In June of 1948, Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery” appeared in The New Yorker. Jackson’s story juxtaposed a nostalgic depiction of rural America with a jarringly brutal ending, causing outraged readers to cancel their New Yorker subscriptions and to deluge Jackson with hate mail. In the 70 years since then, “The Lottery” has become a staple of short story anthologies and American literature curricula, as well as having been adapted into a radio play, two television movies, a popular educational film, an opera, a ballet, a one-act play, and an episode of South Park.

Serial Prestige:

Values in Contemporary “High-End” Episodic and Serial Drama

For this potential anthology with an academic press, the editors invite essays addressing cultural and production values of post-2000 episodic and serial dramas (cable, network, streaming) in view of their ambition to dissolve or minimize oppositions between high and low culture.

Sensing Poverty: Visions of Vulnerable Children

All papers considering representations of impoverished children within fiction or film

will be considered for this panel. Topics relating to the conference theme of sight, visuality, visibility,

and ways of seeing are especially encouraged.

Representations of poverty and childhood within novels, comics, or films will be the subject of this

proposed panel. Topics relating to the conference theme of sight, visuality, visibility, and ways of seeing

are especially encouraged. Proposed papers may consider the experience of poverty (hunger, disease,

violence) for children; the use of language to create imagery and inspire empathy; interconnections with

In the face of violence, acts of witness are crucial to reaffirm the humanity of those that have been dehumanized, rebuild social worlds, and assert new communal bonds. At the same time, efforts at witnessing are fraught with risk. Personal testimonies may increase feelings of isolation instead of yielding catharsis. Writers, scholars, and artists who strive to represent acts of violence risk turning suffering into spectacle and re-inscribing binaries of agency versus victimhood. No act of witness can encompass a person’s experience; there is always more to know than any narrative or representation could portray.

In July of 2016, Niantic Inc. released Pokémon Go in the United States to unanticipated public interest. In one of the hottest summers on record, millions took to the streets to search for charmanders and dragonites, overwhelming both servers and public spaces. While interest in the mobile application has subsided, Pokémon Go remains a cultural artifact that demands further analysis. Opening conversations on public and civic rhetorics through play, the phenomenon of this simple game exposes critical intersections of race, gender, ability, and class as technological concerns over access, privacy, and privilege.

Papers addressing the difficulties of students for whom academia is foreign, considered in terms of the student’s alienation, psychological unpreparedness, underdeveloped perspective, etc. How can such students be incorporated into academia, and thereby into work (and life broadly) made accessible by education? Alternatively, should we seek such incorporation, or instead reimagine and change academia, and how? Institutions have implemented a variety of assimilation and retention strategies, some with better records than others. Some programs engage students individually, whereas others emphasize building communities; some strategies focus on key first-year courses, such as introductory writing.