Black Masculinity in the Trump Era

North Carolina Central University's Departments of Language and Literature and Mass Communication will host the ninth African American Literature/Studies Symposium on Thursday, February 8, 2018.  This year's theme is "Black Masculinity in the Trump Era".  The symposium will explore various contemporary approaches to the study of Black Masculinity in African American Studies.

Possible Paper topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

Afrofuturism, Authenticity, Disability Studies, Drama, Folklore, Gender Studies, Hip Hop Studies, Intertextuality, Film/Television, Literary Canon, Memory, Protest, Pop Culture, and Urban Literature

We are currently seeking writers, editors, and contributors of all kinds to The Open Anthology of Earlier American Literature, an Open Educational Resource (OER) textbook under development with the Rebus Community. Rebus is a non-profit organization that works with faculty, librarians, students, and staff to build tools and resources in support of free and open textbook publishing.

The Fandom and Neomedia Studies (FANS) Association, an internationally recognized academic organization, invites applications for membership in its Law and Politics Studies Area. This group will examine the interconnections between fandom and media on the one hand and politics and law on the other. “How is political culture played out in the media?” “How is law (mis)represented in fiction?” and similar questions will fit into this field. Current and retired lawyers in good standing, law students, elected or appointed government officials, professors of law and/or politics, and political operatives are eligible for membership in this committee. The chair at any given time must be a practicing lawyer, sitting government official, or current professor.

This panel investigates early modern coping strategies that engage both possibility and temporality. Specifically, how do early modern texts model alternative temporalities that evoke revised histories, alternative presents, or potential futures? How might intertextuality, grammatical structures, wordplay, and visual or other paratextual elements signal possibility? And how might alternative temporalities revise early modern subjectivity?

Topics of interest might include:

Humor was the original scaffolding upon which American comic books were built. We have not historically called them “funny books” for nothing. Today, however, humor-based comics and graphic novels have been relatively marginalized by both scholars and contemporary readers alike. The focus of this special issue of Studies in American Humor, ser. 4, 4, no. 2 (October 2018), will be the comic side of comics, the funny that helped make the funnies. We are looking for essays that discuss graphic humor in periodicals from historical, thematic, and theoretical perspectives.

English: The Journal of the English Association (Oxford UP) seeks reliable book reviewers.  Please email the Reviews Editor, Dr Adam Hansen (adam.hansen@northumbria.ac.uk) with your CV (2 pages maximum) and a brief (100 words) statement of areas of interest or expertise.