Articles sought for a proposed edited volume of essays,  “Language of the Unheard”: Riot on the American Cultural Stage, addressing the following questions:

How does a riot speak?  How do we articulate and explore the riot as news, art, event, and mechanism for social change?  How do riots redefine urban landscapes and the ways in which we inhabit and express them?  How and why have American literary and cultural works illuminated cities and communities rocked by injustice and riot as a mode of protest or giving voice to what Martin Luther King, Jr., called “the language of the unheard.” 

CFP for Essay Collection: Frontiers: Cosmos, Curiosity, Creativity Cultures approach religious questions in ways informed by their cosmologies and vice versa. Traditions considered religious therefore interact closely with speculations about “the heavens,” the stars, and outer space in the imaginative work of world-building.

Papers are invited for the SHARP affiliate session at the 2018 South Atlantic Modern Language Association (SAMLA) Convention. Potential topics include print culture, history of the book, authorship, publishing history, ephemera, illustration, publishers' archives, production, circulation, and reception. Papers addressing this year's convention theme, "Fighters from the Margins: Social-Political Activists and Their Allies," are especially welcome. What connections can be made between print culture/book history and ideas of activism? How have books pushed the boundaries of technology, form, artistic expression, and subject matter? What are the connections between printing and social justice, activism and print culture?

Please consider submitting to the American Literature I: Literature Before 1870 session for this year’s MMLA conference, which will be held in Kansas City, MO., November 15-18, 2018. The overall theme of the conference is “Consuming Cultures,” the inspiration for which comes partly from Kyla Wazana Tompkins’ research on racism in terms of food cultures in nineteenth century U.S. literature. As is noted in the general call for papers, “Looking at the disturbing correlations of ‘food and flesh,’ she notes, ‘the evolution of eating cultures across this period opens up new areas of inquiry into the alignment between bodies and bodies politic’” (7-8). American literature before 1870 is suggestive of multiple variations on this broad theme.