Metaphors make the detective. Whether Poe's "clew," Doyle's game metaphor ("the game's afoot"), or film noir's labyrinths, the governing metaphors of the great fictional detectives encapsulate the underlying social, hermeneutic, and cultural assumptions that govern their methods.

This roundtable seeks papers on any aspect of the guiding metaphors of detective fiction from the genre's origins to the present day. Short presentations on detective narratives in any genre, language, or medium are welcome; talks on a single metaphor, author, or nexus of metaphors and authors are of particular interest.

RETHINKING THE HUMANITIES IN TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY AFRICA

By extending the learning environment beyond the classroom's boundaries, undergraduate programs have stimulated lively pedagogical innovation across general education disciplines. The approach encourages rigorous critical thought via assignments that require students to think critically and to reflect actively on links between course materials, historical sites, and concrete social and cultural concerns. However, the popularity for the experiential, fed by administrative and parental enthusiasm, may hinder instructors and encumber students.

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.