Proposals for papers and panels are now being accepted for the 43rd annual SWPACA conference. One of the nation’s largest interdisciplinary academic conferences, SWPACA offers nearly 70 subject areas, each typically featuring multiple panels.  For a full list of subject areas, area descriptions, and Area Chairs, please visit http://southwestpca.org/conference/call-for-papers/

Benvenuti! The Italian American Culture(s) area of the conference will consider proposals from the following suggested topics (the list of topics is suggested but not limited to):

During the pandemic, creative writing classes, like most of academia, moved online. Traditional creative-writing pedagogies and practices were forced to reinvent themselves on Zoom. This emergency process provided opportunities for re-examination, experimentation, and growth. This panel invites practitioners of creative writing and its pedagogies to explore ways that creative writing instruction and praxis were altered by the pandemic.

Possible questions to consider:

· What changes to teaching and writing did you experience during the pandemic?

· How did the pandemic change perspectives on creative writing and creative writing instruction?

Ninth Biennial Graduate Student Conference Department of French, Hispanic and Italian Studies University of British Columbia DATE: 29-30 October 2021 Vancouver, Canada In-between normalities: Care, persistence and the (re)imagination of life Keynote Speaker: Dr. Susan Antebi, University of Toronto As we slowly go back to “normal,” this international graduate student conference invites young scholars to investigate Francophone and Hispanic literature, cinema and culture under the paradigm of care, persistence, and the (re)imagination of life. The sudden outbreak of a pandemic makes us revisit what “normal” is comprised of. We saw this recently and now “new normal” has become integral part of our conversations.

Rhizomatic and Multicentered Approaches in Creative Research Praxes

This seminar will share and exchange perspectives on and experiences of multicentering / multicentricity in creative research practices. Our seminar will explore ways in which multicentricity, rhizomatics, and intra-action inform creative research practices, and how these strategies aid in reinventing the relationships between the elements involved. 

The global COVID-19 pandemic has forced all of us to rethink the ways in which we teach and study literature and the arts. It has also forced us to reconsider the place of the arts during periods of extreme physical and social crisis. Our current pandemic is also a unique occasion to reconsider literature and the arts in previous historical and cultural dispensations. For instance, the flourishing of English drama during the early modern period coincided with almost yearly visitations of the plague, while the Spanish Flu of the early twentieth century proved an important inspiration for many artists—especially the Dadaist movement.