Deadline for submissions: March 3, 2017
Full name / name of organization: Rothemere American Institute, University of Oxford
Contact email: poetrysince2000@gmail.com
Special Relationships: Poetry Across the Atlantic Since 2000

Deadline Extended: Deadline for Submissions March 3

We are delighted to announce the Call for Papers for Special Relationships: Poetry Across the Atlantic Since 2000, a one-day symposium exploring the interstices of poetics in the circum-Atlantic region since 2000, to be held at the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford on May 19, 2017.

The symposium aims to consider some of the ways in which poets’ ideas of relatedness in the region complicate the idea of straight lines of influence. In Claudia Rankine’s 2015 Citizen, for example, Rankine recounts an incident at the home of a British novelist shortly after the 2011 London Riots, sparked by the death of Mark Duggan at the hands of the Metropolitan Police. When asked if she will write about Duggan’s death, Rankine responds ‘why don’t you?’. Yet Rankine does write about Duggan: she includes him in her litany of black people killed at the hands of the state. For Rankine, then, the African diaspora becomes one social formation in tension with the national, a common experience of racism creates a community that does not map on to national borders. Even so, Rankine’s long poem’s subtitle is ‘an American Lyric’.

By exploring the way that poetry’s various concepts of relationships simultaneously transgress borders, operate within them, and even reveal hidden borders across societies, the symposium aims to produce new insights into the multifariousness of poetic production since the year 2000. How have poets from the U.S.A., the U.K., Ireland, the Caribbean, and West Africa conceived of their relationships in a time of ever-greater connection, and how has this changed how they think about differences too?

We invite interested parties, whether scholars or poets, to submit abstracts (200-300 words) for 20-minute papers. We will also accept proposals for panels of three papers (up to 700 words). We are equally interested in receiving proposals for 20-minute pieces that depart from the norms of the conference paper form, either in the form of creative responses to the symposium theme, or creative/critical hybrid pieces.

Topics may include, but are by no means limited to:

Communications, the Internet, and other information networks, and their impact on poetic coteries and movements.
Migration and the relationship between poetry and national borders.
The Special relationship, America and Britain’s commitment to the War on Terror.
Race, class, gender and sexuality: how poets have differed on these questions, and how poets are building transnational communities of liberation.
The relationship between poetry, capital, and labour, especially since the 2008 financial crisis.
The relationship between poetry and institutions, such as academia.

Confirmed speakers include Sarah Howe (winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize), Oli Hazzard, and Sandeep Parmar.

Please send abstracts and a short biography to the organizers, Kristin Grogan and Hugh Foley, at poetrysince2000@gmail.com by Friday, March 3.

We invite you to share this CFP widely.

Deadline for submissions: August 1, 2017
Full name / name of organization: Sandra Hughes/Nathaniel Hawthorne Society/Poe Studies Association
Contact email: hawthornepoekyoto@gmail.com

International Poe & Hawthorne Conference—Kyoto, Japan

The Poe Studies Association, The Poe Society of Japan, The Nathaniel Hawthorne Society, and The Nathaniel Hawthorne Society of Japan invite paper and session proposals for a joint conference to be held in Kyoto, Japan on June 21-24, 2018.

The 2018 Kyoto conference is the successor to the 2006 Oxford conference and the 2012 Florence conference of the Poe, Hawthorne, and Emerson societies.

All topics related to these two authors, together or separately, are welcome. Please send 250-word paper proposals to Philip Edward Phillips, Program Committee Chair, at Philip.Phillips@mtsu.edu by August 1, 2017

Session proposals, which may be 1,000 words, should include organizer and speaker names and affiliations, as well as paper titles and abstract. They are also due by August 1, 2017.

Possible topics include:

• Poe and/or Hawthorne and Asia
• Poe and/or Hawthorne and Japan
• The (Mutual) Influence of Poe and Hawthorne
• Poe and/or Hawthorne, reception and reputation
• Teaching Poe and/or Hawthorne
• Interpreting Poe and/or Hawthorne
• Poe, Hawthorne, and the visual or performing arts
• Poe and/or Hawthorne and science (or pseudo-science)
• The Gothic in Poe and/or Hawthorne
• Allegory in Poe and/or Hawthorne
• Poe and/or Hawthorne at home and/or abroad
• Biographies of Poe and/or Hawthorne
• Poe and/or Hawthorne and the Digital Humanities
• Literary, philosophical, scientific, or cultural influences on Poe or Hawthorne
• Literary influence of Poe and/or Hawthorne
• Poe, Hawthorne, and literary theory
• Poe, Hawthorne, and the supernatural
• Poe and/or Hawthorne and race, class, gender, or sexuality
• Poe and/or Hawthorne and politics
• Poe and/or Hawthorne and transatlantic, transpacific, or global studies
• Poe and/or Hawthorne, aesthetics and genre
• Poe and/or Hawthorne in cinema or other popular media (graphic novels, television, video games, etc.)
• Poe and/or Hawthorne in translation
• Poe and/or Hawthorne and language

All those whose proposals are accepted for the conference must be members of one of the four sponsoring organizations to present papers or to chair sessions.

Deadline for submissions: May 12, 2017
Full name / name of organization: Edith Wharton Society
Contact email: mary.carney@ung.edu
The Edith Wharton Society invites proposals for a panel at the South Atlantic Modern Language Association Conference (SAMLA 89) to be held in Atlanta, Georgia, November 3-5, 2017. The conference topic is High Art / Low Art: Borders and Boundaries in Popular Culture.

Edith Wharton produced a range of cultural products, including canonical novels and short stories, fund-raising anthologies for wartime France, guides to interior design, and travel books. Current popular culture suggests a continuing interest in Wharton, her writings, and those decades that are the focus of her work. Julian Fellows, creator of Downton Abbey, admits that “It is quite true that Edith Wharton has been a tremendous influence on me. . . . I decided, largely because of her work, that it was time I wrote something.” On Wharton’s 150th birthday, Vogue magazine offered an 18-pages to celebrate, including photos by Annie Leibovitz. The Gossip Girl series draws on Whartonian inspiration.  What has driven the renewed attention being paid to the Edwardian and WWI eras in contemporary pop culture?

The Wharton society invites papers that explore a broad range of responses to how Wharton’s art contributes to a continuum of cultural inquiry and commentary that persists to this day in high / low cultural expressions. One might consider such topics as how modern flash mobs reflect or rewrite the tableau vivants of The House of Mirth. How do Wharton’s texts and practices reflect a generational difference (or not) in attitudes toward privacy in (social) media?  How might contemporary short forms or serializations (blog posts, film and music reviews, opinion pieces, etc.) draw on the form and content of her essays, cultural commentaries, letters, or short stories? Does Wharton’s art bear narrative, formal, or thematic similarities to other forms of popular culture, such as soap operas or online TV dramas? Wharton’s travel writing about excursions via automobile might be compared to modern travel blogs, television programming, or websites.  We hope to receive a range of submissions to create lively, even surprising, insights and conversation.

Please submit a 300-500 word abstract, one page CV, and AV requirements via email to Mary Carney, University of North Georgia, at mary.carney@ung.edu by May 12, 2017.

Deadline for submissions: December 2, 2017
Full name / name of organization: Kyle Wiggins, Boston University and Brandon Krieg, Westminster College
Contact email: kwiggins@bu.edu
NANO: New American Notes Online

Issue 13 Call for Papers

Due by: December 2, 2017

Special Issue: The Anthropocene

Guest Editors: Kyle Wiggins and Brandon Krieg

In the Anthropocene–our geological present defined by humans as the dominant, destructive force in the natural world–calamity is familiar. As Jeremy Davies puts it in The Birth of the Anthropocene, “Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, rocks, plants, and animals are experiencing changes great enough to mark the ending of one epoch and the beginning of another” (2). We have entered a moment of environmental crisis, yet the concept of “Anthropocene” continues to be used in “diverse, contested, and even incompatible ways” and its influence on humanism and the humanities remains much debated (6).

For McKenzie Wark, the Anthropocene “is a series of metabolic rifts, where one molecule after another is extracted by labor and technique to make things for humans, but the waste products don’t return so that the cycle can renew itself again. The soil depletes, the seas recede, the climate alters, the gyre widens: a world on fire” (Molecular Red, xiv). Ironically, Wark sees opportunity in this unsettling. He argues that this age of “carbon liberation” invites a reorganization of time and material resources, one that might generate an endurable relationship between human labor and nature. Jane Bennett sees a related opportunity in the Anthropocene to extend our conception of material geology to include human bodies, noting that humans “are made of the same elements as is the planet,” and that, “Like wind or river, human individuals and groups are geologic forces that can alter the planet in countless and, as the concept of the Anthropocene marks, game-changing ways” (“Making the Geologic Now”). Bennett proposes an ethic of “self” as coextensive with other geologic material as crucial to promoting human survival: “For me, one of the effects of a heightened awareness of the interpenetration of the human and ahuman geologic is that it stretches my definition of ‘self’-interest to include the flourishing of the complex system of bio-geologic processes. This enriched understanding of ‘self’ would then, I hope, enable a more extended pursuit of our conatus, the endeavor to persist in being.” In contrast, in a most apocalyptic take, Roy Scranton argues that the “biggest problem we face” in the era of climate change “is a philosophical one: understanding that this civilization is already dead” (“Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene”). Nothing can rescue our doomed species. The time has come to rethink what it means to be human on a planet imperiled by human presence.

The aim of this NANO special issue is to explore what shape this new humanism is taking and how literature, film, art, philosophy – really the breadth of the humanities – are responding to the Anthropocene’s challenges. What does art made for a dying planet look like? Do artists, intellectuals, and critics see our species as moribund? What moral, ethical, and political challenges face citizens of the Anthropocene? What stories do we tell ourselves about civilization’s (inevitable) end? What value or purpose do such tales have? Can a new humanism save us?

This issue of NANO welcomes multimodal essays up to 4,000 words (excluding works cited) exploring topics relating to the Anthropocene, including but not limited to the following:

-art and the Anthropocene
-philosophy and carbon consumption
-the rhetoric of “sustainability” and “green living” in American consumerism
-ecocriticism, ecopoetics, and the Anthropocene
-narratives of resource depletion
-resetting civilization: the Anthropocene’s possibilities for renewal
-climate change and the American novel
-the future of criticism in the age of the Anthropocene
-extinction anxiety and popular culture
-“prepper” and aftermath/cataclysm fiction
-ethical dilemmas of the Anthropocene
-teleology, the apocalypse, and the environmental end-game
-new worlds: science fiction stories of species relocation
-charting time in the Anthropocene
-waste, wreckage, and industrial decay
-posthumanism and the Anthropocene
-the Anthropocene in the age of Trump

Direct questions to the Special Issue co-editors: Kyle Wiggins [kwiggins@bu.edu] and Brandon Krieg [Brandon.Krieg@westminster-mo.edu].

NANO is a multimodal journal. Therefore, we encourage submissions that include images, sound, video, data sets, or digital tools in support of a written argument. The multimodal components of the essay must be owned or licensed by the author, come from the public domain, or fall within reasonable fair use (see Stanford University Libraries’ Copyright & Fair Use site, http://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/ and the U.S. Copyright Office’s Fair Use site, http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html for more information). NANO’s Fair Use Statement is available on its submission page, http://www.nanocrit.com/submissions-information/.

For questions about video, audio, or image usage, please contact NANO: editornano@citytech.cuny.edu.

NANO uses modified 8th Edition MLA (Modern Language Association) formatting and style. See NANO’s Submission page for more information.

Keywords and abstract: Each author is asked to submit 5 keywords and a 150-word abstract to accompany their submission.

Deadlines concerning the special issue to be published in NANO:

Submission deadline: December 2, 2017
Pre-production begins February, 2018
Publication: Spring 2018

Deadline for submissions: March 6, 2017
Full name / name of organization: Hong Kong University
Contact email: grwang@ucdavis.edu
CFP: Imagining Asia in the Era of Trump

Dates: May 22-23, 2017

Venue: University of Hong Kong

Living in the “Asian Century,” when different nationalisms and racial paradigms collide with discourses about rising Asia, the idea of Asia looms large in the U.S. cultural and political imagination. In this current moment of international uncertainty, retrenchment of rights, and growing anti-globalist sentiments, how can transnational, postcolonial, and Asian American critique on matters of citizenship, immigration, capitalism, empire, and migration help situate our understandings of the present? How might we look to artists and writers, activists and cultural producers for new possibilities, politics, and resistance? What temporal and spatial mappings of Asia, U.S.-China relations, diaspora, and transpacific connection are produced in everyday practices? And what are the geopolitical and cultural implications of these new imaginings?

This conference will bring together scholars from the U.S. and Asia to reflect on the changing meanings of Asia and Asianness in the era of Trump. Participants will be asked to explore how discourses of the rise of Asia is rendered in the U.S. imagination, the circulation of ideas about Chineseness or Asianness within changing global relationships, and/or the positioning of Asian Americans within transnational flows and markets.

Small, intimate, and with the goal of producing an edited volume or special journal issue, the conference will function more as a colloquium. Papers will be pre-circulated, with presenters briefly summarizing their work at the conference, and each paper will be the subject of an individual session. The sessions will be held over two days, with opportunities to socialize and experience the cultural richness and vibrancy of Hong Kong.

For presenters coming from abroad, accommodations will be made available at Robert Black College, the university’s on-campus guesthouse. Lunch will be provided on both days and there will be a conference dinner on Monday.

As an objective of the conference is to develop essays for an edited collection, all work presented at the conference must be new, original, and not previously committed or published.

The deadline for proposals is March 6, 2017. Proposals (300 words), together with a brief CV, should be sent to Grace Wang, grwang@ucdavis.edu and Tim Gruenewald, tgreune@hku.edu. Applicants will be notified by March 15, 2017 if their proposal is accepted.

Deadline for submissions: June 30, 2017
Full name / name of organization: Edith Wharton Society
Contact email: paul.ohler@kpu.ca
The Edith Wharton Society welcomes applications for an award for archival research on Edith Wharton. This award, in the amount of $500, is intended to enable a scholar to conduct research on Edith Wharton’s work at the various archives available (e.g., Wharton’s library at The Mount in Lenox, MA; the Wharton Collection at Yale University’s Beinecke Library; the Wharton papers at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, etc). Prospective fellows for the 2016-2017 award are asked to e-mail a research proposal (maximum length 5 single-spaced pages) and a CV by June 30, 2017, with the subject line “EWS Award for Archival Research” to:

Dr. Paul Ohler
President, Edith Wharton Society
Department of English
Kwantlen Polytechnic University
paul.ohler@kpu.ca

The research proposal should detail the overall research project, its particular contribution to Wharton scholarship, the preparation the candidate brings to the project, and the specific relevance that the selected archive has for its completion. The funds must be used for transportation, lodging, and other expenses related to archival research. Notification of the award will take place by July 30, 2017 and the award can be used from August 1, 2017 until July 30, 2018. A final report will be due September 1, 2018. The winner will be asked at that point to submit a short report essay to the Edith Wharton Review, which will briefly inform the readers of the EWR of the research done but will not be in the way of the winner publishing a scholarly article elsewhere as well.

Deadline for submissions: March 31, 2017
Full name / name of organization: Whitney Womack Smith
Contact email: womackwa@miamioh.edu
Representing Rural Women

We invite you to submit an abstract for a proposed collection of critical essays focused on historical and contemporary representations of rural women in North America.

We are interested in interdisciplinary topics and theoretical approaches that help provide new understandings of the lives and experiences of rural women. We are seeking contributors from American studies, women’s and gender studies, ethnic studies, English, popular culture studies, film and media studies, history, sociology, anthropology, political science, and other relevant disciplines. Contributions may include, but are not limited to, the following topics:

-Rural women and poverty
-Rural women in Trump America
-Representations of rural women in literature, film, and television
-Collective organizing among rural women
-Rural women’s social organizations
-Race, racism, and immigration among rural women
-Poverty and food insecurity among rural women
-Rural women and their relationship to the environment
-Rural women and health
-Government policies and programs that impact rural women
-Rural women in social media
The anthology will be organized into thematic sections around these topics or others that emerge from submissions. Feel free to contact the co-editors with questions about the project and share the announcement widely with colleagues.

Please submit a 300-word abstract, or manuscript of previously unpublished work, plus a 150-word biographical sketch to the co-editors of the volume: Margaret Thomas Evans, Chair, Department of English, Indiana University East (margevan@iue.edu); H. Louise Davis, Department of Interdisciplinary and Communication Studies, Miami University (davishl3@miamioh.edu); and Whitney Womack Smith, Chair, Department of Languages, Literatures, and Writing, Miami University (womackwa@miamioh.edu).

The deadline for receipt of abstracts is 31 March 2017. We anticipate that complete chapters of 4000-6000 words will be due 30 November 2017.