Bodies, and representations of bodies, surround our everyday existence. Our bodies, and the bodies around us, are subject to norms that police how a body should look or behave in a given context. Glamorous and desirable bodies draw positive attention and literary and cultural representations reflect this, while deviant bodies are policed and regulated. This panel aims to explore how various bodies are represented in contemporary culture as well as analyze how these representations impact our perceptions of self and world. In a moment where the international political landscape is reliant on the policing and weaponizing of bodies, it is more important than ever before to consider how conceptions of bodies foster these divisions.

19th-century America was the site of various reform movements: antislavery, women's rights, education, temperance, penal reform, et al.

As a result of the pandemic, the RHOME 2020 Conference on Dislocation (22-23 October 2020) has been postponed. However, the good news is RHOME will launch the first issue of, its new creative journal, ROAM, later this year.

Now more than ever, in this time of social distancing and confinement, RHOME sees the need to continue its focus on the theme, the experience and the actuality of home, the place and abode that looms so large these days in the lives of everyone on the planet.

Society for the Study of Early Modern Women & Gender

Call for Panel Proposals 

Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting

Dublin, Ireland, 7-10 April 2021

As we (North American academics) think and, moreover, live in the shadow of the global pandemic, the role digital media plays in our no-longer-ordinary lives becomes increasingly salient. During the quarantine, participation in digital lives can be said to be no longer a supplement or replacement for “real life”; instead, it seems to have become its constitutive activity. Nevertheless, this new entanglement between the pandemic and digital media is not devoid of national, political, economic, and linguistic specificities: issues of accessibility, censorship, credibility, and the like cannot be addressed in the abstract. Instead, they only become visible when uses of digital media is contextualized and compared across national and linguistic boundaries.

SEASECS 2021: “Oceans Rise, Empires Fall: Tidal Shifts in the Eighteenth Century”

February 18-20, 2021 in Ft. Myers, Florida

Session Proposal Deadline: 6.15.2020

(Individual Papers and Fully-formed Panels Deadline: 10.15.2020)

The 47th meeting of The Southeastern American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (SEASECS) will take place February 18-20, 2021 in Ft. Myers, Florida, a historically rich, culturally vibrant city also known as a winter getaway for its warm temperatures, tropical scenery, and beautiful shorelines.

This special issue examines the role of literature and criticism in addressing poverty and dispossession. In a 2009 Inside Higher Ed op-ed, Keith Gandal predicted that the economic crisis would lead to literary studies finally putting “poverty near the top of the agenda and the center of the field.” Ten years later, poverty has become a focus of scholarship in the social sciences, particularly geography, anthropology, sociology, and critical legal studies. Yet the topic remains stubbornly marginal to literary studies, even though qualitative social scientific methods have been taken up in the discipline as never before.