Deadline for submissions: November 30, 2017
Full name / name of organization: Frontiers of Narrative Studies (De Gruyter)
Contact email: biwushang@sjtu.edu.cn
Call for Special Issue Proposals

The journal Frontiers of Narrative Studies (De Gruyter) is seeking proposals for special issues on subjects including but not limited to:

Transnational narrative

Postcolonial narrative

Fictional and factual narrative

Cosmopolitanism and narrative theory

Classical narratology revisited

A peer-reviewed journal of international scope, Frontiers of Narrative Studies under the auspice of De Gruyter features articles reporting results of research in all branches of narrative studies, in-depth reviews of selected current literature in the field, and occasional guest editorials and reports. Its broad range of scholarship includes narratives across a variety of media, including literary writing, film and television, journalism, and graphic narratives. It welcomes theoretically sophisticated essays that examine narratives of all kinds from a host of critical, interdisciplinary, or cross-cultural perspectives. Particular emphasis is placed upon state-of-the-art research in the field of interdisciplinary narrative inquiries. The journal publishes original articles, interviews as well as book reviews. Every year, there will be a special issue devoted to topics of particular interest.

We accept special issue proposals year-round. The specific volume and issue will be determined later, depending on the editors’ schedule.

Prospective guest-editors should submit current CVs and researched proposals of approximately 500 words describing the argument and rationale behind the special issue. If the guest-editor(s) decide to solicit contributions prior to the submission of the proposal, abstracts of articles and biographies of authors should be included with the proposal.

Proposals and supporting materials should be sent to the Editor at biwushang@sjtu.edu.cn as Word or PDF attachments. The subject line of the email should read “Special Issue Proposal.”

If a proposal is accepted, the guest-editor(s) will be responsible for soliciting contributions, appointing outside reviewers, and establishing submission deadlines.

Please note that our typical issue is 200 print pages. We strongly recommend that a special issue include 2 book reviews related to the topic, in addition to articles.

The journal follows the style of Mouton de Gruyter journal, which is available upon request.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Warm regards

Shang Biwu

Editor, Frontiers of Narrative Studies.

Deadline for submissions: January 20, 2017
Full name / name of organization: Historical Society of Palm Beach County
Contact email: Rgualtieri@hspbc.org
The Historical Society of Palm Beach County invites you to submit your articles for the upcoming 2017 Tustenegee issue. Attached you will find the flyer with additional information. Please distribute this flyer to organizations and colleagues that would be interested in submitting an abstract. Thank you.

Please sumbit abstracts in PDF format by email to rgualtieri@hspbc.org and provide author’s full name, and contact information. Abstracts are due by January 20, 2017. Once the abstract has been reviewed, the author(s) will be notified by email whether it has been accepted for publication. Additional information can be found at www.pbchistoryonline.org/page/history-online-journal.

Deadline for submissions: January 13, 2017

Full name / name of organization: American Literature Association
Contact email: nmerola@risd.edu
The Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE) seeks proposals for the panel “Speculative Fictions and Socio-Ecologies of the Americas” to be held at the Annual Conference of the American Literature Association in Boston, Massachusetts on 25-28 May 2017.

This panel seeks submissions that examine the ways in which North American, Caribbean, Central American, and South American authors have used the conventions and techniques of speculative fiction (including science fiction and magical realism) to represent and respond to socio-ecological circumstances, events, and issues.

By 13 January 2017, please send 300-500 word abstracts and one-page CVs to Nicole Merola at nmerola@risd.edu. Please include your contact information, academic affiliation, and any A/V requests.

This ALA panel is sponsored by ASLE. While you do not need to be a member of ASLE to submit a proposed abstract for an ALA panel, presenters must be or become ASLE members before the ALA conference in order to participate in an ASLE-sponsored panel.

Deadline for submissions: March 15, 2017
Full name / name of organization: Canadian Association for American Studies / OCAD University
Contact email: CAASfutures@gmail.com
Uncertain Futures is an interdisciplinary conference hosted by OCAD University and the Canadian Association for American Studies. It will take place at OCAD University, in downtown Toronto, from October 27th to 29th, 2017.

In her introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin writes that “the future, in fiction, is a metaphor.” In uncertain times, we look to the future as a blank screen for projecting our anxieties about the fraught present and unresolved past. Our fantasies about the future reveal the ideological constructs of our contemporary moment. “Science fiction is not predictive,” Le Guin writes. “It is descriptive.”

What does the future look like for Americans and observers of American culture in the 21st century? How have past Americans used the future to address lingering uncertainties about their own eras? In an age of fractured politics, environmental devastation, neoliberal innovation, and deadly imperialism, what hope can the future hold? And what can American Studies hope to teach us about the role of uncertainty and futurity in our daily lives?

We invite proposals for papers and other presentations on the topic of “Uncertain Futures.” We welcome approaches to this theme from all disciplines, fields, and historical periods. Papers on other topics relevant to American Studies will also be considered.

To participate, submit abstracts of 300 words to CAASfutures@gmail.com by March 15th, 2017. Please include a brief bio and five (5) keywords. Panel submissions and other presentation formats will be considered, but an abstract, bio, and keywords are required for each conference participant. Questions about the conference, or about submitting a proposal, can be sent to the lead conference organizer, Ross Bullen (OCAD University): rbullen@faculty.ocadu.ca. You can find additional information and updates about the conference here: https://uncertainfutures2017.wordpress.com/

Topics and themes might include (but are not limited to):

– Manifest destiny, the frontier thesis, and other imperial futures.

– Canada’s 150th anniversary and narratives of North American nationalism

– Reproductive futurism

– Living in Donald Trump’s America

– Queer futures

– Cruel optimism and the false promise of the future

– Afrofuturisms

– The Anthropocene

– Extinction

– 9.7 billion by 2050 / global population anxiety

– Climate migrants

– The future of global citizenship

– The future of energy

– Science fiction and speculative fiction

– Utopias and dystopias

– The future of literacy / the future of literary form

– The history of the future

– The temporality of representations

– Accelerationism, nihilism, and utopia

– The singularity (and its gender politics)

– Back to the future: futurism and primitivism

– Digital futures

– The future of money

– Indigenous futures

– The racialization of futurity

– Critiques of linear temporality

– The future of the university

Deadline for submissions: March 1, 2017
Full name / name of organization: Lara Saguisag
Contact email: lara.saguisag@csi.cuny.edu
In 2013, Bill de Blasio’s mayoral campaign ran on the theme of “A Tale of Two Cities.” The narrative that New York is a deeply divided city – one that is simultaneously the world’s capital of finance and culture and an unfortunate model of economic and social inequality – struck a chord with many voters. This panel will examine the ways in which children’s and young adult literature set in New York City expresses, reinforces, confronts and/or overlooks this image of the city as fractured and unequal. Papers may consider questions such as: how does children’s and young adult literature represent (or ignore) the diversity of New York City childhoods? How do texts written for children and adolescents imagine the lives and concerns of young people who witness and/or experience homelessness, racist policing and/or hunger in a city considered to be a thriving center of finance, multiculturalism and the culinary arts? In what ways do these texts address the city’s paradoxes (its embrace and alienation of immigrant populations, its denouncement and enabling of Wall Street rapacity)? How do narratives for children reinforce and/or interrogate stereotypes of “urban youth”?

Send abstracts (300-500 words) and a short bio (50-75 words) to Lara Saguisag (lara.saguisag@csi.cuny.edu) by March 1, 2017.

PLEASE NOTE: This CFP is for a proposed, not a guaranteed, session at the 2018 MLA Annual Convention (January 4 – 7, 2018; New York City). For your abstract to be included in the session proposal, you must agree to join MLA or renew your membership no later than April 7, 2017. The MLA Program Committee will review all session proposals in May 2017.

Deadline for submissions: January 6, 2017

Full name / name of organization: Percival Everett International Society
Contact email: anne-laure.tissut@univ-rouen.fr
The American Literature Association Annual Conference Boston

May 25-28 2017

Percival Everett International Society call for papers

The Percival Everett International Society requests submissions for its panels at the annual conference of the American Literature Association. Submissions will present fresh perspectives on any aspect of Everett’s work, with an emphasis on, but not limited to, his earliest or most recent work.

Please submit brief proposals of no more than 250 words to Anne-Laure Tissut (anne-laure.tissut@univ-rouen.fr) by January 6, 2017, so that they can be reviewed before the conference proposal deadline. Selections will be made by the end of January 2017.

Deadline for submissions: February 24, 2017
Full name / name of organization: Shifting Tides, Anxious Borders (STAB), Binghamton University
Contact email: jfitzge4@binghamton.edu

Shifting Tides, Anxious Borders: A Graduate Student Conference in Transnational American Studies (8th Annual)

Binghamton University

Saturday, April 8, 2017

Keynote: Russ Castronovo, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Deadline for Proposal Submission: February 24th, 2016

“Shifting Tides, Anxious Borders” is an interdisciplinary graduate conference dedicated to exploring the changing contours of the field of American Studies. This year’s conference theme, “Globalizing the Commons, Localizing the Transnational”, focuses on the transnational turn in American Studies in an effort to re-think the field imaginary, paying particular attention to the intersecting sites of identity, community, nation, and globalization along with the methodological trajectories which make these sites legible. Keeping in mind recent anthological interventions—Globalizing American Studies (2010), Re-Framing the Transnational Turn in American Studies (2011), and American Studies as Transnational Practice (2015), to name just a few—the conference seeks to investigate the conditions through which discussions of the transnational dialectically broaden the scope of the field while underestimating the nuances of the local, and, by the same concern, how local attentiveness precludes visibility of global, coalitional resistance.

In keeping with this year’s focus, we seek papers concerned with the relationships between conceptions of the local, national, and the global, as well as the liminality inherent to the delineation of these spaces. In lieu of examining the well-trodden ground of ‘the state of the field’ and resonant attempts to redefine American studies itself, we encourage papers that attend to more interdisciplinary limits of subjectivity, the state, and global community. We seek papers that localize the transnational, totalize the provincial, and speak to the constituting horizons necessarily produced by these methodologies.

Redolent questions include: How does the global trajectory of capitalism become individualized in neoliberalism? What are the resonances between the global war on terror and the militarization of local police forces? How do identitarian frameworks potentialize coalition while restricting conditions of belonging? More broadly speaking, when considering the roots of the transnational turn are found in the transatlantic, how can we resituate and trouble Occidental cultural dialogues between the United States and Europe? Finally, how is the totalizing schema of the anthropocene configured along local and global registers, and how does this schema’s ontological?

To submit a paper proposal, send a 250-word abstract to shiftingborders@gmail.com. To submit a panel proposal, include the names and email addresses of three participants, with individual paper abstracts and a 150-word abstract uniting them. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

Archipelagos and the Transnational Pacific
The Speculative Limits of Finance Capital
Racialized Transatlantic Histories and Communities
Mapping Subject and Species through Biopower
Relationships between Isolationism and American Empire
Feminist Coalition / Resistance and Co-opting Identity
Trauma in the Local/Transnational Sites of War on Terror
Localized Translations / Globalized Dialects
Multiculturalism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Individual
Dronification as / and Destabilized Imperial Violence

Deadline for submissions: January 15, 2017

Full name / name of organization: New England American Studies Association
Contact email: kathryn.edney@regiscollege.edu
New England American Studies Association (NEASA)– Call for Papers

Hoaxes, Humbugs, Pranks and Play: Functions and Expressions of Foolery in American Society and Culture

March 10-11, 2017

Boston University

The New England American Studies Association’s (NEASA) annual spring conference offers an opportune moment to pursue connotations of playfulness and trickery, and of enjoyment and leisure. The emergence of myriad manifestations and sites of playfulness across social sectors has profoundly impacted American society and culture. Childhood has become a playful time to be treasured; diversionary activities have come to dominate cultural products; even nostalgia has acquired a pronounced lucidity. Play is also big business: gaming, sports, and other recreation activities are their own sectors of the economy. We therefore invite contributions that interrogate, reflect on, and celebrate the changing functions and sites of playfulness and trickery in American society and culture.

Topics to consider include:

The material culture of play (boardgames, cards, videogames, etc.)
Tricksters in literature
Hoaxes and humbugs in history, politics and popular culture
“Playing” in archives and the joys of research
Playfulness and pedagogy
Gamification
The disruptive power of play
Children at play
Leisure culture
Sports and play
April Fool’s Day (history, popular culture representations, etc.)

In addition to individual paper proposals, we welcome submissions for roundtable discussions, hands-on workshops, and alternative format sessions (e.g.: film screenings, 5-minute micropapers). Submissions that do not address the conference theme will also be considered.

Individual proposals should include: 150-200 word abstract, presentation title, name, institutional affiliation, and contact email. For panel/roundtable proposals, in 200-500 words, please provide: session title, its topic, format, individual paper titles (as appropriate), as well as the names, institutional affiliations, and contact emails for each individual participant. All submissions should be sent to: neasacouncil@gmail.com by January 15, 2017.

For more information regarding NEASA, please visit our website: http://newenglandasa.tumblr.com/