Celebrating Shakespeare's 450th birthday this issue of Gender Forum will focus on Shakespeare's plays and sonnets emphasizing the range of criticism and theory dealing with gender and sexuality. In order to widen the current discourse we encourage scholars to also consider early modern texts and their historical milieus about same-sex desire and recent critical and historical arguments about the construction of gay identity. We also encourage papers about modern adaptations looking at literary transformations of Shakespeare plays and sonnets by later women like Paula Vogel and gay artists from Oscar Wilde to Gus van Sant.

The nineteenth century has long been understood as an era of industrial growth, scientific discovery, technological innovation, and imperial expansion. Such sweeping global transformations relied on a complex web of relations between humans and machines, individuals and systems, ideas and practices, as well as more efficient and frequent movement across increasingly connected networks of space. From railroad travel to advances in shipping, from the movement of immigrants, enslaved laborers, scientists and colonial settlers, to the circulation of ideas, bodies, and/as commodities, nineteenth-century mobilities challenged and reconfigured the very constitution of subjects, nations, and cultures across the globe.

The Mary Elizabeth Braddon Association will shortly be launching our website and blog in conjunction with our inaugural meeting at the VPFA conference in July. We welcome submissions for the blog of 750-1,000 words on topics pertaining to Braddon and sensation fiction. We are especially interested in brief highlights of your current work on Braddon, experiences teaching Braddon and discussions of the importance of Braddon and sensation fiction in Victorian literature and cultural studies. Submissions or questions can be directed to Dr. Janine Hatter and Anna Brecke at braddoninfo@gmail.com.

Dear colleagues,
I'm writing to invite you to submit proposals for a collection of essays that is tentatively titled The Good Life and the Greater Good in a Global Context. Please take a look at the brief description of the topic, its rationale, and research questions below. Feel free to add any other comments and questions and let me know if you are interested in contributing. My own essay examines the transnational dimensions of "that moral-intimate-economic thing called 'the good life'" (Berlant 2) as theorized by cultural critic Lauren Berlant and imagined by Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid in his latest novel, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2012).

International Conference - CALL FOR PAPERS

"UNCERTAIN SPACES: Virtual Configurations in Contemporary Art and Museums"

31 October | 1 November 2014, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, Portugal

Over the past decades, and especially since the generalization of the Internet, artists have been actively exploring the potentialities of new media languages and communities, often blurring artistic categories. Movements like Digital Art or Internet Art clearly demonstrate how these technological means came to shape challenging new territories for contemporary art, not only in terms of creation, reception and participation, but also regarding its preservation, collection, curatorship or exhibition.

While poetry itself has played a historically long and significant role in the discourse of love, the period of modernity seems to be largely associated with its opposites. As the standard narrative goes, citizens the world over felt overwhelmed and frightened by the sundry and rapid changes – literal, conceptual, moral, and beyond – brought about by industrialization, scientific developments, WWI, etc. And the poetry that characterizes this time period represents and reflects on some of the more devastating changes. But what happens to poetic love in the early 20th century? What specifically happens when love, loss, and poetry come together during such a fraught time?