Event: 03/15/2017 – 03/18/2017
Abstract: 01/06/2017
Categories: American, 20th & 21st Century, African-American, British, 20th & 21st Century, Comparative, Digital Humanities, German, Interdisciplinary, Anthropology/Sociology, Cultural Studies, Environmental Studies, Film, TV, & Media, History, Popular Culture, Women’s Studies
Location: Richland Washington
Organization: Washington State University

The Manhattan Project was, arguably, the defining event of the twentieth century. More even than the Second World War itself, the Manhattan Project and its Cold War legacy altered the course of world history. For decades shrouded in secrecy and nourished by fear, we are only now—some seventy-five years on—beginning to understand the full effects of that event and its complex aftermath.

Predictably, then, the various legacies of the Manhattan Project have been central to a remarkably diverse and cross-disciplinary body of scholarship. Moreover, ongoing declassification of Manhattan Project-era materials and opening of archives has allowed access to new sources that have forced reevaluations of key decisions and outcomes in virtually every field of research touching on the atomic and nuclear age.

“Legacies of the Manhattan Project” will bring these disparate academic conversations together at a key moment for understanding the origins and consequences of our nuclear past, present, and future.

We invite papers that deal with any aspect of this topic, regardless of disciplinary perspective. Possible themes include (but are not limited to) reconsiderations of

· the rise of the military-industrial complex
· the history of science and technology
· the sociology and politics of the Cold War
· environmental impacts and waste remediation
· literatures of the environment
· the impact of technology on the American West and its
indigenous and settler cultures.

We welcome submissions from both established and emerging scholars for 20 minute panel papers, panel proposals of 3-4 panelists, and plenary sessions of no more than 60 minutes.

Please direct abstracts (not to exceed 250 words) and inquiries to ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu.

Deadline for submissions: January 15, 2017

Full name / name of organization: Midwest Modern Lanugage Association
Contact email: mmla@luc.edu
In the opening pages of Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues (1995), Spokane Indian storyteller Thomas Builds-the-Fire comes into ownership of legendary African American bluesman Robert Johnson’s guitar, a magical object that both furthers his band’s musical aptitude and reopens the scars of historical memory. In Gish Jen’s Mona in the Promised Land (1996), her titular Chinese-American protagonist, newly-relocated to an affluent New York suburb, converts to Judaism, arguing to her mother, “we are a minority, like it or not, and if you want to know how to be a minority, there’s nobody better at it than the Jews.”

Some of the most prominent controversies in literature today have focused on the issue of majority appropriation of minority cultures. In 2015, for example, Alexie himself, as guest editor of Best American Poetry, unwittingly included a poem written by a white writer under a Chinese pseudonym–and defended its continued inclusion once the subterfuge was revealed. More recently, memoirist Yassmin Abdel-Magied scathingly repudiated novelist Lionel Shriver’s “Fiction and Identity Politics” address at the 2016 Brisbane Writers Festival, which defended cultural appropriation as part of the work of fiction. Literature like Reservation Blues or Mona in the Promised Land, however, introduces a different conversation about inter-ethnicity. This conversation may gesture towards horizontal relations, attempt to create inter-ethnic coalitions, reveal new contours to inter-ethnic conflict, or raise questions about the investigation and understanding of literary histories beyond the juxtaposition of white and non-white.

This special issue of the Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association (JMMLA) invites submissions that engage the politics, practices, representations, and meanings of inter-ethnicity, including new parameters for literary studies that arise from inter-ethnic literary histories.

Submissions are due January 15, 2017 to guest editor Emily Lutenski at mmla@luc.edu and should follow MLA guidelines for manuscripts.

Deadline for submissions: January 30, 2017

Full name / name of organization: Edited by Matthew Shipe, Yoav Fromer, and Scott Dill

Contact email: politicalupdike@gmail.com
Recent scholarship on John Updike—especially since his death in 2009 and the subsequent opening up of his personal papers at Houghton Library—has begun to shed light on his still overlooked, albeit extremely fecund, political mindset. A Political Companion to John Updike will seek to establish a new scholarly foundation for this exciting and burgeoning field in Updike studies by inviting scholars to submit essays that employ multiple perspectives and fresh interdisciplinary approaches to better understanding the kinds of political questions Updike’s writing addresses. Like Updike himself, this volume aims to be extremely inclusive and eclectic; conceiving of politics in the broadest manner, we seek works that deal with a variety of issues; from the traditional aspects of power, rights, equality, justice or violence, to more subversive elements that Updike may have preferred to avoid dealing with directly—and that therefore might be of even greater interest—like race, gender, queerness, imperialism, hegemony and technology.

From the inter-generational debates between Connor and Hook in his debut novel The Poorhouse Fair (1959) to the religious violence of Terrorist (2008), Updike in his fiction explicitly and implicitly addressed the pressing political concerns of its era and has much to teach us about American political culture and its problems since WWII. In its attention to the interlocking circles of global, national, local, and domestic power, his fiction consistently affirms Aristotle’s characterization of humans as first and foremost political animals while also highlighting the perennial challenge of reconciling this with the strong individualist ethos entrenched in American culture. A writer rather than a philosopher, Updike in his novels and short fiction deployed uniquely literary ways of framing a variety of political questions. If The Coup (1978) describes the contradictions of American foreign policy, it does so through the stylized sentences of an African dictator’s bemused memories. Likewise, Memories of the Ford Administration (1992) and Buchanan Dying (1974) fill the halls of American power with the comic foibles of intimately rendered private failures that help us understand the intimate relationship between the political and the personal. The list could go on—of scenes of domestic power plays and gender politics, from Cold War fears to cultural tourism, racial tensions and class conflicts, the changing flows of capital and shifts in mass production, evolving religious demographics and the evisceration of urban decay. More than any of his literary peers, Updike found a way to champion the politics of the US’s liberal individualism while laying bare its internal contradictions.

We are particularly interested in engaging Updike’s later (or less explored) works, though welcome proposals about all of his writings (both fiction and non-fiction). Please send 300-400 word abstracts and a 1 page CV to politicalupdike@gmail.com. The deadline for proposals is Monday, January 30th, 2017. Chapters should be 6,000-9,000 words (including endnotes and works cited) and follow the guidelines established by The Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition. For inquiries about the volume, please contact the coeditors: Scott Dill (sdd46@case.edu), Yoav Fromer (fromy857@newschool.edu), and Matthew Shipe (mashipe@wustl.edu).

Deadline for submissions: May 15, 2017

Full name / name of organization: American Literature Association
contact email: skosiba@troy.edu
Call for Papers

American Literature Association Symposium

September 7-9, 2017

Hotel Monteleone, New Orleans, Louisiana

Regionalism and Place in American Literature

American regional writing, as a literary movement, often has a limited association with a few decades during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. At times, many writers have cringed at being described as “regional,” fearing limiting or marginalizing classification. Other writers have embraced the term. However, more recent research has often argued for a renewed importance in regional scholarship or the scholarship of place and has redefined how we look at canonical definitions of regionalism and place. This symposium seeks to deepen our understanding of the importance of regionalism and place in past and present American literature by continuing to question spatial boundaries and definitions. Are regions confined to big patches of landscape or can cities and neighborhoods be regional? How do we address or define more recent regional concepts like the “Postsouthern” or “Postwestern”? What does regionalism look like in the 21st century and how does it define (or fail to define) our sense of place? What is it to publish or write “regionally”? We welcome paper proposals, panels and roundtable discussions on all aspects of regionalism and place within American literature and particularly encourage interdisciplinary papers and projects.

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Michael Steiner, Emeritus Professor of American Studies, California State University, Fullerton

One page proposals or panel suggestions can be sent to program director Dr. Sara Kosiba at skosiba@troy.edu by May 15th, 2017.

Deadline for submissions: January 4, 2017

Full name / name of organization: Emily Dickinson International Society
Contact email: mkohler@tulane.edu
Calls for Papers

Emily Dickinson International Society: ALA 2017

The Emily Dickinson International Society will sponsor two sessions at the 2017 American Literature Association Annual Conference. ALA conference will be held in Boston, May 25-28, 2017. Please send a 300-word abstract and a brief CV to Michelle Kohler (mkohler@tulane.edu) and Renee Bergland (renee.bergland@simmons.edu) by January 4, 2017.

Panel 1: Dickinson and Violence

We welcome papers that consider the significance of violence within Dickinson’s corpus. For example, papers might offer new approaches to Dickinson’s poetic treatment of war violence, slavery, criminality, natural disaster, violence toward or among animals, theodicy, racial or gendered violence, as well as more metaphorical forms of violence, to language, paper, syntax, decorum, etc.

Panel 2: Emily Dickinson, Open Topic

We invite papers on any aspect of Dickinson’s poems and letters, including multi-disciplinary or multi-author.