Deadline for submissions: April 5, 2017
Full name/name of organization: American Religion and Literature Society
Contact email: aball@lindenwood.edu
The American Religion and Literature Society invites proposals for our panel at the 2017 Midwest Modern Language Association convention, November 9-12, 2017 in Cincinnati, OH.

Session title: “Social Activism in American Religious Literature”

From the colonial era to the present day, American religious literature has exhibited an abiding concern with social activism. For example, John Winthrop’s historic sermon aboard the Arbella evinced the Puritans’ emphasis on matters of social organization and the imperative of economic benevolence. As William G. McLoughlin has observed, the early republic’s Great Awakenings and periods of intense revivalism were invariably attended by campaigns for social reform. Similarly, David Paul Nord has shown that the period’s religious press—led by the American Tract Society—constituted the nation’s original mass media and was committed to reshaping the public’s social mores. Anne C. Rose has argued that Transcendentalism was primarily an anti-capitalist social movement led by ministers who also sought to reform America’s gender norms, educational system, and ecological ethics. Gregory S. Jackson has revealed that the immensely popular post-Civil War genre of homiletic fiction encouraged activism, “social engagement,” and the creation of “communities of action.” And in his landmark work, The Social Christian Novel, Robert Glenn Wright analyzed the numerous Social Gospel novels of the Progressive Era that made authentic piety contingent upon social activism. However, clerical authors have not been alone in wedding religion to social activism, as the laity has consistently made use of religious tropes to advance and legitimate their social causes. For example, Jama Lazerow and Teresa Anne Murphy have proven that religious motifs were central to the antebellum labor movement. Similarly, in his The Soul of the Wobblies, Donald E. Winters has shown that the early twentieth century literature of the I.W.W. provides us with “a valuable lesson about how religious sensibility and imagery helped mobilize the radical element of the labor movement.”

In keeping with this year’s conference theme, we seek proposals for presentations on American religious literature that promotes or engages in social activism, as well as presentations on the writing of reformers who appeal to a religious idiom to advocate for the transformation of society.

Potential topics may include but are certainly not limited to:

Puritan social theory
Religious Awakenings and social reform
Transcendentalism and social activism
Religious motifs in abolitionist literature, print culture
Homiletic fiction and social reform
Utopian literature, print culture
Literature of the Social Gospel
Christian Socialist literature, print culture
Religious motifs in labor literature, print culture
Religious motifs in suffragist literature, print culture
Religious motifs in the literature of the settlement movement
Religious motifs in African-American literature
Please submit abstracts to Andrew Ball (aball@lindenwood.edu) by April 5. Be sure to include your name, institutional affiliation, email address, and any AV requests in your abstract. The subject of the email should be “MMLA 2017.”

Deadline for submissions: April 17, 2017
Full name / name of organization: AISNA (Italian Association for North American Studies); University of Milan
Contact email: segretario-aisna@unive.it

24th AISNA Biennial Conference

The US and the World We Inhabit

University of Milan, September 28-30, 2017

Call for workshops

The newly elected administration inaugurated the year 2017 by raising questions in the nation and the world about the oncoming policies of the US government regarding the construction or removal of barriers, the care or exploitation of the environment, and many other dilemmas involving radically alternative scenarios for our future relations to the world and to our habitats. What is at stake is the option of facing contemporary cultural and political challenges on the ground of a shared or an exclusive governance.

In terms of historical and literary reflection, this involves a rethinking of the positioning of even the newest transnational perspectives, such as Border, Hemispherical, and Oceanic Studies, which are called to acknowledge the mobility and multiplicity of the where and what of their investigation. The 24th AISNA Biennial Conference proposes to discuss possible ways of reconceptualizing the mutual and shifting positions of center(s) and margin(s), subject(s) and object(s) in terms of relation, and particularly of an inclusive structure of relations that are based on an ecological ethics. Workshop proposals are invited from the diverse areas of inquiry of AISNA addressing methodological hypotheses, such as the need to assume a complex framework of simultaneous scales of analysis; translation as the main means and medium to expand our theoretical conversation; an ecocentric and ecological paradigm as the ground for our decision-making procedures; and networking as the privileged tool for a hopeful and successful management of the urgent issues posed by an unstoppable process of globalization and an apparently similarly unavoidable process of exhaustion of the planet’s resources.

Topics may include but are not confined to:

• North-American Studies & World Literature

• Rethinking Cosmopolitanism in a Global Perspective

• Exilic Writing

• Migration and the Environment

• US Literature and Global Circulation (Markets and Publishers)

• Translation and World Literature; Multilingualism; New Textualities

• Ecolanguage, Ecopoetry, Ecopoetics

• Animal Studies

• Environmental Dystopias

• Landscape Transformations and Shifting Geographies

• Environmental Justice

• Environmental Politics; Presidencies and Environmental Policies

• Foreign Relations and Climate Change

• US Environmental Activism

• Inhabiting the ‘Wilderness’ – Past and Present

• Natives’ Territories and Newcomers’ Settlements

• Ecofeminism

The deadline for workshop proposals is April 15, 2017.

Submitted proposals will be reviewed by the conference organizer and the AISNA board. A selection of max. 20 workshops will be issued by April 30, notified to the submitters by email, and published on the Conference website.

Submissions should be written in English and include:

• a workshop title

• a clearly stated description of the proposed topic in no more than 300 words

• contact details of the workshop’s coordinator or coordinators (max. 2), including professional affiliation.

Each workshop will host no more than four papers, including the coordinator’s or coordinators’. In case they intend to present papers in their own workshops, aspiring coordinators should indicate their prospective titles in their proposals. We remind aspiring coordinators that their task will comprise a brief introduction of the speakers, a strict monitoring of the observance of the allotted 20-minute time for each presentation, and a supervision of the following question and answer session, aimed to stimulate a fruitful discussion in the last but essential part of each workshop. For this purpose, in their proposal they should also suggest the name of a discussant.

All workshop proposals should be sent by e-mail to the conference organizer, Paola Loreto (paola.loreto@unimi.it), as well as to the secretary of AISNA, Simone Francescato (segretario-aisna@unive.it).

Deadline for submissions: May 31, 2017
Full name/name of organization:
SAMLA/South Atlantic Modern Language Association
Contact email: dstjohn1@gsu.edu
November 7, 2017 will mark the first anniversary of the death of Leonard Cohen. Known predominantly for his music, Cohen’s artistic contributions extend into the genres of poetry, fiction, and visual art. This year’s SAMLA conference theme, “High Art/ Low Art: Borders and Boundaries in Popular Culture,” presents a timely and appropriate venue for an examination and celebration of the artist’s life and work. This panel discusses Cohen’s legacy as a pioneering force in both modern poetry and popular music. This panel seeks papers that provide new insight into Cohen’s published material, including but not limited to his earliest published poetry, his polarizing novel Beautiful Losers, his successful mainstream music, and his final album You Want it Darker. By May 31, please send a 250-word proposal, a brief CV, and any A/V requirements to D.E. St. John, Georgia State University, dstjohn1@gsu.edu, for SAMLA 89, Nov. 3-5, in Atlanta, GA.

Deadline for submissions: August 1, 2017
Full name/name of organization: Jesse Aleman, University of New Mexico & Maria Windell, University of Colorado Boulder
Contact email: jman@unm.edu
“Latinx Lives in Hemispheric Context”

ELN (English Language Notes) Spring/Summer 2018 (Duke University Press)

Editors: Maria A. Windell, University of Colorado Boulder and Jesse Alemán, University of New Mexico

This special issue of ELN (English Language Notes) invites submissions that reflect upon the ways in which Latinx lives, both historical and contemporary, serve as a point of intersection between Latinx, Ethnic, and hemispheric studies. But how exactly do latinidad and the hemispheric relate to one another? How does Latinx Studies intersect with other fields, such as Atlantic Studies, that also constitute hemispheric, transamerican, or inter-American scholarship? Latinx expressive cultures—everything from poetry to graphic art to music to theater—offer different understandings of how the Latinx and hemispheric intersect. We are thus interested in contributions that explore how Latinx expressive cultures and their audiences circulate freely, haphazardly, fleetingly, or deliberately across the Americas. We welcome contributions on a broad range of topics including but not limited to:

Archives
Diaspora
Hemispheric geographies
Indigeneity, Afro-Latinidades, Creoles
Race, gender, sexuality
Circulation, mobility, fugitivity
Migration, immigration, exile, sanctuary
Textual histories and print culture practices
Spanish-language readers and communities
Greater Mexico, Global South, and the “Hemispheric Turn”
Rethinking canons/archives defined by authorial identity
The impact of the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage project
Essays of twenty to twenty-five manuscript pages are invited from scholars in all fields.

Essays will be reviewed by external readers. All submissions should adhere to the Chicago-style endnote citation format. Please submit double-spaced, 12-point font, .docx files by email to both special issue editors (maria.windell@colorado.edu and jman@unm.edu). Please omit identifying information from all pages except the cover page, as we use a blind review process. Please send inquiries regarding this issue to the editors.

The deadline for submissions is August 1, 2017.

A refereed journal housed in the University of Colorado Boulder English Department, ELN has been dedicated to pushing the boundaries of scholarship in literary and cultural studies since 1962. More recently, as this issue suggests, the journal has actively promoted new theoretical speculation and interdisciplinary collaborations crossing geographies, histories and practices. Published bi-annually, the journal is moving to Duke University Press and its digital platform, along with Project Muse, beginning in Spring 2018. This special issue will be the first to appear under the Duke UP imprint.

Deadline for submissions: April 7, 2017
Full name / name of organization: Matthew Mosher
Contact email: matthew.mosher@stonybrook.edu
Additional proposals wanted for the panel “The American Recluse: Contesting Individualism in Narratives of Isolation and Withdrawal” to be presented at the 28th Annual Conference of the American Literature Association, May 25-28, 2017, Boston, MA. All periods and theoretical approaches welcome. Please send 250-word abstract to matthew.mosher@stonybrook.edu by April 7, 2017.

Queen’s University Belfast, 28 July 2017

The Summer of Love was not simply an American phenomenon but an occurrence with international and intercultural influence and significant social and political effects, transforming the ways in which the counterculture, intergenerational relationships, class, gender, and race are understood. Thousands of young people ventured to the Bay Area, particularly the Haight-Ashbury district. The media’s coverage of the influx of students, hippies, and others considered part of the “counterculture” drew national and international attention.

This event will consist of a strong arts and entertainment component. Local artists from Belfast will display their original works, a screening of a countercultural film at Queen’s Film Theatre will take place, and the day will conclude with a special after-party with retro music and drinks at one of Belfast’s popular clubs.
Topics will include:

– Vietnam and the student protests; the New Left; Students for a Democratic Society; Hippies, Yippies, and Diggers

– Timothy Leary; psychedelia and drug culture

– Deviance; intergenerational conflict; youth alienation; Free love and the sexual revolution

– Freaks, bikers, communes, cults, and other marginal groups

– San Francisco rock, folk music, protest songs, and experimental music; Bob Dylan; the Beatles (particularly Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band); Jimi Hendrix; the Grateful Dead; music festivals

– Independent and cult films; the Hollywood Renaissance

– Civil disobedience, riots and race relations; the Black Panthers; the feminist movement

– Eastern religion; the New Age movement; mysticism

Call for Art

Works of art—oil paintings, watercolors, charcoals, prints, etchings, photographs, etc.—are requested for part of the Summer of Love art exhibit. Protest art, photographs representing alternative lifestyles, psychedelic or experimental works, and other subversive counterculture creations are especially desirable.

Please email an image of your work to plederer01@qub.ac.uk.
The deadline is May 1, 2017. Results will be announced by June 1.

The event will take place in the Peter Froggatt Center at Queen’s University Belfast. A vegetarian and non-vegetarian lunch will be served.