In the final week of January, 1977, the ABC miniseries Roots became the most-watched television program of all time. To the surprise of the show’s producers, Roots became not only a ratings windfall, but a cultural phenomenon, articulating an African-American counter-narrative of American history, provoking a dialogue about the legacy of slavery, and presenting African-American characters with a dignity and integrity that differed sharply from the caricatured representations common to television up to that time. In many ways, the response to the show by the media and the general public constitutes the first of many “conversations about race” that have punctuated the Post-Civil Rights era.

Now in its ninth year, the AUM Southern Studies Conference invites panel and paper proposals on any aspect of Southern literature. The conference will be held 10-11 February 2017. Topics may include but are not limited to:

Papers on Language and Literature is seeking proposals for special issues on subjects including but not limited to

Digital Humanities

Film

Literary Translation

Print Culture

PLL is a generalist publication that is committed to publishing work on a variety of literatures, languages, and chronological periods. We accept proposals year-round. We are a quarterly and expect to publish a special issue once a year, every year. The specific volume and issue will be determined later, depending on the editors’ schedule.

Compared to film, TV and the novel, science fiction theatre is not a widely discussed topic. But, whilst there is only one book from the 1990s that lists the history of sf plays, there is a long legacy of staging the fantastical, including the importance of Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. (1920) in coining the term ‘robot’. With contemporary mainstream plays such as Constellations, The Nether, MrBurns and X, sf theatre may be experiencing something of a revival. There are an increasing number of sf theatre companies worldwide as well as a new anthology in sf plays.

An examination of cultural representations of breastfeeding that attends to diffuse discourses about infant feeding, ranging from medical and anthropological to socioeconomic and cultural, all the while utilizing feminist methodologies, can facilitate an interrogation of the feminist implications ofbreastfeeding advocacy, including essentializing discourses about women’s bodies as the “natural” choice for infant feeding and the complex considerations women and families navigate in making decisions about infant feeding.