What constitutes the canon of academic novels? Discussion of the genre has tended to focus on a limited number of novels. On the British side, C. P. Snow's The Masters, Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim, David Lodge's campus trilogy (Changing Places, Small World, Nice Work), and A. S. Byatt's Possession dominate. For American academe, a similarly small number have dominion over the field: Mary McCarthy's The Groves of Academe, Randall Jarrell's Pictures from an Institution, Vladimir Nabokov's Pnin, Bernard Malamud's A New Life, Jane Smiley's Moo, Richard Russo's Straight Man, and Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys. If these novels are taken to constitute the academic novel canon, as it were, what picture of academe emerges from them?

This session proposes to explore and discuss science fiction by French and Francophone women authors, through all issues present in texts (novels or short stories): hybrid bodies, network connections, environmental issues, political systems, cloning, gender relations, and much more.

CALL FOR SESSION PROPOSALS deadline April 22, 2014

In spring 2015, NeMLA will meet in Toronto, Ontario for its annual convention. In mid-March, the association will begin accepting online session proposals (panel, seminar, roundtable, creative session) in the following areas:

American
Anglophone
British
Canadian
Comparative Languages & Theory
Culture & Media Studies
French and Francophone
German
Italian
Pedagogy
Professional
Russian
Spanish/Portuguese
Rhetoric & Composition
Women's and Gender Studies
World Languages (non-European)
 
For 2015, NeMLA  particularly welcomes proposals on the following topics:

The Minetta Review is a literary and arts publication managed by undergraduate students at New York University. Print editions are made available free of charge to the student body and to bookshops in Greenwich Village, and select content is viewable on our WordPress. If you are a poet, proser, prose-poet, painter, sculptor, photographer, digital illustrator—otherwise an experimenter of combining word and visual art—we encourage you to submit your work to minettasubmit@gmail.com. The deadline for the Spring 2014 issue is March, 15 2014.

Check out our WordPress for previous issues and submission guidelines:
minettareview.wordpress.com/submit

This special issue for Black Camera, titled "Fugitivity and the Filmic Imagination," ponders whether American mainstream and/or independent cinema—primarily with regard to the current string of films being released that take up chattel slavery—engages or disavows black fugitivity as the imaginative condition for film; a reassessment of the frameworks that are most generative for exploring black fugitivity's complexities; and a rethinking of how online social media now informs the discourses that shape the filmic imagination.

Interdisciplinarity has become a buzzword across the humanities; the term usually implies that scholars make use of the tools of another discipline while remaining within the boundaries of their own. The French philosopher Jacques Rancière points to the impossibility of this project, describing his work as "a-disciplinary" or "in-disciplinary." This conference seeks to reflect on the current state of work within the humanities by asking if the traditional ways of organizing disciplines are sufficient for the future of academia.

We invite talks/papers that deal with but are not limited to the following topics:

A new project designed to defend and promote the value and all round general goodness of the arts and humanities is looking for passionate people to contribute articles.

We are looking for like-minded people to write on a variety of subjects and urge you to contact us at editors@new-union.co.uk with ideas and suggestions. We aim to start publishing content online from March 2014.

You can find out more about us at thenewunion.wordpress.com/manifesto.