Romance novels have often been dismissed by critics because of their nature as a popular genre and for being written and read largely by women. However, in the last decade a number of scholars have approached the study of the romance novel with critical rigor and avoiding the condescending treatment of previous analysis. Quite often in romance novels we encounter characters that have very different backgrounds: come from different countries and cultures, speak different languages, belong to very different social strata or are, in some other way, an “Other” to the rest of the characters and/or the intended readers.

Britain in Europe, Europe in Britain

A Two-Day Interdisciplinary Conference

Thursday June 22nd & Friday June 23rd2017

Keynote Speakers:

Prof Arthur Aughey, University of Ulster & award-winning novelist Linda Grant

As we approach the centennial of the October revolution, the international and multilingual online journal La Furia Umana is publishing a special dossier looking at Russian media creation in the period between 1912 (the year of A Slap in the Face of Public Taste) and 1930 (the year of Mayakovsky's suicide), with a concentration on the Russian avant-garde in film and the plastic arts.
Topics for this dossier might include but are not limited to:

A One-day Conference at the University of Chichester. West Sussex. UK
Saturday May 27th 2017
Co-organised by Dr Miles Leeson and David Clayton
Department of English & Creative Writing

The conference aims to extend the discussion of British women’s writing that was initiated at the University of Hull in June 2016.

Challenges of Media Anthropology

Princeton-Weimar Summer School for Media Studies

Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie

(Bauhaus-Universität Weimar)

German Department (Princeton University)

Weimar, Germany, June 10–17, 2017

Contemporary environmental theory has adopted vast spatial and temporal paradigms as a method for reckoning with global-scale environmental problems. These paradigms—increasingly bracketed under the concepts of the “Anthropocene,” “Capitalocene,” “World-Ecology,” and “Great Acceleration,” among others—offer what has been termed a "god’s eye view" of environmental catastrophe. While granting a macro-scale view of human agency and ecological change, these monumental concepts risk collapsing into what Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht has in another context described as an “ever-broadening present of simultaneities.” In response to the “big history” turn, this panel will attend to the cracks, fissures, and seams in the monumental.

Thoreau and Material Culture - gaurenteed session at MLA 2018

How do material objects enrich our understanding of Thoreau’s literary, natural-history, and politically-minded endeavors? How might tangible things deepen our sense of the author’s work, life, and world? What insights can we gain by recovering objects associated with his work, home, and place? The Thoreau Society invites abstracts of 250 words and a brief cv by 1 March 2017: Rochelle Johnson (rjohnson@collegeofidaho.edu).