Deadline for submissions: June 1, 2017
Full name / name of organization: 2017 Film & History Conference
Contact email: kellirmarshall@gmail.com
CALL FOR PAPERS

No Place Like Home—In the Film Musical

An area of multiple panels for the 2017 Film & History Conference – Representing “Home”: The Real and Imagined Spaces of Belonging
The Hilton—Milwaukee City Center, Milwaukee, WI (USA)
November 1-5, 2017

DEADLINE for abstracts: June 1, 2017 (early decision) July 1, 2017 (general decision)

One of the most recognized lines in cinema comes to us from The Wizard of Oz: “There’s no place like home.” While Dorothy’s adventures primarily take place in the techni-colorful land of Oz, she ultimately returns to her sepia-toned Kansas farm, reaffirming the viewer’s faith in the plain ol’ values of home and family.

The Wizard of Oz is not the only Hollywood musical that centers its narrative around notions of home and homeland. Musicals like Meet Me in St. Louis, State Fair, Oklahoma, and The Music Man set their stories specifically in the Midwest, attempting, as Stanley Green notes “to capture the home-and-hearth spirit of the American family.” Even if the musical’s setting is the world’s largest city, it can be made to appear “no more than a slightly bigger version of one’s hometown.”

Why is this genre especially equipped for building stories and characters around representations of home and homeland? How might these films function as American propaganda? What and whose styles of music and dance are indicative of “home”? Does this American folksiness translate to musicals produced by other countries? When and why does this trend (predominant in the classical era) start to die off, or has it?

Possible topics about home/homeland in the film musical include, but are not limited to:

• marriage and/or family (The Gay Divorcee, Kiss Me Kate, Gigi, Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music)
• frontier (Hallelujah, Calamity Jane, The Harvey Girls, Annie Get Your Gun)
• religion (Cabin in the Sky, Guys and Dolls, Footloose, Sister Act)
• biographical (The Jolson Story, Coal Miner’s Daughter, La Bamba, Ray)
• social class/issues (Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Newsies, Billy Elliot)
• wartime and/or national identity (Thousands Cheer, For Me and My Gal, Yankee Doodle Dandy, Evita)
• LGBTQ-themed (Cabaret, Yentl, Fame, Victor/Victoria, De-Lovely, Rent)
• teen/collegiate musicals (Babes on Broadway, Bye Bye Birdie, Grease!, High School Musical)
• race/ethnicity (Showboat, The King and I, Flower Drum Song, Fiddler on the Roof)
• fantasy (The Pirate, Brigadoon, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, The Wiz, Enchanted)
• animated (The Little Mermaid, Pocahontas, The Lion King, Frozen)
• Proposals for complete panels (three related presentations) are also welcome, but they must include an abstract and contact information, including an e-mail address, for each presenter. For updates and registration information about the upcoming meeting, see the Film & History website (www.filmandhistory.org).

Please e-mail your 200-word proposal to the area chair:

Kelli Marshall

DePaul University

kellirmarshall@gmail.com.

Deadline for submissions: May 1, 2017
Full name / name of organization: American Literature Association Symposium, Hotel Monteleone, New Orleans
Contact email: leticia.p.alonso@jsums.edu
This panel explores the sense of place as part of the indigenous language of American artistic production of Modernism in the context of the European avant-garde. Though U.S. poets and artists were influenced by the formal techniques of Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism, Dadaism and Surrealism, they were also determined to search for the essence of an expressive language that defined its authenticity as opposed to European foreignness. One of their avenues of research was the exploration of the distinctive features of the American soil as a means of contributing novel aspects to modern aesthetics. The genuine character of the environment is closely linked to the strong attachment to rural or urban spaces and the value they acquire for the observer. In this regard, the American Modernists engaged in the project of unearthing the specificity of their native land as a means of defining their national identity. This is noticeable in the group of the Precisionists led by Charles Demuth and Charles Sheeler, who helped poets to see the sense of place and transcribe it in their own words. For instance, William Carlos Williams and Hart Crane took the cityscape painting of Charles Sheeler and Joseph Stella to record urban architecture as part of U.S. culture. In this same vein, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost promoted natural spaces in their poetry, just as Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley and Georgia O’Keeffe gave visibility to regional settings in their artistic production. Abstracts for papers that examine the sense of place underlying the American poetic and visual art are welcome to participate in this session. Topics might include, but are not limited to the following:

—The impact of European experimental language on the rise of an American artistic expression rooted in the autochthonous soil of the U.S.

—The role of twentieth-century print culture and the press to promote the “Americanness” of Modernism.

—The creation of coteries and galleries that raised awareness of the necessity of developing a consciousness for the native land.

—Representations of the natural and technical sublime in the U.S.

—Ethnicity and the sense of place in the Harlem Renaissance.

—The regional poetry of Carl Sandburg, Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens.

—Sherwood Anderson’s poetry and the place of an American Indian past.

—Urban architecture and industrial landscapes in Precisionist art and the poetry of Williams Carlos Williams.

—The local painting of Arthur Dove and Marsden Hartley.

—The import of women poets and artists such as Marianne Moore and Georgia O’Keeffe in marketing the American soil.

By May 1st, 2017, please submit a 300-word abstract along with a short biography to Leticia Pérez Alonso, Jackson State University, at leticia.p.alonso@jsums.edu.

Deadline for submissions: July 7, 2017
Full name/name of organization: Aix-Marseille Université – LERMA (EA 853)
Contact email: cecile.cottenet@univ-amu.fr

Mediating American Modernist Literature:

The case of/ for Big Magazines

1880-1960

Aix-Marseille Université, LERMA (EA 853)

Aix-en-Provence, France, October 5- 7, 2018

This interdisciplinary conference seeks to explore the role played by “Big Magazines” in the production, publication, circulation, and reception of American literature between 1880 and 1960.

The study of modernism’s relations to the press and periodical culture is certainly not new to Modernist Studies. Over the last three decades, sustained interest in the role played by “little magazines” has been instrumental in reorienting the conventional reading of magazines “merely as containers of concrete bits of information” to an approach that considers them as “autonomous objects of study,” comparable with individual books (Latham and Scholes) in the field of modernism.

However, this interest has, so far, been directed mostly towards little magazines, as if these were the only periodicals intersecting with modernist practices. In doing so, it has tended to insulate little magazines as a field separate from other kinds of contemporary periodicals (the lowbrow pulps, the middlebrow slick/smart/mainstream/big periodicals), reducing the latter, at best, to a kind of dim cultural fringe or hinterland of modernism. It is only recently that modernist studies have begun to deal directly with the institutional overlap of literary modernism and middlebrow culture, enriching our understanding of their deep affiliations, by focusing on such middlebrow and smart magazines as Life (in its first form), The Smart Set, Vanity Fair or The New Yorker.

In the wake of such studies, the purpose of this conference is to expand consideration of the connection between American literature and mainstream print culture so as to include “an eclectic range of periodical genres having in common, beyond the necessary qualification of being unapologetically commercial, …a conscious effort to expand their readerships by way of their textual and visual styles rather than their content”(Harris, 6). Mainstream print culture includes a vast array of diverse magazines, united by their ambition to speak to a wide national audience and, often, to forge the cultural, literary and political tastes of the middle class, with periodicals such as Harper’s, Scribner’s, Saturday Evening Post, Atlantic Monthly, Reader’s Digest, Life or Henry Luce’s Time. To this same field of national periodicals one can also relate magazines with a narrower editorial scope, selecting their audience on an ideological (McClure’s) or ethnic (The Crisis) basis, or along gender lines, as with the women-oriented Munsey’s and Ladies’ Home Journal and the more masculine Esquire, a precursor in many ways of the men’s magazines that emerged with and around Playboy in the early 1950s.

We invite papers that explore the interaction between mass-market magazines and modernist literary and aesthetic preoccupations over the time span of eighty years, from the emergence of industrialized journalism and the “fully-fledged magazine” (Scholes) to the rise of television as a most influential medium, and the coincident decline of the magazine as “the major form of repeated cultural experience for people in the United States” (Ohmann, 29). Taking into account transatlantic influences – such as Vu’s influence on Henry Luce’s decision to remodel Life after 1936, or connections between Condé Nast and Lucien Vogel, creator of the French edition of Vogue – we would also like to encourage transatlantic perspectives involving French magazines.

Subjects might include, but are not limited to, the following:

• overlaps, parallels & points of intersection between “little”, “middlebrow”, & “pulp” magazines;
• the influence of magazine work on literary work (form, content, imagination);
• the role of magazines in fostering creative nonfiction stories;
• the role of aesthetic, financial, & commercial preoccupations in shaping editorial policies & contents;
• the links, interactions, & networks among writers, publishers, editors, & agents;
• the construction of “complex literary milieus” (Ohmann);
• the identification of style as a promotional tool;
• the link with the phenomenon of celebrity & the rise of popular celebrity culture;
• the role of interviews and portraits in fashioning authorial personae;
• the role of magazines in creating literary institutionalization & professionalization;
• transatlantic exchanges & influences with French magazines (Vu, Voilà, Match, or Marie Claire).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brooker, Peter and Andrew Thacker, ed., The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist magazines. 2. North America, 1894-1960, and vol. 3, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012.

Brown, Erica, and M. Grover, Middlebrow Literary Cultures, The Battle of the Brows, 1920-1960 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

Hamilton, Sharon, ‘American Manners: The Smart Set (1900-29); American Parade (1926)’, in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: volume II: North America 1894-1960, ed. by Peter Brooker and A. Thacker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 224-48.

Hammill, Faye, and Mark Hussey, Modernism’s Print Cultures, London, Bloomsbury, 2016.

Harris, Donal F., On Company Time. American Modernism in Big Magazines. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.

Latham, Sean, and Robert Scholes, “The Rise of Periodical Studies,” PMLA 121 (2006): 517-531.

Mansanti Céline, “Mainstreaming the Avant-Garde: Modernism in Life Magazine (New York, 1883–1936),” Journal of European Periodical Studies, 1.2 (Winter 2016): 113–28.

Morrisson, Mark S., The Public Face of Modernism. Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905–1920, University of Wisconsin Press, 2000.

Ohmann, Richard, Selling Culture. Magazines, Markets and Class at the Turn of the Century, London, New York: Verso, 1996.

Rubin, Joan Shelley, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992).

Scholes, Robert, « Afterword », Little Magazines and Modernism: New Approaches, Suzanne W. Churchill, Adam McKible, ed., Aldershot : Ashgate, 2007.

Stead, Evanghélia, “Reconsidering “Little” versus “Big” Periodicals,” Journal of European Periodical Studies, 1.2 (Winter 2016): 1–17.

Tadié, Benoît, Céline Mansanti et Hélène Aji, dir., Revues modernistes, revues engagées (1900-1939), Rennes : Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2011.

ORGANIZATION (Local):

Cécile Cottenet, PhD., American Studies (Aix-Marseille Université)

Anne Reynes-Delobel, PhD., Associate Professor, American Literature (Aix-Marseille Université)

Franck Conesa, PhD., American Literature (Aix-Marseille Université)

ADVISORY BOARD

Hélène Aji (Université Paris Nanterre, France)

Cécile Cottenet (Aix-Marseille Université)

Faye Hammill (University of Strathclyde, Scotland)

Sean Latham (University of Tulsa, USA)

Céline Mansanti (Université de Picardie, France)

Mark Morrisson (Penn State University, USA)

Benoît Tadié (Université de Rennes 2, France)

Céline Mansanti (Université de Picardie Jules Verne, France)

Anne Reynes-Delobel (Aix-Marseille Université)

Andrew Thacker (Nottingham Trent University, UK)

TO SUBMIT A PAPER, follow the link: https://bigmagazines.sciencesconf.org/.

Deadline for submissions: March 15, 2017
Full name/name of organization: Conversations: The Journal of Cavellian Studies
Contact email: sdiasbranco@fl.uc.pt
CFP NO. 5
“THE AESTHETICS OF POLITICS AND THE POLITICS OF AESTHETICS IN AFTER CAVELL”

Stanley Cavell has described the “new, yet unapproachable America.” These days, America seems as unapproachable as ever. Cavell’s reprise of Thoreau for the twentieth century, where American sins of slavery and the Mexican-American War are trumped by the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War, was either “politically” effective or it was not.

While Cavell has been open about his desire to address politics questions in a philosophical manner, it remains a matter of some dispute how, if at all, he does so. One reason for this is that Cavell does not outline a political platform or recommend specific action of any kind; another is that–from his late sixties Lear essay on–the political moment in Cavell is regularly entangled with aesthetic and epistemological questions.

In what ways, then, are Cavell’s political writings efficacious? How might Cavell’s reading of King Lear help us make headway of the peculiar political challenges America faces in the twenty-first century, if one extends a critique of America begun by Thoreau to the Black Lives Matter movement, or to the War in Iraq? And how might Cavell’s writings avoid falling into the aestheticization of politics criticized by thinkers such as Benjamin, Schmitt, and Habermas?

For the fifth issue of CONVERSATIONS, we invite essays that address these questions as they emerge either in Cavell’s own work or in the evident political crises of our time as seen in light of that work. Topics might include:

Cavell and Romanticism
Politics as poetics and poetics as politics
Cavell and Hannah Arendt
Cavell and Pragmatism
Cavell and political resistance
Cavell and Black Lives Matter
Cavell and democracy
Cavell and the republican tradition
Cavell and Communitarianism
Cavell and perfectionism
Cavell and the politics of cinema

Papers should be no more than 6000 words, including footnotes, and must follow the notes and bibliography citation system described in The Chicago Manual of Style (http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html). We also welcome shorter, more intimate pieces addressing specific questions (800-1200 words).

Please send complete articles to Amir Khan at amirazizkhan@missouristate.edu no later than September 15th, 2017. If you submit your article through the website, please send a follow-up query to one of the managing editors as well (Amir Khan or Sérgio Dias Branco at sdiasbranco@fl.uc.pt).

Deadline for submissions: January 1, 2020
Full name/name of organization: Edinburgh University Press
Contact email: gdrhodes@gmail.com
In 2015, the University of Edinburgh Press launched a multivolume series of scholarly, refereed anthologies entitled ReFocus. Edited by Robert Singer (CUNY Graduate Center, Liberal Studies) and Gary D. Rhodes (Queens University, Belfast), each book focuses on a critically overlooked American film director who worked in the studio system, independent cinema, experimental filmmaking, or documentary tradition. The volumes published so far include Preston Sturges, Amy Heckerling, Delmer Daves, and Budd Boetticher. Future volumes will include William Friedkin, Doris Wishman, Ida Lupino, and several more.

ReFocus features a series of contemporary methodological and theoretical approaches to the interdisciplinary analyses and interpretations of the work of these American directors, from the once-famous to the ignored, in direct relationship to American culture –its myths, values, and historical precepts. This series will consider any director who created a historical space, either in or out of the studio system, beginning with the origins of American cinema and continuing up to the present. This research may include work in other media such as television.

We are now soliciting on-line proposals by potential editors/authors for new ReFocus editions. We are especially interested in proposals for the following filmmakers:

• Joe Sarno
• Nora Ephron
• Susan Seidelman
• Archie Mayo
• Sydney Pollack
• F. Gary Gray
• John Singleton
• Irvin Kershner
• Stuart Rosenberg
• Franklin Schaffner
• Sydney Lumet
• William Wyler
• Spencer Williams
• Mervyn LeRoy
• Rouben Mamoulian
• Robert Florey
• Woody Van Dyke
• Joseph Mankiewicz
• Trinh T. Minh-ha
• Antoine Fuqua
• Jerry Lewis
• Suggest a director you deem worthy of consideration

If you are interested in editing/authoring such a volume, please attach a curriculum vitae to your abstract/proposal and email to both:

Gary D. Rhodes, Ph.D.
Film Studies
 The Queen’s University of Belfast, 
gdrhodes@gmail.com.

Robert Singer, Ph.D.
CUNY Graduate Center, Liberal Studies, rlsngr99@gmail.com.

Deadline for submissions: November 15, 2017
Full name / name of organization: Michael Y. Bennett/Editor, New Perspectives in Edward Albee Studies book series
Contact email: bennettm@uww.edu
Call for Submissions for Volume Three of New Perspectives in Edward Albee Society, the Official Publication of the Edward Albee Society. (Published annually by Brill from which Volume One, Edward Albee and Absurdism, is now available)

Topic: Edward Albee as Dramatic and Theatrical Innovator

We are seeking essays that explore Albee’s plays for innovations in theatrical style, dramatic structure, creation of great characters (from both a performance and observation of human behavior perspective), and subject matter (e.g., mistreatment of the elderly, reversal of gender roles in conventional marriage, death and dying).

In addition, we welcome essays that explore Albee’s innovative work in a variety of roles and venues other than as author of plays produced in theaters, for example:

• The Last Frontier Conference in Alaska

• The William Flanagan Memorial Creative Persons Center (The Edward Albee Foundation)

• Albee’s teaching at the Universities of Houston and Princeton, and his visits to colleges and

universities to participate in conferences or give talks, and mentorship of student playwrights

• His directing plays other than his own (e.g., Beckett)

• His mentoring at Signature Theatre and Cherry Lane Theatre

• His international engagement as an ambassador of PEN and International Theatre Institute

• His curating of art exhibits, and support of specific visual artists (and artists of any type)

We encourage submissions from graduate students as well as established scholars or theatre professionals from any approach (e.g., theatre history, performance studies, literary theory and criticism), as well as those who have worked with Mr. Albee in any of the above activities.

Please contact either/both of the Editors, David Crespy (CrespyD@missouri.edu) and Lincoln Konkle (konkleli@tcnj.edu) for queries, proposals, and/or submissions. For submission guidelines, please see the general call for submissions on the Edward Albee Society website:

http://edwardalbeesociety.org/new-perspectives-in-edward-albee-studies-a…

Deadline of submission for completed manuscripts: November 15, 2017.

Deadline for submissions: May 1, 2017
Full name / name of organization: Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Richmond B.C.
Contact email: greg.millard@kpu.ca
CORRUPTIBLE SEED: Literary, Political, and Historical Perspectives on Bob Dylan

Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Richmond B.C., September 22-23, 2017

Bob Dylan, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in November 2016, is one of the seminal figures of contemporary culture. Aligning with the 50th anniversary of his landmark album John Wesley Harding, this conference will explore perspectives on Dylan’s work from a variety of disciplines. Proposed papers should deal with any aspect of Dylan’s career and oeuvre, whether from a political, historical, or literary standpoint. More musicological analyses are also welcome.

If you would like to present a paper or organize a panel, please submit a proposal (150-200 words) including your name and institutional affiliation to greg.millard@kpu.ca, cc’ing tracey.kinney@kpu.ca and heather.cyr@kpu.ca, by no later than March 1, 2017. Panel proposals should include the names of each panel member, along with preliminary paper titles. If you are interested in chairing a panel at the conference, feel free to indicate your interest by way of an email.

Contact
For further information on the conference, do not hesitate to contact greg.millard@kpu.ca.

Deadline for submissions: March 15, 2017
Full name / name of organization: American Philosophical Society
Contact email: ashelton@amphilsoc.org
The tumult and transformations resulting from the Age of Revolutions (1770s-1840s) created a trans-Atlantic body of art and material culture that reflected and inspired new ideas and actions. Inspired by Curious Revolutionaries: The Peales of Philadelphia, the American Philosophical Society’s 2017 exhibition on the legacy of the patriot portraitist Charles Willson Peale and his artistic family from the eighteenth century until the middle of the nineteenth, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA)’s forthcoming publication of The Art of the Peales: Adaptations and Innovations, along with a series of other Peale-centric events happening in Philadelphia, the APS and PMA will co-sponsor a scholarly conference on October 19-21, 2017 that explores the role of imagery in influencing and giving meaning to the political revolutions that defined the late-18th and early-19th centuries.

The conference is especially interested in papers covering the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Circum-Caribbean Revolutions, and the Revolutions of 1848.

Potential topics include:

• the work of individual artists or artistic movements,
• the role and influence of those who reproduced artwork for the public, such as printers or engravers,
• the ways in which works were received by audiences, and
• the function of art in shaping public perceptions both at the time of revolutionary events and through historic memory.

 

We hope the chronological scope and transatlantic breadth of the conference will stimulate an interdisciplinary dialogue that crosses traditional geographic barriers and transcends the limitations of strict periodization.

Applicants should submit a title and 250-word proposal along with a C.V. by March 15, 2017 to: conferences@amphilsoc.org. Decisions will be made by the summer of 2017. All presenters will receive travel subsidies and hotel accommodations. Accepted papers will be due a month before the conference and pre-circulated to registered attendees. Papers should be no longer than 15-double spaced pages. Presenters may also have the opportunity to publish revised papers in the APS’s Proceedings, one of the longest running scholarly journals in America.

Deadline for submissions: May 20, 2017
Full name / name of organization: SAMLA Conference 2017
Contact email: j.sciuto@mcla.edu
Time, Space, and Epistemic Violence in Hemispheric American Literature

This panel seeks papers that explore the depiction of time and space in hemispheric American Literature and the ways in which traditional conceptualizations may be read as a form of epistemic violence. How do the depictions of physical spaces in works from the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States interact with complex configurations of time as progressive, circular, or even anti-linear and irregular—narrative time as composed of a randomized trail of apexes and abysses? How does this literature address/redress/move beyond the concepts of time and space and the harm caused by the imposition of Western paradigms?

Please submit 300-word abstracts, a brief bio, and AV requests to j.sciuto@mcla.edu by May 20th.