American Literature Association
26th Annual Conference
May 21-24, 2015
The Westin Copley Place

10 Huntington Avenue
,
Boston MA 02116-5798

Conference Director:
Olivia Carr Edenfield,
Georgia Southern University

Conference Fee: For those who pre-register before April 15, 2015: $90
 ($60 for Graduate Students, Independent Scholars, and Retired Faculty).
 After April 15, the fees are $100 and $75.
American Humor Studies Association
Call for Papers
The AHSA plans to sponsor three sessions at the 2015 national meeting. We seek cogent, provocative, well-researched papers on the following subjects:

1. "American National Humor(s)." Abstracts (300 words max.) are encouraged on American humor as it relates to concepts of national identity, "American character," and related concepts. We are also willing to consider papers that consider other national traditions in ways that illuminate the links between humor and imagined national identies.

2. "Page to Screen: American Literary Humor and the Silent Film Comedy." Abstracts (300 words max) are requested on the relationship between American literary humor and its transmutation to the silent film screen. While one-to-one correlations between text and film of the same title are obvious foci for this panel, more oblique relationships are encouraged—of the coincidental misidentification of lookalike characters, as in Charlie Chaplin's characters in, say, The Idle Class, which clearly hearken back to a story like Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Adaptions in silent animation are also acceptable. The importance of the English music hall and American vaudeville stage is well known and understood in the development of screen comedy, but what is the role of silent film comedy's literary precursors?

3. "Humor and Charles Chesnutt"—Abstracts (300 words max.) are encouraged on subjects addressing any aspect of humor in relation to Charles Chesnutt or related topics. Panel sponsored by the American Humor Studies Association and the Charles Chesnutt Society.

Please e-mail abstracts no later than January 10, 2014 to Tracy Wuster (wustert@gmail.com) with the subject line: "AHSA session, 2013 ALA." Notifications will go out no later than January 20, 2013.