and profound engagement with the contemporary moment, on both individual and national levels. Submissions (max. 500 words) are invited that consider this or related questions in any of Brand's works. Rachel Mordecai, University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Cultural anxieties concerning biological reproduction often pivot around the notion of the non-reproductive body, in which intersecting fears about class, race, sexuality, gender and disability are encoded. Media discussions of abortion rates, teenage use of contraception, and gay marriage all register the perceived threat of sex without procreation. In a broader sense, the imperative to safeguard the future by 'thinking of the children' is powerful ideological currency, animating activists on both the left and the right.

This panel will explore the 'cognitive turn' in literary studies as it emerges in contemporary American fiction and non-fiction. Since George H. W. Bush declared the 1990's the "decade of the brain," there has been a surge of cross-disciplinary work done at the site of cognitive studies, neuroscience and the humanities. For example, scholars such as Lisa Zunshine and Paul John Eakin have called for literary methodologies that account for cognition and perception in their analyses. Additionally, a growing number of fiction and non-fiction texts use cognitive studies and neuroscientific research to upend generic constraints, as well as challenge assumptions about how we construct, perceive, and describe the world and ourselves within it.