One very common narrative about Victorian Britain is that it was an age of ground-breaking scientific discoveries: Charles Lyell significantly extended the age of our planet; Charles Darwin forced a rethinking of the origins and development of life; Michael Faraday and James Maxwell Clark paved the way for modern physics; Non-Euclidean Geometry changed the way mathematicians measured and formalized the world; Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace laid the foundation for computing. The list could be expanded at leisure, as scientists made and remade the various fields in which humans have tried to make sense of the natural world.

On behalf of my co-editors Jennifer C. Dunn and Danielle M. Stern, I am glad to announce that we have been invited to prepare a second edition of our book Lucky Strikes and a Three-Martini Lunch: Thinking about Television's Mad Men. This new edition will feature revisions to essays from the first edition, new essays that explore later developments in the program, and a new section that will offer teaching materials for those interested in using the book in the classroom. The second edition will be released in conjunction with the final episodes of the popular AMC series.

NeMLA 46th Convention
Toronto, Ontario
April 30-May 3, 2015

Recipes for Power: Food and Literacy in French and Francophone Literature

Deadline for submissions: September 30, 2014

Showalter's definition of the fin de siècle as the 'golden age of hysteria' in her seminal work, The Female Malady, bolstered late-twentieth-century theory and criticism's association between 'hysteria' and European fin de siècle culture and medicine. Literary critics, historians, and cultural theorists are reopening the discussion of 'hysteria' and, in effect, shifting our understandings of its role in gender ideology, literary form, and politics beyond the turn of the century. This roundtable takes up the title of the authoritative, cultural history, Hysteria Beyond Freud, in order to foster and take part in this new discussion.

In his "Reflections on Exile," Edward Said asked "if true exile is a condition of terminal loss, why has it been transformed so easily into a potent, even enriching, motif of modern culture?" Arguably, this motif emerged in the eighteenth century, as
colonialism and the consolidation of the modern nation-state made more visible the movement--sometimes voluntary and sometimes forced--of peoples across and within political and geographical borders.
This interdisciplinary panel invites papers that address exile, migration, and statelessness in the long eighteenth century.

The relationship between the visual and the literary traces its origins to antiquity. In Rhetoric, Aristotle famously defines rhetoric as 'the ability to see the available means of persuasion' (I.2.1). Sight is a vital component of the human cognitive experience; neither education nor persuasion can take place without visualization. Throughout antiquity, philosophical concepts were often conveyed by artistic terminology and visual language, and all genres of Classical literature contain lengthy ekphrases.