Consuming Cultures and Manuscript Evidence

at the Midwest Modern Language Association Conference

15-18 November, Kansas City, Missouri 

The Research Group on Manuscript Evidence, in keeping with the M-MLA conference’s theme of “Consuming Cultures,” is sponsoring panels on the consumption of manuscripts.  This consumption can be both literal—for example, the destruction wrought by bookworms, fires, and biblioclasts—or metaphorical—where “consuming” can mean textual transmission and reception more broadly.  We invite all approaches, including textual, art historical, codicological, and paleographical as well as all periods.

International Conference Literature (&), (In)tangible Heritage

FCSH, NOVA University (Lisbon, Portugal)

11-12 October 2018

Throughout 2018, we are celebrating diverse cultural heritage across Europe. The aim of the European Year of Cultural Heritage is to encourage more people to discover and engage with Europe’s cultural heritage, and to reinforce a sense of belonging to a common European space. The slogan for the year is: “Our heritage: where the past meets the future”.

In keeping with this year’s MMLA theme, “Consuming Cultures,” I welcome papers that address issues of consumption in nineteenth-century British literature and culture. Possible topics include, but are certainly not limited to: print culture and readership; leisure activities; studies in food, medicine, plants, agriculture, and animals; consumption vs. production; consuming identities and bodies; and the intersections between postcolonialism, imperialism, and capitalism. Please send a 250-word abstract and a brief bio. by April 5th, 2018 to Bailey Shaw at bshaw@siu.edu. 

Since the emergence of Capitalism in Western society, humanity’s role as consumers of culture has become internalized as an inalienable component of modernity. From Marx’s metaphor of vampire labor in Capital to George Romero’s metaphorical representation of zombies as consumers in Dawn of the Dead to the ravenous hunger of online fandoms eagerly seeking for new content, the relationship between popular culture and its human consumers draws upon a rich, expansive history that recontextualizes interpolated human relationships by emphasizing (and sometimes questioning) the cultural narratives that dominate modern societies.

Call for Proposals for a Special Issue of Feminist Teacher

Performance in the Feminist Classroom 

Editors:

Elizabeth Currans, Eastern Michigan University

Michelle Martin-Baron, Hobart and William Smith Colleges

Holly Masturzo, Florida State College at Jacksonville

Call for Manuscript Proposals:

The proposed panel aims to explore modernist techniques and perspectives as they might appear in any form of fact-based discourse in the early twentieth century. Much work has already been done on modernism and nonfiction literary forms such as (auto)biography and travel writing, but what about less evidently literary genres and fields—economics, chemistry, history, policy, mathematics, and so on? Among many questions this panel might investigate, a central one is this: what happens to facticity when it is presented through modernism’s disorienting multiperspectivism, unreliability, ambiguity or fuzzy logic?

The Atrium: A Journal of Academic Voices

Our spring 2018 CFP Theme:

The Differences That Bind Us:

Diversity in our classrooms