Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain)
Departamento de Estudios Ingleses, Facultad de Filología
October 29–31, 2025
The year 2025 will mark the centennial of one of the most powerful voices in
twentieth-century American Literature. Author of a reduced fictional production (two
novels and three collections of short stories), Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) remains
among the most widely praised authors of the United States, to the extent that, shortly
after her premature death, claims by, among others, Brainard Cheney, Robert Giroux, and
Caroline Gordon were made about the country having lost their next Nobel Laureate for
Literature. Alternative history aside, what is true is that the last century of American
literature would have lost an enormous amount of its meaning without the existence of
Flannery O’Connor’s writing. Contemporary authors such as Eudora Welty (1909–2001),
Alice Munro (born in 1931), Joyce Carol Oates (born in 1938), Stephen King (born in
1947), and Nick Cave (born in 1957), among others, are indebted to the brief, yet infinite
universes created by O’Connor.

 

The aim of this conference is to commemorate Flannery O’Connor’s centennial
with an academic symposium and a fresh approach to the meaning of her texts and her
afterlife in today’s literature. Since the first conference held in Denmark in 1984, other
European events about O’Connor have taken place in Italy, France, and Spain. Thus, the
centennial is a timely opportunity to strengthen this exchange and to open new
possibilities for research, teaching, and international collaboration.

 

The Department of English Studies at Universidad Complutense invites
submissions of both individual papers (20 minutes) and/or panels. Proposals for
individual papers should include a 200–250 words-long abstract and a short bio-note
(100–150 words) of the author(s). Full panels should include three papers and a chair
(who may also be the author of one of the papers); for full panels, the proposal should
include the three abstracts and all the bio-notes. Topics can include, although not limited
to, the following ones:
– Flannery O’Connor’s legacy in American letters.
– Flannery O’Connor’s legacy in foreign letters.
– Academic reception of Flannery O’Connor (both in the United States and
internationally).
– Flannery O’Connor from a post-colonial perspective.
– Flannery O’Connor and Spain.
– Flannery O’Connor beyond fiction (letters, essays, reviews…).
– Flannery O’Connor and identity (religion, race, gender, class…).
– Flannery O’Connor as a Southerner: relationship with the cultural heritage of the
region.
– The making of the artist: Flannery O’Connor and craftmanship.
– Flannery O’Connor and the tradition of spiritual writing

 

Proposals should be sent to oconnor100@ucm.es by December 13th, 2024.
In a forthcoming, updated version of the CFP, we will provide information about
fees, plenary speakers, etc., along with other practical issues concerning the celebration
of the conference.

Organizing Committee:
– José Manuel Correoso Rodenas (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)
– Laura de la Parra Fernández (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)
– Eusebio De Lorenzo Gómez (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)
– Carmen M. Méndez García (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)
– Miguel Sanz Jiménez (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)

27-29 November 2024

The Roosevelt Institute for American Studies (RIAS) is a leading research center and graduate
school, partnered with Leiden University, dedicated to the study of American history, politics,
and society. Since 2003, the Institute has organized regular seminars for doctoral students
pursuing research in its areas of interest.

The RIAS will host its next in-person research seminar in Middelburg on 27-29 November 2024.
We kindly invite applications from current doctoral candidates whose research covers any
aspect of American culture, media, society, politics, or foreign relations, recent or historical.
We are particularly interested in studies in the following research areas:

– U.S. in the world
– Culture and ideology
– Environmental issues
– Race and gender studies
– Social justice movements, civil and political rights

We welcome proposals for research papers (e.g., a dissertation chapter) or papers that give an
overview of the PhD project. Participants will present their paper and contextualize it within
their research project in 15 minutes. Each presentation is followed by a group discussion of
approximately 45 minutes, providing extensive opportunities for feedback.
Applicants are invited to submit their proposals, consisting of a 300-word abstract and a CV,
both in pdf, no later than Sunday, 15 September 2024. These should be addressed to the
seminar coordinator, Jeanine Quené, and sent to info@roosevelt.nl.
To support a culture of diversity and inclusion, we strongly encourage proposals from students
that reflect the diversity of our field in terms of gender, ethnicity, and disability.
Participants will be expected to have a paper (approximately 6,000 words) ready for precirculation
by Friday, 8 November 2024.
The RIAS will provide accommodation and meals in Middelburg.
For further information, please consult our website at www.roosevelt.nl or contact the
seminar coordinator at j.quene@roosevelt.nl

When considering the evolution of the African American Civil Rights movement, 1963 looms large in

historical study and memory. In 1963, the Birmingham campaign (and the state violence wrought

upon it) captured national and international attention, and a quarter of a million people marched on

Washington D.C. and listened to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s iconic ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. The wider

struggle for civil liberties extended beyond the Civil Rights Movement, even while it remained

inspired by and crucially intertwined with it. From housewives inspired by the publication of Betty

Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique to white evangelicals protesting the secularization of public

education, 1963 was a year in which the struggle for civil liberties manifested in new forms and

adopted new rhetorics. As such, the year of 1963 demonstrates how broader changes in the

political, intellectual, media, and cinematic landscape provided a variety of societal groups with new

ways to interact with the civil rights story and to reimagine themselves as part of it.

 

This edited volume engages with and interrogates the historical concept of the calendar year,

capturing the breadth of diverse historical actors whose ideals and actions were inspired by and

interwoven with the Civil Rights Movement. The kaleidoscopic nature of 1963 – with interconnected

shifts at a micro and macro level – indicates the distorting and transforming impact of the year on

American life. This strict chronological focus, combined with a thematic breadth of papers, offers a

range of new perspectives on a crucial year for the Civil Rights Movement. However, it also

encourages students and scholars to reflect on the purpose, significance, and potential limitations of

the calendar year as a category of analysis in history.

 

We are seeking chapter proposals that interact with the concept of 1963 as a ‘watershed year’ in

the struggle for civil liberties. Whilst we will consider papers from a broad spectrum of topics, we

particularly encourage papers that address gaps in the current plan for the volume. These include,

but are not limited to:

 

• Students and student activism

• Women’s history and the history of feminism

• Cultural forms and their relationships to civil rights, including literature and literary figures

 

Chapter proposal submission:

Please contact the volume editors, Uta Balbier (uta.balbier@history.ox.ac.uk), Emily Brady

(emily.brady@rai.ox.ac.uk), and Megan Hunt (megan.hunt@ed.ac.uk) by March 1, 2024, if you are

interested in submitting a proposal for the volume.

 

Please include a proposal of 300-500 words, alongside a short biography (max. 300 words).

 

Deadline for abstract submission: March 15, 2024

 

Further information: We intend to conduct a workshop for authors which will take place in

September 2024 (in person or online depending on funding) to workshop draft chapters and to work

jointly towards a cohesive volume.

 

Subject Fields

History, American History, American Studies, Film and Film History, Literature, Black Studies, Gender

Studies.

AfterWords: Reconsidering Narratives of Trauma and Violence in the Humanities

School of English Postgraduate Conference – Trinity College Dublin & Trinity Long Room Hub

We are delighted to annoAfterWords final poster hybrid versionunce that a postgraduate conference on the representation of trauma and violence in the humanities will be organised by Elena Valli and Ginevra Bianchini, two PhD researchers from the School of English in Trinity College Dublin, on the 9th February 2024 in person and online at the Trinity Long Room Hub.

We welcome abstracts of 300 words and a short bio of about 100 words to pgengconference2024@gmail.com from postgraduate and early career researchers working on any subject area of the humanities and social sciences by Monday 18th December. More information on the event and on suggested topics can be found in the attached poster.

The organisers can be reached at the above email address with any questions.

 

 

Irish Association for American Studies Annual Conference 

University College Dublin 

1-3 May 2024 

Conference Theme: “Dis/Trust” 

 

Keynote Speakers: Dr Imaobong Umoren (London School of Economics) Prof. Johannes Voelz (Goethe-University Frankfurt) 

“In God We Trust.” While these words, printed on every coin and banknote issued by the Federal Reserve, evidently speak to the importance of religion in the United States, they also acknowledge the centrality of trust to America’s self-image. Even for those thinkers whose interests have been more secular than religious, the special status and nature of social trust in the US has been a subject of comment and debate. In Democracy in America (1835/1840), Alexis de Tocqueville praised the American culture of voluntary association as an antidote to the loss of trust that came with the decaying of the old regimes and rising class conflict in Europe. In the late twentieth century, neo-Tocquevilleans including Francis Fukuyama (Trust, 1995) and Robert Putnam (Bowling Alone, 2000) argued that the high-trust character of communal life was crucial to American success but that it was coming under renewed threat in an age of economic globalisation. Today, the increasingly polarised quality of American cultural and political life, fuelled by bitterly contrasting media narratives, seems to indicate that social trust is indeed breaking down. 

Yet to view the US as a high-trust society in present-day decline also involves overlooking those who have historically been excluded from its networks of social trust. While the American dream has traditionally offered immigrants a reason to trust in the possibilities of their new lives, American reality has often inculcated distrust more than trust. For marginalised and racialised groups – including but not limited to Native Americans and African Americans – it has been particularly difficult to trust in the benevolence of an American state founded on their destruction and enslavement, and to feel part of a shared history in which promises have been broken and treaties disregarded. The expansion of American Studies into a transnational and hemispheric discipline over recent decades has also drawn attention to trust and distrust of American power, particularly in the history and cultural production of peoples who have fallen within the ambit of that power.

Trust can be described as a feeling, an attitude, an atmosphere, or a relationship (Baier 1986, Hosking 2014). It has been considered a means to reduce modern complexity (Luhmann 1973), a cognitive-emotional coping mechanism that facilitates action in situations of uncertain outcome (Schloss 2021). Although a regular subject for social scientists, the fact that trust tends to be invisible and unconscious (especially when functioning well) makes it an equally appropriate subject for the humanities. Social trust provides “the ethical substance of everyday life” (Bernstein 2015) and becomes most evident only in its absence, when what was previously trusted becomes open to question. The present moment in the United States is arguably defined by a heightened consciousness of issues of trust and distrust: we invite papers that address this moment, but we are equally interested in papers that consider dis/trust at other moments in American history and culture. 

We welcome papers on the general theme of “Dis/trust” from all disciplines in American Studies, broadly defined. Possible paper and panel topics may include but are not limited to: – American histories of dis/trust 

– Literary histories of dis/trust 

– Dis/trust and American politics 

– Dis/trust and the visual arts 

– Dis/trust and disinformation 

– Interpersonal, institutional, and distributed trust in the US 

– Digital ecologies of dis/trust 

– American experiments in trust 

– Paranoia and dis/trust 

– Dis/trust, economy, finance 

– Dis/trusting American power 

– Dis/trust and the racial imaginary 

– Dis/trust in/of the American academy 

– Gendered histories of dis/trust 

– Queer(ing) American dis/trust 

Abstracts of 200-300 words for 20-minute papers, along with an author bio of c.100 words, should be submitted by attachment to trust.ucd@gmail.com by 1st February 2024. We also welcome joint proposals for panels of three papers, or panels with innovative formats. Applicants will be informed by the end of February as to their acceptance for the conference. 

The IAAS is an all-island scholarly association dedicated to promoting interdisciplinary American Studies in Ireland. We are dedicated to equality, diversity, and inclusion, and we welcome proposals from under-represented groups. We also encourage proposals from researchers who are based at institutions around the world, whose research stems from a variety of disciplines and languages, and who are at any career stage. Some IAAS bursaries are available to support the participation of early career and precariously employed researchers. You can apply for these at the IAAS website: https://iaas.ie/bursaries/ 

All presenters must be members of the IAAS to register for and attend the conference. More information is available here: https://iaas.ie/memberships/

This conference is held in association with the Irish Research Council-funded project “Imaginative Literature and Social Trust, 1990-2025.” The website is: www.trustlit.org.

 

Irish Association for American Studies
Postgraduate Symposium

Evolutions and Involutions of Human Rights in the Americas

Trinity College Dublin – Trinity Long Room Hub
In-person event
18th November 2023

Organizers: Ginevra Bianchini and Midia Mohammadi, IAAS PG Caucus co-chairs

 

For the 2023 IAAS Postgraduate Symposium we invite scholars across all disciplines of American Studies to reflect on the interlocked themes of ‘Evolutions and Involutions of Human Rights in the Americas.’ We seek to understand how, throughout history, backlashes have occurred in cyclical patterns and how thinkers, authors, human rights activists, and scholars have responded to these challenges.

There are many examples indicating these cyclical recurrences in the United States. For instance, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights (1789) initially pledged equal treatment for all Americans regardless of gender, race, or social class; however, it took seventy-four years, many lives, and a destructive Civil War for the 13th Amendment to be ratified. Even after legal emancipation, Black people have endured persistent racism and injustice. The arduous struggle for justice found expression through the Civil Rights and Black Power movements in the 1960s and 70s, an ongoing pursuit that still persists. As a part of systematic, racialized police violence, the brutal murder of George Floyd aggravated the backlashes against the revindication of Black people’s rights. It returned the ongoing activism of the Black Lives Matter movement to the forefront, proving once again that continual, political, and cultural work is necessary to preserve fundamental human rights in America.

The backlashes against human rights go beyond the streets and are taking place in the legal arena too, as several of the rights gained during the 20th century are being revoked. The overturning of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court in 2022 and the anti-LGBTQ laws passed in the same year – which add to the ongoing challenges faced by LGBTQIA+ individuals in numerous states – serve as crisis-level reminders of the erosion of hard-won, established rights within the US. These contemporary examples repeat and revise a long history of backlashes against fundamental human rights. Margaret Jay Jessee’s Female Physicians in American Literature (2022), for example, illuminates how late 19th-century America witnessed backlashes against the advancement of women’s rights and how abortion was made illegal under the pressures of heteropatriarchy, xenophobia, and racism. Throughout the 20th century, researchers and activists have continued to draw attention to the ongoing backlashes against women’s rights, as seen in Susan Faludi’s influential work Backlash (1991), which explores the historical challenges faced by women’s rights in the US. In short, these are just two representative examples of how the US has long proven to be prone to backlashes against fundamental human rights, and this symposium is interested in examining the reasons for it.

Delegates are encouraged to reflect on the contexts and significance of these evolutions and involutions and how they have been narrated and represented in the cultural imaginary. When and why do backlashes occur? How have diverse constituencies in the US responded to them in given historical moments? How have political and social backlashes been represented, debated, or silenced in American cultural productions? How are these impacting contemporary society?

Paper and panel topics may include but are by no means limited to:

  • Investigations of the causes and origins of backlashes against fundamental human rights/judicial decisions concerning human rights and flouting and/or breaking of human rights’ legislations throughout the Americas[1] and/or within the USA.
  • Analysis of the portrayal of backlashes against human rights in cultural productions (literature, film, TV series, visual arts, music).
  • Comparative analysis of parallels and connections between current backlashes and historical incidents.
  • Examinations of the impact of legal decisions and policy changes on the perpetuation or mitigation of backlashes against human rights.
  • Analysis of the depiction of backlashes in the mainstream media and popular culture.
  • Explorations of the influences of colonialism and decolonialism on the development of backlashes.
  • Impacts of capitalism and consumer culture on the perception of freedom and fundamental human rights.
  • Relations between gun control, domestic terrorism, and ideas of freedom and human rights.
  • Impacts on marginalized communities of human rights’ backlashes, including women’s rights, LGBTQIA+’ rights, and the rights of people of color, immigrants, and religious minorities.

The symposium is scheduled as an in-person event and will be hosted by Trinity College Dublin and the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts & Humanities Research Institute. The Trinity Long Room Hub can be reached by public transport to city center and is fully accessible.

The IAAS and the Postgraduate Symposium are dedicated to diversity, equality, and inclusion, and we welcome papers from under-represented groups. You can read our code of conduct at this link: https://iaas.ie/blog/iaas-annual-conference-code-of-conduct/.

All presenters must be members of the IAAS to register for and attend the symposium. More information is available here: https://iaas.ie/memberships/.

The IAAS is an all-island scholarly association dedicated to promoting interdisciplinary American Studies in Ireland. The annual Postgraduate Symposium, run by Postgraduates, aims at fostering a supportive and discursive environment for more junior scholars to share their research, exchange ideas, and create lasting connections and networks.

For more information, email us at postgrad@iaas.ie or join the IAAS Postgraduate Discord: https://discord.gg/jasEAMKJ4b.

The IAAS offers two bursaries of €50 each for attendance at the Postgraduate Symposium. Applicants must be presenting a paper in person at the symposium and should express their interest and reasons when submitting their paper proposal. The bursary recipients will be delegates without additional funding who are traveling the farthest distance to attend the symposium. 

Submission Details

We welcome 300-word proposals for fifteen-minute papers or 500-word proposals for three-person panels, along with a short academic biography (150 words) in the same document, from postgraduate and early career researchers across all disciplines of American Studies, including literature, history, film, politics, music, art, media, geopolitics, geography, and more.

The deadline for submissions, to be sent to postgrad@iaas.ie, is Monday 9th, October 2023.

[1] The word Americas in this context refers to the countries of North and South America, considered together. (Cambridge Dictionary, s.v. “Americas,” accessed September 08, 2023, https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/americas)

 

Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies 2024  

Call for Papers  

 Trans()Turns in Nineteenth-Century Studies  March 21-24, 2024  

Hyatt Regency Hotel  

Cincinnati, OH  

 

Trans- 

“across, through, over, to or on the other side of,  

beyond, outside of, from one place, person,  

thing, or state to another”; “beyond, surpassing,  

transcending” (OED). 

Whether in bridging divides or leaping over  

them, contesting a binary or dismantling it,  

“trans(-)” linguistically registers changes of state 

as well as movements in time and space; it  

indexes communication or traffic that puts  

places, persons, and things in new relations to  

one another and, perhaps, to themselves. 

Building on INCS’ rich history, this iteration of  

the conference will seek to explore the “trans(-)”  

alongside and in productive tension with the  

“inter-.” Proposals on a wide array of topics from 

all areas of nineteenth-century studies will be  

welcome. 

 

Read the full CFP below:

INCS 2024 CFP

CALL FOR PAPERS:

The Spatial Imagination in Postwar and Contemporary

American Literature and Art

 

A two-day international conference at the University of Strasbourg funded by the Institut Universitaire de France

Dates: 21-22 March 2024

Venue: University of Strasbourg, France

Confirmed keynote speaker: Dawn Raffel is a writer whose most recent book is Boundless as the Sky (2023).

Other keynote speakers TBC.

Seen as an emblematic feature of the United States, American space has been represented, interpreted and questioned along multiple lines. Yet, these lines of critical inquiry often remain separate and discrete, treated from perspectives that do not take into account their interaction. They are also spelt along a particularly white, male trajectory. While it is generally agreed that ‘space’ is a major component of the American imagination, literary representations and artistic practices of space in postwar US have rarely been treated together as intersecting narratives. This conference sets out to consider postwar and contemporary conceptualizations and material practices of space in American literature and art, with the prospect of opening larger and more interdisciplinary vistas. The conference builds on the 2018 conference in Paris on The cartographic imagination. Art, literature and mapping in the United States, 1945-1980.

What are the prevailing and the underrepresented spatial imaginaries in postwar and contemporary America, and how are they represented in literature and art? How do these expressions relate to various Indigenous and colonial traditions of the spatial imagination? How do issues of whiteness, race, and the racial imagination shape spatial practices and imaginaries? What does the dialogue between literary texts, visual studies and art historical practices bring to the understanding of the construction and experience of space in American postwar and contemporary contexts? What are the major paradigms that arise? How do national and transnational, local and global, official and alternative narratives of space intersect in literature and art? How do the contexts of US imperialism and militarization play out in the representation of Cold War and ‘war on terror’ geographies?

We invite proposals that highlight the ways in which literature and art, and more generally literary and art historical studies as disciplines, can be fruitfully and innovatively brought together and made to interact. This conference will be a venue for discussing interdisciplinary and creative methodologies. An important, exploratory aspect of the conference consists precisely in determining the possible intersections between art and literature that deserve to be further explored.

We invite interdisciplinary proposals on the following topics:

  • Intermediality and space;
  • The legacies of literary and artistic modernisms and their investigations of space;
  • Indigenous and minoritised spatial discourses and practices;
  • Spatial practice, whiteness, race;
  • US militarization, imperialism and Cold War geographies;
  • Popular literary and graphic genres and the spatial imagination;
  • Liminal spaces, meta-spaces, horizontal and vertical spaces;
  • Site-specificity and the disturbance of the gallery and museum;
  • Comparative literary and artistic representations of exploration, displacement and exile;
  • Alternative constructions of American geography;
  • Discourses of place informed by environmentalism and ecology in literature and art;
  • The local and the global;
  • Mapping and counter-mapping;
  • Artists’ writings and artistic practice;
  • The digital turn in literature and art, systems, cartographies;
  • The notion of “space” broadly (re)imagined.

We invite:

  • individual paper proposals for 20-minute papers (abstracts of no more than 350 words, plus 100-word biography)
  • panel proposals for 1.5 hour panels (panel abstracts of no more than 350 words, plus paper abstracts of no more than 250 words each, plus 100-word biographies). Panels of no more than 3 presenters are recommended.
  • suggestions of interdisciplinary panels or roundtables (a mix of critical and creative practitioners are welcome)

Please submit your proposals and biographies to Gwen Cressman (cressman@unistra.fr) and Monica Manolescu (manoles@unistra.fr) by September 30, 2023.

Registration for the conference will be free of charge.

Organizers: Sandrine Baudry (University of Strasbourg), Chloé Bour-Lang (University of Strasbourg), Gwen Cressman (University of Strasbourg), Catherine Gander (Maynooth University), Hélène Ibata (University of Strasbourg), Monica Manolescu (University of Strasbourg/Institut Universitaire de France), Will Norman (University of Kent).

Bodies and Boundaries in Irish and American Literature, to be held in Dublin City University on September 05-06, 2023, entirely in person.
 
This conference intends to explore twentieth and twenty-first century literature through the lens of literary geography and theories on space, place and embodiment. Indeed, by using the different approaches of literature and geography to “think beyond taken-for-granted categories, levels, and terms” (Hones, 688), literary geography allows a discussion that redefines not only the genres but also how one experiences a text according to different spatialities and bodies. 

Papers addressing the following themes are especially welcomed and encouraged: 

  • Literary geography in relation to Irish literature, American literature, or Irish-American literature (20th-21st centuries) 
  • The body as a boundary 
  • Bodies and boundaries in literature 
  • Fictional accounts on: race; sexuality; gender; disability; social status; the “future body” 
  • Ecocriticism 
  • Political/ non-political bodies
  • Gendering bodies and boundaries 
  • Keynote speakers: June Caldwell, Nessa Cronin, Sophie White and Emilie Pine. 
If you are interested in participating in the conference, whether by giving a presentation or organising a panel, please send an abstract (300 words maximum) and a short biography (100 words) to: laetitia.nebotdeneuville2@mail.dcu.ie. If you want to attend the conference, please send an email to the same email address. Please specify your home institution for both cases. 
 
Deadline for abstract submission and attendance registration: May 22, 2023.

Full details here:

Bodies and Boundaries CFP