Central Illinois Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference

Event: 24/03/2017 – 25/03/2016
Abstract: 12/01/2016
Categories: Graduate Conference
Location: Illinois State University, Normal, IL
Organization: ISU Society of English Graduate Scholars

The First Annual Central Illinois Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference is hosted by the Society of English Graduate Scholars at Illinois State University in Normal, IL and currently accepting presentation proposals. This year’s conference theme is the exploration of “the in-between” from diverse and varied scholarly perspectives.

Just as Edward Soja proposes in his theorizing of a Thirdspace, our goals with this year’s theme of the in-between are to “encourage you to think differently about the meanings and significance of space and those related concepts that compose and comprise the inherent spatiality of human life: place, location, locality, landscape, environment, home, city, region, territory, and geography.” The in-between represents a liminal space where everything comes together, where traditional understanding is necessarily complicated, and where uncertainty is most certain.

This conference is meant to be inclusive to a variety of disciplines and intellectual discourses. Potential paper topics to explore the in-between include but are certainly not limited to:

Borders and borderlands: geography, language, translation, lived spaces and experiences
Life and death: ghosts, zombies, vampires, Frankenstein’s monster, angels
Childhood and adulthood: adolescence, children’s literature, maturation
Human and technology: cyborgs and posthumanism, medicine
Text and image: postmodernism and picture books, graphic novels, ebooks, multimodality, emojis
Bodies: relationships, health, visible and invisible disabilities
Media: television, theatre, gaming, breaking the fourth wall
Cultural binaries: gender, sex, fluidity, religion, race, morality
Classrooms: interdisciplinary pedagogies, history of academia, mathematical creative writing
The conference will be held on Friday and Saturday, March 24­–25, 2017. All proposals may be submitted through our online form at ISUSEGS.tumblr.com. All proposals must be received by December 1, 2016.

Conference presentations follow a “long panel” format that provides 25 minutes for each presenter (typically 15 minutes to present followed by 10 minutes for questions). We accept proposals for individual and panel formats:

25­ minute individual presentation (includes time for questions)
50 ­minute panel presentation (2­–4 presenters)
75­ minute panel presentation (3­–5 presenters)
Through our online form at ISUSEGS.tumblr.com/propose2017, please submit a brief biography for each presenter (max 150 words) and an abstract for the presentation (max 250 words for single presentation, 500 words for panel.) Contact us for more information via at isuSEGS@gmail.com, like us on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/isuSEGS/ and follow us on Twitter @ISU_SEGS.

Deadline for submissions: January 20, 2017
Full name / name of organization: Society for the Study of Rebecca Harding Davis and Her World
Contact email: mischa.renfroe@mtsu.edu
The Society for the Study of Rebecca Harding Davis and Her World welcomes proposals for two sessions at the next meeting of the American Literature Association. The conference will be held May 25-28, 2017 in Boston, MA. For further information about the conference, please consult the ALA website at www.americanliterature.org.

1. Joint Session with the Louisa May Alcott Society: Rebecca Harding Davis (1831-1910) and Louisa May Alcott (1832 – 1888) witnessed dramatic changes in American culture throughout their lifetimes. As authors, they explored a variety of genres, including realist fiction (often oriented toward reform), gothic fiction, children’s literature, essays, and journalism. Both women viewed aspects of the Civil War firsthand, were troubled by the effects of industrialization and the factory system, critiqued the position of women in nineteenth-century culture and advocated for women’s rights. They also at times examined the tension between philosophical ideals and the pragmatic demands of daily life. Both women experienced the vicissitudes of publication, recognition, and careers in authorship. Davis and Alcott met during a visit Davis made to Concord in 1862. About this meeting, Alcott wrote in her Journal for May 1862 “Saw Miss Rebecca Harding, author of ‘Margaret Howth,’which has made quite a stir, and is very good. A handsome, fresh, quiet woman, who says she never has any troubles, though she writes about woes. I told her I had had lots of troubles; so I write jolly tales; and we wondered why we each did so.”

The two authors encountered each other again years later, and Davis recorded their meeting in Bits of Gossip (1904):

Years afterward she came to the city where I was living and I hurried to meet her. The lean, eager, defiant girl was gone, and instead, there came to greet me a large, portly, middle-aged woman, richly dressed. Everything about her, from her shrewd, calm eyes to the rustle of her satin gown told of assured success.

Yet I am sure fame and success counted for nothing with her except for the material aid which they enabled her to give to a few men and women whom she loved. . . . Louisa Alcott wrote books which were true and fine, but she never imagined a life as noble as her own.

To explore the connections between these two significant 19th-century women’s voices in greater depth, the Rebecca Harding Davis Society and the Louisa May Alcott Society will offer a joint panel at the American Literature Association in May 2017. We invite papers that examine how Alcott and Davis treat or respond to any of the issues mentioned in the opening paragraph.

Send brief abstracts by January 20, 2017 to Mischa Renfroe (Mischa.Renfroe@mtsu.edu) and Melissa Pennell (Melissa_Pennell@uml.edu)

2. Open Topic Session: We welcome proposals that engage any aspect of Davis’s work and are especially interested in new readings of neglected texts. Presenters must be members of the Society for the Study of Rebecca Harding Davis and Her World. For information about joining the society, please visit our website at http://scotus.francis.edu/rebeccahardingdavis/

Deadline: January 20, 2017

Please send a 200-250 word abstract to:

Mischa Renfroe

Middle Tennessee State University

mischa.renfroe@mtsu.edu

and

Sharon Harris
sharon.harris@uconn.edu

Deadline for submissions: January 22, 2017
Full name / name of organization: Jeff Birkenstein & Robert Hauhart/Saint Martin’s University
Contact email: jbirkenstein@stmartin.edu
CFP: Social Justice & American Literature

We seek essays of 5,000 to 6,000 words for an anthology that explores American literature through the lens of social justice. The volume will become a part of a popular literary series published by a major press.

We understand the term “social justice” to refer typically to the advancement of human rights—whether social, racial/cultural, economic, political, or many others besides—and are seeking essays that examine these advancements, or the lack thereof, through American literature. Many American writers have pursued themes of personal and community liberation from oppressive cultural forces. We seek criticism of important writers who have written movingly of their attempts to escape persecution by myriad forces, such as religious indoctrination from family and community; the pervasive, quasi-official heteronormativity supported by standard American culture; the solid, Midwestern American mantras of progress and optimism; or, the lamentable ignorance bred of poverty and isolation. Any American writings, and the authors who penned them, that embrace these or similar themes are well within the range of our interest.

“We, the people,” have long been told that, as John Winthrop put it before the country even existed in his 1630 sermon, “A Modell of Christian Charity”, the United States of America is as a “Shining City Upon a Hill”. While this colonialist perspective completely ignores the original inhabitants of this North American landmass, this idea nevertheless pervades both America’s history and present. Sometimes, even, this idea has been used to uplift peoples and make true social justice progress. Yet, this idea has just as often been used in the name of fear and provincialism and bigotry in order to squash progress, enslave peoples, and hinder all manner of advancement. This bipolar American personality, if you will, this bifurcated tension, has long been at the intersection of great American writing and attempts at social justice progress across a range of issues.

The United States has long been both a refuge for people and writers from many countries and, as a country, a strife-torn nation which has subjugated and oppressed many of its own residents. Thus, in our view, the phrase “social justice” involves not just American-born writers, but also those who have come to this country seeking a better life. Writers could include Harper Lee, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Kurt Vonnegut, Alice Walker, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Cormac McCarthy, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsburg, Walt Whitman, Zora Neale Hurston, Carson McCullers, J.D. Salinger, Upton Sinclair, Nathanael West, John Hersey, John Updike, Philip Roth, Amy Tam, Sandra Cisneros, Nella Larsen, Sinclair Lewis, Charles Bukowski, Octavia E. Butler, Tomás Rivera, Pat Conroy, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Hardwick, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Lorraine Hansberry, August Wilson, Tony Kushner, Amiri Baraka, Langston Hughes, Wendy Wasserstein, Anna Deavere Smith, Sylvia Plath, Louise Erdrich, Maya Angelou, Adrienne Rich, Julia Alvarez, Esmeralda Santiago, Luis Alberto Urrea, Rigoberto González, Rudolfo Anaya, Justin Torres, Jhumpa Lahiri, Maxine Hong Kingston, Porochista Khakpour, Chang-rae Lee, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Khaled Hosseini, Vu Tran, Bharati Mukherjee, Ta-Nehisi Coates, W.E.B. DuBois, Alex Haley, Saul Bellow, Gertrude Stein, Art Spiegelman, Tillie Olsen, Judy Blume, and many, many, many others. Of course, this is necessarily a partial list and we urge you to consider other relevant, well-known American writers who have made their voices known through their writing of social justice.

In line with the expectations of the Critical Insights (Salem Press) series, we seek essays that:

Provide undergraduate and advanced high school students with a comprehensive introduction to works and aspects of American writers whose work and/or lives explored social justice and that they are likely to encounter, discuss, and study in their classrooms;

Help students build a foundation for studying the works and aspects in greater depth by introducing them to key concepts, contexts, critical approaches, and critical vocabulary found in the scholarship relating to social justice and American literature.

This collection will attempt to cover a variety of American cultures and historical periods and envisions understanding the intersection of our contemporary world and various social justice-minded writers in new cultural, historical, spatial, and epistemological frameworks. How does literary production in an increasingly globalized world—when seen through the lens of the search for social justice—serve this search? How does exile push a writer to look outward to new social justice space(s)? How does (do) your chosen text(s) construct meaning at/in/against the context of a globalized, dehumanizing, suffocating, and endless movement of goods and services and ideas across significant regional and international boundaries, often with the goal of silencing local voices and cultures? These and other questions are important to investigate about American social justice writers and, taken in sum, we intend to have an academically rigorous, interesting, and cohesive volume on the topic.

The volumes follow a uniform format, including four original introductory essays as follows:

*a “critical lens” chapter (5,000 words; offers a close reading of the topic embodying a particular critical standpoint)

*a “cultural and historical context” chapter (5,000 words; addresses how the subject at hand influences the theme(s) of social justice across different time periods and American cultures, as well as what continues to make the concept relevant to a contemporary audience)

*a “compare/contrast” chapter (5,000 words; analyzes the topic of social justice with regard to two or three different works, or authors, with some reference to the similarities and differences of their experiences.)

*a “critical reception” chapter (5,000 words; surveys major pieces of comment or criticism on social justice and the major concerns, or aspects, that commentators on the topic have attended to over the years)

The book will also include ten or eleven additional chapters that analyze the themes that pervade the experience of American literature and social justice and focus specific attention on some of the best works and/or authors in the “genre.” Each essay will be about 5,000 words. Together, these chapters will offer readers a comprehensive introduction to the essential themes that arise from the lives and works of those writers who sought, or are yet seeking, increased social justice as they reflect major critical approaches to the topic.

Writers are expected to:

Center their essays on works, topics, and critical approaches that are commonly studied, or perhaps should be, at the advanced high school and undergraduate levels and are representative of foundational and mainstream critical discourse about social justice in the United States. Topics and critical approaches should be neither dated, nor so cutting edge as to risk becoming dated in 5 to 10 years.

For the introductory critical reception and cultural/historical context essays, writers should not devote their essays to selective critical approaches or contexts. Rather, the introductory critical reception essay should offer readers a comprehensive overview of the body of criticism or comment on American social justice, and the introductory cultural/historical context should consider a variety of contexts in which the topic is commonly situated. If you wish your proposal to fulfill one of these overarching thematic goals, please say so in your communication to us.

Abstracts of around 500 words & CV by January 22, 2017 to:

Jeff Birkenstein, Ph.D. Robert Hauhart, J.D., Ph.D.

Department of English Department of Society & Social Justice

jbirkenstein@stmartin.edu

rhauhart@stmartin.edu

Saint Martin’s University

5000 Abbey Way SE

Lacey, WA 98503

To the extent that you are already working on author(s) that would be relevant to this volume, and have an interest in our CFP, please contact us to discuss the possibilities. The co-editors have extensive editorial experience, including successful preparation of a companion text, Critical Insights: American Writers in Exile (see http://store.salempress.com/products/9781619255173).

Completed first drafts of around 5,000 words by April 30, 2017.

Deadline for submissions: January 15, 2017
Full name / name of organization: Tana Jean Welch / Florida State University
Contact email: tana.welch@med.fsu.edu
American Documentary Poetics

CFP for American Literature Association (ALA) 28th Annual Conference

May 25-28, 2017, Boston, MA

Call for papers on any topic related to American docupoetics/investigative poetics. Part documentary, part imagination, investigative poetry incorporates a variety of data and reportage into the poem—including photos and images, testimonials, interviews, facts and figures—in order to explore the historical and political conditions of contemporary culture.

Submit 250 to 500-word abstracts and a CV, by January 15, 2017, to Tana Jean Welch, Florida State University, at tana.welch@med.fsu.edu.

Deadline for submissions: August 30, 2017

Full name / name of organization: The International Hemingway Society
Contact email: mattcnickel@gmail.com
XVIII International Hemingway Conference

HEMINGWAY IN PARIS

“Paris est une fête” . . . Hemingway’s Moveable Feast

JULY 22-28, 2018

Conference Co-Directors: H. R. Stoneback & Matthew Nickel

Paris Site Coordinators: Alice Mikal Craven & William E. Dow

Host Institution: The American University of Paris

Mark your calendars now for what promises to be an amazing conference in Paris, July 22-28, 2018. Paris is Hemingway’s moveable feast. A major concern of the conference directors is to make this a truly international conference. To that end, committees have already been established to ensure the input and participation of French, European, Asian and worldwide Hemingway scholars and aficionados. If you have special knowledge and expertise in the matter of France, or useful French and Parisian contacts, or you would like to serve on a Paris 2018 Conference Committee (or suggest on-site individuals who might serve on such committees), let us know as soon as possible. And please invite and encourage your colleagues and students and friends to be there with us—in Paris, with Hemingway.

Our Host Institution will be The American University of Paris, centrally located in the heart of historic Paris, in the 7th arrondissement near the Seine and the Eiffel Tower, yet far enough from the madding tourist crowd to guarantee an authentic and idyllic Parisian experience for Hemingway conferees. From our home-base academic sessions at AUP to special sessions at The Sorbonne, from a cocktail or dinner bateau mouche boat-ride on the Seine to a dazzling array of other special events now being investigated and considered from among l’embarras des richesses that Paris has to offer—an overabundant embarrassment of riches and choices—we promise that this conference is not to be missed. (And this word from an old Paris hand: don’t be scared by that word “riches”—Paris is inexpensive compared with some of our conference venues and our recommended hotel list in Paris 2018 will be less expensive than most hotels in Oak Park in 2016, Venice in 2014, etc.)

Enthusiasm for the Paris 2018 conference is running high, in the U.S. and abroad. One reason to be in Paris in 2018 is the truly once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to participate in the global commemoration of the First World War Centenary and to do so in Paris, at the heart of such commemorations. Papers and panels on all aspects of Hemingway studies are welcome. Stay tuned. Watch for the CFP coming soon. Follow the news on the Hemingway Society website <hemingwaysociety.org>.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Presentations and panels on all aspects of Hemingway Studies are welcome. The above description and following list are suggestive rather than definitive, though they do represent the broad scope of the conference and post-conference essay collection:

World War I, Wounds, Soldiers, Veterans, War Poetry, Battlefields; Armistice Day; The Centenary Retrospect; World War II, the Liberation of Paris, Memoir, Memory, Concussions, New Wounds, New Wives;
The Local: Paris, the Luxembourg Garden, Museums, Montmartre, Place de la Contrescarpe, Montparnasse, Latin Quarter, the Seine, Île St. Louis; Imagining Paris; Food & Drink; Hemingway’s uses of Parisian and French settings in his fiction, journalism, poetry, and memoir;
Travel throughout Europe: France, Spain, Italy, Austria, Germany; Sports: Cycling, Boxing, Skiing, Swimming, Toreo, Fishing, Hunting; Feasts and Festivals, Pilgrimages, Hikes;
Journalism, Reporting from abroad, Greco-Turkish War, Politics; Writing in Paris, Displacement, Roman à clef; Trains, Transportation; Borders, Symbolic-Landscape;
Expatriates, Writers, Artists, Musicians, Movements, Gossip; Away from home, Nostalgia; Religion, Conversion, Catholicism, Marriage, Divorce, Exile; Irony & Pity; Fashion;
Hemingway as Character: Movies, Novels, Pop-Culture; Influence, Resonance, Intertextualities;
One-page abstracts and 40-word professional bio to Matthew Nickel by email (mattcnickel@gmail.com) or post (Department of English, Misericordia University, 301 Lake Street, Dallas, PA 18612), by 30 August 2017.

Deadline for submissions: November 21, 2016
Full name / name of organization: ALA Symposium–Criminal America: Reading, Studying and Teaching American Crime Fiction
Contact email: lpennywa@purdue.edu
The hard-boiled in crime and detective fiction is frequently associated with a nostalgia for an imagined white, working-class, American masculinity. Yet, women writers and characters also address the hard-boiled, often in order to modify, critique, or resituate it within cultural frameworks.

This panel invites papers that explore how women writers and characters disrupt dominant understandings of the hard-boiled in US crime and detective fiction. What does hard-boiled femininity look like? Under what circumstances is it possible? What strategies do women writers use when writing within the genre of hard-boiled fiction? How does hard-boiled femininity intersect with or challenge popular representations of race and class within crime and detective narratives?

Please send 300 word abstracts by November 21, 2016 to lpennywa@purdue.edu.

“Goin’ Up Yonder”: Sounding a Secular/Sacred American South in Gospel Music Performance
Event: 04/08/2017 – 04/08/2017
Abstract: 12/31/2016
Categories: American, African-American, Comparative, Gender & Sexuality, Graduate Conference, Interdisciplinary, Cultural Studies, Popular Culture
Location: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Organization: Department of English & Comparative Literature

At times of great political unrest and/or aesthetic stagnancy, black artists and leaders often have looked to the church and its music to provide a source for renewed inspiration and spiritual reassurance. Both W.E.B. Du Bois’s descriptions of the early “sorrow songs” and Amiri Baraka’s designation of the black church as the “focal point” of the earliest black social life lend to an understanding of gospel music as a unique sonic space, historically, in which the black soul is made legible for public consumption. As such, the continuing place of gospel music as a key component of African American religious and cultural practice cannot be given enough scholarly attention. Recent reimaginings of gospel music within hip hop culture, including Kanye West’s Life of Pablo and Chance the Rapper’s Coloring Book, provide small glimpses into how the genre continues to define popular concepts of blackness in the United States—particularly in artistic renderings of black community, the South, and a more-inclusive future America.

This one-day symposium, to be held at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, welcomes papers that examine gospel music performance in literary texts, widely imagined, particularly as they relate to experiences of belonging, as they mediate ideas of an “old South” and “new south,” and as they explore black identity at the cusp of these shifting landscapes. In particular, this symposium will consider gospel’s return to its “southern roots” as a stage for contemplating historical and contemporary black cultural performances, and as a necessary meditation on literary, musical, and artistic experimentation in the figuring of blackness/the South/America. We encourage examinations of gospel music or gospel soundings and/in the literary text that imagine the future possibilities of the genre as it might be used to figure race, gender, sexuality, and belonging in the United States. Papers are welcomed by authors from a diverse array of academic disciplines, including (but not limited to) American studies, English literature, comparative literatures, history, religious studies, ethnomusicology, and gender and sexuality studies.

Possible topics may include (but also are not limited to) the following:
-The idea of boundaries in gospel music: past/present/future, black/non-black, religious/secular, Southern/Northern, church/club, spiritual/non-spiritual, rural/urban/suburban
-Constructions of gender, race, nation, boundary, the South, the rural, the urban in gospel music
-Reimagining the American South through the discourse of gospel music
-The future of gospel and its ability to help imagine future possibilities for racialized identity
-The vexed site of secularization/popularization/commercialization within contemporary gospel music
-Intersections between gospel music and hip-hop culture, or other vernacular forms (blues, jazz, soul, funk, and so forth)
-The representation of gospel music and performance in literature
-Spirituality and the performance of blackness in music/literature of all genres
-Mergers of past and future in the discourse of gospel music
-Gospel music and Afro-Futurism
-Gospel music and Feminism
-Gospel music and Humanism
-Gospel music and Sexuality
-Gospel music in international contexts
-British Black gospel music
-Gospel music of the Caribbean
-Southern gospel music

Please submit an abstract of no more than 250 words, as well as a short biography that includes any academic title and/or affiliation, to [UNCGospelSymposium@gmail.com] by December 31, 2016. We strongly encourage panel presentations organized by applicants. If you wish to submit a panel presentation, please include the abstracts of all panel members together along with the contact information for the panel organizer. Decisions about acceptance will be sent by January 15, 2017, along with the announcement of our Keynote Speaker and symposium performances.

For more information, please direct all queries to the symposium’s organizers:
Andrew Belton (abelton@email.unc.edu) and
Kimberly Burnett (klgibbs@email.unc.edu)