Deadline for submissions: April 28, 2017
Full name/name of organization: MOSF Journal of Science Fiction
Contact email: aisha.matthews@museumofsciencefiction.org
MOSF Journal of Science Fiction @ Escape Velocity 2017

The MOSF Journal of Science Fiction is accepting 250 word proposals for 15-20 minute papers for this year’s Escape Velocity Conference in Washington, D.C, September 1st – 3rd.

The topic of this literature panel is “Technology of the Soul and of the self,” and aims to discuss posthumanism, metaphysics, and identity politics. More specifically, we would love papers discussing the boundaries of what we might consider the human “soul” or self and where we locate the parameters of personhood in a technologically enhanced world.

While we are primarily seeking papers discussing works of science and speculative fiction, there are several additional panels we’re holding, some of which address film, science, and graphic art. If you are not selected for the technology of the soul and of the self panel, you may be considered for other panel topics.

Panel Description:

As technology pushes the boundaries of the human body and attempts to reimagine cognition through artificial intelligence, our notions of what defines humanity are forced to evolve. In the Cartestian sense, the metaphysical question of the “human soul” as separate from the body raises ontological questions about where to locate the humanity in human beings. As pertaining to questions of identity, the posthuman and transhuman elements of modern reality encourage a reimagining of the self and the subjective experience. Presenters will offer reflections on the ways in which contemporary literature is tackling this blurring of boundaries to question the relationship between technology and the essence of personhood.

Conference: September 1-3rd, 2017

https://escapevelocity.events/

Deadline for proposals: April 28th, 2017

Deadline for submissions: June 1, 2017
Full name/name of organization: Southern Studies in the UK Network
Contact email: ssuknetwork@gmail.com
Studying the South: Approaches and Orientations

A one-day colloquium organised by the Southern Studies in the UK Network

26th August 2017, University of Hertfordshire

Studies of the U.S. South have radically changed across the last century, and especially so in the twenty-first. As Michael Bibler (2016) has argued recently, southern studies scholars “begin with the assumption that there’s no such thing as a solid South. We are interested in all kinds of Souths, bringing a dazzling range of theoretical approaches” to the region. This one-day colloquium will explore the variety of perspectives or “orientations” (Bibler) that open up discussion of the U.S. South today. Where historically the South has been considered as the “nation’s region” (in Leigh Ann Duck’s words), southern studies scholars have begun to see the region in smaller and larger scales and frames. The South can be read in relation to other American regions like the West or Midwest; it can be thought of in circum-Caribbean networks; it can be connected to Black, Red, and Green Atlantics; it can be theorised in transregional, postregional, transnational, hemispheric, global, and planetary terms; and it can also be considered at micro-regional or community-based scales. Souths can be: queer and Native and disabled and Eco and Black and trans, and so on. The plurality and diversity of this region—far from fixed or ossified—will be at the heart of this colloquium.

In addition to developing interdisciplinary approaches and orientations to studying the South, this event will also be the official launch of the Southern Studies in the UK Network. The day will consist of paper presentations and a closing roundtable. The aim of the colloquium is to bring together scholars of the South that are working in the UK and elsewhere, as well as setting an agenda for the future of the SSUKN. Members and non-members of the network are welcome to submit and/or attend.

We therefore welcome paper and panel proposals on the U.S. South from interdisciplinary perspectives. Approaches from literary studies, history, cultural criticism, media studies, visual studies and more are encouraged. Some possible topics might include:

-The U.S. South at different scales

– The South in the Anthropocene

-The South and the world

-New materialisms, animal studies, posthumanism, memory studies, and the South

-The South on film and television

-Literary depictions of southernness

-Immigration, multiculturalism, and globalisation

-Queer Souths

-Native and Indigenous Studies

-African-American culture in the South

-Gulf, Appalachian, Sea Island, Bayou, Delta, and other southern micro-regions

-Slavery, Jim Crow, and Incarceration

Abstract proposals of 300 words, accompanied by a short bio, should be sent to ssuknetwork@gmail.com by June 1st, 2017. You can also contact the organiser, Christopher Lloyd, at c.lloyd@herts.ac.uk.

Deadline for submissions: June 1, 2017
Full name/name of organization: Essay collection for Kent State University Press
Contact email: lggodfrey@nic.edu
Call for Papers: Teaching Hemingway in the Digital Age

Collection Editors: Laura Godfrey (lggodfrey@nic.edu) and Mark Ott (teachhemingway@gmail.com)

Teaching Hemingway in the Digital Age combines two broad aims: to make available to high school and college teachers a wide selection of the best techniques and contemporary digital tools for teaching Hemingway to 21st century “digital age” students, and to showcase how digital humanists use Hemingway’s writing for their own scholarship and teaching. The subtle textures of Hemingway’s prose can provide valuable training for contemporary students who need above all to learn to read slowly and with close attention to a literary text. (In fact, the novelist Andre Dubus III touched on these benefits in his 2012 PEN Hemingway keynote address, remarking that “In this digital present where so many human faces are lit with the glow of one screen after another, a time when the notion of individuality and the truly real is beginning to blur, more than ever before we need the life’s work of Ernest Hemingway.”) How do we illuminate the dense complexities of Hemingway’s seemingly-simple prose to readers used to skimming websites? How can we highlight his characters’ attachments to physical environments when students are more attuned to virtual ones? Alternatively, contributors might consider whether “digital age” students are by virtue of their environment and experiences somehow more connected to Hemingway’s life and his writing.

But Teaching Hemingway in the Digital Age is not intended simply to indict contemporary students and their smartphones. More important, we expect contributors will describe pedagogical opportunities for teaching Hemingway that are made possible with digital applications or digital humanities, opportunities that illuminate unique qualities of his work and life. We hope that the contributors to this collection will document not only the divisions but the remarkable, unexplored parallels between Hemingway’s works and the contemporary digital era, offering ways to bring those comparisons to life in the classroom.

While the final organization of the collection will depend upon the accepted essays, we anticipate three general thematic sections:

I. The “Digital Divide”

Those of us responsible for teaching the works of Ernest Hemingway to 21st century students often find ourselves trying to bridge an ever-growing “digital divide.” Simply put, students accustomed to seeing virtual landscapes on a screen often find it difficult to picture literary ones. Yet an appreciation of Hemingway’s work depends in large part on understanding the physical world he recreates. In his 1935 Esquire piece, “Monologue to the Maestro,” Hemingway stated that aspiring writers must “be able to go into a room and when you come out know everything that you saw there and not only that. If that room gave you any feeling you should know exactly what it was that gave you that feeling.” The generative power of things is an important principle in Hemingway’s entire body of work. Can students who have not been trained to pay attention to actual places—and things-in-their-places—understand the intensity and fidelity of Hemingway’s literary environments? Or does training one’s eye toward virtual landscapes, paradoxically, somehow give students better (but different) skills for reading Hemingway’s real ones?

A second topic in this section might concern individuality, community, and solitude. Students born in the 1990s or 2000s have grown up in a social-media-driven environment, one in which individuality is often expressed and defined in ways that are decidedly oppositional to some of the best-known Hemingway “code” heroes, reticent yet contemplative figures who so often go it alone. The 21st century emphasis on “connectivity” sits at odds with solitude, stands in opposition to introspection. Instead, the digital-age focus is often on constant connection and collective, ubiquitous sharing—minute-by-minute updates of our thoughts and all our daily ‘data.’ (Students’ attitudes towards solitude have altered so much, as William Deresiewicz has written in an often-quoted 2009 essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education, that we are, in fact, witnessing “the end of solitude.”) But solitude, introspection, and individuality are some of the core traits of Hemingway’s characters. How do we teach texts such as “Big Two-Hearted River,” a narrative of an entirely solitary fishing trip, to students who may rarely or never be alone? In what sense can the social media-immersed student possess some new or illuminated understanding of the relationships between Hemingway’s individual characters and their communities?

II. Digital Resources for Teaching Hemingway

Digital humanities scholars are currently developing platforms to teach Hemingway’s writing to students on their terms, and students themselves (undergraduate and graduate students alike) are participating in the invention of digital Hemingway technologies. We are interested, in this section, to publish essays concerning the use of such resources. What do spatially insular stories like “The End of Something” look like when we create digital maps for them? How can a digital cartographic technology like a GIS (Geographic Information Systems) map show how much wider Hemingway’s spatial sense of the world became in The Sun Also Rises? Other examples of recently-developed Hemingway digital technologies include student-created Google Lit Trips interactive maps; the “Hemingway App,” a downloadable text-editor application that can edit a writer’s style based on a Hemingway-esque algorithm designed to produce prose of “clarity and simplicity”; or the JFK Library’s recent digitization of Hemingway’s childhood scrapbooks (a watershed moment in Hemingway studies, because students and scholars no longer have to travel to Boston to see the documents). In short, there is much of Hemingway’s life and work that can be made more accessible and meaningful with these new digital tools, and we are interested in contributors’ commentary on both the creation and/or use of these resources.

III. Virtual Hemingways

In this thematic section of the book, we invite contributors to consider the ways that 21st century Hemingway internet resources provide rich opportunities for seeing Hemingway in new lights and from multiple angles. We seek contributors who can speak about specific digital resources that have been created around Hemingway’s life and work and who think broadly about what kind of Hemingway those resources manufacture. When we enter Hemingway’s name into any basic search engine like Google, hundreds of separate and fragmented ‘identities’ emerge of him as a writer and a man. How do students make sense of the Hemingways they encounter on Wikipedia or as depicted by Tumblr bloggers? Which picture of Hemingway is more credible? Which of these and countless other virtual spaces are likely to be used most enthusiastically by our digital-age students, for better or for worse?

Deadlines and Contacts: We are looking for essays of approximately 2500-4000 words that consider topics related to the broad theme of teaching Hemingway in the digital age as well as essays that address the teaching of specific texts. The editors welcome essays from emerging scholars, and the published collection will reflect a wide range of critical approaches. Proposals of no more than 750 words should be sent to both Laura Godfrey (lggodfrey@nic.edu) and Teaching Hemingway series-editor Mark Ott (teachhemingway@gmail.com) by June 1st, 2017 to ensure fullest consideration for inclusion in the volume. Authors whose work is accepted should plan to submit completed manuscripts by September 1st, 2017.

Deadline for submissions: June 2, 2017
Full name/name of organization: Stefan Schöberlein
Contact email: stefan-schoeberlein@uiowa.edu
The Long Media Century: American Literature and Technology in the 1800s

Special Session at the South Atlantic MLA 89, Nov. 3-5 2017 (Atlanta).

The nineteenth century has, in many ways, laid the foundation for much of the media still in use today: Be it in the telegraph’s first steps into digital code, devices that began to record or transmit sounds, or bulky typing machines to ease and structure textual production, the 1800s saw the birth of what could be called modern media technology. Still, the effects of this watershed moment on the literatures of the time—especially in a US context—remain a somewhat neglected topic in academia. This panel thus invites papers on the intersections, cross-inseminations, and conflicts between American literature in the long nineteenth century and media technology (broadly understood). It welcomes close readings as well as media-theoretical and -historical approaches that answer questions like: How did US poetry and prose encounter new media technologies? What broader cultural trends did they enable or problematize? What generic and stylistic effects resulted from the technological takeover of the scene of writing? What discourses of euphoria and repression sprang up around certain technologies? How did popular culture (via periodicals, dime novels, performance, etc.) encounter these novel modes of data storage and transmission? By June 2, please send a 300 word abstract, short bio and/or CV, and A/V requirements to Stefan Schöberlein, University of Iowa, at stefan-schoeberlein@uiowa.edu.

Deadline for submissions: August 31, 2017
Full name/name of organization: Dawn Keetley/Lehigh University
Contact email: dek7@lehigh.edu
Jordan Peele’s horror film, Get Out (2017) just became the highest-grossing debut project for a writer-director with an original screenplay (beating out the prior holder of that record, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s 1999 film The Blair Witch Project).

Get Out is not only an enormous box office success but it has won a critical acclaim unusual for a horror film—currently (as of early April, 2017) standing at 99% on Rotten Tomatoes with 225 positive and only one negative review.

Popular writers and bloggers have already mapped out a whole panoply of contemporary issues that Get Out takes up (many of them guided by what Peele himself has said in interviews). The film tackles liberal racism, US electoral politics, white privilege, feminism, the targeting of black men by the police, the prison industrial complex, even slavery. And its place within the horror tradition is already being mapped, as writers have pointed out the film’s explicit and implicit connections to Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Psycho (1960), Night of the Living Dead (1968), Rosemary’s Baby (1968), The Stepford Wives (1975), Halloween (1978), and The Shining (1980).

Get Out is widely touted as having inspired countless conversations among its viewers—propelling many of them back to the theater for a second and third viewing—and so it seems time to begin a conversation among scholars of horror, scholars of film, and scholars of millennial popular culture and politics more generally.

To that end, I invite abstracts for a collection of essays on Jordan Peele’s Get Out. Abstracts on any topic will be considered, as my aim is to shape a comprehensive anthology that will be the place to go for anyone interested in writing about and teaching the film in the future. I am especially interested in articles that place Get Out within the horror tradition and articles that address the film’s social/economic/cultural/political context, as well as the film’s own explicit political intervention in that context.

Lexington Books, an imprint of Rowman Littlefield, has expressed interest in the collection.

The anticipated timeline is below (and is presuming the film will become available on DVD / VOD at some point this summer).

Abstracts due: August 31, 2017

Articles due: November 30, 2017

Revised articles due: March 31, 2018

Please email your 500-word abstract, along with a brief biography, to Dawn Keetley (dek7@lehigh.edu) by August 31. Feel free to email me with any questions.

Deadline for submissions: April 5, 2017
Full name/name of organization: American Religion and Literature Society
Contact email: aball@lindenwood.edu
The American Religion and Literature Society invites proposals for our panel at the 2017 Midwest Modern Language Association convention, November 9-12, 2017 in Cincinnati, OH.

Session title: “Social Activism in American Religious Literature”

From the colonial era to the present day, American religious literature has exhibited an abiding concern with social activism. For example, John Winthrop’s historic sermon aboard the Arbella evinced the Puritans’ emphasis on matters of social organization and the imperative of economic benevolence. As William G. McLoughlin has observed, the early republic’s Great Awakenings and periods of intense revivalism were invariably attended by campaigns for social reform. Similarly, David Paul Nord has shown that the period’s religious press—led by the American Tract Society—constituted the nation’s original mass media and was committed to reshaping the public’s social mores. Anne C. Rose has argued that Transcendentalism was primarily an anti-capitalist social movement led by ministers who also sought to reform America’s gender norms, educational system, and ecological ethics. Gregory S. Jackson has revealed that the immensely popular post-Civil War genre of homiletic fiction encouraged activism, “social engagement,” and the creation of “communities of action.” And in his landmark work, The Social Christian Novel, Robert Glenn Wright analyzed the numerous Social Gospel novels of the Progressive Era that made authentic piety contingent upon social activism. However, clerical authors have not been alone in wedding religion to social activism, as the laity has consistently made use of religious tropes to advance and legitimate their social causes. For example, Jama Lazerow and Teresa Anne Murphy have proven that religious motifs were central to the antebellum labor movement. Similarly, in his The Soul of the Wobblies, Donald E. Winters has shown that the early twentieth century literature of the I.W.W. provides us with “a valuable lesson about how religious sensibility and imagery helped mobilize the radical element of the labor movement.”

In keeping with this year’s conference theme, we seek proposals for presentations on American religious literature that promotes or engages in social activism, as well as presentations on the writing of reformers who appeal to a religious idiom to advocate for the transformation of society.

Potential topics may include but are certainly not limited to:

Puritan social theory
Religious Awakenings and social reform
Transcendentalism and social activism
Religious motifs in abolitionist literature, print culture
Homiletic fiction and social reform
Utopian literature, print culture
Literature of the Social Gospel
Christian Socialist literature, print culture
Religious motifs in labor literature, print culture
Religious motifs in suffragist literature, print culture
Religious motifs in the literature of the settlement movement
Religious motifs in African-American literature
Please submit abstracts to Andrew Ball (aball@lindenwood.edu) by April 5. Be sure to include your name, institutional affiliation, email address, and any AV requests in your abstract. The subject of the email should be “MMLA 2017.”

Deadline for submissions: April 17, 2017
Full name / name of organization: AISNA (Italian Association for North American Studies); University of Milan
Contact email: segretario-aisna@unive.it

24th AISNA Biennial Conference

The US and the World We Inhabit

University of Milan, September 28-30, 2017

Call for workshops

The newly elected administration inaugurated the year 2017 by raising questions in the nation and the world about the oncoming policies of the US government regarding the construction or removal of barriers, the care or exploitation of the environment, and many other dilemmas involving radically alternative scenarios for our future relations to the world and to our habitats. What is at stake is the option of facing contemporary cultural and political challenges on the ground of a shared or an exclusive governance.

In terms of historical and literary reflection, this involves a rethinking of the positioning of even the newest transnational perspectives, such as Border, Hemispherical, and Oceanic Studies, which are called to acknowledge the mobility and multiplicity of the where and what of their investigation. The 24th AISNA Biennial Conference proposes to discuss possible ways of reconceptualizing the mutual and shifting positions of center(s) and margin(s), subject(s) and object(s) in terms of relation, and particularly of an inclusive structure of relations that are based on an ecological ethics. Workshop proposals are invited from the diverse areas of inquiry of AISNA addressing methodological hypotheses, such as the need to assume a complex framework of simultaneous scales of analysis; translation as the main means and medium to expand our theoretical conversation; an ecocentric and ecological paradigm as the ground for our decision-making procedures; and networking as the privileged tool for a hopeful and successful management of the urgent issues posed by an unstoppable process of globalization and an apparently similarly unavoidable process of exhaustion of the planet’s resources.

Topics may include but are not confined to:

• North-American Studies & World Literature

• Rethinking Cosmopolitanism in a Global Perspective

• Exilic Writing

• Migration and the Environment

• US Literature and Global Circulation (Markets and Publishers)

• Translation and World Literature; Multilingualism; New Textualities

• Ecolanguage, Ecopoetry, Ecopoetics

• Animal Studies

• Environmental Dystopias

• Landscape Transformations and Shifting Geographies

• Environmental Justice

• Environmental Politics; Presidencies and Environmental Policies

• Foreign Relations and Climate Change

• US Environmental Activism

• Inhabiting the ‘Wilderness’ – Past and Present

• Natives’ Territories and Newcomers’ Settlements

• Ecofeminism

The deadline for workshop proposals is April 15, 2017.

Submitted proposals will be reviewed by the conference organizer and the AISNA board. A selection of max. 20 workshops will be issued by April 30, notified to the submitters by email, and published on the Conference website.

Submissions should be written in English and include:

• a workshop title

• a clearly stated description of the proposed topic in no more than 300 words

• contact details of the workshop’s coordinator or coordinators (max. 2), including professional affiliation.

Each workshop will host no more than four papers, including the coordinator’s or coordinators’. In case they intend to present papers in their own workshops, aspiring coordinators should indicate their prospective titles in their proposals. We remind aspiring coordinators that their task will comprise a brief introduction of the speakers, a strict monitoring of the observance of the allotted 20-minute time for each presentation, and a supervision of the following question and answer session, aimed to stimulate a fruitful discussion in the last but essential part of each workshop. For this purpose, in their proposal they should also suggest the name of a discussant.

All workshop proposals should be sent by e-mail to the conference organizer, Paola Loreto (paola.loreto@unimi.it), as well as to the secretary of AISNA, Simone Francescato (segretario-aisna@unive.it).

Deadline for submissions: May 31, 2017
Full name/name of organization:
SAMLA/South Atlantic Modern Language Association
Contact email: dstjohn1@gsu.edu
November 7, 2017 will mark the first anniversary of the death of Leonard Cohen. Known predominantly for his music, Cohen’s artistic contributions extend into the genres of poetry, fiction, and visual art. This year’s SAMLA conference theme, “High Art/ Low Art: Borders and Boundaries in Popular Culture,” presents a timely and appropriate venue for an examination and celebration of the artist’s life and work. This panel discusses Cohen’s legacy as a pioneering force in both modern poetry and popular music. This panel seeks papers that provide new insight into Cohen’s published material, including but not limited to his earliest published poetry, his polarizing novel Beautiful Losers, his successful mainstream music, and his final album You Want it Darker. By May 31, please send a 250-word proposal, a brief CV, and any A/V requirements to D.E. St. John, Georgia State University, dstjohn1@gsu.edu, for SAMLA 89, Nov. 3-5, in Atlanta, GA.

Deadline for submissions: August 1, 2017
Full name/name of organization: Jesse Aleman, University of New Mexico & Maria Windell, University of Colorado Boulder
Contact email: jman@unm.edu
“Latinx Lives in Hemispheric Context”

ELN (English Language Notes) Spring/Summer 2018 (Duke University Press)

Editors: Maria A. Windell, University of Colorado Boulder and Jesse Alemán, University of New Mexico

This special issue of ELN (English Language Notes) invites submissions that reflect upon the ways in which Latinx lives, both historical and contemporary, serve as a point of intersection between Latinx, Ethnic, and hemispheric studies. But how exactly do latinidad and the hemispheric relate to one another? How does Latinx Studies intersect with other fields, such as Atlantic Studies, that also constitute hemispheric, transamerican, or inter-American scholarship? Latinx expressive cultures—everything from poetry to graphic art to music to theater—offer different understandings of how the Latinx and hemispheric intersect. We are thus interested in contributions that explore how Latinx expressive cultures and their audiences circulate freely, haphazardly, fleetingly, or deliberately across the Americas. We welcome contributions on a broad range of topics including but not limited to:

Archives
Diaspora
Hemispheric geographies
Indigeneity, Afro-Latinidades, Creoles
Race, gender, sexuality
Circulation, mobility, fugitivity
Migration, immigration, exile, sanctuary
Textual histories and print culture practices
Spanish-language readers and communities
Greater Mexico, Global South, and the “Hemispheric Turn”
Rethinking canons/archives defined by authorial identity
The impact of the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage project
Essays of twenty to twenty-five manuscript pages are invited from scholars in all fields.

Essays will be reviewed by external readers. All submissions should adhere to the Chicago-style endnote citation format. Please submit double-spaced, 12-point font, .docx files by email to both special issue editors (maria.windell@colorado.edu and jman@unm.edu). Please omit identifying information from all pages except the cover page, as we use a blind review process. Please send inquiries regarding this issue to the editors.

The deadline for submissions is August 1, 2017.

A refereed journal housed in the University of Colorado Boulder English Department, ELN has been dedicated to pushing the boundaries of scholarship in literary and cultural studies since 1962. More recently, as this issue suggests, the journal has actively promoted new theoretical speculation and interdisciplinary collaborations crossing geographies, histories and practices. Published bi-annually, the journal is moving to Duke University Press and its digital platform, along with Project Muse, beginning in Spring 2018. This special issue will be the first to appear under the Duke UP imprint.