Quentin Tarantino's films situate characters within groups/institutions that are morally suspect (e.g., drug dealers, hit men, assassin squads, Nazi Germany, American slavery); in doing so his films interrogate the parameters within which we frame moral codes. While we can trace such moral inquiry back to Pulp Fiction, where hit men paused to debate the morality of massaging your boss's wife's feet, the stakes of his filmic investigations have become increasingly more historically and culturally significant as his embrace of the revenge drama has taken on Nazism in Inglourious Basterds and American slavery in Django Unchained.

The recent trend in medieval literary studies to emphasize inanimate objects and materiality as a means of contextualizing or de-emphasizing human and humanist activities has encouraged two, perhaps unintended, consequences: 1) The segregation of 'Humanist' philosophical interpretations of the world and its contents/inhabitants (metaphysics, Marxism, psychoanalysis, etc.) from 'non-human' oriented epistemologies (Eco-Criticism, Object Oriented Ontology, etc.); and 2) the lack of distinguishment between human-inanimate object relationships within a culturally homogenous setting and human-inanimate object relationships within a culturally mixed setting.

This panel is urgently seeking one or two additional papers for a panel on Marriage, Money, and Seduction in literature for the upcoming Rocky Mountain MLA conference in Boise, Idaho (Oct. 9-11, 2014). The topic is open to any time period, British or American.

Please send abstracts and questions immediately to Autumn Lauzon at autumn.lauzon@uncp.edu.

By the end of the eighteenth-century, thanks to literary histories such as Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Poets and Thomas Warton's The History of English Poetry, along with the beginning of literary criticism, the framework of the eighteenth-century canon we still use today had already been created. Writers who were lauded by Johnson and Warton as the writers of the age are for the most part still anthologized and taught in undergraduate courses in today's universities. However, an entire oeuvre of white male authors of the dominant political party—such as Elkanah Settle, Colley Cibber, and Warton himself—are relatively unexplored even though they exerted influence over literary culture as City Poet and Poets Laureate, respectively.

The deconstruction of categories of animal, human, and cybernetic organisms has led to wholesale rethinking of corporeal futures. Likewise, the increase of information-based interactions refigures interactivity in ways which seem to subvert embodied expectation. Is this in fact the case? What are the frontiers of imagining futures, and how do feminist studies and queer theory help us get there?

"LauraPalooza 2015"
Through Laura's Eyes:
Imagery, Illustrations, and Impressions from the Little House

The National Laura Ingalls Wilder
Legacy and Research Association Conference

Sponsored by the Laura Ingalls Wilder Legacy and Research Association and South Dakota State University

We invite submissions of paper, panel, and workshop proposals for review and possible acceptance for presentation at the third LauraPalooza conference, to be held on the campus of South Dakota State University in Brookings on July 16-17, 2015. The conference will be followed by a field trip to De Smet, South Dakota, on July 18.

This roundtable will address success strategies for professional engagement, curriculum planning, and reappointment & tenure cases as the lone medievalist in a department or institution.