Deadline for submissions: July 1, 2017
Full name/name of organization: Jody Baumgartner, editor
Contact email: ABCCLIOSATIRE@GMAIL.COM

Seeking contributors for ABC-CLIO’s two-volume forthcoming encyclopedia, “American Political Humor: Masters of Satire and Their Impact on U.S. Policy and Culture.” This two volume set, due out in the fall of 2019, will have a total of approximately 110 profiles, 2,000 words in length, of important individuals or media outlets (specific magazines, television shows, websites, and specific vehicles of political humor). These will be divided into 12 chronological chapters.

In exchange for agreeing to contribute, all authors will have complimentary e-book access to the set and an ABC-CLIO gift card worth $100 as a token of appreciation.

The complete list of the topics to be covered in the encyclopedia can be found at http://satire.jodyb.net (entries that are already “claimed” are in strike-out, italicized text).

If you are interested, send an email to ABCCLIOSATIRE@GMAIL.COM listing your choice(s) along with your contact information. Entries will be due December 30, 2017.

If you are not interested or unable to participate in this project, but know of someone who might be, please consider forwarding this call to them.

Deadline for submissions: June 14, 2017
Full name/name of organization: Southern Studies in the UK Network
Contact email: ssuknetwork@gmail.com
Studying the South: Approaches and Orientations

A one-day colloquium organised by the Southern Studies in the UK Network

26th August 2017, University of Hertfordshire

Studies of the U.S. South have radically changed across the last century, and especially so in the twenty-first. As Michael Bibler (2016) has argued recently, southern studies scholars “begin with the assumption that there’s no such thing as a solid South. We are interested in all kinds of Souths, bringing a dazzling range of theoretical approaches” to the region. This one-day colloquium will explore the variety of perspectives or “orientations” (Bibler) that open up discussion of the U.S. South today. Where historically the South has been considered as the “nation’s region” (in Leigh Ann Duck’s words), southern studies scholars have begun to see the region in smaller and larger scales and frames. The South can be read in relation to other American regions like the West or Midwest; it can be thought of in circum-Caribbean networks; it can be connected to Black, Red, and Green Atlantics; it can be theorised in transregional, postregional, transnational, hemispheric, global, and planetary terms; and it can also be considered at micro-regional or community-based scales. Souths can be: queer and Native and disabled and Eco and Black and trans, and so on. The plurality and diversity of this region—far from fixed or ossified—will be at the heart of this colloquium.

In addition to developing interdisciplinary approaches and orientations to studying the South, this event will also be the official launch of the Southern Studies in the UK Network. The day will consist of paper presentations and a closing roundtable. The aim of the colloquium is to bring together scholars of the South that are working in the UK and elsewhere, as well as setting an agenda for the future of the SSUKN. Members and non-members of the network are welcome to submit and/or attend.

We therefore welcome paper and panel proposals on the U.S. South from interdisciplinary perspectives. Approaches from literary studies, history, cultural criticism, media studies, visual studies and more are encouraged. Some possible topics might include:

-The U.S. South at different scales

– The South in the Anthropocene

-The South and the world

-New materialisms, animal studies, posthumanism, memory studies, and the South

-The South on film and television

-Literary depictions of southernness

-Immigration, multiculturalism, and globalisation

-Queer Souths

-Native and Indigenous Studies

-African-American culture in the South

-Gulf, Appalachian, Sea Island, Bayou, Delta, and other southern micro-regions

-Slavery, Jim Crow, and Incarceration

Abstract proposals of 300 words, accompanied by a short bio, should be sent to ssuknetwork@gmail.com by June 14th, 2017. You can also contact the organiser, Christopher Lloyd, at c.lloyd@herts.ac.uk.

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

Art, Responsibility, and Satire: The Challenges of Kurt Vonnegut’s Fiction

This panel for the 2018 Annual Convention for the Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA), to be held in Pittsburgh, PA, from April 12 to April 15, 2018, will examine the fiction of Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) on the eleventh anniversary of the author’s death on April 11, 2007.

Kurt Vonnegut’s fourteen novels and three short story collections, written over the course of five decades, express complex, sometimes shifting views about the meaning of art and the dimensions of human responsibility. Throughout his fiction, Vonnegut remained a committed satirist. Over a series of interviews with The Paris Review in the 1970s, Vonnegut described fiction itself as an inherently humorous endeavor: “If you make people laugh or cry about little black marks on sheets of white paper, what is that but a practical joke? All the great story lines are great practical jokes that people fall for over and over again.”

This panel seeks papers that explore the challenges of Kurt Vonnegut’s fiction, particularly in relation to his evolving artistic vision in the various phases of his career; his speculations about human agency and responsibility; and his use of satire and humor. Papers may focus on single works or multiple books, and consider any number of topics and subtopics that touch on these larger themes.

Paper proposals (300 words) may be submitted between June 15, 2017, and September 30, 2017, and must be posted through NEMLA’s online system at https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/cfp.

The panel description and link to submit an abstract for this panel are available at https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/17066.

Decision emails will be sent out after the submission deadline, no later than October 15, 2017. NeMLA requires that accepted panelists pay their membership/registration fees by December 1, 2017, in order to present at the 2018 convention. Please send any questions about the specific panel to Jeffrey Hotz at jhotz@esu.edu.

Deadline for submissions: September 30, 2017
Full name/name of organization: Northeastern Modern Language Association
Contact email: ed.simon@themarginaliareview.com
Since the 1939 publication of Perry Miller’s classic The New England Mind early Americanists have acknowledged the fundamental role New English Puritanism played in the subsequent development of American culture. Scholars like Edmund Morgan, Sacvan Bercovitch, Andrew Delbanco and many others have placed New England at the center of the development of American identity. Yet in the past generation, other scholars have broadened an understanding of regionalism in the construction of American nationhood, with many focusing on the polyglot, multiethnic and religiously non-conformist colonies of New York, New Jersey, and especially Pennsylvania. This panel asks for papers that help to recontextualize the central role that the middle colonies, and in particular Pennsylvania’s far western frontier, held in the future development of American culture. How did the Mid-Atlantic contribute to later understandings of religious pluralism and multiculturalism? Potential topics could include Mid-Atlantic religious literature, including discussions of the Society of Friends, Moravians, German pietism, Dutch Reformed churches, Anabaptists including the Brethren as well as the Amish and Mennonites, as well as smaller sects including the Ephrata colonists and the Society of the Women in the Wilderness, and general religious culture from the first to the second Great Awakenings. Other papers could examine the culture and literature of European colonialism in the Mid-Atlantic from the English, Dutch, and Swedish, as well as interactions with native populations including the Lenape and the Iroquois, racial conflicts such as those involving the Paxton Boys or Pontiac’s siege on Fort Pitt, German Pennsylvanians, Huguenot immigration to Pennsylvania and Delaware, Presbyterian immigration on the western frontier, linguistic diversity in the Mid-Atlantic, military history including the Seven Years War and the Revolutionary War, as well as Mid-Atlantic writers including Benjamin Franklin, Charles Brockden Brown, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, Benjamin Banneker, and Francis Daniel Pastorius among others.

Please simulaneously submit abstracts to both Ed Simon, associate editor of The Marginalia Review of Books (ed.simon@themarginaliareview.com), as well as through the Northeastern Modern Language Association’s online submission form.

Deadline for submissions: June 15, 2017
Full name/name of organization: Amber P. Hodge, University of Mississippi
Contact email: ahodge@go.olemiss.edu
Although popular culture has gained significant traction as a subject worthy of intellectual consideration over the last decade, a divide between popular and canonical persists. The academy may have instituted a boundary distinguishing high culture from low, but film and television regularly crosses these fabricated borders as popular media evokes the canon. From Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) to Penny Dreadful (2014–2016), the most successful narratives among millennial viewers (roughly, those born 1982–2004) share a common theme, the incorporation of texts considered canonical into popular storylines. For example, films such as She’s the Man (2006) and The Great Gatsby (2013) contextualize classic literature within a contemporary aesthetic. What does media that evokes or adapts the canon have to say about the priorities of millennial viewers? How does contemporary culture impact classic literature (and vice versa)? This panel will examine these and related questions on the intersection of popular culture and the canon as they relate specifically to a millennial audience, exploring how traditional narratives function in a post-9/11, social media-driven age. By June 15, please send a 300-word abstract, brief bio, and A/V requirements to Amber P. Hodge, University of Mississippi, at ahodge@go.olemiss.edu.

Deadline for submissions: July 31, 2017
Full name/name of organization: John Buchtel / Bibliographical Society of America
Contact email: jb593@georgetown.edu
Each year, the Bibliographical Society of America (BSA) invites three scholars in the early stages of their careers to present twenty-minute papers on their current, unpublished research in the field of bibliography as members of a panel at the BSA’s Annual Meeting, which takes place in New York City in late January. The New Scholars Program seeks to promote the work of scholars who are new to the field of bibliography, broadly defined to include any research that deals with the creation, production, publication, distribution, reception, transmission, and subsequent history of texts as material objects (print or manuscript). Those selected for the panel receive $600 toward the cost of attending the Annual Meeting and a complimentary one-year membership in the BSA. For more about the New Scholars Program and application procedures, see: http://bibsocamer.org/awards/new-scholars-program/.

One-day international workshop organised by the Invasion Network at Lancaster University, 8th September 2017.

Key-note speaker: Professor Emeritus David Glover

Call for Papers Deadline: 31st July 2017

Hosted by the Department of History, Lancaster University and supported by the Irish Research Council, this is the second international workshop of the Invasion Network, a group of social and cultural historians, literary scholars, and a range of other specialists and independent researchers working under the broad theme of invasion, with a particular focus on British invasion fears in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. ‘War of the Worlds: Transnational Fears of Invasion and Conflict 1870-1933’ seeks to expand this focus geographically to consider the fear of invasion as a global phenomenon and temporally to take in the period between the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1) and the rise of the German Third Reich. We invite papers that consider invasion fears in any region in which the fear became a notable social phenomenon and/or analysing how fears of invasion and future conflict expressed in different nations and regions informed each other. Papers may consider any form of representation – fictional, journalistic, visual, etc. Possible areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

• European fears of invasion and future conflict
• U.S. fears of invasion and future conflict
• Fears of invasion in the colonial and quasi-colonial territories of the British empire – including but not limited to Ireland, India, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa, Latin America, South East Asia and coastal China – including the fears of the colonised and the colonisers
• Global concerns about mass migration
• International espionage, secret societies, terrorism and anarchism
• Sinophobia and Russophobia
• Invasion fears in war time (such as Zeppelin scares) and in the interwar period
• The global circulation and reception of invasion texts
• Female authors and readers, and gendered aspects of international invasion fears

The workshop is aimed at all levels of academic scholarship, and we are especially keen to receive paper proposals from postgraduate students and early-career researchers. Please send abstracts of 300 words and a short biographical note (150 words) to Dr Harry Wood (harry.1.wood@kcl.ac.uk) and Dr Ailise Bulfin (bulfinam@tcd.ie) by 31st July 2017. Enquiries also to these addresses.

For more information on the Invasion Network: https://invasionnetwork.wordpress.com/.

Deadline for submissions: June 26, 2017
Full name / name of organization: Kimberly Drake, Scripps College
Contact email: kdrake@scrippscollege.edu
This panel explores the conference theme of sight, vision, and visibility as it operates in American literature and visual media by and about people with disabilities. How can disability studies concepts intervene interpretively in literature preoccupied by enlightenment, transcendence, and disembodiment; mobility, virility, and contamination; and racial/class (in)visibility?

Individual paper presentations will be between 15 and 20 minutes long. Please submit proposals via the online system by June 26, 2017. The PAMLA 2017 Conference will be held at the lovely Chaminade University of Honolulu (with the official conference hotel being the Ala Moana) from Friday, November 10 to Sunday, November 12.

Paper proposals must be made via our online system found here:

http://pamla.org/2017/topic-areas

Any questions can be sent to the above email address.