We are excited to announce that the Brandeis English Department Graduate Student Conference will be held on February 13, 2015 and will examine the topic of Melodrama. Lucy Fischer, Distinguished Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, will give the keynote address.

A colloquium to be hosted by Sigma Tau Delta Iota Chi Chapter, sponsored in part by the Department of English at California State University, Northridge.

New Deadline:
January 16, 2015

Conference Date:
Saturday, April 25, 2015
California State University, Northridge

Italo Calvino once asked, "who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined?" And while the question maintains its relevance, isn't it about time we turn our attention away from the individual, the "we," and ask this question of the texts produced and the environments in which they are produced?

Powerlines is a graduate student-run online journal and welcomes work that exhibits or complements interdisciplinary approaches to producing knowledge. We feature scholarly and artistic production that enriches understandings of identity and difference, cultures of the everyday, and the politics of power. Specifically, we invite submissions that foreground questions concerning disability, sexuality, gender, race, class, and nation in work that approaches these and other categories of difference from American studies, material and visual culture studies, performance studies, women's studies, public or social history, sociology, anthropology, English, geography, the digital humanities, and related fields.

In a time when even Bridget Jones finds herself in her early fifties, it may at first glance seem unwarranted to speak of the invisibility of ageing women in literary and cultural contexts. In fact, in a review of Mad about the Boy in The Times, Sarah Lyall writes that, "Bridget's amorous adventures … make the prospect of middle age not so bad at all". Constructions like this open up questions about representations of women and ageing. What types of images of the "ageing woman" are created in cultural texts? Do women in later life, in order to become visible, need to find ways to "pass" as younger so that "age shall not wither them" as Kira Cochraine puts it in an article in The Guardian?

CALL FOR PAPERS

Tracing the path of tolerance.
History and critique of a political concept from the early modern period to the contemporary debate

Padua, May 26-27, 2015.

Call for Papers: International Symposium in Comparative Sinology
Organized by the International Center for Comparative Sinology, CUMT
This event will bring together researchers and artists from China and elsewhere in the world, to present ground-breaking research in the interdisciplinary field of Comparative Sinology. Held in Xu Zhou, cradle of Han civilization, the symposium's formal component will take place June 8-9, 2015, while a cultural program will be provided for interested participants geared towards more open exchange between scholars, June 10-12.