Interdisciplinary Conference on Sports and Violence, March 19, 2016, Proposals due by October 31, 2015

Americans love sports. An estimated 35 to 50 million American youth play organized sports, the Super Bowl regularly attracts over 160 million viewers, and sports figures are among America's most recognized celebrities.

The Department of English, Gauhati University, in its series International Seminars on Contemporary South Asian Fictions in English is happy to announce the second conference of the series. This time the focus is on Pakistan: an attempt at mapping its culture, literature, people, politics and conflicts—in short, ensuring comprehensibility from our varied locations and positions. One of the many themes in this seminar will be to consider the issues that concern writers of/from Pakistan and writers from North-Eastern parts of India.

Transformations: CFP: Issue 28

The Ruin, the Future

Over the past few years a swathe of what has come to be known as "ruin porn" has swept the internet. Perhaps in an uncanny updating of Albert Speer's dark fantasies of "ruin value", photographs of Detroit's abandoned factories and theatres, Chernobyl's crumbling tenements and "urbex" photos of ruined asylums and hotels are gleefully traded on Facebook and Reddit and have amassed immense cultural currency.

This seminar aims to focus attention on a segment of the English population that is often ignored or treated simplistically in scholarship on our period: the English Catholic community. Recent research by Gabriel Glickman, Alison Shell, and several other scholars has demonstrated that the Catholic community was active politically, socially, and artistically throughout the eighteenth century. This panel seeks papers from historians, art historians, literature scholars, and religion scholars on any subject related to the political or social activities or cultural productions of eighteenth-century English Catholics.

The postmodern god figure has been a staple of postmodern art at the very least since John Barth published Lost in the Funhouse, in which the god figure, both author and father, was simultaneously characterized as asleep, malevolent, kind, and/or insane. As this figure has penetrated popular culture, s/he has become more and more linked to investigations of gender and sexuality. These "god" figures strive to control the lives of others (e.g. Amy Dunne in Gone Girl, Tyler Durden in Fight Club, Kaiser Soze in The Usual Suspects). These puppet masters often work behind the scenes, exploiting the margins of society for either personal or social gain.

This proposed panel for the 2016 C19 conference seeks paper proposals on the topic of collectors and collections in nineteenth-century American culture. In keeping with the conference's theme of "Unsettling," this panel aims to explore how examining practices of collecting opens up new approaches to considering American literature in relation to institutions, print and material culture, and scientific study. How does literature engage with the efforts of individual collectors or institutions to organize texts, natural specimens, material objects, and other forms of information? How did competing taxonomies unsettle existing modes of categorizing objects?

In recent scholarship, lyric emerges as a privileged form for expressing, simulating, and circulating pain: its formal flexibility, non-narrative structure, and somatic elements allow lyric to evoke an embodied sensation whose "resistance to language," as Elaine Scarry memorably argues, "is essential to what it is." Yet these characteristics do not adhere neatly to lyric. Not all lyrics are formally free and non-narrative. Furthermore, various literary genres employ the formal invention, non-narrative digressions, and somatic elements most often identified with the lyric form.