This panel seeks to explore how medical narrative was used in nineteenth-century fiction and medical texts as a counterargument to the medical gaze, thereby rewriting the medical history of the period from the patient's prospective. The use of medical narrative as a counter-current to the profession's paternalism indicates the subversive nature of nineteenth-century literature and reinforces the value of storytelling and narrative within the "factual" world of medicine.

"Words in Place," from the University of Waterloo's English Department, is announcing our first ever One Sentence English Contest!
(We're calling the contest OneSEC, because that's how long it will take you to submit the shortest academic application ever.)

The OneSEC prize is for the best single sentence in an academic essay in a peer-reviewed journal in 2014 by a scholar trained or nested in English. How is "best" defined? The judges are academics, so through peer review by a disparate group of scholars with competing priorities, naturally.* No affiliation with the University of Waterloo is required.

Susan Glaspell's one-act play, "Trifles," premiered in Provincetown in 1916, during an era of historic upheaval in American gender relations. That same year, Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control center in the United States and Jeanette Rankin became the first woman elected to the US House of Representatives. The Nineteenth Amendment, of course, would be passed within three years. In the intervening century, the position of women in American society has evolved dramatically – 2016 may see the election of the first woman president – and yet the depiction of gender relations portrayed in "Trifles" remains trenchantly familiar to twenty-first-century readers.

NEMLA
47th Annual Conference
March 17 - 20, 2016
Hartford, Connecticut

Japanese animation has had an important place in Latin American TV for decades. This panel will explore the reception of anime and its impact on Latin American anime fan communities. These groups have created networks of science-fiction fans that actively participate in the construction of a transnational cultural identity. Latin American anime fans create literature and art that illustrate how they envision their national, and transnational communities expanding the canon to include the Latin American context through fan fiction and original work.

The deadline for abstracts for most sessions will be Sept. 30, 2015.

Queer Intimacies, Queer Spaces, & Scales of Desire

This panel is searching for papers that address how LGBTQ* texts of the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries construct varieties of queer intimacy and attempt to anatomize the epistemological, formal, and affective structures that make such intimacies possible—whether in public or private. We are looking for papers that discuss the ways queerness operates in a variety of spaces: city streets, forest clearings, parks, gardens, restrooms, bedrooms, manor homes, and apartment buildings.

Showrunners in the Classroom: Teaching Strategies for Composition & Literature Courses

In the last two decades, there has been a steady rise in our pop culture's awareness of the role writers, producers, and directors play in developing television series both from a commercial and critical context. With the advent of social media, fans are able to hear directly from the source on the fandoms that they hold so dear. This panel looks to investigate lesson plans and courses that are based on using the work of television auteurs in composition and literature classrooms. How are instructors using television episodes to construct critical thinking and writing skills?

In the rapidly expanding field of neo-Victorian studies, the million-dollar question remains: what qualifies as neo-Victorian? For guidance, many scholars have relied on Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn's definition, which specifies that to be called neo-Victorian, a text "must in some respect be self-consciously engaged with the act of (re)interpretation, (re)discovery and revision concerning Victorians." The implication is that this is a subgenre for respectable texts, of clear intellectual pedigree.