Deadline for submissions: January 29, 2017
Full name / name of organization: American Studies Association annual meeting, Chicago, November 9-12
Contact email: paulfess@gmail.com
Title: “The Empathetic Imagination and the Pedagogies of American Protest Music”.

Music has a longstanding place in the American tradition of dissent. It has featured prominently within large-scale protest movements, such as those associated with antislavery, civil rights, and labor, as well as efforts to resist localized and momentary forms of oppression and exploitation such as the call and response of the picket line. In addition to enriching the history of American protest, this music has also served as a pedagogical tool for dissenters, conveying the ideological commitments of the faithful and persuading new supporters to join causes. Much of the instructive function adopted by dissenting singers and songwriters manifests within the register of empathy, what psychoanalysts might call the empathetic imagination. This panel seeks 20-minute papers that examine this intersection between music, dissenting political positions, and modes of empathetic understanding.

The tendency to link dissent with empathetic songs can be observed in the music associated with such historically significant movements as abolitionism, which deployed music in part to cultivate sentimental responses to enslavement, and the rise of the International Workers of the World, which used songs to instruct laborers in fellow-feeling and class consciousness. In the mid-twentieth century, music was also an instrumental part of the educational workshops that led to the formation of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, an organization whose signature song “We Shall Overcome” uses empathy to foment cross-racial solidarity. In orienting our discussion around ideas about the pedagogical uses of protest music, though, we also hope to gain a new sense of the work this music does for more quotidian oppositional politics as well. Along these lines we might consider how underground movements such as the Riot grrrl combined empathy and angst against the everyday problems of 90s gender politics, or how artists such as Randy Newman or the Drive-by Truckers use empathetic tropes to undo the perspectives of deplorables like Southern racists. Similarly, we might consider how a song like Kendrick Lamar’s “How Much a Dollar Cost?” uses empathy to blend its critique of race and class. With this in mind, our focus on dissent, pedagogy, and the empathetic is intended to broaden the definition of “protest” music itself

Please send 300-word abstracts to Paul Fess (paulfess@gmail.com) by January 29th.

Event: 28/09/2017 – 30/09/2017
Abstract: 05/07/2017
Location: The Skirvin Hilton Hotel, 1 Park Ave, Oklahoma City, OK 73102
Organization: The women’s research center and BGLTQ+ student center

Call for Papers
Due date: May 7th 2017
Venue:
Skirvin Hilton Hotel
1 Park Ave, Oklahoma City, OK 73102
September 28 – 30, 2017
The International Gender and Sexuality Studies Conference is hosted by the Women’s Research Center and the BGLTQ+ Student Center at the University of Central Oklahoma. “The Center” hopes to promote intellectual engagement with Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality issues by hosting annual conferences.
The Center invites proposals for presentations at the Second International Gender and Sexuality Studies Conference. This international interdisciplinary conference welcomes proposals for presentations in a variety of formats that address issues of gender and sexuality in the social sciences, humanities, fine arts, and STEM fields. We invite students, faculty, staff, scholars, and activists to propose papers, panels, roundtable discussions, and poster presentations. We also welcome proposals to present or perform creative work including creative writing, drama, music, and visual art.
Instructions for submission
Paper, workshop, panel and round table discussion submission guidelines:
1. Initial submissions should include a 350-word abstract.
2. You may submit your abstract in Word or PDF format.
3. If The Center has questions on the proposal, we will reach out to you via email.
4. Include your name, affiliation, phone number, and email address in your document.
Creative art submission guidelines:
1. Creative art includes art displays, writing, drama, music and visual arts.
2. If your work falls into one of the above categories, you are required to submit a 350-word description of your creative artwork.
3. If The Center has questions on the proposal, we will reach out to you via email.
4. You may submit your abstract in Word or PDF format.
5. Include your name, affiliation, phone number, and email address in your document.
General instructions
1. Abstracts should be submitted to thecenteratuco@gmail.com.
2. The deadline to submit your paper for consideration is May 7, 2017, Sunday, before 11:59PM.
3. The Center’s decision is final.
For more questions, please reach out to Dr. Lindsey Churchill, Director of the Women’s Research Center and the BGLTQ+ Student Center, at lchurchill@uco.edu.

Website: https://www.uco.edu/central/thecenter/

Event: 02/06/2017
Abstract: 02/06/2017
Location: Birkbeck, University of London
Organization: Dandelion Journal

The Dandelion editors seek submissions on the theme of THE CONTEMPORARY for their forthcoming issue.

When will the contemporary end? When did it begin?

Contemporary cultural production and questions about the nature of contemporaneity itself have become dominant in recent scholarship but just what is ‘the contemporary’? What type of creative and scholarly work is being done under its aura? Should we apprehend the contemporary as a noun, offering definition and order to a discrete period in history; or is it rather as an adjective, traced with a particular structure of feeling, an interdisciplinary apprehension to what is happing Now and an anxiety towards what comes next?

We seek submissions that address how the social, political and aesthetic dilemmas that characterize our present are made manifest in the twenty-first century’s cultural production. For instance, if the contemporary is the cultural logic of neoliberal capitalism made tangible, then how can its ‘common sense’ be registered, revised, or resisted? Is the contemporary experienced similarly across the globe, or are its pressure points, modes and sites of dissent different depending on their location? How might we pull on the emergency brake?

We are also keen to examine emergent methodologies and debates that offer a barometer of the contemporary in humanities scholarship. For example, how to explicate ‘the contemporary’ is a matter of anxiety for art history: does the term simply denote a period that came after the modern, or were all works of art once contemporary? And what are the conceptual tools and interpretive frameworks we need to study contemporary writing in the present age? As literary scholars have noted, one of the defining features of twenty-first century fiction is the return of the novel about time. How, might we ask, are time and space to be negotiated in an era of transnational literary form and planetary ruination? Finally, we wish also to consider the fate of the humanities, and academic labour itself, inside the contemporary University.

The journal invites submissions from postgraduate students and early career scholars that address the theme of the contemporary across the spectrum of Arts and Humanities research.
Topics could include, but are by no means restricted to:

• Periodisation and the competing temporalities of ‘the contemporary’ across the humanities: Beyond –modernisms, ‘Post-Post’?
• Methodological shifts in the humanities: Digital Humanities, Medical Humanities, World Literature, Post-Critical, Distant and Surface Reading.
• Tone and the contemporary’s affective intensities: Hope and Pessimism, Anxiety, Depression and Belonging.
• The Anthropocene: Environment and Ecocriticism
• Mapping the networks and flows of Late Capitalism and Neoliberalism: Towards a contemporary realism?
• Contemporary Resistances: Digital Commons, the Hacker, Occupy, Black Lives Matter, Indigenous Social Movements.
• Human, Non-Human, Post-Human: Artificial Intelligence, Prosthetics, and Augmented Reality; Embodiment and Subjectivity.
• The Future of the Novel: Transnational, Graphic, Documentary, Historical, Science Fiction
• The Production, Philosophy, Criticism, and Curating of contemporary art
• The Relation between Contemporary Art and Art history

Submission guidelines

We welcome short articles of 3000-5000 words, long articles of 5000-8000 words and critical reviews of books, film, and exhibitions. We also strongly encourage submissions of artwork including visual art; creative writing; podcasts and video footage (up to 10 minutes). We would be happy to discuss ideas for submissions with interested authors prior to the submission deadline.
Please send all completed submissions to mail@dandelionjournal.org by 6th February 2017.
Please also include a 50-word author biography and a 200-300-word abstract alongside your submission. All referencing and style is required in full MHRA format as a condition of publication and submitted articles should be academically rigorous and ready for immediate publication.

Deadline for submissions: January 16, 2017
Full name / name of organization: American Literature Association (ALA) 28th Annual Conference May 25-28, 2017, Boston, MA
Contact email: mdalessandro@fas.harvard.edu
This proposed panel will attempt to collect perspectives about literary tourism, particularly regarding immigrant and ethnic communities from the nineteenth century to the present. The late 1830s and early 1840s marked the beginning of the tourist industry in North America, particularly in the Northeast United States. Representing the scores of European travelers upon his tour of the United States in 1842, Charles Dickens wrote about the visual splendor of Boston’s private houses, the State House, the Boston Common, and its immigrant populations. New York City, meanwhile, welcomed nearly 70,000 tourists annually by the mid 1830s, as travelers visited Manhattan’s noted parks and churches as well as its hidden slums.

A variety of literary genres emerged out of the rising interest in American urban areas and the ethnic populations contained within. Sensational city-mystery novels featured graphic scenes of urban decay and slumming middle-class tourists. Meanwhile, the “urban sketch”—including such purportedly non-fiction texts as George Foster’s New York by Gas-Light (1850)—aspired to be instructional guides to understanding the immigrants, beggars, workingmen, and prostitutes within urban locations. Less tawdry traveler literature such as tourist guidebooks (Appleton’s Guide Book for Travelers, among others) and travel journals (Richard Henry Dana’s Journal and Dickens’s American Notes) simultaneously sought to make immigrant neighborhoods navigable for outsiders. As fears of and fascinations with America’s diverse populations grew, sightseers could consult any of these literatures for guidance and often misguidance.

Paper proposals can analyze fiction and non-fiction genres of any time period.

Questions that will be considered include:

How are immigrant communities affected by literary intrusions into their spaces?
How did ethnic populations attempt to wrest back narratives from nativist writers?
Besides cities, what areas welcomed slumming and slumming literature?
What does it mean to be a tourist, and not simply a traveler, in literature?
How did such literature affect readers who were aspiring city tourists themselves?
What is the book history of slumming literature, and how did it operate in the marketplace?
What types of literature written by immigrants co-existed and/or resisted tourism literature?

Please submit 300-500 word abstracts to mdalessandro@fas.harvard.edu by January 20th.

Deadline for submissions: June 30, 2017
Full name / name of organization: The International David Foster Wallace Society
Contact email: tony.mcmahon@rmit.edu.au
The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies

Call for Papers:

Published by The International David Foster Wallace Society, The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies is a double-blind, peer-reviewed print journal aimed at the international academic and professional communities engaged with Wallace’s work. The goal of the journal is to publish the most recent scholarship in the development of Wallace Studies and to encourage and identify new lines of inquiry for the discipline.

Researchers, practitioners, and independent scholars are invited to share their views on the current trends, challenges, and state of Wallace Studies, as well as on potential future directions that situate Wallace in larger contexts and conversations. We highly encourage non-traditional forms of scholarship. The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies is particularly interested in working closely with emerging scholars and writers.

The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies is also interested in publishing a number of themed special issues in the future. Contributors who wish to collaborate on such issues should email the editor-in-chief.

Article submissions:

We invite researchers, teachers, and independent or interdisciplinary scholars of Wallace’s work to contribute to The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies. We welcome papers exploring Wallace’s relationship to and impact on the wider culture beyond writing, including, but not limited to, the arts, ethnography, sociology, politics, fashion, history, musicology, and pedagogy. We particularly encourage papers discussing regional and international differentiation in Wallace Studies, as well as papers that read Wallace’s work through more traditional critical lenses such as approaches that explore intersections between Wallace and race, Wallace and gender, Wallace and global politics, and Wallace in relation to other authors.

Articles should be between 6,000 and 8,000 words in length, be devoid of any identification of the author’s name (except on the cover sheet), and use U.S. English.

Potential contributors should send a 200-word abstract to editor-in-chief Dr. Tony McMahon at tony.mcmahon@rmit.edu.au.

Deadline for submissions: January 28, 2017
Full name / name of organization: Frankenstein and the Fantastic
Contact email: FrankensteinandtheFantastic@gmail.com
Frankenstein and the American Dream?

Frankenstein and the Fantastic, an outreach effort of the Fantastic (Fantasy, Horror, and Science Fiction) Area of the Northeast Popular Culture/American Culture Association seeks proposals for a panel in commemoration of the endurance of Frankenstein and the Frankenstein tradition. The session is being submitted for the 2017 meeting of the American Literature Association to be held in Boston, Massachusetts, from 25-28 May 2017.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein celebrates the two-hundredth anniversary of its publication in 2018, and, over the almost two centuries of the story’s existence, Frankenstein, its characters, and its themes have inspired a myriad range of creative responses, including retellings, adaptions, linked texts (i.e. prequels, midquels and sequels), recastings, and allusions. American creators seem to have been especially fascinated by Frankenstein and its textual progeny, and American-made productions have offered many thought-provoking transformations of Shelley’s work.

What is most interesting is that some of these American works promote happy (or at least happier) endings to the tale that permit the creator and/or his creation to live beyond the ending prescribed by Shelley’s narrative. This has allowed them, the creature most importantly, to achieve (at least to some extent) the privileges, available to all Americans, of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In seeking and claiming aspects of the American dream for Shelley’s characters the Frankensteiniana of the United States provides insight in how one nation in particular has adopted and appropriated Shelley’s story and made it its own.

We are especially interested in proposals that explore how American-made texts relate to Shelley’s novel and the larger tradition of Frankenstein-related texts in popular culture. Possible options would include works by American production companies (film and television studios, publishing houses, comic book companies, etc.), American-born creators working either in the United States or abroad, and foreign-born creators working for American companies. Additional options might explore Frankenstein and Frankenstein-related texts in an American context/setting.

Please submit proposals to FrankensteinandtheFantastic@gmail.com no later than 28 January 2017. A complete proposal should include the following: your complete contact information, a clear and useful title of your paper, an abstract of your paper (approximately 250 to 600 words), a brief biographical statement explaining your academic status and authority to speak about your proposed topic, and a note on any audio/visual requirements.

Further details on the Fantastic (Fantasy, Horror, and Science Fiction) Area can be found at https://nepcafantastic.blogspot.com. The Frankenstein and the Fantastic project has its own dedicated site at http://frankensteinandthefantastic.blogspot.com/ that will be expanded in 2017.

Complete details on the American Literature Association and its conference can be found at http://americanliteratureassociation.org/ala-conferences/ala-annual-conference/.