As part of the Manchester University Press series, Contemporary American and Canadian Writers, this volume will chart recent and emerging critical opinion on the celebrated author, Marilynne Robinson. Having issued an earlier call for papers, the editors now seek proposals that specifically address the following areas: 

• Robinson and her contemporaries;
• Robinson’s nonfiction writing;
• Robinson and race;
• Robinson’s role as a public intellectual;
• Literary review culture, prize giving, and the production of “literary” fiction via the Iowa Writers’ Workshop;
• Robinson’s engagement with history, particularly the ongoing relevance of the American Civil War, Reconstruction, and/or Civil Rights Movement to her work;
• Robinson and US intellectual history.

Please email abstracts of no more than 300 words with your institutional affiliation and brief bio (c. 250 words) to robinsonsymposium@gmail.com no later than 15^th September 2017.   All chapters will be subject to a blind peer review process and full details and submission guidelines will be provided to contributors on acceptance of proposals. Any queries should be sent to the editors at robinsonsymposium@gmail.com.

“The one test of the really weird is simply this—whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers.” 
—H.P. Lovecraft, “Supernatural Horror in Literature” (1927)

“This whole world’s wild at heart and weird on top.”
—David Lynch, Wild at Heart (1990)

For H.P. Lovecraft, the weird conveys “a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe’s utmost rim.” Taking its cue from Lovecraft’s enduringly influential conceptualization, this conference examines and broadens the notion of weirdness towards an ecology and geography of the weird as a new field of theoretical and practical resonances. What we call The American Weird comprises not only an aesthetics evoked by literary practices or films from the genres of the gothic or horror, but also by other forms of cultural expression, such as music, sculpture, photography, and performance art. The conference theme also aims to address new theoretical perspectives on humanity’s relation to the world, perspectives that have recently been proposed by what might be called the “new demonologists” (e.g. Graham Harman, Eugene Thacker, and others).

Against the backdrop of new ontologies and epistemologies of the weird, the following questions will form the conceptual backbone of The American Weird: What are the ecologies and geographies of the weird today, and how are they conceived, perceived, and reworked? Which strands of contemporary critical theory and philosophy have engaged in a dialogue with the discourses of and on the weird, and what is specifically “American” in The American Weird? If weirdness is more than a mere index of parody and/or subversion, how might one conceive of a politics or an ethics of the weird?

These and related questions on The American Weird will be explored in a three-day conference at the University of Göttingen. Possible topics, which can come from different genres, historical periods, and/or media include, but are not restricted to:

–    American literature from Charles Brockden Brown and Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories to the authors of “the new weird,” like Jeff VanderMeer, China Miéville, and Thomas Ligotti. What are the aspects and intricacies of the literary evolution of the weird in America? What is specifically American about this evolution? What has changed in weird literature since the publication of Lovecraft’s essay on “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” on both a poetic and political level?
–    the sculptural work of artists such as Lydia Benglis, Louise Bourgeois, Charles Ray, and others. How does this type of artistic practice negotiate normativities and weirdness? How do the materials, size, and content matter of their art contribute to the way they subvert viewing habits and expectations?
–    the music of The American Weird,  from the musical instruments of Harry Partch, via artists like Tom Waits or Mike Patton, all the way to the tunes of Joanna Newsom and the “New Weird America” or “Freak Folk” movement, and the protagonists of so-called “outsider music” such as Daniel Johnston or Wesley Willis. What exactly is necessary to make music weird or “outsider”? Is it the actual music, the self-presentation of the artists, their perception (or lack thereof), their non-affiliation with the industry?
–    the photography of Diane Arbus, Cindy Sherman, and others. What are the liminal spaces that open up between the camera’s alleged “reality effect” and evocations of weird America and its “freaks”? How does Sherman challenge notions like subjectivity and objectivity and what effects and affects are contained in her “vomit pictures”?
–    the eco art, land art, or bio art of Robert Smithson, Joe Davis, and others. How do these practices expand the notion of what counts as art, where it begins and ends? What and where are the locales in which it takes place, grows, and decays? Does the participation of plants or bacteria in a dynamic artwork redistribute agencies in the process of creating art and constitute a truly hybrid mode of being beyond the nature-culture divide?
–    the filmic visions of Tod Browning, David Lynch, David Cronenberg, and others, as well as recent TV-series that resonate with the aesthetics of the weird, such as True Detective, The Walking Dead, and Stranger Things. How to film the weird? Is there a moving image of American weirdness?
–     the comics and graphic novels of Robert Crumb, Charles Burns, Daniel Clowes, and others. How to picture The American Weird in separate panels and what is specific about this kind of narrating weirdness?
–    the different theoretical approaches which assess the cultural productions of The American Weird, from subcultural discourses to contemporary materialism, ecocriticism, and realism. What is the function of the weird as a concept vis-à-vis notions of the uncanny, the grotesque, the abject, and the carnivalesque? What are the milieus, theories, histories, and practices of The American Weird?

We invite scholars of American studies and related fields such as cultural studies, film and media studies, comparative literature, art history, and philosophy to submit a short abstract (approx. 300 words) and a short bio-statement by August 15, 2017 to the conference organizers Julius Greve (julius.greve@uni-oldenburg.de) and Florian Zappe (florian.zappe@phil.uni-goettingen.de).

The conference will take place from April 12-14, 2018 at the University of Göttingen and is organized by the North American Section of the English Department in cooperation with the Institute for English and American Studies of the University of Oldenburg.

Deadline for submissions: September 1, 2017
Full name/name of organization: The Art of Artertainment: Nobrow, American Style
Contact email: tero.vanhanen@helsinki.fi

Many of our current cultural practices are marked by a union of art and entertainment. Underlined by all-pervasive processes of globalization and digitalization, this union comes in all shapes and sizes, transforming culture so that it can no longer be comfortably classified as high or low, art or genre. Surprisingly, this ‘art of artertainment’ has not, as yet, attracted much scholarly interest. It is with the aim of overcoming this omission that we launch this call for papers.

As editors of a collection titled The Art of Artertainment: Nobrow, American Style, we warmly invite articles that focus on all aspects of American culture, such as literature, television, cinema, music, painting, material culture, photography, theater, and all other that are influenced by the crossovers of highbrow with lowbrow. Of special interest are historical and/or analytical approaches illuminated by colorful studies of cases where art and entertainment come together, written from the perspective of aesthetics, history, sociology, anthropology, art history, communications, digital culture, and the like.

Please send an abstract of minimum 400 words along with a biographical note to both editors, Peter Swirski, Distinguished Professor of American Studies and American Literature (peter.swirski@ualberta.ca) and Tero Eljas Vanhanen, Researcher in American Literature and Culture (tero.vanhanen@helsinki.fi). To coin a slogan, we are looking for highbrow content and reader-friendly, lowbrow style. The deadline for the abstract submission is 1st September, 2017, but feel free to approach us any time.

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

Cities occupy physical, psychological, and cultural spaces that function, as Henri Lefebvre argues in The Production of Space, “in the establishment, on the basis of an underlying logic and with the help of knowledge and technical expertise, of a ‘system’” (11). More recently, Stephen Graham’s Vertical (2016) proposes a multi-layered matrix of spatial effects that examines how inequality is built, reinforced, and exhibited in the modern city space. American writers as disparate as Ralph Ellison and Herman Melville have explored urban spaces as psychologically daunting. John Edgar Wideman’s memoir Brothers and Keepers specifically explores how he and his brother moved through different spaces in Pittsburgh and the impact of neighborhood on individuals. This panel will explore how American writers of any era depicted urban spaces in their writings, from the transformation of colonial outposts to bustling metropolises to the gentrification and class homogenization in our current era. It is important to understand city space as constant development and redevelopment and how U.S. writers traced the development of urban centers and the people who built and shaped the identities of those cities even as the cities reshaped the people who moved through their spaces.

Please submit 300 word abstracts by 9/30/2017 to rhancuff@misericordia.edu and please include NeMLA2018 in your subject line.

Deadline for submissions: March 1, 2018
Full name/name of organization: University of Kent, Canterbury, UK
Contact email: sciencesofthemindconference@gmail.com

17-18 July, 2018 – University of Kent

Keynote Speakers: Professor Helen Small, Pembroke College, University of Oxford
Professor Priscilla Wald, Duke University

This conference aims to stimulate a wide-ranging discussion about the interactions between British and American literature, education, and the sciences of the mind between 1850-1950. We welcome paper and panel proposals on any aspect of British or American literature, education and/or the sciences of the mind broadly construed.This conference is part of Dr Sara Lyons’ (PI), Dr Michael Collins’ (Co-I) and Dr Fran Bigman’s (Research Associate) AHRC-funded project, Literary Culture, Meritocracy, and the Assessment of Intelligence in Britain and America, 1880-1920. The project is an investigation of how British and American novelists understood and represented intellectual ability in the period, with a particular focus on how they responded to the rise of intelligence testing and the associated concepts of I.Q. and meritocracy. For additional information, please visit our website: https://research.kent.ac.uk/literaryculture/​ Possible topics include literature and:

*Teaching and Being Taught; pedagogical theory and practice
*Representations of Places of Learning
*Examinations, grades, scholarships, qualifications
*Inequality, Discrimination, and Exclusion in Education
*Academic Success and Failure
*Literacy and Illiteracy
*Intellectuals, Experts, Professionalism
*Autodidacticism, Informal Education
*Varieties of education: aesthetic, classical, moral, religious, scientific, technical
*Learning Styles and Types of Intelligence
*Intellectual ability and disability

As well as literature and:

*Professionalisation/ Institutionalisation of Psychology
*Social Psychology
*Developmental Psychology
*Psychometrics and personality testing
*Physiology and psychology
*Psychological Schools and Controversies
*Psychology and Philosophy
*Experimental Psychology
*Psychiatry
*Sexology
*Parapsychology
*Eugenics
*Language and Cognition

Please submit an individual proposal of no more than 350 words or an outline for a 3 paper panel proposal to sciencesofthemindconference@gmail.com by the 1 March, 2018. Papers will be limited to 20 minutes. Please include your name, a short bio, and email address in your proposal.

Deadline for submissions: August 18, 2017
Full name/name of organization: Emma Newcombe, Boston University
Contact email: newcombe@bu.edu

This proposed panel for the 2018 C19 conference seeks paper proposals on the topic of tourism in nineteenth-century American culture. The panel aims to explore the relationship between tourism and the American landscape. This might refer to tourism’s impact on the American landscape, or how tourists and touristic writers understood and depicted the environment. Papers might also consider how touristic writers grappled with the cultural or political “landscape” of the nineteenth century.

Questions to consider might include: What does tourism discourse reveal about the way authors perceived the American environment? How do different literary genres related to tourism reveal competing or clashing understandings of America? How do authors describe different tourist sites in terms of aesthetic atmosphere? What do the unique (or not unique) aesthetics of different tourist sites reveal about nineteenth-century conceptions of environment, or the sociopolitical climate?

The C19 conference will be held from March 22-25, 2018 at the University of New Mexico. For more information, see http://c19conference.org. Please email an abstract of no more than 300 words and a CV by August 18th to Emma Newcombe (newcombe@bu.edu).

Deadline for submissions: July 28, 2017
Full name / name of organization: Centre for Travel Writing Studies (CTWS), Nottingham Trent University/ North American Periodicals Society (NAPS)
Contact email: ctws@ntu.ac.uk

A one-day seminar hosted by the Centre for Travel Writing Studies, Nottingham Trent University, in collaboration with the Network for American Periodical Studies.

Friday 22nd September 2017, Nottingham Trent University, Clifton Campus

Deadline for proposals extended: 28th July 2017

Keynote speaker: Professor Andrew Thacker (Nottingham Trent University)

Organisers: Dr Victoria Bazin (Northumbria University); Dr Rebecca Butler (Nottingham Trent University); Dr Sue Currell (Sussex University); Prof Tim Youngs (Nottingham Trent University)

Confirmed speakers include Dr Claire Lindsay (UCL) and Dr Rachel Farebrother (Swansea University)

This day-seminar will focus on the relationship between North American travel writing and the periodical format. Its primary purpose is to facilitate historical and critical discussion of narratives of travel in North American periodicals.

We invite proposals for twenty-minute papers that examine accounts of travel to, within, or from North America, published in North American periodicals. We also welcome papers on periodicals and travel of Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean.

Topics to be examined in considering the interplay between the travel experience, the written and/or visual record of travel, and the periodical publication of the travel record, may include, but are not limited to:

*Commercial considerations
*Editorial policy and interventions
*Gender and sexuality
*Periodical context and design
*Purpose of travel
*‘Race’
*Readership
*Solo or group travel
*Technologies of transport/mode of travel
*Tourism
*Visual representations

The seminar is a collaboration between Nottingham Trent’s Centre for Travel Writing Studies (CTWS) and the Network of American Periodical Studies (NAPS). It draws on the expertise of both research centres, as well as that of our keynote speaker, Professor Andrew Thacker (NTU), a specialist in modernist magazines and spatial geographies of modernism.

The Centre for Travel Writing Studies (CTWS) was established by Prof Tim Youngs (Nottingham Trent University) in 2002 to produce, facilitate, and promote scholarly research on travel writing and its contexts, without restriction of period, locus, or type of travel writing.

The Network of American Periodical Studies (NAPS) is a research initiative set up by Dr Sue Currell (Sussex University) and Dr Victoria Bazin (Northumbria University). It aims to bring together scholars working on American periodicals (magazines, newspapers and other periodical publications) from a range of historical periods and disciplines.

We welcome papers from scholars at any career stage and strongly encourage postgraduates to submit a proposal for consideration. Paper proposals of c200 words should be sent to ctws@ntu.ac.uk. Early submission is advised.

With grateful thanks to the British Association for American Studies (BAAS) for financial support, we are now able to offer a limited number of travel bursaries and fee waivers for postgraduate students to attend. Priority will be given to those offering papers. Please state at the end of your proposal if you are a postgraduate wishing to apply for help towards costs.

Deadline for submissions: October 1, 2017
Full name/name of organization: Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association
Contact email: taylor13@rose-hulman.edu

Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association (PCA/ACA)

2018 National Conference

Indianapolis, IN

March 28-31, 2018

Call for Papers: American Literature

Deadline: October 1, 2017

The American Literature Area of the PCA/ACA seeks individual papers for presentation at our 2018 National Conference, to be held March 28-31 in Indianapolis, IN at the J.W. Marriot.

Papers may concern any work(s) of American literature in any genre from the colonial era to the early twenty-first century. A range of critical approaches is welcomed: For instance, presentations may consider literary representations, explore historical implications, offer theoretical readings, or examine thematic parallels. Proposals about the intersections of American literature and popular culture—including but not limited to film, music, television, theater, visual arts, and fashion—are encouraged, as are treatments of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality in American literature.

Interested individuals should submit a titled, 250-word abstract and contact information—name, institutional affiliation (if applicable), email address, and telephone number—by October 1, 2017. Decisions pertaining to the status of proposals will be communicated within two weeks of receipt.

Proposals must be submitted through the PCA/ACA submission database, which can be found at https://conference.pcaaca.org/. Visit http://pcaaca.org to learn more about the organization.

If you would like more information, or if you have any questions, please contact the American Literature Area Chair:

Corey Taylor, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of English

Department of Humanities and Social Sciences

Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology

5500 Wabash Avenue, CM 91

Terre Haute, IN 47803-3920

taylor13@rose-hulman.edu