Where does one draw the line between madness and badness when it comes to women’s misbehavior? In some cases, a woman who defies social convention is considered bad, exhibiting a kind of failed femininity. In others, her actions are, in fact, so bad that she must be mad to have committed them. This panel seeks to unpack the concepts of madness and badness in contemporary American literature and visual arts to determine when these terms are worth resisting, and when they might be worth embracing.

Kimberly Drake, the editor of the proposed book Critical Insights: Literature of Inequality, a collection of scholarly essays (under contract with Grey House Publishing/EBSCO), seeks contributions on literature, music, and film/television dealing with inequality and social injustice.

Persian Literary Studies Journal (PLSJ), a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary periodical designed to comparatively explore literary, artistic and cultural issues, is seeking book reviewers to write essays about the publications it receives.

We also kindly invite publishers to send their publications of interest to the PLSJ office at Farideh Pourgiv, Dept. of Foreign Languages & Linguistics, Eram Campus, Shiraz University, Shiraz, Iran.

42nd Comparative Drama Conference

Text & Presentation

Call for Papers

April 5-7, 2018

Orlando, Florida

2018 Keynote Event

April 6, 2017      8 p.m. (followed by a reception)

Keynoter:  TBA

Abstract Submission Deadline: 3 December 2017

In both their lives and texts, lawyers who are also literary authors have long implicitly or explicitly explored the complex relationships between creative and practical work; Franz Kafka and Wallace Stevens are among the most salient of these hybrid disciplinarians. The law and literature movement’s burgeoning since James Boyd White’s The Legal Imagination (1973) can be envisaged as the scholarly iteration of this phenomenon. Proposals responding to this call should analyze the generative liminality of literary-legal professionals; all time periods and places are welcome. Additionally, proposals may endeavor to instigate a broader reconceptualization of the interconnections between literature and law and scholarship and praxis.

Call For PapersRendering (the) Visible III: LiquidityAtlanta, February 8-10, 2018Deadline: October 20, 2017

Since the early 2000s, the idea of “liquidity” has been mobilized in discourses ranging from social theory to aesthetics, from informatics to architecture, to describe a new relationship with the networked environments of life within global capital. More specifically, within the study of moving image culture, we have seen an increasing turn toward affective relations, plasticity, resonances and flows, whereby images and sounds—no longer grounded in an analogical relation to the real—are seen variously as malleable, untethered, “viral,” or fluid.