Category: Calls for Papers

Extended Deadline: Emily Dickinson International Society Conference, 2022

Posted on by Sarah McCreedy

Extended Deadline

 

The 2022 Emily Dickinson International Society Conference, “Dickinson and Foreignhood,” and the Dickinson Critical Institute in Seville

 

The Emily Dickinson International Society is extending its deadline until November 20 for proposal submission to its international conference, “Dickinson and Foreignhood,” and to its Critical Institute, both to take place at the College of Philology, University of Seville, Spain. The conference will go from Tuesday, July 12, to Thursday, July 14. The Critical Institute will be on Monday, July 11.

The Dickinson Critical Institute helps graduate students and early career scholars develop their work in collaboration with established Dickinson specialists. For more information about the Critical Institute in Seville, please see the conference website (https://edisforeignhoodconference.org/). To apply to the Institute, submit a one-page cv and a 500-800-word description of your project to Eliza Richards (ecr@email.unc.edu) and to Karen Sánchez-Eppler (kjsanchezepp@amherst.edu) no later than November 20. Use the subject heading “[Last Name] Dickinson Institute Application,” and attach your application materials as Word or pdf documents. Decisions on acceptance will be made by December 15.

The EDIS International Conference “Dickinson and Foreignhood” takes its cue from “A South Wind – has a pathos” (c.1864), where the poet refers to “much not understood – / The fairer – for the farness – / And for the foreignhood.” These lines represent the unknown as more beautiful when distant and unfamiliar, or foreign. The conference seeks to develop knowledge of how Dickinson understood the foreign, how she has been understood as foreign, and how foreign peoples have understood her.

The Program Committee welcomes all work on configurations of the foreign, broadly understood, in Dickinson’s writing, including:

• Conceptions of the foreign (or what we might call otherness) in Dickinson’s culture and historical moment

• Discussions of race, ethnicity, class, disability, gender, sexuality, and other categories that have historically been associated with alienation and cultural disenfranchisement

• Dickinson, geography, navigation, and foreign travel

• Parts of Dickinson’s environment, culture, or identity that seemed foreign to her

• Immigration, emigration, and exile

• Dickinson’s reception abroad

• Dickinson, foreign languages, and translation

• Lyric alienation and the poetics of estrangement

• Invasion, contagion, and infection as encounters with the foreign

Finally, regardless of theme, all proposals engaging serious scholarship on Dickinson’s work are welcome. Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words, along with a brief biography of 100 words maximum, to Jefferey Simons (dickinsoninseville@dfing.uhu.es) and to Cristanne Miller (ccmiller@buffalo.edu) before November 20. Please specify if you plan to present virtually rather than in person. The conference Program Committee will respond by December 15.

For further information, please see the websites of the conference (https://edisforeignhoodconference.org/) and of The Emily Dickinson International Society (http://www.emilydickinsoninternationalsociety.org/).

CFP: Cormac McCarthy International Conference

Posted on by Sarah McCreedy

Call for Papers

 

Cormac McCarthy

International Conference

 

Sponsored by

Trinity College Dublin

in association with

the Cormac McCarthy Society

 

Topics open,

with special interest in

Cormac McCarthy’s relationship to Ireland and Irish heritage

 

June 14-17, 2022

Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

 

Send brief proposals for 15-20-minute presentations or complete panels by April 1, 2022 to:

 

Steven Frye, President of the Cormac McCarthy Society cormacmccarthysociety@gmail.com

 

email proposals only

Provide contact information including email address and region

CFP: Heidelberg Center for American Studies Conference

Posted on by Sarah McCreedy

Heidelberg Center for American Studies 19th Annual Spring Academy Conference

Heidelberg, Germany, 21–25 March, 2022

Call for Papers

The eighteenth HCA Spring Academy on American Culture, Economics, Geography, History, Literature, Politics, and Religion will be held from March 21-25, 2022. The Heidelberg Center for American Studies (HCA) invites applications for this annual one-week conference that provides twenty international Ph.D. students with the opportunity to present and discuss their Ph.D. projects.

The HCA Spring Academy invites participants to work closely with experts in their respective fields of study and offers workshops held by visiting scholars.

We encourage applications that pursue an interdisciplinary approach and range broadly across the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Papers can be presented on any subject relating to the study of the United States of America. Possible topics include American identity, issues of ethnicity, gender, transatlantic relations, U.S. domestic and foreign policy, economics, as well as various aspects of American history, literature, religion, geography, law, musicology, and culture. Proposals should include a preliminary title and run to no more than 300 words.

Participants are requested to prepare a 20-minute presentation of their research project, which will be followed by a 40-minute discussion. The presentations will be arranged into ten panel groups.

In addition to cross-disciplinary and international discussions during the panel sessions, the Spring Academy aims at creating a pleasant collegial atmosphere for further scholarly exchange and contact.

Accommodation will be provided by the Heidelberg Center for American Studies.

Thanks to a small travel fund, the Spring Academy is able to subsidize travel expenses for participants registered and residing in soft-currency countries. Scholarship applicants will need to document the necessity for financial aid and explain how they plan to cover any potentially remaining expenses. In addition, a letter of recommendation from their doctoral advisor is required.

 

START OF APPLICATION PROCESS:                                          September 30, 2021

DEADLINE FOR APPLICATIONS:                                                November 15, 2021

SELECTIONS WILL BE MADE BY:                                                January 2022

PLEASE USE OUR ONLINE APPLICATION SYSTEM:             www.hca-springacademy.de

MORE INFORMATION:                                                                 www.hca.uni-heidelberg.de

FOR FURTHER QUESTIONS:                                                        springacademy@hca.uni-heidelberg.de

 

Popularizing STEM | Science and Technology in 21st-Century US Popular Culture

Posted on by Sarah McCreedy

Popularizing STEM | Science and Technology in 21st-Century US Popular Culture 15-19 November 2021 (hybrid format conference)

Confirmed keynotes: Gerry Canavan, Charles Adler, Stina Attebery, André Brock, Emily Cox- Palmer-White, J. Jesse Ramírez.
Follow further updates on Twitter or the official conference website!

In 1959, British physicist and novelist C.P. Snow delivered a lecture in which he highlighted the increasing intellectual separation between the humanities and the sciences—the emergence of “two cultures.” While his arguments were clearly anchored in British society, he nevertheless suggested that this emerging chasm was “a problem of the entire West.” To present the argument in a perhaps even more exaggerated manner than Snow did: Not even the most highly educated humanities scholars can comprehend basic physics, while what we today would refer to as STEM professors don’t read “highbrow” literature. Snow came to understand that the situation was not quite as black-and-white as he suggested, which is why he anticipated the emergence of a “third culture” a few years later.

Of course, much has happened in the sixty-plus years since Snow’s iconic lecture. And, indeed, scholars such as Rachel Holland have diagnosed the emergence of a “third culture” and, along with it, third-culture cultural objects. In her recent book Contemporary Fiction and Science (2019), Holland argues that the increasing presence of science in fiction (and, by extension, popular culture) “is, in part, a response to the upsurge in interest […] in popular science.” Holland identifies a “new strand of fiction” that engages with “elements of popular science in a number of ways. These include: researching and relaying information gleaned from scientific publications; challenging or promoting ideas presented by science writers; exploring the moral and ethical implications of these ideas; and testing the limits and capabilities of the novel in relation to scientific discourse.” As some of the elements in this list suggest, science is a tool of power; science is purported to be objective and, hence, often serves as a purveyor of Truth. As such, it has been (ab)used in a variety of ways in the course of history–among others, scientific curiosity drove (and technology made possible) the exploration and colonization of foreign lands, science explained the inferiority of non-white peoples, iconic Nazi doctor Josef Mengele experimented on humans in the name of scientific progress, etc.

Holland’s elaborations also indicate that science and technology have taken an integral place in global society—and the ongoing pandemic has brought this process to the fore. Due to the proliferation of science and technology on television, in films, video games, and other popular media and the attendant use of YouTube and other platforms by STEM fields, it is important to study the dynamic and complex interrelationship between science & technology and popular culture. Indeed, science & technology has infiltrated popular culture. However, this is not a one-way street! “The cultural products that scientific discoveries and developments sparked have become significant parts of the discourse surrounding science,” as Steven Gil rightfully stresses in the opening editorial of the Journal of Science & Popular Culture.

We are particularly interested in presentations that seek to engage with questions of intersectional discrimination in STEM representations in popular culture, spanning from cultural products aimed at dissemination and debate on STEM to texts such as films, TV series, comics and graphic novels, genre fiction, video games, new media narratives.

Suggested fields of analysis might include but are not limited to:

  • STEM dissemination in popular culture: storytelling strategies, (in)accuracy, multimedia programs and projects promoting access, flexibility, and adaptability in STEM education and knowledge, deconstructing the existing barriers within the field and building equality in legitimacy
  • Interrelationship between STEM and Popular Culture: Using popular culture to teach/educate on STEM (i.e., in STEM programs) and teaching about STEM via popular culture
  • Economic discourses and the challenges of capitalism related to STEM in US popular culture and media
  • Representation of STEM in popular culture aimed at children and young adults
  • Intersectionality versus marginalization in the dissemination and communicationof science and technology
  • STEM and Gender Studies :  the portrayal of masculine, feminine, and gender non-conforming individuals in STEM-centered popular media narratives
  • Science, tech, and race/ethnicity: Afro(Latinx), Indigenous, and Chicana Futurism(s), minority perspectives, alternative narratives, borderland spaces
  • Digital technology and virtual realities as safe spaces for marginalized groups
  • The use of science and technology in depictions of the future as critiques or reevaluations of current realities: tech-noir and sci-fi utopias, dystopias, post/apocalyptic scenarios, and retrofuturism 
  • Cyborgs, AI, and the human: representations, conflicts, and horrific developments
  •  Health and technology: care robots and the representation of disabilities, human aging, biomedical issues
  • Representations of surveillance, biometrics, and biological citizenship
  • Tech, science, and the (non)human body: narratives related to experimentation,bioethics, artificial monstrosity, transhumanism, biopunk
  • Pop depictions of STEM: (in)accuracy, “prediction” of future technologies, breaking down the science and tech behind superhero narrativesDeadline for submission: August 31, 2021.Submit your abstract proposal (~ 300 words) at popmec.stem@gmail.com as an attachment, including name, affiliation if any, and contact email. Depending on the proposals and participants’ response, an editorial project might originate from the conference.

The conference will take place on the days 15-19 November 2021 in mixed format:

  • ONLINE | panels and main keynotes
  • IN PRESENCE at Universidad de Alcalá, historical campus, Friday 19 November |2 keynotes + workshop/seminars. If it will be feasible considering the changing COVID-19 related measures, we will allow selected panels to be carried out in person (if their participants wish to do so)Participation fees:
  • FREE for PopMeC members (membership yearly fees: 12€ students / non-tenured / unwaged / retired, 20€ regular)
  • Non-members: 15€                                                                 

 

The conference is organized by the PopMeC Association for US Popular Culture Studies, in collaboration with the Instituto Franklin-UAH located in Alcalá de Henares (Madrid, ES) and the academic research project Fiction Meets Science.Organizing committee: Michael Fuchs and Anna Marta Marini (coordinators), Laura Álvarez Trigo, Paula Barba Guerrero, Paul Mitchell, Dina Pedro, Erika Tiburcio.
On-site organization: Francisco Sáez de Adana, Ana Serra, Carlos Herrero (Instituto Franklin- UAH).

Call for General Submissions: The Society of Americanists Review

Posted on by Sarah McCreedy

Call for general submissions:  The Society of Americanist Review

Following the publication of our second annual volume, the editors of SOAR are pleased to announce that we will begin to move to a twice-annual publication schedule! In support of this goal, we invite the submission of general interdisciplinary scholarship relating to the culture of the United States. The journal publishes work in a variety of formats, including research articles; forum, discussion, memorial, and state-of-the-field essays; dialogues and interviews; reports on programs, organizations, and pedagogy; as well as book, exhibit, and media reviews. Submissions undergo a rigorous multi-tiered peer review process that includes the journal’s editorial staff, advisory board members, and external reviewers. 

For more information about how to submit to SOAR, see our submission guidelines. Submissions can be made directly through our website.

Deadline for submissions: September 01, 2021. 

 

Find out more about our mission and editorial board here. Check out our second volume “The Resistance” here.

 

For general inquiries, please contact the editors at: americanist@psu.edu

 

 

 

CFP: EAAS Conference, Madrid 2022

Posted on by Sarah McCreedy

Wastelands

34TH EUROPEAN ASSOCIATION FOR AMERICAN STUDIES CONFERENCE

Madrid 6-8 April 2022

Organized by the UNED (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia)

with the collaboration of the Universidad Complutense.

 

The year 2022 marks the centenary of the publication of T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land. The title of the conference alludes to Eliot’s work and the main themes in it, expanding the idea of the wasteland to the study of the United States. Hence, the overarching theme of the conference is open to all kinds of reflections around the concept of “wasteland” and waste. EAAS 2022 invites proposals that address the concept of waste in U.S. culture, history, and politics.

 

Proposals may address (but are not restricted to) the following topics:

WASTELANDS IN THE ANTHROPOCENE

  • Environmental waste (water, land, e-waste, etc.).
  • Anti-Waste: degrowth philosophy.
  • “Zero waste” movement and consumerism.
  • Food waste.
  • Wastelands as devastation of spaces.
  • Waste of resources (human, natural, economic, etc.).

 

THE ETHICS OF WASTE

  • Moral waste: deterioration of democracies and other values. Empty discourses (political, cultural, etc.).
  • Wasted opportunities (land of opportunities, American dream).
  • Waste as a “negative store”, as opposed to the archive; forgetting, destruction, and latent cultural memory.
  • Waste of information: useless and redundant data, technology, media, etc.

 

CORPOREAL WASTE

  • Illnesses and pathologies.
  • Age: The Growing Land.
  • Emotional wastelands: real or metaphorical
  • Pandemics and other physical threats.

 

LITERARY AND CULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS OF WASTELANDS

 

  • ‘Wasteland” as an image of decadence, crisis, and postwar.
  • Barrenness vs. fertility, hopelessness vs. regeneration.
  • S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and its literary / cultural influence.
  • Literary representations of wastelands.
  • (Audio)visual representations of wastelands.
  • Ruins, trash, in painting, music, film, and other artistic representations.

 

SUGGESTED FORMATS:

EAAS 2022 accepts abstracts and proposals including individual papers, complete panels, workshops or talkshops.

Paper proposals should be 300 words maximum. Individual papers should be 15 minute presentations.

Panel proposals should include a description of the panel as a whole and the abstracts of three individual papers.  Full panels have 1 h. 30 minutes.

Workshops or Roundtables of 4-5 participants with shorter statements and discussion on a given research topic or common theme. Presentations for workshops will be uploaded one month in advance of the conference to encourage intellectual exchange.

Workshop and Talkshop proposals should include a title and a brief description of the theme. Workshops and talkshops have 1 h. for questions or debate.

We strongly encourage and will give preference to panels that reflect the diversity of our field in terms of gender, ethnicity, and institutional affiliation. We encourage the participation of scholars from different institutions and countries.

Presentations are restricted to one paper per participant at the conference.

 

SUBMISSIONS:

Submissions are made through the webpage of the conference: https://eaas2022.com/

 

DEADLINE for submissions: September 30

Notification: October 31

Contact: conference@eaas2022.com

*CFP* Beyond the White House: The First Lady in Film, Fiction, and Culture

Posted on by Sarah McCreedy

 

This edited collection seeks to explore the representation of the First Lady in a range of different texts and media. The collection aims to examine the President’s wife in a purely cultural context by investigating the ways in which she has been represented, embodied, characterised and commemorated in film, fiction, memoir, photography and portraiture, television, theatre, education, museum studies, fashion, and social media.

Beyond the White House is an original work that makes use of cultural interpretation to reconfigure the figure of the First Lady as a culturally authoritative individual possessing the ability to sway, change, inspire, and manipulate public attention and opinion. Moving away from biographies and histories, this is the first volume of its kind to consider the representation of the First Lady figure through the prism of popular culture – and therefore consider her impact upon ‘cultural politics’ – and the first to regard her as a strategically important socio-cultural figure.

Removed from the patriarchal hierarchy of White House politics and expectations, the First Lady emerges as a force of her own; she subtly carves out cultural agency and gender identity despite her (in)visibility in the public eye. Simply by being the ‘First Lady of the United States’ she possesses what MaryAnne Borrelli has labelled the “performance of descriptive representation” (Women and the White House: 229). The relationship between the woman and the office is paramount; the existence of the title ‘First Lady’ permits popular culture to tolerate or reject not only political and cultural manoeuvring, but also issues of gender, race, self, location, fashion, identity, satire, memory, authority, and even pedagogy. The office of the First Lady is what the woman makes it, and in Beyond the White House she has become a commanding cultural icon.

 

Possible topics might include (but are not limited to):

 

  • The First Lady in film and on television (both fictional First Ladies and representations of real First Ladies, such as in the new First Ladies series from Showtime)
  • First Ladies in fiction (this might be retellings of the stories of real First Ladies, or new fictional First Ladies)
  • First Ladies and self-representation, life-writing and memoir (i.e. Becoming by Michelle Obama, Hard Choices by Hilary Clinton)
  • First Ladies in education; how the role of FLOTUS is represented and taught in classrooms
  • The First Lady on display; exhibitions, curatorship and portraiture of FLOTUS
  • Photography and portraiture of the First Ladies (in magazines, photoshoots and journalism as well as official portraiture)
  • First Ladies on stage and in theatre
  • Fashion and the First Ladies (from inaugural gowns to Melania’s ‘I really don’t care’ jacket)
  • Self-representation and social media; FLOTUS on Twitter and Instagram.

 

 

Please send 300-500 word abstracts, a short bio to Dr Anne-Marie Evans (a.evans@yorksj.ac.uk) and Dr Sarah Trott (s.trott@yorksj.ac.uk ) by 16th July 2021.

CFP: Special Issue of American Nineteenth Century History

Posted on by Sarah McCreedy

“Music in American Nineteenth Century History”

 

Co-editors: J. M. Mancini and Billy Coleman

 

Abstracts Due — 30 September 2021

Draft Papers Due — 30 May 2022 

Symposium – mid-June 2022 (tentative)

Full Papers Due for peer review — 30 September 2022
Planned publication — mid-2023

 

In the nineteenth-century United States, music was everywhere: at work, leisure, and prayer; in places of worship and in the home, on the battlefield and on the path of reform; in times of joy, in times of crisis, and in times of mourning.  And yet in comparison to literature or art and material culture, music and musical practice remain largely unsung within nineteenth-century US historiography.  Thus until recently most historians ignored music–or considered its analysis beyond the bounds of historical inquiry.  As a result, music has only begun to be treated as integral to the nineteenth-century experience, or analysed through a historical lens that sees and hears the world first and foremost through historical processes–social, economic, political, cultural, environmental–rather than through practices, parameters, and personnel derived from and internal to the world of music.  

 

Nonetheless, recent developments suggest that nineteenth-century American history is undergoing a musical turn.  The aim of this special issue is to build on this momentum by bringing together members of a growing, but disparate community of historians; musicologists; and historically-minded interdisciplinary scholars, for a timely conversation on music and nineteenth-century American history spanning the Revolution to the invention of recorded sound. Possible topics include:

 

  • What relationships existed between the many profound social transformations of the nineteenth century (e.g., emancipation; mass education/literacy; conquest; mass migration) and musical change?
  • How did the many forms of transregional encounter that characterised the nineteenth-century US (empire/conflict, migration, commerce, evangelism, reform) interact with musical exchange, both inside the US and globally? 
  • How can historians make sense of the many diverse settings for nineteenth-century US music, and the transformations that occurred both within those settings (congregations; domestic spaces; townscapes; military contexts; commercial stages; etc.) and in terms of overall shifts (e.g., the displacement of music-making in informal settings to performance in dedicated, often commercial spaces?) 
  • How did the gendering of music relate to broader historical trends?
  • How did technological rupture–from mass print to recorded sound–transform musical practice and the place of music in American life?  
  • How did music contribute to the construction of race and concepts of racial difference across the long nineteenth century?
  • What was the relationship between music, nation-making, and nationalism in nineteenth-century America? How did it evolve over time and space?
  • How did music practices, or perceptions of musical power, map onto different political ideologies or partisan-based identities?
  • How can historians think through the many binary relationships in nineteenth-century American music such as sacred/secular, commercial/non-commercial, signed/anonymous, individual/communal, private/public, written/oral, recorded/unrecorded, formal/informal?
  • What historiographical trends have shaped the incorporation of music into nineteenth-century American history over time? What new methodological opportunities may offer the most constructive paths forward?
  • How can scholars leverage recent technological and metahistorical developments to make historical music available to listeners and usable in the history classroom?

 

We seek submissions of 300–500 word abstracts proposing articles for consideration for publication, with full manuscripts to follow. In addition to the abstract, please advise us of your interest and capacity to participate in a symposium event for workshopping drafts (whether in-person or in a hybrid digital format).  Please also advise us of your potential interest in, and any musical or technical skills you may be willing to contribute to, a possible soundtrack album aimed at facilitating the use of this research in the classroom. Acceptance of an abstract does not mean acceptance of a paper and submitted papers will proceed through American Nineteenth Century History’s usual peer-review process.

 

Please send abstracts and all queries to J. M. Mancini (JoAnne.Mancini@mu.ie) or Billy Coleman (colemanw@missouri.edu) by September 30, 2021.