Critical Issues in North African Literary and Cultural Studies

2017 NeMLA Convention, Baltimore, MD, March23-26

We are seeking papers for a session on North African literatures and cultures at the upcoming Northeast Modern Language Association Convention to be held in Baltimore, March 23-26, 2017. We welcome submissions that open original and ground-breaking avenues for the study of North Africa.

While literary responses to the Great War remain central to scholarship on 20th century British literature, British authors writing in the immediate aftermath of WWII have garnered far less critical attention.  Poised as they were between their modernist predecessors’ “radical break,” and their post-colonial successors’ challenges to cultural orthodoxies, most post-WWII authors have come to be regarded as comparatively minor, singular, or idiosyncratic.  For many critics, the diminution of Empire and the rise of the social welfare state produced not “giants,” but artists in disgruntled retreat from the modern world.  Even the socially conscious “Angry Young Men,” perhaps the era’s most celebrated authors, are, in the words of Terry Eagleton, “individualis

This panel seeks to explore the explosion of cinematic excellence and exploration, perhaps unparalleled in cinema history, that occurred in Italy following the end World War II and continued until the 1970's. While this panel welcomes papers on some of the more artistically ambitious and celebrated of these films and filmmakers, it is also very much interested in the numerous ways that Italian cinema changed not only the art film but a host of popular genres as well, such as the Western, police drama, the horror film, and even science fiction.

Ever since Paul J. Crutzen popularized the use of the term ‘Anthropocene’ to describe our current epoch, the word has carried apocalyptic implications: visions of a world in which human civilization has collapsed or the species has been totally eradicated from planet Earth. Meanwhile, new movements in contemporary philosophy from speculative realism to new materialism and beyond have sought to disrupt Enlightenment ontologies that place human beings in a centralized position for either philosophy or environmental thought. The Anthropocene, however, is only the latest manifestation of attempts to conceptualize massive destruction on a global scale.

Studies in the History of the English Language (SHEL) 10

SHEL 10 will be hosted by the English Department at the University of Kansas on June 2-4, 2017. This 10th anniversary conference in the SHEL series seeks to allow scholars to explore long-standing and emerging questions in the study of the history of the English language (HEL). The conference invites abstracts and workshop proposals from all linguistic approaches to and methodological perspectives on HEL, and welcomes presentations on all varieties and periods of the language. (More information on the conference website: http://shel10.ku.edu/)

Deadline for abstracts and workshop proposals: November 1, 2016