Deadline for submissions: January 20, 2017
Full name / name of organization: Graduate English Organization University of Maryland College Park
Contact email: conference.geo@gmail.com
DEADLINE EXTENDED!

Call for Papers: 10th Annual Graduate English Organization Conference

“Worked Up: Labor, Literature, and Culture”

Department of English

University of Maryland, College Park

March 18th, 2017

As questions of unionization, solidarity, precarity, and capital reverberate throughout our academic communities, this conference asks how an historical consideration of labor can invigorate our work as literary scholars today. We might map our present moment through histories of labor that navigate the legacy of slavery, colonization, indentured servitude, guild labor, convict labor, undocumented labor, and the gendered spheres of public and private work. Literary inquiry can trace genealogies of labor—how writings register continuities and ruptures in the way we regulate, politicize, and imagine work over time. Writers as varied as Shakespeare, Marx and Engels, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Zora Neale Hurston, John Steinbeck, and Jacques Rancière illustrate that labor is constantly being reimagined and repurposed. We thus invite you to explore work and labor as not only nouns but verbs: what it means “to work,” and what is a “work,” as both an art object and the outcome of labor. These terms invite questions about power, property, and subjectivity that engage many interpretive frameworks like feminist theory, Marxist criticism, critical race studies, disability studies, and digital humanities. We imagine this conference to be, in part, self-reflexive: a space for us to think about our work as scholars in academic communities.

We aim for “work” and “labor” to broadly encompass not only questions of material production, but also create opportunities to consider representations of work across boundaries of race, sexuality, gender, class, nation, and form. How do texts work, what do they do? What constitutes the labor of an author or reader? How are bodies transformed by or in the service of labor? How do we account for domestic, racialized, emotional, nonhuman, and collaborative labor? What histories have we traced for these forms of labor, and what futures might we imagine?

We welcome MA, MFA, and PhD students to submit a diversity of “works” to our spring conference: critical presentations, collaborative projects, craft essays, creative work in fiction, poetry, drama, dance, arts, and film. Topics of potential essays can include, but are not limited to:

Representations of Labor

○ Commodified or laboring bodies

○ Dis/ability

○ Invisible labor

○ Digital labor

○ Sex work and transgressive labor

● Global and transnational mappings of work

○ Representations of migrant and displaced labor

○ The work of translation

○ The work of (de)colonization

○ Hemispheric and transatlantic literary traditions

○ The circulation of trade, knowledge, and texts

● Literary Labor

○ The political work of aesthetics and poetics

○ Fetishization, lack, and surplus desire

○ The work of authors, publishers, printers, and readers

○ Ideology and labor

○ Issues of craft and the creative process

● Labor and the University

○ Models of labor in academia

○ Pedagogy as labor and ethics

○ Intellectual labor

○ The work of the Humanities

○ Creative writing within the university

Please submit proposals for fifteen-minute presentations. Panel submissions (3-4 participants) are highly encouraged, as are other collaborative projects. Proposals for papers or panels should be 300-word abstracts. Proposals for creative work should be a short sample from an original composition or a description of the intended work. Please include your full name and email address.

Abstracts are due Friday, January 20th, 2017 and should be e-mailed to conference.geo@gmail.com

Website: http://workedupconference.weebly.com

Facebook: GEO Conference 2017: Worked Up

Twitter: UMD GEO Conference @workedup2017

Event: 03/10/2017 – 03/11/2017
Abstract: 01/15/2017
Categories: American, 1865-1914, 20th & 21st Century, African-American, Colonial, Revolution & Early National, Transcendentalists
Location: Boston University
Organization: New England American Studies Association NEASA

New England American Studies Association (NEASA)– Call for Papers Hoaxes, Humbugs, Pranks and Play: Functions and Expressions of Foolery in American Society and Culture

March 10-11, 2017

Boston University

The New England American Studies Association’s (NEASA) annual spring conference offers an opportune moment to pursue connotations of playfulness and trickery, and of enjoyment and leisure. The emergence of myriad manifestations and sites of playfulness across social sectors has profoundly impacted American society and culture. Childhood has become a playful time to be treasured; diversionary activities have come to dominate cultural products; even nostalgia has acquired a pronounced lucidity. Play is also big business: gaming, sports, and other recreation activities are their own sectors of the economy. We therefore invite contributions that interrogate, reflect on, and celebrate the changing functions and sites of playfulness and trickery in American society and culture. Topics to consider include: • The material culture of play (boardgames, cards, videogames, etc.) • Tricksters in literature • Hoaxes and humbugs in history, politics and popular culture • “Playing” in archives and the joys of research • Playfulness and pedagogy • Gamification • The disruptive power of play • Children at play • Leisure culture • Sports and play • April Fool’s Day (history, popular culture representations, etc.) In addition to individual paper proposals, we welcome submissions for roundtable discussions, hands-on workshops, and alternative format sessions (e.g.: film screenings, 5-minute micropapers). Submissions that do not address the conference theme will also be considered. Individual proposals should include: 150-200 word abstract, presentation title, name, institutional affiliation, and contact email. For panel/roundtable proposals, in 200-500 words, please provide: session title, its topic, format, individual paper titles (as appropriate), as well as the names, institutional affiliations, and contact emails for each individual participant. All submissions should be sent to: neasacouncil@gmail.com by January 15, 2017. For more information regarding NEASA, please visit our website: http://newenglandasa.tumblr.com/

Deadline for submissions: January 20, 2017
Full name / name of organization: American Literature Association
Contact email: luke.mueller@tufts.edu
American Literature Association

28th Annual Conference

Boston, May 25-28, 2017

Endemic: Crisis and Representation in 20th and 21st century American Literature

The sense of national crisis has become endemic. From Greek roots, the word endemic means a condition that is constantly present in a “demos,” in a group of people. Today’s democracies face such constant threats as internal division, terrorism, and global climate change, and we are unsure whether any moment of crisis could prove to be the turning point that determined the future. We might wonder, however, when Americans were ever not living in a time of crisis, and whether our decisions really do allow for a different future.

This panel explores the endemic sense of crisis by looking to twentieth and twenty-first century American literature. As Pericles Lewis claims, writers of the early 20th century addressed crises of representation in response to political and institutional crises of war, nationalism, faith, reason, and empire. Even as the iconoclastic energies of modernism have waned, the modernist project continues with an ever-broadening array of literary subjects, forms, and techniques. We seek papers on literary works that represent American life in crisis and that help illuminate current crises. Topics may include the Great Depression or the Great Recession, Civil Rights Protests or the Black Lives Matter Movement, Nazism or ISIS, McCarthyism or the politics of Russian internet hacking.

We hope to understand whether and how such socio-political crises are endemic, how they occur, and whether they persist, recur, and iterate over time. We hope to find answers to questions such as: how does literature register this sense of crisis? Do literary experiences help to create it or escape it? Do they simply present or clarify an era’s crises? How does literature help imagine resolutions or contain threats? And what models, if any, does it offer for survival, stability, or progress?

Submit abstracts of no more than 300 words to luke.mueller@tufts.edu along with a brief description of yourself and your relevant work. The deadline for submissions is January 20, 2017.

Deadline for submissions: February 12, 2017
Full name / name of organization: Rothemere American Institute, Oxford University
Contact email: poetrysince2000@gmail.com
Special Relationships: Poetry Across the Atlantic Since 2000

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 Sunday, February 12.

EXTENDED CALL FOR PAPERS

Pocahontas and After:

historical culture and transatlantic encounters, 1617-2017

 

The British Library and the Institute of Historical Research, London

March 16-18, 2017

 

A major international interdisciplinary conference to commemorate the 400^th anniversary of Pocahontas’ death.

 

In 2017 the Anglo-American world will mark the 400th anniversary of the death of Pocahontas.  Her story has been romanticised at many points over the centuries, and multiple representations of Pocahontas (as Noble Savage, Mother of a Nation, propaganda icon, seductive temptress) have materialised in historical accounts, in literature, and in visual, and material culture, and performance art.  From a range of historical and literary perspectives, and for a variety of social and political purposes, Pocahontas has left an enduring legacy among Indigenous, local, national, and international communities.

 

This conference will explore the continued interest in Pocahontas as a subject of study.  It will examine the academic challenges posed by the multiple versions and the contemporary appropriations of this Powhatan/Pamunkey woman variously known as Amonute, Matoaka, Pocahontas, and Rebecca.  In exploring the life and afterlives of Pocahontas, it aims to open new interdisciplinary discussions.

 

Papers are thus welcomed from all disciplinary perspectives, including (but not limited to) literary studies; film and media studies; cultural studies; gender and indigenous studies; art history; transatlantic and early modern studies; and particularly, from Native American perspectives.  Comparative work is also encouraged, as are contributions from early career researchers.  We additionally encourage contributions that shed new light on the British Library and the Institute of Historical Research’s collections related to Pocahontas.

 

Suggested themes include:

• Indigenous feminism
• Pocahontas’ literary afterlife
• Pocahontas on film
• Pocahontas and political resistance
• Pocahontas in material culture
• The commodification of Pocahontas
• Comparative approaches to Pocahontas (eg. La Malinche)
• Pocahontas and Bloomsbury
• Teaching Pocahontas, and Pocahontas as subject of academic enquiry.

 

Confirmed plenary speakers:

Professor Mishuana Goeman (UCLA)

Professor Karen Kupperman (NYU)

Professor Camilla Townsend (Rutgers)

Dr Karenne Wood (Virginia Indian Heritage Programme)

 

The Satuday 18^th will host a range of cultural activities, including:

• A special session: ‘Historic Jamestown and new perspectives on Pocahontas’ with Jim Horn and Bill Kelso.
• A panel debate on the iconography of Pocahontas and its relationship to contemporary indigenous women’s political and social issues. Confirmed speakers: Joanne Prince of Rainmaker Gallery, Bristol; Shelley Niro, Mohawk film-maker and artist; Dr Max Carocci, Chelsea College of Art; Dr David Stirrup, Reader in Indigenous and Settler Literatures of the Americas at the University of Kent; and Dr Buck Woodard, Colonial Williamsburg, American Indian Initiative.
• Screening of Reel Injun and Indigenous London with director Q&A’s
• A musical performance by singer-songwriter ElizaBeth Hill

 

250-word abstracts together with a short biography should be submitted to eccles-centre@bl.uk (please include subject line: Pocahontas and After conference) by Midnight (GMT) Wednesday 14^th December.  We aim to offer a number of bursaries for postgraduates and early career researchers to offset costs.

 

Deadline for submissions: December 19, 2016

Full name / name of organization: Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE)
Contact email: info@asle.org
Deadline for Sumbission Extended to December 19, 2016

Rust/Resistance: Works of Recovery

Call for Papers, Association for the Study of Literature and Environment
(ASLE) Twelfth Biennial Conference
June 20 – 24, 2017

Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan

http://asle2017.clas.wayne.edu

In Rust: The Longest War, Jonathan Waldman claims that, for those who “yield to rust, find beauty in rust, capitalize on rust, raise awareness of rust, and teach about rust, work is riddled with scams, lawsuits, turf battles, and unwelcome oversight. Explosions, collisions, arrests, threats, and insults abound.” Rust is the underside of cosmopolis. Rust belts follow industry and its corrosions; the parasitic Rust fungi are enemies of agriculture. And yet there is an irenic side to rust: it inspires contemplation, the search for beauty, and the effort to defend what is threatened. As an agent of time, rust sponsors stories of collapse-and-recovery, evolution-and-extinction, but it also questions them. Narratives of progress that see rust as the enemy are not universal. In Japanese aesthetics, for instance, sabi is the beauty of natural aging and aged materials; what is new is not as lovely as what has weathered. In a time obsessed by environmental apocalypse, rust may reveal other trajectories for cultures of recovery. Resurget Cineribus, “It Will Rise from the Ashes,” is the motto of Detroit—our host city.

Long associated with steel, car culture, and the music of Motown, Detroit is also a site of struggle for racial and environmental justice, against depopulation and “ruin porn,” and for the preservation of artistic heritage. A nexus of encounters between indigenous nations and the French fur trade, it became a locus of the Great Migration, “white flight,” and gentrification. Water-rich on the strait between Lake Huron and Lake Erie, Detroit and its neighbors struggle against corroded infrastructure and government corruption. For all those reasons, Detroit is an ideal place to confer about rust, resistance, and recovery. We invite participants to interpret the conference theme as broadly as possible and to imagine their work in terms of content and form. We particularly encourage non-traditional modes of presentation, including hybrid, performative and collaborative works; panels that minimize formal presentation in favor of engaged emergent discussion; interdisciplinary approaches; environmentally inflected readings of fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, film, theatre and other media; and proposals from outside the academic humanities, including submissions from artists, writers, teachers, practitioners, activists and colleagues in the social and natural sciences. Topics may include, but are certainly not limited to:

The literatures, arts, and cultures of the Rust Belt, the Great Lakes, and Appalachia.
Transnational rust
Elemental rust
Labor and rust
Aeons of rust
The arts and sciences of resistance
Methods of resistance
Genres of resistance
Recovering ecological citizenship
Recovering lost lands
Recovering past and future

Keynote Speakers/Panelists:

Our list of keynote speakers includes scholars, activists and writers working on/in different forms of resistance and recovery: humor and the new American nature writing; the Transcendentalist and Humboldtian lineages in the environmental humanities; poetry and urban gardening; indigenous rights, climate fiction, and climate change; the history of slavery and the Detroit River; and cultural sustainability through the Digital Humanities. Confirmed speakers include Michael Branch, Ross Gay, Tiya Miles, Siobhan Senier, Laura Dassow Walls, and Kyle Powys Whyte.

Panel and Paper Submission:

For additional information and to submit a pre-formed panel or individual presentation, please visit the conference website at http://asle2017.clas.wayne.edu. All conference sessions will be 90-minutes long. ASLE strongly encourages presenters to create pre-formed panels and to experiment with alternative forms of presentation, discussion and engagement. Both scholarly and creative submissions are welcome. We expect to receive more proposals than we can accommodate; therefore, not all proposals will be accepted. Proposals for fully constituted panels will be given priority over individual paper proposals; please note that there are separate tabs for panel proposal submission and individual paper submission on the submissions website.

Only one proposal submission is allowed per person; participants can present only once during the conference (pre-conference seminars/workshops and chairing a panel not included).
Proposals must be submitted online at https://asle.submittable.com/submit; in cases in which this requirement poses a significant difficulty, please contact Christoph Irmscher and Anthony Lioi, as above.
ASLE policy is currently to discourage virtual participation at our biennial conferences except in extraordinary circumstances.
Deadline Extended: All proposals must be submitted by December 19, 2016.

We will evaluate your proposal carefully and notify you of its final status by February 15, 2017. If you are a panel organizer and would like a panel CFP posted to the ASLE website, or if you are an individual interested in submitting to a panel call for papers, please use our Panel Call for Papers page: http://www.asle.org/panel-calls-for-papers/.

Note: you must be or become a member of ASLE by the time of registration to present at the conference. Join or check your membership status at http://www.asle.org/. For questions, please contact 2017 ASLE Presidents Christoph Irmscher and Anthony Lioi at asle2017@indiana.edu.

Conference Events and Activities:

Banquet and dance at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History
Special panel on water + activism in Detroit
Field trip options, including the Underground Railroad Living Museum, Arab American National Museum, an urban garden tour, cycling, running, and volunteering for a local group
Progressive evening in Midtown Detroit, including a radical poetry reading at Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD)
Special movie screening of Watermark at the Detroit Film Theater in the Detroit Institute of Arts

Deadline for submissions: January 30, 2017

Full name / name of organization: Tel Aviv University
Contact email: meyravko@post.tau.ac.il
REMINDER: Jewish-American Fiction and Magical Realism: Narrative Strategies

The editors are seeking contributors for a volume focused on narratological analysis of the magical realism genre in Jewish-American fiction.

Magical Realism – a mode of narration in which the fantastic is organically presented within the fabric of a realistic settings – has long been used in literature to explore issues of a mutable and conflicting nature. Consequently, Jewish-American magical realism was pioneered in the early stages of the 20th century by authors such as Bernard Malamud and Isaac Bashevis Singer, who depicted the possible conflict between ancient Jewish tradition and the American consumer culture. The tension between these two inherently different traditions has risen again, and is aptly depicted by an increasing number of young Jewish-American writers who often interject postmodern sensitivity into their narratives in the form of magical realism. These postmodern tendencies are evident in such narratological ploys as the unreliability of the narrator, the subversion of time and space and the creation of gaps in the text. In fact, contemporary Jewish-American magical realism often involves an intentional attempt to create a subversive reading experience as structural indication of the chasm evoked by the hyphenated identity. In the search to represent a sense of a split self, these authors often resort to the reconfiguration of the temporal-spatial axis of the narrative (displaced objects or subjects that reappear in different places and or times), the subversion of the narrative voice (dead or unreliable narrators) and the collapse of the continuity of the narrative (gaps in the sequence of events). The proposals, for chapters of approximately 6000 words (MLA Style), should focus on the topic of Jewish-American identity through narrative analysis of magical realism in short stories, novels, graphic novels and plays/drama.

We are particularly interested in chapters that engage the following authors, and we strongly encourage comparative essays based on several works by the same author:

Isaac Bashevis Singer
Bernard Malamud
Cynthia Ozick (The Messiah of Stockholm, The Puttermesser Papers)
Avram Davidson
Nicole Krauss (The History of Love, Great House)
Dara Horn (In the Image, The World to Come)
Alice Hoffman (The Museum of Extraordinary Things, Incantation)
Michael Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay)
Jonathan Safran-Foer (Everything Is Illuminated)
Steve Stern (“The Tale of a Kite”, “Bruno’s Metamorphosis”, The Frozen Rabbi)
Joseph Skibell (A Blessing on the Moon)
Ben Marcus (The Flame Alphabet)
Mayla Goldberg (Bee Season)
Nathan Englander (“The Gilgul of Park Avenue”)
Art Spiegelman (Maus)
Tony Kushner (Angels in America)
The editors are pursuing a tier 1 academic publication venue. The selection process will therefore be a two-stage review process – an invitation to submit an essay based on your proposal and a final selection of chapters once the completed essays have been submitted.

THE DEADLINE FOR PROPOSALS IS 30 JANUARY 2017, WITH DELIVERY OF COMPLETED ESSAYS BY 31 AUGUST 2017.

Please send the following by 30th January 2017:

A detailed 500-1000 words proposal for an original contribution (adding a preliminary outline to your proposal would be an advantage)
A 100 word bio (including selected publications)
Notifications will be sent to potential contributors by 28th February 2017

Please e-mail both editors:

Inbar Kaminsky, Ph.D. Tel Aviv University: inbar.kaminsky@gmail.com

Meyrav Koren-Kuik, Tel Aviv University: meyravko@post.tau.ac.il

Deadline for submissions: January 16, 2017
Full name / name of organization: Jacqueline Foertsch / U North Texas
Contact email: foertsch@unt.edu

Postwar Geographies: Discussions of literature, 1945-1975, wherein mapping, locating, traveling, place-making, or turf-marking has a significant role: the Iron Curtain, the color line, “the women’s room(s),” Model Cities, etc. Abstracts to foertsch@unt.edu by 16 January 2017.