CFP  Jimmy Carter and the ‘Year of the Evangelicals’ Reconsidered
April 6-8, 2017
New Hampshire Institute of Politics, Saint Anselm College
Manchester, New Hampshire

In 1976 Newsweek magazine borrowed a phrase from pollster George Gallup and proclaimed that year the “Year of the Evangelicals.”  Both presidential candidates – Republican Gerald Ford and Democrat Jimmy Carter – claimed to be “born again” Christians, a claim made by one third of all Americans; and significant proportions of Protestants and Catholics told Gallup’s pollsters that the Bible should be taken literally, a marker of conservative evangelical Christianity.  This phenomenon caught journalists by surprise, and they struggled to understand this new segment of the electorate, beginning at the top with the candidacy of Jimmy Carter. The election of 1976 brought evangelicals back into the political arena. While many of these people supported Carter’s candidacy and made the difference in his election, the ways in which they influenced public life quickly extended beyond Carter and the Democratic Party.  It also marked evangelicals’ movement from the margins of intellectual and cultural life into the mainstream. Indeed, they soon became a political and cultural force.

Some forty years later, with financial support from the Henry Luce Foundation, Saint Anselm College and the New Hampshire Institute of Politics in Manchester, New Hampshire, will host a conference in honor of that Newsweek cover story and presidential election. The conference, “Jimmy Carter and ‘The Year of the Evangelicals’ Reconsidered” aims to assess both the scholarly and popular significance of the return to public life of American evangelicals.  While theNewsweek cover story provides the initial starting point, this conference aims to explore the phenomenon of evangelicals and politics more broadly.

Conference organizers seek individual paper proposals or proposals for an entire panel that analyze evangelicalism in light of its contributions to public life both in and since 1976.  In many ways, scholarship on late twentieth-century evangelicalism and the rise of the Religious Right has matured.  But there are still questions to be answered and new interpretations to be offered.  The following research questions point to potential areas for proposals, but this list is not exhaustive and proposals that address other questions or re-imagine conventional interpretations will be welcomed.

First, with the rise of the Religious Right in the late 1970s and 1980s, the progressive evangelicalism in the Newsweek article was relegated to minority status in the political world.  Why is that and what happened to its political influence in the late 20^th century?

Second, in the Newsweek story, Foy Valentine, leader of the Southern Baptist Christian Life Commission, called the label “evangelical” a “Yankee” word.  What made southern Protestant Christianity different from the rest of the nation (and why was it not necessarily “evangelical”)?

Third, African Americans are not often included in the category “evangelical” – especially in the political sense that characterized Newsweek’s story. What about African-American evangelicals?  Where do they fit in evangelicalism’s conventional historical narrative?

Fourth, what has been evangelicals’ influence on popular culture and intellectual life since their return to public life in the 1970s?

Fifth, where are we now?  Has evangelicalism’s influence on American politics diminished in the twenty-first century?

Sixth, what about the mainstream press’s treatment of evangelicals and politics?  What impact did the Newsweek cover story and the election of 1976 have on journalists?

Finally, what was the relationship between Catholics and evangelicals during this period?

Individual paper proposals should include a 250-word abstract, a brief (1-page) CV, and contact information (including email address).  Panel proposals should include a 500-word abstract, with brief (1-page) CVs for all participants and contact information for the panel organizer.

Direct proposals and any questions to Andrew Moore (amoore@anselm.edu).

Deadline for submissions is November 15, 2016.

The International Auto/Biography Association

Chapter of the Americas Conference: May 15-17, 2017

Lives Outside the Lines: Gender and Genre in the Americas

A Symposium in Honour of Marlene Kadar

To be held at the Centre for Feminist Research, York University, Toronto.

We invite proposals for the third biennial meeting of IABA Americas that will be held at the Centre for Feminist Research in Toronto with support from the US Fulbright Program. The conference will explore the multiple lines that gendered lives in the Americas cross, both physical borders and intangible boundaries. The conference is dedicated to the celebration of the scholarship of Marlene Kadar, a Canadian theorist and critic whose contributions have dramatically changed the field by pushing the conceptual boundaries of what constitutes life writing and expanding its interdisciplinary methods of study.

The themes suggested below relate to and amplify Kadar’s research interests and are clustered around issues of gender and genre with special attention given to trauma and illness studies, archival methodologies, and transnational themes in the Americas. Potential subjects include, but are not limited to, the following topics:

• Gender in migration, dislocation, displacement, transit;
• Gender constructions on and across borders;
• Transnational and decolonial practices of gender and embodiment;
• Intersectional interrogations of gender and sexuality with race, class, body size, health, and ability;
• Fluidity of genders, sexualities, becoming bodies;
• Bodes in extremis, bodies in pain, medicated bodies, permeable bodies;
• Creativity and illness; living with life-threatening illness; living with death/dying;
• End-of-life interview and (auto)pathographic genres;
• Intimacies of health care biopower;
• “Traumics” (comics of medical trauma, violence, abuse, and war);
• Plasticity of life writing;
• Hybrid forms and practices;
• Multimedial and multimodal life writing;
• Emerging genres (Instagram, selfie, I-doc, digital diary, etc.);
• Secret as a genre, unpublished secrets;
• Practices of testimony in multiple modes (oral, digital, photographic, film, documentary, writing);
• Intersections of life writing and the life sciences;
• Gendering and racializing the archives;
• Sensorial and affective encounters in the archives;
• Empathy, sympathy, and compassion;
• Interdisciplinarity of archival work;
• Methodological practices related to gender and genre; and,
• Pedagogical intersections of gender and genre.

Please send 300-word abstracts with brief biographical statements as email attachments to the convenors: Eva C. Karpinski, York University [evakarp@yorku.ca] and Ricia Anne Chansky, University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez [ricia.chansky@upr.edu] by October 31, 2016. Decisions will be made by January 15, 2017. Please be aware that space is limited. Inquiries are welcome.

The IABAA supports presenters’ rights to their own language preferences. While we do ask that abstracts be submitted in English or in English and a second language, we will assist with arranging translation for scholars who would like to present their papers in Spanish, Portuguese, or French.

Eva C. Karpinski is Associate Professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at York University, Toronto. She edited Pens of Many Colours: A Canadian Reader (3 editions). She is the author of Borrowed Tongues: Life Writing, Migration, and Translation (2012) and co-editor of Trans/Acting Culture, Writing, and Memory (2013). She edited a special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies on “Broken Dialogues.”

Ricia Anne Chansky is Associate Professor of Literature at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez. She is the editor of the journal, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, and of three books: The Routledge Auto/Biography Studies Reader, Auto/Biography in the Americas: Relational Lives, and Auto/Biography across the Americas: Transnational Themes in Life Writing. She is a Fulbright Specialist in American Studies and the founder of the International Auto/Biography Association – Chapter of the Americas.

Marlene Kadar is a professor in the Department of Humanities and Gender and Women’s Studies at York University, Toronto. She has published extensively in the field of life writing, especially in relation to traumatic historical events, archival lives, and memory studies. Her 1992 essay on life writing as a critical practice is one of the first comprehensive attempts to theorize this genre. She has co-edited four volumes on life writing theory: Tracing the Autobiographical (2005); ARIEL: Life Writing in International Contexts (2008); Photographs, Histories, and Meanings (2009); and Working Memory: Women and Work in World War II (2015). She is the co-editor of Working in Women’s Archives (2001). She is the editor of the Life Writing Series at Wilfrid Laurier University Press.