Rights are entitlements or justifiable claims; human rights are a special kind of claim that one is entitled to by virtue of being human. In her recent study _Inventing Human Rights_ (2008), Lynn Hunt argues that rights were imagined as natural, inalienable, and universal in eighteenth-century sentimental literature, prior to their promulgation in the revolutionary Declarations. Specifically, for Hunt, it is by extensively documenting the flagrant wrongs suffered by various disenfranchised groups—women, slaves, prisoners, the insane— in the form of rape, enslavement, and carceral torture that sentimental fiction implicitly underscored their rights to bodily integrity and self-possession.

The Zionist imagination in global literatures and cultures. Potential topics: pre- or proto-Zionist texts, Christian Zionism, post-Zionism, Israel and its others. Abstract, 250 words maximum by 10 March 2013; Garrett Eisler (gbe2@nyu.edu).

Over the past several years, a debate regarding the place of online writing instruction has endured on college campuses around the world. Although online course delivery increases educational access to some segments of the population, there are some scholars who believe that the online delivery is inherently inferior to more traditional methods of instruction. Compound that with the traditional lack of formal education in online pedagogy that most instructors receive.

The President of the MLA, Marianne Hirsch, has announced her theme for the 2014 meeting of the MLA in Chicago: "Vulnerable Times addresses vulnerabilities of life, the planet, and our professional disciplines, in our own time and throughout history. Its aim is to illuminate acts of imagination and forms of solidarity and resistance that promote social change."

The Black Jacobins Revisited: Rewriting History
International conference to be held at the International Slavery Museum and the Bluecoat Arts Centre, Liverpool, 27–28 October 2013

CALL FOR PAPERS

The editors invite chapter proposals that work with the collection's title, Haunting Whiteness: Rhetorics of Whiteness in a 'Post-Racial' Era. As imagined in this collection, whiteness is an identification, a trope with associated discourses and cultural scripts for thinking and acting. As an identification, whiteness (via its presences and absences) constructs identities for people and texts as well as for cultural events and institutions. As an identification, whiteness functions as Freud describes all identifications: as a ghost, a haunting, which feeds on invisibility, nostalgia, and melancholy.