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.

Since the advent of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, supernatural dramas aimed at a young adult market have become a staple of the television landscape. Shows like Angel, The Vampire Diaries, Supernatural, Smallville, MTV's recent remake of Teen Wolf, The Secret Circle, and even Heroes and (though perhaps to a lesser degree) HBO's True Blood draw on the audience's voracious appetite for vampires, werewolves, and other creatures of the night. And of course the Twilight book and film series have drawn in ever more readers and viewers.

I'm happy to answer questions.

Call for Papers: Writing Across the Peninsula (WAP) Conference; Thursday, October 24-Saturday, October 26, 2013

Michigan Technological University, Houghton, Michigan

"Revolutionary 'Riting: Working-class Perspectives and the 1913-14 Michigan Copper Strike"

The Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Georgia is launching a new journal of comparative literature, Xenophile. This journal will feature the works of undergraduate and graduate students from around the world. We are currently seeking submissions for our premiere issue, and we would like to invite you to be a part of it. This is a perfect opportunity for undergraduate students seeking their first (or second, or third) scholarly publication, as well as for graduate students hoping to reach a new audience.

Paper proposals sought for a PAMLA regular session panel on Critical Theory. The special theme for the 2013 PAMLA conference is "Stages of Life: Age, Identity, and Culture," so proposals in literary or cultural theory that suit the theme are especially welcome, though all proposals in the broader session area will be considered.

The conference will be held on Friday, November 1 through Sunday, November 3, 2013 at the Bahia Resort Hotel in San Diego, California.