Deadline for submissions: September 30, 2017
Full name/name of organization: Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)
Contact email: jl479@cornell.edu

Seeking abstracts for the 49th Northeast Modern Language Asssociation (NeMLA) Annual Convention at the Omni William Penn Hotel in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The panel is called “What If? Alternative Histories and Reimagined Worlds” (description below).

Abstracts of around 300 words must be submitted via the NeMLA site: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/17033.

What would our world look like if the Axis powers won World War II? What would it be like if the Union lost the American Civil War? What if the Great Depression never ended? Whether it is from our desire to change the past or our relief at horrors that did not occur, we like to imagine alternative histories, often the province of science fiction. Alternative histories range from expansive visions that focus on the fate of the world (Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee, Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle) to highly personal stories that concern a single life (James Tiptree, Jr.’s “Backward, Turn Backward”). Science fiction experiments with world-shaping possibilities, and it can present us with changed visions of our pasts, opening up possibilities—both good and bad—for our presents and futures. Written for dramatic and often ironic effect, alternative histories chronicle the moment of divergence and the consequences of that divergence. Among the consequences of these changed timelines are reimagined spaces: borders shift, and those who were welcome are now excluded. This panel explores the relationship between history and space, asking panelists to examine fictional histories and investigate the impact of alternative timelines upon the landscape. How do mechanisms like time travel, time loops, and timeslips into parallel worlds make these reimagined worlds possible? Do positive alternative histories demolish borders while negative ones erect them? Are natural spaces as susceptible to change by altered timelines as political boundaries?

The submission deadline is September 30, 2017. Applicants will hear back by October 15, 2017.

Deadline for submissions: December 15, 2017
Full name / name of organization: Yale University, Department of English
Contact email: americanliteratureintheworld@gmail.com

The conference hopes to broaden the scope of American literature, opening it to more complex geographies, and to a variety of genres and media. The impetus comes partly from a survey of what is currently in the field: it is impossible to read the work of Toni Morrison and Junot Díaz, Yusef Komunyakaa and Carolyn Forché, Tony Kushner and Lynn Nottage without seeing that, for all these authors, the reference frame is no longer simply the United States, but a larger, looser, more contextually varied set of coordinates, populated by laboring bodies, migrating faiths, generational sagas, memories of war, as well as the accents of unforgotten tongues, the taste and smell of beloved foods and spices.

The twenty-first century is a good century to think about American literature in the world. But other centuries are equally fertile ground, as the writings of Anne Bradstreet, Phillis Wheatley, William Apess, Margaret Fuller, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Sui Sin Far, Gertrude Stein, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Frank O’Hara, and Tomás Rivera make abundantly clear. To study these and countless other authors is to see that the United States and the world are neither separate nor antithetical, but part of the same analytic fabric. Our conference explores these extended networks through many channels: from the cultural archives circulating across the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans as well as the Caribbean Sea; to the dynamic interactions between indigenous populations and those newly arrived; from the institutions of print, to the tangled ecologies of literature, art, theater, music, and film, to the digital globalism of the present moment.

The conference is supported by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library; the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences; the Creative Writing Program; the English Department; the American Studies Department; and the African American Studies Department.

Conference attendees are also invited to a slate of related events: a reading by former U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Rita Dove on Thursday; a research workshop with Melissa Barton, Curator at the Beinecke Library; and a publication workshop with Wai Chee Dimock, editor of PMLA, and Gregory Cowles, columnist and staff editor at the New York Times Book Review.

Please send a 1-page abstract (250-650 words) to americanliteratureintheworld@gmail.com by December 15.

The Postgraduate Forum of AISNA (Italian Association of North American Studies), in coordination with the PG representative of BAAS Katerina Webb-Bourne and with thebacking and full support of the EAAS Board as well as the President, Philip McGowan, is organising a panel at the EBAAS conference of London on ‘American Studies in Europe: Life as a Postgraduate Student and Early Career Researcher’. The panel is designed as an occasion for networking and exchange between PG students and ECRs across Europe, with the objective of confronting problems,sharing best practices and building a European community of young scholars of American Studies.

We are seeking contributions from representatives of PG and ECR Forums associated with the Associations of American Studies across Europe, but we would also be very interested to hear from individual members of the American Studies community. Ideally, contributions should discuss the situation of the PG and ECR communities in the country of origin of the speaker, and offering comments on problems and best practices. The length of each contribution will be decided according to the final number of presenters. We aim to have an informal event, with open interaction between presenters and the public.

To express your interest in taking part in the panel, please email l.costaguta@bham.ac.uk with a brief personal introduction, academic affiliation, and the position held in one of the associations of American Studies affiliated with EAAS (if any), by September 29th at the latest. We look forward to have representatives from as many European countries as possible, so please do not hesitate to get in touch with us.

Submission deadline: December 1, 2017. The Southern Quarterly invites submissions for a special issue that explore this iconic film: responses to the film from reviewers and famous writers in non-English speaking countries; the film and World War II; the ways the film has been reinterpreted in other media; recasting gender/racial roles; etc. Submit manuscripts online at www.usm.edu/soq, where guidelines and the full call for papers can also be found. The Southern Quarterly is an internationally-known scholarly journal devoted to the interdisciplinary study of Southern arts and culture, including the Caribbean and Latin America.

The Harry Ransom Center invites applications for its 2018­-2019 research fellowships.

The Ransom Center will award 10 dissertation fellowships and up to 50 postdoctoral fellowships for projects that require substantial on-site use of its collections. The collections support research in all areas of the humanities, including literature, photography, film, art, the performing arts, music, and cultural history.

The deadline for applications, which must be submitted through the Center’s website, is November 15, 2017, 5 p.m. CST. All applicants, with the exception of those applying for dissertation fellowships, must have a Ph.D. or be independent scholars with a substantial record of achievement.

The fellowships range from one to three months, with stipends of $3,500 per month (domestic) or $4,000 per month (international). Travel stipends and dissertation fellowships provide stipends of $2,000 (domestic) or $2,500 (international). Fellowship residencies may be scheduled between June 1, 2018, and August 31, 2019. During the fellowship, scholars will work on-site at the Ransom Center in Austin, Texas.

Fellows will become part of a distinguished group of alumni. Since the fellowship program’s inauguration in 1990, the Ransom Center has supported the research of more than 1,000 scholars from around the world.

Details and application instructions are available here.

Questions about the fellowship program or application procedures should be directed to ransomfellowships@utexas.edu.

CFP: Global Studies of Childhood

Special Issue: Children and Popular Culture

Guest Editor: Patrick Cox, Rutgers University

Childhood and youth are always contested notions, but perhaps nowhere more than in popular culture. Popular culture offers representations of children and youth as, among other things, wise, dangerous, evil, innocent, sexual, doomed, and in various states of “in progress.” Popular culture is also the broad site of much child agency, where children and youth produce texts from novels to YouTube channels to websites, blogs, and zines, frequently outstripping their adult contemporaries in technological savvy and communicative capability. Popular culture for children is by turns condescending to the youngest audience, crass, pedantic, and appropriated by adults for their own pleasure. Elements of popular culture are designed to educate and socialize children; others are manipulated by children as political activism. These turns call into question and trouble conceptions not only of “the child” but of “popular culture” itself and propose a compelling nexus of questions befitting both Childhood Studies and Popular Culture Studies.

In this special issue, authors are invited to consider intersections of popular culture by, for, and about childhood, both broadly construed. We will explore both the impacts of popular culture on youth and childhood and the very real impacts of children and youth on popular culture. All disciplinary approaches are welcome, including but not limited to textual and visual analysis, ethnographic work, studies of children’s popular material culture, historical readings, comparative analysis of texts, and consumer and communication studies.

Additionally, contemplations of the interstices between Childhood Studies and Popular Culture Studies as academic endeavors are encouraged. The two fields have been in limited conversation with one another, perhaps separated by epistemological and methodological concerns, yet the available data seems like a rich vein for insight. While both fields are multi-disciplinary and continuously evolving, Childhood Studies maintains very clear traces of its roots in social sciences, while Popular Culture Studies is still found more often housed in the Humanities. The two fields each have at their center subjects that have at times made it difficult for them to be taken seriously as sites of academic inquiry. With different questions at their core, how can the two fields interact? Put another way, how do we study this multitude of texts?

Topics for this special issue might include:

*Popular culture and education, whether intentional or inadvertent;
*Children’s popular culture as grown-up nostalgia;
*Youth vs. adult perspectives on popular culture;
*Children and youth as producers of popular culture;
*New media as empowering or oppressive;
*Capabilities for communication and interconnectivity;
*Adult consumption of children’s popular culture;
*Children’s consumption of decades-old popular culture;
*Definitions of youth in popular culture;
*Nostalgia through revivals and reboots;
*Social media;
*Diminishing space between children’s and adult popular culture.

The guest editor welcomes submissions of articles via the journal submission system on its SAGE Publishing site. See “Submission Guidelines” here: https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/journal/global-studies-childhood#description.

Deadline for submissions: December 1, 2017.

Please send any queries to guest editor Patrick Cox at patrick.cox@rutgers.edu.

Southern Cultures, the award-winning quarterly of the Center for the Study of the American South, encourages submissions from scholars, writers, musicians, and visual artists for our Music and Protest Issue, to be published Fall 2018. We will be accepting submissions for this special issue through December 1, 2017, at https://southerncultures.submittable.com/submit.

This call aims to gather work that documents and understands southern music’s relationships to protest and resistance, both historically and in its present moment, and in the voices of musicians, scholars, critics, audiences, visual artists, and activists, broadly defined. We understand southern music to exist across many genres, communities, and collaborations and seek to expand the conversation beyond the sometimes-limiting lenses of “traditional music” and “protest songs.” To that end, we are less interested in stereotypes, revisiting past debates, or fetishized music culture than we are in the interaction of peoples and cultures with the broader forces of political, social, historical, and economic change at work in the South.

Submissions can explore any topic or theme related to southern music and protest, with a special interest in pieces that seek new understandings of the region and its musics, identify current communities and concerns, and address its ongoing struggles for justice and expression. We welcome explorations of the region in the forms Southern Cultures publishes: scholarly articles, memoir, interviews, surveys, photo essays, and shorter feature essays.

Possible topics and questions to explore might include (but are certainly not limited to):

-How have musicians and audiences in the American South aligned or unaligned their musics with their politics and ethics, both historically and today, within both formal and vernacular contexts? How has music addressed, rectified, or exacerbated oppressive situations over the course of southern history?

-Is music inherently political or apolitical, and do musicians have political responsibilities or not? How do artists and listeners engage with southern politics and social justice through music beyond the confines of programmatic “protest music” with explicit political content? What other strategies of political engagement and action through music are possible and fruitful?

-How are musicians responding, both within their art and beyond, to the current cultural and political climates of the South? Topics might include discourses related to Black Lives Matter; arguments about the removal of Confederate monuments; the recently increased visibility and violence of white nationalists in the South; HB2 and debates about gender and transgender rights; the acrimonious 2016 presidential election and its aftermath; immigration and the U.S.–Mexico border; and the military, national security, and the ongoing “War on Terror.”

-As the South assumes an increasingly diverse and global identity, how is the music of (or about) recent immigrant, refugee, and transplanted communities engaging or disengaging with articulations of protest, social justice, and identity? How is the music and musical consumption of recent arrivals changing the textures of southern music?

-How have new technologies and media—allowing for the increasingly rapid creation, sampling and editing, dissemination, and critique of music both new and old—changed the capacity, pace, and immediacy of musical protest and resistance in the South and beyond?

As we also publish digital content, we are able to feature select essays with video, audio, and interactive visual content. We encourage creativity in coordinating print and digital materials in submissions and ask that authors submit any potential digital materials with their essay or introduction/artist’s statement.

We encourage authors to gain familiarity with the tone, scope, and style of our journal before submitting. Those whose institutions subscribe to Project Muse can read past issues for free via http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/southern_cultures/. To read our current issue, access our submission guidelines, or browse our content, please visit www.southerncultures.org.

General Call for Papers

For the general section of its eleventh issue, aspeers seeks outstanding
academic writing demonstrating the excellence of graduate scholarship,
the range of concerns scrutinized in the field of American studies, and
the diversity of perspectives employed. We thus explicitly invite
revised versions of term papers or chapters from theses written by
students of European Master (and equivalent) programs. For this section,
there are no topical limitations. Contributions should be up to 7,500
words (including abstract and list of works cited). The submission
deadline is October 15, 2017.

Topical Call for Papers on “Alternative Americas”

From ‘flyover country’ to ‘coastal liberals,’ from the ‘American
heartland’ to ‘urban elites’–the 2016 presidential election engendered
numerous debates about where the allegedly ‘real’ America lies. Beyond
displaying political divisiveness, each invocation stylizes a vision of
the United States that stands as an alternative to the presumed
political and cultural mainstream, each locates ‘real’ America in a
different place, and each constitutes an attempt at making alternative
voices heard–from Americans who feel un- or misrepresented by
politicians or neglected by the media, thus trying to reassert
themselves into the public sphere.

‘Alternative’ visions of America and of what it means to be American,
often cast as competing with or as polar opposites to a perceived
mainstream, loom large throughout US culture and history. Whether their
fault lines are drawn between rural and urban, conservative and
progressive, or young and old, at their core, they form interventions
into the status quo: voicing dissent, spotlighting difference and
otherness, making the invisible seen and representing the previously
unrepresented, criticizing assumed norms, or unearthing forgotten points
of view. Implicitly or explicitly, such alternative configurations also
highlight the constructedness of the ‘mainstream’ they position
themselves against.

For its eleventh issue, aspeers thus dedicates its topical section to
“Alternative Americas” and invites European graduate students to
critically and analytically explore American literature, (popular)
culture, society, history, and politics through the lens of alternative
visions of the US. We welcome papers from all fields, methodologies, and
approaches comprising American studies as well as inter- and
transdisciplinary submissions, ranging from economy and political
science to history, media studies, literary and cultural studies, and
beyond. Potential paper topics could cover (but are not limited to):

* Expressions of counterculture, specific subcultures, or other
counter-voices to what is considered (the political) mainstream (e.g.,
the hippie, Beat, Occupy Wall Street, Tea Party, or alt-right movements)

* Literary and filmic representations of alternatives, e.g., in fantasy
and science fiction, (post)apocalyptic narratives, utopias and
dystopias, alternate history, or conspiracy fictions

* Spotlights on the US beyond the mainland, towards its ‘alternate’
fringes–the border zones of the US with other countries, inter-American
relations, etc.

* Anti-normative and alternative social constructions, e.g., alternative
religions or family constellations

* Camp, queerness, and other concepts questioning the ‘norm’ or the
‘natural’

* Notions of fact and fiction in journalism and politics (e.g.,
‘alternative facts’ and fake news)

* Deconstructions/’revisions’ of traditional mainstream genres in
various media (music, literature, TV, etc.)

aspeers, the first and currently only graduate-level peer-reviewed
journal of European American studies, encourages fellow MA students from
all fields to reflect on the diverse meanings of “Alternative
Americas.” We welcome term papers, excerpts from theses, or papers
specifically written for the eleventh issue of aspeers by October 15,
2017. If you are seeking to publish work beyond this topic, please refer
to our general Call for Papers.

Please consult our submission guidelines
and find some additional tips at www.aspeers.com/2018<http://www.aspeers.com/2018>.
Alternative Americas | www.aspeers.com<http://www.aspeers.com/2018>
www.aspeers.com

LIT-TV: A Two-Day Symposium Exploring Contemporary US Television and “the Literary”

Organisers: Dr Arin Keeble (Edinburgh Napier) and Dr Sam Thomas (Durham).

Keynote: Professor Stephen Shapiro (Warwick University)

We are seeking proposals for a symposium to be hosted by the School of Arts and Creative Industries at Edinburgh Napier University on May 5-6, 2018.

Contemporary US television is frequently conceived of, promoted and analysed as “literary”. Following the game-changing impact of The Sopranos (1999-2007), The Wire (2002-2008) can potentially be identified as a paradigm case here: it was originally pitched to HBO as a “novel” for television; it has been famously compared to the serial works of Dickens; it has received enthusiastic endorsements from writers such as Junot Díaz and Zadie Smith; its creator David Simon has been suggested by some commentators as a worthy recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature; it has been studied and taught in university English Departments.

Beyond The Wire, there are examples from across the genre spectrum of an intriguing, multifaceted interplay between screen and page. Cult favourite Justified (2010-2015) is deeply rooted in the distinctive prose of Elmore Leonard and pays tribute to the creator of its principle characters in reverential yet playful ways. Sons of Anarchy (2007-2013) fuses extreme pulp violence and melodrama with the narrative frame of Hamlet. Shows as diverse as Breaking Bad (2008-2013), True Detective (2014-) and Orange is the New Black (2013-) feature strategic allusions to all manner of literary texts. A recent spate of productions, including The Man in the High Castle (2015-), American Gods (2017-) and The Handmaid’s Tale (2017), are based on influential novels — inspiring much discussion about the new possibilities for literary adaptation and even, in the case of the latter, acts of political protest.

Tied to profound changes in the production and reception of television, these series demonstrate a range of entrenched associations with literary culture. The relationship between television and the literary is also a crucial factor in recent debates about prestige, canonicity and contemporary value systems. With these points in mind, critics such as Greg Metcalf have gone so far as to assert that television now has the capacity “to create what we think of as literature” (The DVD Novel, 2012).

Cutting against this, however, is a wave of scholarship that focusses on how such programmes might resist and/or diverge from the literary tag, often by embellishing narrative possibilities that are unique to television. In Complex TV (2015), for instance, Jason Mittell argues that “such cross-media comparisons obscure rather than reveal the specificities of television’s storytelling form”. In ‘Breaking Bad’ and Dignity (2015), Elliot Logan claims that the celebrated series challenges the way in which the “literary” is held up as an ideal for television to aspire to.

In many respects, the analysis of contemporary US television therefore speaks to a rich cultural history that encompasses both cross-pollination and opposition, while at the same time opening up compelling questions about present and future relationships between narrative media.

Ultimately, the two-day symposium seeks to contribute to emerging scholarship on the nature and value of televisual storytelling vis-à-vis the literary. Plans are also underway for a special issue of a high quality refereed journal, based on selected and expanded papers from the conference.

We invite proposals for 20 minute papers addressing (but not limited to) the following areas:

• Parallels, converges and (dis)connections between literary and televisual narrative form
• Seriality
• Literary sources / adaptation / allusion
• The relationship between televisual and literary genres (crime, dystopia, the gothic, social realism, and so on)
• The relationship between televisual and literary places / regions
• Television and literary heritage / tradition
• Theoretical paradigms for (re)thinking the relationship between television and the literary
• Value / cultural capital / canonicity
• The legitimacy of ‘literary tv’ as a concept in culture and criticism

Please send abstracts to littvconference2018@gmail.com by December 1, 2017

“Surveillance, Race, Culture”

Panel Proposal

We are seeking papers from academics interested in taking part in a panel on “surveillance, race, culture” at the joint British Association of American Studies/European Association of American Studies Conference in April (4^th – 7^th) 2018.

In keeping with the conference theme of ‘Environment, Place and Protest’, the issue of surveillling identity seems to be paramount. Recent movements such as Cop Watch; events in the Middle East and Syria (drones, the ‘war on terror’); and our increasing reliance upon personal technology, all point to an era of multiple gazes. In such an environment, our place appears to be firmly rooted within view of the camera eye. Our place (and therefore, our identity) is therefore often determined as binary signifiers: either submissive or dominant, powerful or powerless. The effect of the camera eye is therefore two-fold – to create identity (as watched) and to refuse identity (as an individual) – as such, our place within such an environment gives rise to protest, rebellion and the desire for freedom. This panel seeks to investigate the manner in which our daily lives are interconnected with these technologies, and how these interconnections are shored up across the humanities. This panel brings together papers which question our relationship with surveillance technologies and expose the ways in which cultural narratives of race are constructed by the act of being watched. Offering multidisciplinary readings of surveillance, this panel demonstrates how culture is intertwined with race relations, and in doing so, how these are bound to surveillance technologies.

If you are interested in presenting a 20-minute paper, please send a 250 word abstract and short biography to Dr Antonia Mackay (antoniamackay@brookes.ac.uk) and Dr Susan Flynn (S.flynn@lcc.arts.ac.uk) by 25^th of September.