Deadline for submissions: September 23, 2016

Full name /name of organization: ACLA

Contact email: mmalburn@highpoint.edu

Monsters in Our Midst: Hauntings, Taboos, and Terror in Global Literature

Organizer: Meredith Malburne-Wade

Co-Organizer: Ashley Reed

Co-Organizer: Megan Goodwin

In his essay on the unheimlich, Freud proposed that the uncanny is “something which ought to have remained hidden but has come to light.” Toni Morrison foregrounds the specter of race haunting the American literary imagination when she asks, “are there ghosts in the machine?” Barbara Creed’s engagement of Kristeva suggests that “abjection, as a source of horror, works within patriarchal societies, as a means of separating the human from the non-human.” Edward Ingebretsen’s answer to the question “why does one make a monster?” is chilling: “to watch it die, of course.”

The ogres of our imagination are raced, gendered, classed, and embodied. Societies define themselves at the threshold of repulsion. The stories we tell ourselves about what we fear reveal who we are, what we want, and what we cannot or will not tolerate. How do cultures narrate unspeakable things? How may literature help us approach—or repel—the unthinkable? Can our specters be benevolent, or can history only haunt us?

Building on these observations and inquiries, this seminar invites explorations of monstrosity, hauntings, abjection, and interstitial embodiment in global literature. We invite papers on both research and pedagogy, including the challenges of teaching monstrous or haunted works. Open to texts from or situated around the world, we look forward to discussing the history of terror, taboos, and the “ghosts in the machine,” as well as the ways in which literature hides or exposes them. ACLA will be held at Utrecht University in Utrecht, the Netherlands, July 6-9 2017. Paper proposals must be submitted by September 23. ACLA seminars run a bit differently: each seminar meets over 2-3 days and all participants should plan to attend all 2-3 days of the seminar to encourage conversation about and between individual papers. Questions can be addressed to Meredith Malburne-Wade at mmalburn@highpoint.edu

Deadline for submissions: September 30, 2016

Full name /name of organization: Letizia Guglielmo/Kennesaw State University
Contact email: lgugliel@kennesaw.edu

Misogyny in American Culture

I am seeking contributors for a two-volume reference set on misogyny in American culture, currently under contract with ABC-CLIO publishers to be released in 2018. This two-volume set will provide a broad survey of American misogyny in all its cultural forms, from rap lyrics, slasher films, and stand-up comedy to politics and business. The set will explore the history of misogyny in these various areas, the forms that they take today—up to and including acts of violence against women—and proposals to confront and reduce expressions of hatred toward women and girls in whatever form they take. In addition to providing users with tools to understand the roots of violent and misogynistic behavior and attitudes toward women and girls, the texts will also explain how specific cultural, political, and technological developments are in some cases exacerbating the problem, identify particularly high-profile examples of misogyny, and provide resources for further engagement in the issue. The following topics are currently available for reference essays of 9,000 to 12,500 words each with opportunities for shorter 500-words case studies under these broad categories. Collaborative authorship is welcomed.

Arts
Advertising
Beauty and Fashion
College and University
Education (primary and secondary)
Employment and Careers (not to overlap with Workplace)
Film
Health and Medicine
Justice System
Literature
Marriage and Motherhood
Military
Popular Music
Radio and Journalism
Religion
Politics and Democracy
Public Policy
Pornography and Sex Work
Sports
Technology Industry (not to overlap with Digital/Social media or Video Games and Gaming)
Television
Video Games and Gaming (not to overlap with Digital/Social media or Technology Industry)
Violence and Terrorism
Workplace (not to overlap with Employment and Careers)
Please send an email inquiry with your name, institutional affiliation, topic(s) of interest, and a brief outline/overview of potential essay content. Attach a current CV to your message. Inquiries should be sent to Letizia Guglielmo, Associate Professor, Kennesaw State University (lgugliel@kennesaw.edu) no later than September 30, 2016.

Invited contributors will be notified by October 15, 2016 and provided detailed guidelines for essay organization and format.
Completed essay drafts will be due by February 15, 2017.
Following editor feedback, revised essays will be due by June 1, 2017.

Full name / name of organization: American Studies Association of Texas (ASAT)
Contact email: asat@shsu.edu

The 60th Annual American Studies Association of Texas (ASAT) Conference will be held November 10-12 2016 on the campus of Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, Texas. The Conference Committee is now accepting proposals for the upcoming meeting. The theme of the 2016 conference is “Intersections of Innovation and Imagination in American Studies” The following is a suggested, though not a comprehensive list of subject areas to consider:
Agriculture and Rural Studies Ingenuity and invention
Art (visual/performing) and Music Journalism
Communication Studies Language and Literature
Creative Writing Penal Systems and Reform
Environment and Landscape Studies Political Science
Fashion and Design Popular Culture
Film Studies Sports
Folklore Studies Technology
Gender Studies Transatlantic Topics
Health and Wellness
War and Military Studies
Historical Perspectives Zeitgeist
*This is the 60th Anniversary Meeting of ASAT-commemorative panels/posters are welcome*
• The committee encourages the submission of proposals for panels, papers, posters, and visual presentations that reflect academic/creative inquiry of the conference theme from an original and interdisciplinary perspective. Sessions will include 4-20 minute time slots for individual and/or collaborative presentations. Panel presentations are limited to 4 participants. Presenters should be professionals in their fields; graduate students are encouraged to submit proposals endorsed by a faculty mentor. The committee also welcomes submissions of creative works that address the conference theme (creative non-fiction, short works of fiction, poetry, dramatic excerpts).

• Blind abstracts (limited to 300 words) that clearly state a line of inquiry as it applies to the conference theme should be sent as email attached documents to: asat@shsu.edu Please include the following information on a separate page: full name, college/university affiliation, (if applicable), fall 2016 teaching schedule, contact information (campus email address, mailing address, and extension; if not university affiliated, please provide a personal email address, mailing address and phone number), and the working title of the presentation proposal. The submitter’s name/university affiliation should NOT appear on the abstract. Please indicate “proposal for ASAT 2016” in the email subject line. A confirmation of receipt email will be sent immediately. If a confirmation is not received within 24 hours, please re-submit, as the proposal may not have been received initially.
Deadline for submission is October 15, 2016. Those whose proposals have been accepted will be notified via email no later than October 22, 2016. Those whose proposals are accepted must confirm participation no later than October 25, 2016.
A selection of scholarly and creative works presented at this year’s meeting will be solicited for publication in the Journal of the American Studies Association of Texas (JASAT), an annual, peer-reviewed journal edited and published on the campus of Baylor University, Waco Texas. Additional information about the journal is available at www.asatexas.org/jasat.html

Studies in the Novel is currently seeking submissions for a special issue on “Gender and the Cultural Preoccupations of the American West,” guest edited by Sigrid Anderson Cordell (University of Michigan) and Carrie Johnston (Bucknell University), which will be published in fall 2017. The submission deadline has been extended to October 1, 2016.

This special issue examines the novel as a tool of political engagement through which women writers have challenged prevalent notions of the American West as masculine, antimodern, and untouched. Even thirty years after Annette Kolodny’s foundational study The Land Before Her, recent work by Nina Baym and Krista Comer has shown there is considerable work to be done to account for women writers’ engagement with the West as an imaginative and political space. Likewise, new directions in gender studies, border theory, settler colonialism, and critical regionalism have made new conversations about the Western as a literary genre increasingly urgent.

We invite contributions that examine the ways that women novelists have located themselves in the West—both imaginatively and geographically—asking how these narratives have engaged cultural “preoccupations” with the West as an extension of the predominantly white, masculine public sphere. Examining these narratives, contributors will also evaluate gendered representations of the longstanding contested nature of the “occupation” of western territories and, more recently, US borders.

Possible topics include:

Women’s writing and borderlands
Gender and settler colonialism
Intersections of post-feminism, the post-western, and the post-racial
Novels about the West as spaces for debate
New readings of canonical western women writers like Willa Cather and Mary Austin
Ways that the critical landscape shifts by paying attention to neglected texts
New readings of under-read women writers
Women writers and the post-West or post-regionalism
Globalization and the novel
Visualities in women’s novels about the West
The Western novel as a gendered genre
The gendering of anthropology in narratives about the West
Submissions should be sent in MS Word, devoid of personal identifying information. Manuscripts should be 8,000-10,000 words in length, inclusive of endnotes and Works Cited, and follow MLA style.

Deadline for submissions: October 1, 2016

Full name / name of organisation: Studies in the Novel
Contact email: studiesinthenovel@unt.edu

Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)

38th Annual Conference, February 15-18, 2017

Hyatt Regency Hotel & Conference Center

Albuquerque, New Mexico

Proposals for papers and panels are now being accepted for the 38th annual SWPACA conference. One of the nation’s largest interdisciplinary academic conferences, SWPACA offers nearly 70 subject areas, each typically featuring multiple panels. For a full list of subject areas, area descriptions, and Area Chairs, please visit http://southwestpca.org/conference/call-for-papers/

The American Studies and American History subject area allows for a broad range of topics that address historical influences on American culture and/or cultural identity. Papers from a historical, interdisciplinary, and/or transnational perspective are encouraged. Subjects may include, but are not limited to:

Labor
Class studies
Medicine
Regional and local history
Materialism
Urbanism
Public history and collective memory
Leisure activities
Entertainment
Ethnicity
Economics and American culture
Nationalism, citizenship, community
Specific eras/periods
American Studies as a field
Cultural history as a field

All proposals must be submitted through the conference’s database at http://conference2017.southwestpca.org/

For details on using the submission database and on the application process in general, please see the Proposal Submission FAQs and Tips page at

http://southwestpca.org/conference/faqs-and-tips/proposal-submission-faqs-and-tips/

Individual proposals for 15 minute papers must include an abstract of approximately 200-500 words. Including a brief bio in the body of the proposal form is encouraged, but not required.

For information on how to submit a proposal for a roundtable or a multi-paper panel, please view the above FAQs and Tips page.

The deadline for submissions is November 1, 2016.

SWPACA offers monetary awards for the best graduate student papers in a variety of categories. Submissions of accepted, full papers are due December 1. For more information, visit http://southwestpca.org/conference/graduate-student-awards/

Full name /name of organisation: Southwest Popular American Culture Association

Contact email: marinski@ohio.edu

American Studies and American History

http://www.southwestpca.org

Elie Wiesel has long been a pivotal figure in Holocaust discourse. His book Night was one of the earliest works by a survivor and continues to be a significant point of reference in Holocaust literature. He went on to become an incredibly prolific writer, working in a range of genres. His death in July 2016 invites examination of what form his literary, political, and cultural legacy will take. Despite a large and distinguished body of scholarship on his writing, many of his works, particularly his more recent fiction such as The Sonderberg Case (2010) and Hostage (2012), have yet to be subject to sustained critical analysis. This volume seeks to bring together insights into Wiesel’s novels.

The editors invite abstracts on any work concerning Wiesel’s novels. Topics may include:

• Wiesel and the contextualization of the Holocaust within Jewish history
• The relationship between Wiesel’s fiction and non-fiction
• Hypertextuality in Wiesel’s work
• The role of trauma Wiesel’s fiction
• The development of Wiesel’s voice as a writer
• Wiesel’s political voice in his fiction
• Religious and theological exploration through fiction

Please direct any questions and 500-600 word proposals to Victoria Nesfield (victoria.nesfield@york.ac.uk) and Philip Smith (Philip.Smith@cob.edu.bs) by the end of January 2017. Final pieces will be 8,000 words, due June 2017.

Location: Marriott Waterfront, Baltimore, MD

Dates: 23/03/2017 – 26/03/2017
Organization: Northeast Modern Language Association

The idea that African-Americans are actual and full-fledged citizens of the United States is not a new one; the racism that prevents that idea to flourish is also not new. Recent events, including the death of Freddie Carlos Gray, Jr. in Baltimore, have brought to the fore the question of whether or not the United States values its black citizens, and extends to them the same rights as it does to its non-black citizens. The historical record has much to say on this point, but the literary record also is instructive in perceptions of race in the United States. This panel will explore the literary precedents to examine how tensions between citizenship and real-world status have formed the basis of works by American authors.  How do the literary works of the past offer insight into the ways in which race has shaped American culture? How do those works inform us about racial constructions and deconstructions in our own time? What is required in a work of literature to demonstrate that black lives matter?  Please submit 200-300 word abstracts by September 30th.

Contact Email: plourde@rowan.edu

Website: http://www.nemla.org

Since its publication in 2014, Canadian author Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven has attracted enthusiastic critical responses. This post-apocalyptic novel won an Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction in 2015 and was shortlisted for many other awards, including the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction. In this OLH Special Collection, we seek to explore Station Eleven’s position within twenty-first-century writing.

Station Eleven intersects with various debates in contemporary literary studies, opening up questions about genre, politics, national literary traditions, literary form and intermediality, popular culture and prize culture. The novel partakes in what James Berger describes as the “pervasive post-apocalyptic sensibility in recent American culture”. This sensibility is no longer the sole province of science fiction, as canonical literary authors like Cormac McCarthy and Jim Crace have written novels imagining post-catastrophic futures. Indeed Veronica Hollinger speaks of the “’disappearance’ of science fiction as a separate generic enterprise” in the contemporary and Mandel herself, Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction notwithstanding, identifies her novel as literary fiction rather than science fiction. How might Station Eleven help us to frame issues of genre in twenty-first-century writing, in particular the debate between “literary fiction” and “genre fiction”, and how are these issues entangled with the production of cultural capital through literary prizes? Biblical apocalyptic narratives, as Lois Parkinson Zamora underlines, “developed in response to political and moral crises”. To what do we owe the contemporary surge of post-apocalyptic narratives and is Station Eleven radical or conservative in the way it imagines a hopeful future after global capitalism? The post-apocalyptic world of Station Eleven is post-national.

Similarly, the reception and publication history of the novel raises questions about the importance and legitimacy of national literary traditions and awards in the age of transnationalism. Station Eleven was written by a Canadian, published first in America and was nominated for and won awards aimed at American, Canadian, and Women’s Fiction. So is the novel American Literature? Canadian Literature? A new kind of Trans- or even Post-National fiction? And if it is post-national, does the text feature “the eclecticism and borderlessness in language and structure” that Aitor Ibarrola-Armendariz claims is “typical of the best postnational fiction”? Finally, the narrative’s apocalyptic erasure of borders leads us to interrogate artistic and cultural borders. Station Eleven is an intermedia text that places comics and Star Trek alongside Sartre and Shakespeare. This concern with intermediality is reflected in the novel’s materiality, as physical copies of the Dr Eleven comic depicted in the text were included in some American editions. How does the materiality of a text like Station Eleven influence our reading of its intermediality? Does the critical acceptance of Station Eleven mean that, as Wolfgang Hallet predicted, works featuring “the co-presence of different media in one work of art” now “constitute a literary or aesthetic genre of their own”? And, finally, what are the implications of the apocalyptic collapse of the “popular” and “elite” culture binary?

Topics for submission may include, but are not limited to, Station Eleven and:

• contemporary literature
• the literary fiction/genre fiction debate
• the apocalyptic imagination
• the utopian and dystopian tradition
• literary prize culture
• national literary traditions
• the contemporary publishing industry
• women’s writing
• popular culture
• politics
• the materiality of its different editions

Research articles should be approximately 8000 words in length, including references and a short bibliography. Submissions should comprise of:

• Abstract (250 words)
• Full-length article (8,000 words)
• Author information (short biographical statement of 200 words)

The deadline for submission is 30th April 2017.

The special collection, edited by Dr Diletta De Cristofaro (Harlaxton College) and Dr Daniel King (University of Derby), is to be published in the Open Library of Humanities megajournal (ISSN 2056-6700). The Open Library of Humanities (OLH) is an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded open access publisher with a strong emphasis on quality peer review and a prestigious academic steering board. Unlike some open-access publications, the OLH has no author-facing charges and is instead financially supported by an international consortium of libraries. Submissions should be made online at: https://submit.openlibhums.org/ in accordance with the author guidelines and clearly marking the entry as [“STATION ELEVEN AND TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY WRITING” SPECIAL COLLECTION]. Submissions will then undergo a double-blind peer-review process. Authors will be notified of the outcome as soon as reports are received.

To learn more about the Open Library of Humanities please visit: https://www.openlibhums.org/.