The Octavia E. Butler Society invites abstracts (of no more than 300 words) for presentations at the annual conference of the ALA (http://alaconf.org/annual-conference/). Please note that we can only accept proposals for individual papers and will not be able to accept proposals for entire panels.

We invite paper proposals on Octavia Butler and all aspects of her work. We particularly invite papers on Fledgling, as 2015 marks the 10th anniversary of that novel.

JOYCE, YEATS AND THE REVIVAL

The VIII James Joyce Italian Foundation Conference in Rome

Conference Date: February 2-3, 2015
DEADLINE FOR ABSTRACTS: November 15, 2014

The James Joyce Italian Foundation invites proposals for the Eighth Annual Conference in Rome. It will be hosted by the Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the Università Roma Tre, to celebrate Joyce's 133th birthday.

The conference will be the occasion to present unpublished papers and works in progress on Joyce to an international audience.

Confirmed speakers: Matthew Campbell, Erik Bindervoet, Robbert-Jan Henkes, Fritz Senn, Carla Marengo Vaglio

Food culture has enjoyed a renaissance in recent years, moving to the forefront of many global and local cultural discourses. Among these discourses are the revival of old and/or dying culinary traditions, the promotion of exotic or underappreciated dishes, global fusion cooking, food and travel, ethical food consumption, the political and social dimensions of food production and consumption, and an examination of the potential for, and limitations to, eating sustainably. While much attention has been paid to practical, aesthetic, and social considerations of food, less has been examined concerning the semiotic and constructed aspects of food culture, in particular, what constitutes food, and for whom.

For the December 2014 issue, East – West Cultural Passage (http://magazines.ulbsibiu.ro/ewcp/index.htm) seeks quality essays in the fields of language (Pragmatics, Semantics, Semiotics, Socio-linguistics, Methodology, Grammatical and Literary Stylistics, Hermeneutics, Linguistics, Syntax, Morphology, Translation Studies, Rhetoric and Composition, Creative Writing), culture, civilization and religion. You are strongly encouraged to submit original articles that have not been published elsewhere, nor are currently under review in any other journal. We regret we are unable to accept multiple submissions.

It is common to conceive of Canada's North, especially in its early history, as a barren frontier conquerable only by the hardiest of men. However, as Barbara Kelcey's Alone in Silence: European Women in the Canadian North Before 1940 outlines, an estimated five hundred women or more traversed the Northwest Territories before World War II. While some of these women were the wives of missionaries or explorers, others were career-women in their own rights—artists, nurses, missionaries, entrepreneurs, or explorers.

Foucault's influence on the field of sexuality studies is undeniable, yet many scholars have taken him to task for his famous assertion that the nineteenth-century gave birth to the homosexual as "un personnage" whereas the sodomite was simply "un sujet juridique". These distinctions between acts and persona, between alterity and continuum have been vigorously analyzed and debated by scholars in all areas of sexuality studies, including hetero-, homo- and queer sexualities. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick sharply criticized this divide as presupposing that the modern homosexual is a "coherent definitional field", and that earlier sexual categories simply disappear as new ones take over.

Inspired by our era of globalization and instantaneous communication, the Duquesne University English Department Graduate Student Conference is asking about access, especially in pre- and early modern literary cultures. As the rise of Disability Studies and Mobility Studies has provided theoretical and linguistic frameworks for defining, explaining, and challenging traditional conceptions of access, we invite literary, historical, and cultural considerations of access. Historically, who has had access? How do texts navigate the political, economic, social, etc. constraints on access? How does asking this question raise awareness of contentious literary spaces?