This special topics session slated for the 2017 RMMLA Convention will explore monsters in culture, literature, and media. Monster Studies is a growing sub-discipline within English and Cultural Studies. Some scholars have been incorporating monsters into their classrooms as a way to not only teach tenuous topics in a college classroom (e.g. sexism, racism, classism) but to engage students through a new, innovative topic.

This panel seeks proposals for presentations on Monster studies in general with a secondary focus on the use of monsters as pedagogical tools in the classroom. Proposals submitted for consideration will address either monsters at large or in some specific facet of the academic experience. Papers submitted can

“Circus Space: The Big Top on the Big Screen”
We are currently accepting proposals for chapters to be included in an edited volume under contract with McFarland books.

Updated with new information and dates!

***

Freaks. Carny. MirrorMask. Water for Elephants. The Unknown. Trapeze. The Clown. Freakshow. Circus World.

What do all these films have in common? The circus, of course.

Achille Mbembe (2003) used the term ‘necropolitics’ to account for the existence of ‘death worlds’ within postcolonial geopolitical spaces. While work in biopolitics has privileged the dynamics of ‘making live and letting die,’ Mbembe highlights the importance of both, extending lives and making deaths.

10th Colloquium on Translation Studies in Portugal

20-21 July 2017

Translating Fear

In a recent article published in The Guardian and in an upcoming book, author Pankaj Mishra argues that we are now living in the age of anger. While anger seems to be spreading globally, it often seems to result from and in fear and / or disenfranchisement. Questions such as ‘who speaks together, who breathes together, who translates?’ (Apter, 2009: 204) are in the foreground of almost every form of public discourse, shaping political concerns, new forms of identification, and redefining ways of living.