Deadline for submissions: September 30, 2017
Full name/name of organization: Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)
Contact email: jhotz@esu.edu

Art, Responsibility, and Satire: The Challenges of Kurt Vonnegut’s Fiction

This panel for the 2018 Annual Convention for the Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA), to be held in Pittsburgh, PA, from April 12 to April 15, 2018, will examine the fiction of Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) on the eleventh anniversary of the author’s death on April 11, 2007.

Kurt Vonnegut’s fourteen novels and three short story collections, written over the course of five decades, express complex, sometimes shifting views about the meaning of art and the dimensions of human responsibility. Throughout his fiction, Vonnegut remained a committed satirist. Over a series of interviews with The Paris Review in the 1970s, Vonnegut described fiction itself as an inherently humorous endeavor: “If you make people laugh or cry about little black marks on sheets of white paper, what is that but a practical joke? All the great story lines are great practical jokes that people fall for over and over again.”

This panel seeks papers that explore the challenges of Kurt Vonnegut’s fiction, particularly in relation to his evolving artistic vision in the various phases of his career; his speculations about human agency and responsibility; and his use of satire and humor. Papers may focus on single works or multiple books, and consider any number of topics and subtopics that touch on these larger themes.

Paper proposals (300 words) may be submitted between June 15, 2017, and September 30, 2017, and must be posted through NEMLA’s online system at https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/cfp.

The panel description and link to submit an abstract for this panel are available at https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/17066.

Decision emails will be sent out after the submission deadline, no later than October 15, 2017. NeMLA requires that accepted panelists pay their membership/registration fees by December 1, 2017, in order to present at the 2018 convention. Please send any questions about the specific panel to Jeffrey Hotz at jhotz@esu.edu.

Deadline for submissions: September 30, 2017
Full name/name of organization: Northeastern Modern Language Association
Contact email: ed.simon@themarginaliareview.com
Since the 1939 publication of Perry Miller’s classic The New England Mind early Americanists have acknowledged the fundamental role New English Puritanism played in the subsequent development of American culture. Scholars like Edmund Morgan, Sacvan Bercovitch, Andrew Delbanco and many others have placed New England at the center of the development of American identity. Yet in the past generation, other scholars have broadened an understanding of regionalism in the construction of American nationhood, with many focusing on the polyglot, multiethnic and religiously non-conformist colonies of New York, New Jersey, and especially Pennsylvania. This panel asks for papers that help to recontextualize the central role that the middle colonies, and in particular Pennsylvania’s far western frontier, held in the future development of American culture. How did the Mid-Atlantic contribute to later understandings of religious pluralism and multiculturalism? Potential topics could include Mid-Atlantic religious literature, including discussions of the Society of Friends, Moravians, German pietism, Dutch Reformed churches, Anabaptists including the Brethren as well as the Amish and Mennonites, as well as smaller sects including the Ephrata colonists and the Society of the Women in the Wilderness, and general religious culture from the first to the second Great Awakenings. Other papers could examine the culture and literature of European colonialism in the Mid-Atlantic from the English, Dutch, and Swedish, as well as interactions with native populations including the Lenape and the Iroquois, racial conflicts such as those involving the Paxton Boys or Pontiac’s siege on Fort Pitt, German Pennsylvanians, Huguenot immigration to Pennsylvania and Delaware, Presbyterian immigration on the western frontier, linguistic diversity in the Mid-Atlantic, military history including the Seven Years War and the Revolutionary War, as well as Mid-Atlantic writers including Benjamin Franklin, Charles Brockden Brown, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, Benjamin Banneker, and Francis Daniel Pastorius among others.

Please simulaneously submit abstracts to both Ed Simon, associate editor of The Marginalia Review of Books (ed.simon@themarginaliareview.com), as well as through the Northeastern Modern Language Association’s online submission form.

Deadline for submissions: June 15, 2017
Full name/name of organization: Amber P. Hodge, University of Mississippi
Contact email: ahodge@go.olemiss.edu
Although popular culture has gained significant traction as a subject worthy of intellectual consideration over the last decade, a divide between popular and canonical persists. The academy may have instituted a boundary distinguishing high culture from low, but film and television regularly crosses these fabricated borders as popular media evokes the canon. From Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) to Penny Dreadful (2014–2016), the most successful narratives among millennial viewers (roughly, those born 1982–2004) share a common theme, the incorporation of texts considered canonical into popular storylines. For example, films such as She’s the Man (2006) and The Great Gatsby (2013) contextualize classic literature within a contemporary aesthetic. What does media that evokes or adapts the canon have to say about the priorities of millennial viewers? How does contemporary culture impact classic literature (and vice versa)? This panel will examine these and related questions on the intersection of popular culture and the canon as they relate specifically to a millennial audience, exploring how traditional narratives function in a post-9/11, social media-driven age. By June 15, please send a 300-word abstract, brief bio, and A/V requirements to Amber P. Hodge, University of Mississippi, at ahodge@go.olemiss.edu.

Deadline for submissions: July 31, 2017
Full name/name of organization: John Buchtel / Bibliographical Society of America
Contact email: jb593@georgetown.edu
Each year, the Bibliographical Society of America (BSA) invites three scholars in the early stages of their careers to present twenty-minute papers on their current, unpublished research in the field of bibliography as members of a panel at the BSA’s Annual Meeting, which takes place in New York City in late January. The New Scholars Program seeks to promote the work of scholars who are new to the field of bibliography, broadly defined to include any research that deals with the creation, production, publication, distribution, reception, transmission, and subsequent history of texts as material objects (print or manuscript). Those selected for the panel receive $600 toward the cost of attending the Annual Meeting and a complimentary one-year membership in the BSA. For more about the New Scholars Program and application procedures, see: http://bibsocamer.org/awards/new-scholars-program/.

One-day international workshop organised by the Invasion Network at Lancaster University, 8th September 2017.

Key-note speaker: Professor Emeritus David Glover

Call for Papers Deadline: 31st July 2017

Hosted by the Department of History, Lancaster University and supported by the Irish Research Council, this is the second international workshop of the Invasion Network, a group of social and cultural historians, literary scholars, and a range of other specialists and independent researchers working under the broad theme of invasion, with a particular focus on British invasion fears in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. ‘War of the Worlds: Transnational Fears of Invasion and Conflict 1870-1933’ seeks to expand this focus geographically to consider the fear of invasion as a global phenomenon and temporally to take in the period between the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1) and the rise of the German Third Reich. We invite papers that consider invasion fears in any region in which the fear became a notable social phenomenon and/or analysing how fears of invasion and future conflict expressed in different nations and regions informed each other. Papers may consider any form of representation – fictional, journalistic, visual, etc. Possible areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

• European fears of invasion and future conflict
• U.S. fears of invasion and future conflict
• Fears of invasion in the colonial and quasi-colonial territories of the British empire – including but not limited to Ireland, India, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa, Latin America, South East Asia and coastal China – including the fears of the colonised and the colonisers
• Global concerns about mass migration
• International espionage, secret societies, terrorism and anarchism
• Sinophobia and Russophobia
• Invasion fears in war time (such as Zeppelin scares) and in the interwar period
• The global circulation and reception of invasion texts
• Female authors and readers, and gendered aspects of international invasion fears

The workshop is aimed at all levels of academic scholarship, and we are especially keen to receive paper proposals from postgraduate students and early-career researchers. Please send abstracts of 300 words and a short biographical note (150 words) to Dr Harry Wood (harry.1.wood@kcl.ac.uk) and Dr Ailise Bulfin (bulfinam@tcd.ie) by 31st July 2017. Enquiries also to these addresses.

For more information on the Invasion Network: https://invasionnetwork.wordpress.com/.

Deadline for submissions: June 26, 2017
Full name / name of organization: Kimberly Drake, Scripps College
Contact email: kdrake@scrippscollege.edu
This panel explores the conference theme of sight, vision, and visibility as it operates in American literature and visual media by and about people with disabilities. How can disability studies concepts intervene interpretively in literature preoccupied by enlightenment, transcendence, and disembodiment; mobility, virility, and contamination; and racial/class (in)visibility?

Individual paper presentations will be between 15 and 20 minutes long. Please submit proposals via the online system by June 26, 2017. The PAMLA 2017 Conference will be held at the lovely Chaminade University of Honolulu (with the official conference hotel being the Ala Moana) from Friday, November 10 to Sunday, November 12.

Paper proposals must be made via our online system found here:

http://pamla.org/2017/topic-areas

Any questions can be sent to the above email address.

Deadline for submissions: September 30, 2017
Full name/name of organization: Betina Entzminger
Contact email: bentzmin@bloomu.edu
Joyce Carol Oates is one of America’s most prolific and celebrated living writers. Her short fiction and novels frequently explore spaces and the borders surrounding them: for example, the physical spaces of the home in “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” or a car sinking in Black Water, the border between reality and the imagined in Blonde, the psychic and ideological spaces that separate individuals in A Book of American Martyrs. What forces create and maintain these spaces? What are the costs and benefits of blurring or crossing these borders? How do these different types of spaces–physical, social, psychic, and imaginary—constrain or intensify one another? This panel at the 2018 NeMLA Conference will include essays that explore these questions in Oates’s fictional works, along with the larger question of how Oates’s oeuvre records and analyzes the complex physical, social, imagined, and psychic space of American life. Abstracts must be submitted on the NEMLA website https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/login by September 30. The 2018 NEMLA convention will take place in Pittsburgh on April 12-15.

Deadline for submissions: June 15, 2017
Full name/name of organization: Culture, Theory and Critique
Contact email: culturetheoryandcritique@gmail.com

Call for Papers

Culture, Theory and Critique

Special Issue:

“The Social Life of Corruption in Latin America”

Issue Editors:

Donna M. Goldstein and Kristen Drybread

Introduction

The aim of this special issue of Culture, Theory, and Critique is to examine the social meanings and effects of corruption in Latin America. While remaining attentive to the enduring and pronounced forms of corruption in the region, we seek to explore how recent political, financial, and media events signal the emergence of novel forms of white collar crime and corruption, which require us to rethink the operation of state (or state-like) power in Latin America (Aretxaga 2003).

For more than a century, large-scale corruption has flourished throughout the continent in forms including patronage, cronyism, nepotism, and coronelismo. In his now famous travel journal from the 1830s, Charles Darwin commented on the plague of corruption in South America, speaking to its debilitating effects on democratic principles (Darwin 1959[original 1839]). Corruption also features prominently in the Latin American literary canon, and the iconography of upper class corruption that writers such as José Hernandéz, Euclides da Cunha, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carmen Naranjo, and Carlos Fuentes have established continues to be substantiated in contemporary political narratives, which affirm that forms of white-collar corruption are rarely met with punishment.

While recognizing the continued validity of this established notion of corruption in the region, here we suggest that in recent years a new narrative has begun to emerge: In 2014, for example, Brazilian authorities began an investigation of the construction firm Odebrecht; it has brought to light evidence implicating high-level government officials from ten Latin American countries in a complex scheme of bribery and kickbacks that helped the Brazilian firm secure lucrative building contracts across the continent. Thus far, the investigation has led to the arrest of high-level officials in Colombia, Peru, and Brazil; indictments elsewhere are likely to follow. Since 2015, charges of corruption have spurred the resignation of Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina, the indictment of Former Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, and the impeachment of Brazilian President Dilma Rouseff. In December of 2016, Kirchener was indicted on charges of corruption in a case involving funds earmarked for public works; she claims she is being targeted by Argentina’s current president, her political rival, Mauricio Macri. That same month, Dilma Rousseff was impeached in a process that extended from 2015. Depending on who is speaking in Brazil, corruption either explains the downfall of Dilma’s government and her Workers’ Party, or it is the driving force of those who led the “coup” (and within that, either a true interest or an opportunistic use of these cases) and are currently in control of the government—or both. In another 2016 scandal, the Panama Papers case, 11.5 million leaked documents obtained from a Panamanian law firm exposed associations between scores of Latin American politicians, business leaders and members of organized criminal networks, and a shadowy and secretive off-shore industry that is believed to facilitate corruption, money laundering, tax evasion, and other illegal activities on a global scale.

To some, the sudden emergence of so many high profile corruption scandals in Latin America indicates the intractability of dishonesty, thievery, and graft in the continent’s politics. To others, this proliferation of scandal heralds significant shifts in the ways that corruption is perceived, exposed, tolerated, and punished.

Of course, both emergent and embedded forms of corruption produce real effects on local communities. In Latin America, effects have included variations of drug, military, and gang violence that in turn are entangled with state power. Do emergent forms of corruption highlight the fragility of democratic citizenship in the young, and tenuously stable, democracies of Latin America (Drybread 2009)? Has neoliberalism—or the threat of neoliberal collapse—produced new intersections of class and corruption (Goldstein 2012)? We seek papers that will illuminate these intersections.

Starting with the sense that corruption is at once a conceptual category and a set of historically embedded and particular practices that take shape in a “creative” manner at local, national, and global scales, this special issue of Culture, Theory and Critique will ask: In what ways do emergent forms of corruption in Latin America require new ways of understanding relationships between authority, morality, transparency, and (il)legality in putatively democratic regimes or lead us to rethink the relationship between democracy and capitalism more broadly?

Topics

Questions of interest include, but are not limited to the following:

-General consensus holds that corruption runs counter to the principles of democracy. Yet, within Latin America’s young democratic states, charges of corruption can be strategically leveled to promote—or to thwart—ideological and social projects that further equality. How do accusations of corruption reveal tensions between the democratic promise of equality and the realities of pervasive social and economic hierarchy in particular Latin American contexts?
-In what ways do millennial and post-millennial forms of capitalism and the culture of neoliberalism (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001) intersect with old and new, left and right, individual and party forms of corruption in the Latin American region?
-How do racial categories and stereotypes configure the multiple facets of “crime” and “corruption” and the ways in which they are framed in particular local and national contexts? In what ways are practices of corruption and its exposure gendered?
-How have recent political events opened a space for new forms of academic activism, or for more politically engaged instantiations of disciplinary praxis? By the same token, how are anthropologists and other scholars of diverse identities and positions working in Latin America constrained in their representations of corruption at local, national, and global levels?
-How is white-collar corruption framed in this newest iteration? Does white-collar crime and corruption in Latin America share characteristics with white-collar crime and corruption in other developing, or developed, democracies?
Potential Contributors

With humility and sympathy given our own ongoing and current North American instantiations of corruption, we call on scholars of Latin America—from the region and beyond—to contribute to this special issue with ethnographic case studies, theoretical insights, and analyses of the social life of corruption in the region. At this time, the journal is only able to accept papers written in the English language.

Works Cited

Aretxaga, Begoña. 2003. “Maddening States.” Annual Review of Anthropology 32(2003), pp. 393-410.

Comaroff, Jean and John Comaroff, eds. Millenial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism. Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 1-56.

Darwin, Charles. 1959. The Voyage of the Beagle. Everyman’s Library. London: Dent, original 1839.

Drybread, Kristen. 2009. “Rights‐Bearing Street Kids: Icons of Hope and Despair in Brazil’s Burgeoning Neoliberal State.” Law & Policy 31(3): 330-350.

Goldstein, Donna M. 2012. How Corruption Kills: Pharmaceutical Crime, Mediated Representations, and Middle Class Anxiety in Argentina. City and Society 24(2): 218-239.

Important Dates

Submit 500-word abstracts to Donna Goldstein (donna.goldstein@colorado.edu) and Kristen Drybread (kdrybread@gmail.com) by June 15, 2017. Special issue editors will make initial acceptance decisions. Once a decision made based on the merits of the abstract, authors will be invited to submit full papers of 8000 words or less by the deadline of November 15, 2017 for publication in the journal Culture, Theory and Critique (CTC) in the late Fall of 2018.

Submission Guidelines

CTC uses the Scholar One website and will be uploaded to that system once accepted for review: ScholarOne http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/rctc. All paper submissions will be subject to the normal double blind peer review processes at Culture, Theory and Critique. Essays should be no more than 8000 words, including notes and bibliography. Style guidelines can be found here:

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?journalCode=rctc20&page=instructions#.U7Dq_mSx8E