american

Call for Papers: Small Screen Supers: Essays on Superhero Television 

As superhero films have proliferated, so too has superhero television. But as scholarship on superhero films has similarly proliferated, scholarship on superhero television has not. When superhero television is discussed by scholars, it is often as an offshoot of filmic franchises rather than as a phenomenon in its own right, with its own histories and contexts of production, its own approaches to adaptation, and its own dynamics of reception. 

Issue #34 (2023) of RSA Journal: Rivista di Studi Americani, the official journal of the Italian Association for North American Studies (Associazione Italiana di Studi Nord-Americani – AISNA) will feature a special section, edited by Cristina Iuli (Università del Piemonte Orientale) and Pilar Martinez (University of L’Aquila), on Posthumanism andEnvironmental Poetics in American Literature. Scholars from different areas of American literature, culture, and the arts are invited to submit their proposals.

Since the dawn of the Cold War, U.S. popular culture has been saturated with narratives that pit a morally-righteous United States against a sinister, duplicitous Russia–a binary foundational to postwar American Studies. In the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine–and the attacks on democracy and human rights that it entails–the image of a menacing Russian presence is once again salient. Rather than redeploying a Cold War logic designed to disavow the sordid histories of the United States, this panel asks how we might approach the intertwined histories of Russia and the U.S. as a way of strengthening our critique of the oppression and exploitation perpetuated by both nations.

Call for Papers

“Ecocritical Approaches to Shirley Jackson” and “Shirley Jackson: Witchcraft and Magic”

Sponsored by the Shirley Jackson Society

American Literature Association Annual Conference

Boston, Massachusetts

May 25-28, 2023

The Shirley Jackson Society invites scholars at all stages of their careers to submit to our panels for the American Literature Association’s Annual Conference in Boston, May 25-28, 2023. We are planning for two panels this year: 1. Ecocritical Approaches to Shirley Jackson, and 2. Shirley Jackson: Witchcraft and Magic.

Emerson Society Panels ALA 2023

The Ralph Waldo Emerson Society will sponsor two panels at the 34th Annual Conference of the American Literature Association, to be held May 25–28, 2023, at the Westin Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston. Both panels will honor the contributions of the late professor Joel Myerson.

“Editing Emerson and his Circles”

Hugh Kenner: How to Write

Symposium, Université Paris Nanterre, May 5th, 2023

Call for papers

The Stephen Graham Jones Society is inviting participants for an American Literature Association panel for the 2023 meeting comprised of emerging and established scholars who have interest and/or experience with the recent and ongoing scholarship and/or pedagogical value of Jones' ever-expanding body of writing. We are seeking proposals that examine any aspect of Jones’ literary, philosophical, cultural or historical engagements as reflected in his novels or short fiction. Proposed presentations on his more recent experimentations in genre and horror are especially welcomed. 

Sponsored by the Children and Youth Studies Caucus of the American Studies Association, this session seeks papers that grapple with the ways that childhoods have been restricted—temporally, geographically, sexually, racially, politically—as well as the work that has been done to build solidarities that enable more expansive possibilities for childhood. 

Contemplative Practice and Writing about Race

The American Religion and Literature Society (ARLS) invites papers for a panel at the American Literature Association Conference, May 25-28, 2023 in Boston. 

The Charles Olson Society will sponsor a session at the annual American Literature Association Conference, to be held in Boston, May 25-28. We are interested in abstracts that examine the influence of Charles Olson and/or other Black Mountain Poets on poetic practices and their developments up to the present. A variety of poets took up the innovative practices of figures like Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Ed Dorn, Robert Duncan, John Wieners, and others associated with Black Mountain. How have the practices of this fundamentally important school of poetics been extended, transformed, and/or resisted by other poets?

International Conference: “Infrastructures of Racism and the Contours of Black Vitality and Resistance.”

University of Torino (Italy), 23-25 March 2023

The graduate school 'Authority and Trust' (GKAT) at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies welcomes submissions for their conference "Practicing Trust and Authority" to take place in Heidelberg (Germany) on May 11-13, 2023. Submission deadline is February 5, 2023.

Get in touch: gkat-conference2023@hca.uni-heidelberg.de

Visit our website: www.hca.uni-heidelberg.de/gkat/2023conference.html

Keynote Speakers

Dr. Long T. Bui, Associate Professor of Global and International Studies, the University of California at Irvine 

Dr. Patricia Pelley, Associate Professor of History, Texas Tech University

Dr. Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, Professor of English and Asian American Studies, the University of Texas at Austin

Special Guest Speaker

Ms. Callie Wright, Education Director, Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund

In the aftermath of the spatial turn in literary studies, we look for fresh approaches to Jamesian spaces, material and metaphorical, real and imaginary. James’s texts have explicit spatial dimensions. Whether as settings aesthetically conceived or as sites of cultural, social, and political signification, spaces in James constitute means of thematic as well as formal exploration and even experimentation. From the Roman Colosseum to the “house of fiction” and from the “chamber of consciousness” to the “jolly corner” and the “amazing hotel-world,” James’s literary geography emphatically asserts the dynamic relations between space, subjectivity, and text.