Deadline for submissions: January 12, 2018
Full name/name of organization: Ralph Waldo Emerson Society
Contact email: prentiss.clark@usd.edu

The Ralph Waldo Emerson Society announces four awards for projects that foster appreciation for Emerson.

*Graduate Student Paper Award*

Provides up to $750 of travel support to present a paper on an Emerson Society panel at the American Literature Association Annual Conference (May 2018) or the Thoreau Society Annual Gathering (July 2018). Submit a 300-word abstract to David Greenham (david.greenham@uwe.ac.uk) by January 12, 2018. Abstracts should address the 2018 CFPs posted at emersonsociety.org.

*Research Grant*

Provides up to $500 to support scholarly work on Emerson. Preference given to junior scholars and graduate students. Submit a confidential letter of recommendation, and a 1-2-page project proposal, including a description of expenses, by April 1, 2018.

*Pedagogy or Community Project Award*

Provides up to $500 to support projects designed to bring Emerson to a non-academic audience. Submit a confidential letter of recommendation, and a 1-2-page project proposal, including a description of expenses, by April 1, 2018.

*Subvention Award*

Provides up to $500 to support costs attending the publication of a scholarly book or article on Emerson and his circle. Submit a confidential letter of recommendation, and a 1-2-page proposal, including an abstract of the forthcoming work and a description of publication expenses, by April 1, 2018.

Send Research, Pedagogy/Community, and Subvention proposals to:

Prentiss Clark (Prentiss.Clark@usd.edu) and

Kristina West (k.j.west@reading.ac.uk)

Award recipients must become members of the Society; membership applications are available at http://www.emersonsociety.org.

Deadline for submissions: September 1, 2018
Full name/name of organization: Philip Roth Studies
Contact email: philiprothstudies@gmail.com

September 2017 saw the publication of the final volume in the Library of America series of the complete works of Philip Roth: Why Write?: Collected Nonfiction 1960-2013. The volume includes Roth’s literary criticism, critical introductions, interviews, movie reviews, political writing, cultural commentary and open letters.

For an issue of Philip Roth Studies offering a special focus on “The Non-Fiction of Philip Roth,” we invite scholars to submit essays on any aspect of Roth’s non-fiction. Subjects might include, but need not be restricted to, the following: the relationship between Roth’s non-fiction and fiction; Roth’s literary relations with other authors; Roth’s role as a public intellectual; Roth as literary critic; Roth as polemicist; Roth as interviewee and interviewer; Roth as custodian/curator of his own oeuvre.

For inquiries and submissions, please contact Executive Co-Editors David Brauner and Debra Shostak at philiprothstudies@gmail.com. The deadline for submissions is September 1st, 2018.

Deadline for submissions: December 31, 2017
Full name/name of organization: American Literature Assoc./Shirley Jackson Society
Contact email: andersonwires@gmail.com

Shirley Jackson wrote about about haunted houses, dysfunctional families, wayward children, attempts at maintaining a sane work-life balance, as well as restricted, doomed women in a period when Americans were constantly reminded of their civic duties to manage and maintain clean, comfortable, ‘normal’ domestic spaces. But as evidenced by letters from her fans, Shirley Jackson’s approach to domesticity opened up the possibility for something different, something more for women who felt trapped by their home lives.

This panel seeks work that addresses any aspect of Jackson’s domesticity in her fiction or nonfiction for the May 2018 ALA Conference in San Francisco.

Please email a 350-word abstract and short bio with the subject line “ALA Jackson Panel” to Dr. Jill E. Anderson at andersonwires@gmail.com by December 31, 2017.

Symposium, TU Dortmund University, 1 and 2 June 2018

In his poem “Poets to come,” Walt Whitman addresses “orators, singers and musicians to come” to “arouse – for you must justify me – you must answer.” This will be the first symposium devoted to the wide creative reception of Whitman’s works – from poetry and prose, translation, painting and music, to film, advertising and the World Wide Web, in the U.S. as well as countries and languages around the world. One-page abstracts of paper proposals should be sent electronically, no later than February 1, 2018, to all four symposium organizers: Stephanie M. Blalock: stephanie-blalock@uiowa.edu; Wendy Katz: wkatz22@unl.edu; Kenneth M. Price: kprice2@unl.edu; Julia Sattler: julia.sattler@udo.edu.

The Eleventh Annual International Whitman Week Seminar and Symposium TU
Dortmund University, Germany, 28 May – 3 June, 2018

The Transatlantic Walt Whitman Association (TWWA) invites students, researchers, and Whitman enthusiasts to participate in its 11th annual Whitman Week, consisting of a Seminar for students interested in Whitman and Whitman’s poetry, and a Symposium bringing together international
scholars and graduate students. Students will have an opportunity to confront Whitman’s books, share their readings of key poems and clusters, and discuss Whitman’s cohesive representation of human relations and his work’s international significance. Afternoon translation workshops will focus on the reception of Whitman in different languages. The team of international instructors of this year’s seminar include Jeanne Cortiel (Bayreuth), Betsy Erkkila (Northwestern), Ed Folsom (U Iowa) and Christine Gerhardt (Bamberg). Applications for the seminar should include a curriculum vitae, a one-page statement of interest, and a short letter of support from an instructor who knows the applicant well should be submitted by e-mail to the Dortmund organizers, Walter Grünzweig (walter.gruenzweig@udo.edu), and Laura Kost
(laura.kost@udo.edu) by February 1, 2018.

Deadline for submissions: December 1, 2017
Full name/name of organization: The Texas Center for Working-Class Studies
Contact email: LKirby@collin.edu

The Texas Center for Working-Class Studies, housed at Collin College, a two-year institution serving Collin County, is pleased to announce a one-day Working-Class Studies conference for interested scholars and students. The conference will consist of panels in a range of disciplines and on a variety of issues related to social class and labor issues, both historical and contemporary. The keynote speaker will be noted scholar Dr. Victoria E. Bynum, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at Texas State University and author of The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War, The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies, and Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South.

Conference organizers invite scholars from all disciplines to take part in this conference and submit proposals for individual papers, full sessions, roundtables, or workshops. Graduate and undergraduate students, in particular, are encouraged to submit their work.

Potential topics might include:

-Working-Class Literature
-The Worker and the Modern Workplace
-Understanding Working-Class Studies
-The Future of Working-Class Studies
-Working-Class History
-Connections among Race, Class, and/or Gender
-Class Representations in the Media and Popular Culture
-The Complexity of Social Class
-The Pedagogy of Social Class

Those interested should submit an abstract of no more than 150 words to Digital Commons@Collin (http://digitalcommons.collin.edu/txcwcs/) by December 1, 2017. For more information, please contact Dr. Lisa A. Kirby, Director of the Texas Center for Working-Class Studies and Professor of English, at LKirby@collin.edu.

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.