While composition is often a standalone course, some colleges offer it as discipline-specific writing, either as a linked course or integrated into a learning community. Brief presentations that explore successes and challenges as well as the impact on student success.

Send 300 word abstracts and brief bios to sdonohue@cocc.edu by or before March 14th, 2014.

If accepted, you must be a member of the MLA by April 1, 2014.

The editors of The Ashgate Research Companion to Shakespeare and Classical Literature (forthcoming 2016) welcome brief submissions of 700 words or fewer for a multiauthored compilation of classroom assignments relating Shakespeare's drama and poetry to classical works or traditions — or, alternatively, to the idea of "classics" or "a classic." By "classics" we do not mean only texts from ancient Greece or Rome (though we do, of course, mean those). Rather, eligible "classics" in our broad sense may be found in any canon of verse, drama, narrative, or even music and visual art that has exerted large cultural influence or carried high cultural prestige — from Egypt and Israel to China, India, Japan, and beyond.

Please send abstracts of no more than 350 words by June 15, 2014. Papers may treat the literary works of Slavic writers in any genre and from any literary period, tradition or theoretical perspective. Comparative literary approaches are also welcome, as are papers on grammar topics or teaching methodology.

Papers are invited for publication in a special issue entitled War and Life Writing. Ed. Louise O. Vasvari and I-Chun Wang. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 17.2 (June 2015): (Purdue University Press ISSN 1481-4374). Throughout history, humans share(d) similar experiences in war: they narrate their experiences and document suffering, trauma, dislocation, memory, etc. Life writing on war is often about (im)migration, separation, and dreams of return. The guest editors of the special issue on War and Life Writing invite studies on life writing in all its forms: auto/biography, memoir, testimony, diaries, letters, works in media other than print, as well as visual representation of war from all periods of human history.

Q&A with Hari Kunzru at Birkbeck, University of London, Friday 20th June 2014

International conference dedicated to the writing of Hari Kunzru, University of Surrey, 21st June 2014

Papers are invited for the first academic conference dedicated to the writing of Geoff Dyer—novelist, essayist, art and photography critic and travel writer. Dyer's witty subtle and experimental writing has won him critical acclaim and a broad literary following but has received little sustained academic attention to date. The event will mark a collaboration between the Centre for Contemporary Literature and the History and Theory of Photography Research Centre, looking particularly at the place of photography and of photographic criticism in Dyer's work. Geoff Dyer will be in attendance throughout the day and for a Q&A session at the end of proceedings.

A recurring symbol and theme in Western cultural production since the fifteenth-century, imagery of death and the maiden reveals a dark bond between sexuality and death. Pictures of a decaying corpse seducing a young woman, such as Hans Baldung's Death and the Maiden, became popular during the Renaissance, and have been repeated and adapted oftentimes since, the theme taken up by modern artists such as Edvard Munch and Egon Schiele, or composer Franz Schubert.