This special issue of Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society explores the relationship between religion and fat. The editors invite papers on a variety of topics that address, for example, how particular religious traditions engage the fat body, or how religions define, circumscribe and/or understand fatness. We seek to answer questions such as: How is the fat body read in religious ways? What kinds of socio-cultural spaces do religions offer fat people?
Potential topics might include, but are not limited to:
• Fat bodies as religious bodies
• The use of fat or fatness in religious texts
• Use of fat in theological discourse
• Fat in world religions

The editors of JMMLA seek essays about the literature, film, music, and art of places that don't really matter, places whose adjacency to the capitals of the world confirms their lack of sway. Especially welcome are essays that explore the consequences that come from the way literary and artistic value gets determined, the way consumers of culture continue to count on a handful of institutions to vet the art of the elsewhere.

Gothic and Uncanny Explorations

An interdisciplinary international conference

Wednesday 10 September – Friday 12 September 2014

Karlstad University, Sweden

Second Call for Papers

The gothic, as a mode or genre, has become an increasingly widespread and noticeable cultural phenomenon during the last few decades. There is also a great interest in the closely related concept of the uncanny in a number of different contexts. In addition to playing a larger role in academia, the gothic and the uncanny have been integrated in our everyday vocabulary and thinking in recent years.

Revista Laboratorio (www.revistalaboratorio.cl) invites scholars, academics and writers to submit their proposals for number 10 (Autumn 2014). We specially call for articles that come from ongoing investigations, focused on the main themes of this journal: the diverse kinds of literary experimentation and the relationship between literature and other arts. They can be written in spanish, english or portuguese. Submissions will be sent for blind peer-review, and must follow these instructions:

Reading Matters.
Call for Presentations:

Papers are invited for the first academic conference dedicated to engaged reading organized by Troy University. This interdisciplinary summer conference, "Reading Matters," will take place from June 11 to June 13, 2014, at Troy University, Troy, Alabama.

This conference is an attempt to rethink what it means to read and how we read in our current culture. The topic is intentionally broad in order to encompass and encourage a wide variety of potential themes including historical, sociocultural and disciplinary contexts. We welcome any sustained attempt to explore and rethink the various aspects involved in engaged reading.

The Mellon Research Initiative in Digital Cultures at the University of California, Davis is proud to sponsor a conference on The Contours of Algorithmic Life. We seek to provide an interdisciplinary space for artists, scholars, activists, performers, and others interested in the intersections of algorithm and life. The Contours of Algorithmic Life conference is currently accepting proposals for papers, performances, presentations, and other engagements with algorithmic life.

CALL FOR PAPERS
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At MLA 2014's "Beyond the Digital: Pattern Recognition and Interpretation" panel, the first question from the audience was, "Why are so many of these projects modernist? What is it about modernism that attracted the presenters?" Modernism, indeed, with its textually diverse and expanding canon, its relative immunity to copyright problems, its attention to formal qualities, and its following of academics dedicated to "making it new," has attracted perhaps a disproportionate amount of attention from digital humanists.