CFP Lying Conference to be held at Bordeaux Montaigne University, France, November 9-10, 2017. If you look up the word “lie” in the Oxford dictionary, it is defined as an intentionally false statement, meant to deceive. Like irony, lying is a matter of intention and interpretation, and it exists in a virtual space. Indeed, if it is not reported or simply detected by somebody else, a lie never exists as such, and in a way never reaches its potential. However, unlike irony, it is not regarded as a figure of speech. It does not refer to the particular position or strategy of a speaker with regard to his/her own words, but instead to the deceitful nature of these words. Lying challenges facts and truth and distorts them. It either works in the interests of the liar or, when it becomes compulsive or pathological, against them. It can thus designate fundamentally different […]

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 […]

Call for Papers: The Red and the Black – The Russian Revolution and the Black Atlantic Conference to be held at the Institute for Black Atlantic Research (IBAR), University of Central Lancashire, Preston, 14-15 October 2017, to mark the centenary of the Russian Revolution. Keynote speaker: Professor Winston James, University of California, Irvine. With special performances from Linton Kwesi Johnson (invited) and David Rovics The Russian Revolution was not only one of the most critical events of the twentieth century in its own right but an inspirational event across the ‘black Atlantic’ as a blow against racism and imperialism.  For colonial subjects of European empires internationally as well as black Americans, the Russian Revolution promised the hope of a world without oppression and exploitation.  This conference aims to build on the growing scholarship and literature in this area to explore the impact the revolutionary events in Russia during 1917 made […]

Transatlantic Studies Association 16th Annual Conference University College Cork, Ireland 10-12 July 2017 Call for Papers Established in 2002, the TSA is a broad network of scholars who use the ‘transatlantic’ as a frame of reference for their work in political, economic, cultural, historical, environmental, literary, and IR/security studies. All transatlantic-themed paper and panel proposals from these and related disciplines are welcome. This conference thus welcomes papers in the following areas: 1. History 2. International Relations and Security Studies 3. Literature, Film and Culture 4. Planning and the Environment 5. Economics 6. Proposals that investigate the ‘transatlantic’ and explore it through frames of reference such as ideology, empire, race, religion, migration, political mobilisation, or social movements 7. Proposals that incorporate perspectives that involve north-south and south-south transatlantic connections, as well as north-north Both panel proposals and individual papers are welcome. Panel proposals are encouraged to include a discussant. New members […]

HOTCUS Annual Conference: Call for Papers University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland, 16-18th June 2017 Plenary Speaker: Professor Penny Von Eschen (Cornell University) Papers from members or non-members are requested on all topics concerning the history of the United States from 1890 to the present. Individual or panel proposals are welcome (panels should have no more than three presenters in total). Topics for papers or panels might include: Political and policy history Race and racism Gender and sexuality Citizenship and immigration Capitalism and economics Religion Domesticity and the home Conservatism and liberalism Environmental history Urban history Border history Native American history Cultural and intellectual history International and transnational history “State of the field” debates Please send a brief CV and a summary of the proposed paper or panel of no more than 300 words per paper by 4 February 2017 to the HOTCUS Events Secretary, Nicholas Grant: Nicholas Grant (n.grant@uea.ac.uk)

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 […]

Migration, Diaspora, Circulation and Translation  October 5-7, 2017 University College Dublin, Clinton Institute for American Studies Dublin, Ireland A conference sponsored by the Charles Brockden Brown Society (www.brockdenbrownsociety.ucf.edu) Our conference site in Dublin calls to mind issues of migration, immigration, emigration, colonization, revolution, and other changes that result from the movement of people, ideas, and things from one place to another. Such issues were significant in colonial and early national American writing and thought in the long eighteenth century. The current global migration crisis and the recent “Brexit” vote makes these topics timely for reappraisal: as millions of migrants and asylum seekers cross into Europe, the world confronts questions about borders, resources, community, poverty, wealth, understanding of cultural differences, and human rights. The Eleventh Biennial Conference of the Charles Brockden Brown Society invites papers on all aspects of diaspora, migration, circulation, and translation in the long eighteenth century. The following […]

BRANCH Postgraduate and Early Career Workshop UCL Institute of the Americas 30th March 2017 We are pleased to invite papers for the BrANCH postgraduate and early career workshop, to be held at University College London on 30th March 2017. The Workshop provides a forum for the constructive consideration and discussion of thesis chapters, potential journal submissions, and conference papers. Submissions are encouraged for individual papers from postgraduate and early career academics working on all aspects of US history in the long nineteenth century. The Workshop is a valuable medium for young scholars to bring exciting new research to the table and develop it further through in-depth discussion with their peers. It also provides an opportunity for those of us at the early stages of our academic careers to meet up outside the annual BrANCH conference. Limited funding is available to subsidise the travel of those presenting their work. We will […]

24th Annual BrANCH Conference University of Warwick, 6-8 October 2017 Call For Papers Peter Parish Memorial Lecture: Emily West (University of Reading), “Reflections on the History and Historians of the Black Woman's Role in the Community of Slaves” Saturday Night Keynote: Jeff Forret (Lamar University) The BrANCH committee is pleased to invite proposals for panels and papers on all aspects of U.S. history from the period 1789-1917. We particularly encourage panels that open new lines of communication between established thematic specialties as well as individual papers that cut across traditional categories of historical inquiry in imaginative and innovative ways. Postgraduate contributions are especially welcome. Subsidies for UK-based postgraduate participants will be offered on a first come first served basis. Please send a brief CV and a summary of the proposed paper or panel (no more than three speakers per panel and 300 words per paper, please) by Friday 24 February […]

Call For Papers: “Voices of Dissent”: Social Movements and Political Protest in Post-war America Conference Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford 2 June, 2017 On the evening of April 4, 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered a historic speech before a crowd of 3,000 people at Manhattan’s Riverside Church. In his speech, entitled “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” King condemned the Vietnam War and American Cold War policy and characterized the U.S. government as the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world”. Describing Vietnam a  “victim deadly Western arrogance”, King detailed the war’s devastating effects on both America’s and Vietnam’s poor, and declared that it was a moral imperative for opponents of the war to use “every creative method of protest possible” to halt the war through non-violent means. In 2017, the fiftieth anniversary of Martin Luther King’s Riverside Church speech, the Rothermere American Institute at the University […]

CALL FOR PAPERS Interrogating Commodity Cultures | Exploring Global Connections 5 May 2017 This one-day interdisciplinary workshop will interrogate the cultural transformations effected by global commodity histories in the long nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Colonial conquest, advancements in travel technologies and industrialisation all contributed to creating the material conditions which allowed for the production, consumption, and movement of commodities across the globe. In so doing, the global capitalist system and actors within it changed not only transnational relations, but also local cultures and practices. The increased mobility of commodities, peoples and things introduced new geographies of connection and provided new ways of imagining the contact zones of colonial encounters. This workshop will ask how the global circulation of commodities is mediated through forms such as novels, poetry, drama, advertising and art. It will explore how these literary and visual mediations of the global circulation of commodities have rewritten the map […]

Postcolonial Studies Association Convention School of Advanced Study, Senate House,University of London 18–20 September 2017 We are pleased to announce that the 2017 PSA Convention will be held at the School of Advanced Study, Senate House, University of London, from 18th to 20th September 2017. Paper and panel proposals are invited from academics, scholars and postgraduates with research interests in any area of postcolonial studies from any disciplinary, cross- or interdisciplinary perspective. Confirmed keynote speaker:  Dr. Sharae Deckard (University College Dublin) Other keynotes to be confirmed shortly The Special Topic of the 2017 Convention is Globalisation. Proposals for panels and papers on this theme are particularly encouraged (click here for CfP). While the transregional history of globalisation can be traced back to antiquity, its discursive entanglement with the temporal realm of the ‘postcolonial’ has been the subject of much discussion and analysis in recent times. The 2017 convention seeks to investigate the crucial role of postcolonial studies in furthering newer understandings of economic, […]

Call for Submissions Encounters in the ‘Game-Over Era’: The Americas in Video Games Research done in the frame of the ‘new imperial studies’ has made it clear that in the past half century our everyday relationship to and encounters with ‘empire’ and our (post)colonial heritage have changed almost entirely. On the one hand, the contemporary experience, myths, and memories of/about empires in the former colonies has opened spaces for the colonized to record the otherwise unheard or suppressed voices from the margins. On the other hand, in the so-called metropole, unprecedented geopolitical ruptures, disruptions in the colonial economic (im)balance, and new narratives of (post)coloniality and of relating to, representing, and imagining (post)colonial identity have altered the perspectives and experiences of empire and the settings in which it is re-enacted. The special issue Encounters in the ‘Game-Over Era’: The Americas in Video Games seeks to investigate this changed everyday experience and […]

TRANSFORMERS: all that is solid changes into something else INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON  PRACTICES AND MEMES IN CONTEMPORARY MEDIA & CULTURE Department of Languages and Cultures University of Aveiro, Portugal 29, 30 June & 1 July 2017 Keynote addresses by: Roz Kaveney, Author and Activist Toby Miller, University of California Riverside & Loughborough University London The movement of narratives and characterisations across forms, conventionally understood as adaptation, has been commonly carried out from the high-status classical forms (drama, epic, novel) to recorded and broadcast media (film, radio and television), or from the older recorded media to the newer ones. The advent of new convergent digital platforms has further transformed hierarchies. Now source texts can move in any direction and take up any configuration, as emergent interacting fan bases drive innovation and new creative and commercial possibilities are deployed. “Transformers” is the guiding metaphor for this conference, as the Transformers toy franchise […]

Ecology, Economy, and Cultures of Resistance: Oikoi of the North American World A two-day symposium at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh. 29-30 June 2017 Ecology and economy are inextricable. From the ‘oeconomy of nature’ theorised by Thomas Burnet, and later Carl Linnaeus, to the recent turn in the social sciences that reconsiders the Anthropocene as the Capitalocene, the interwoven global history of these two fields of thought makes their conceptual separation impracticable. This two-day symposium considers the roles of cultural production and critique under these conditions of inextricability. It takes as its locus the North American world. We use the term North American world to denote the world-view as conceived by or through North American social conditions, governance, cultures, politics, and institutions, but which is global in its influences and effects. Scholars working in Anglophone universities, primarily in the United States, have dominated discussions […]

Call for Conference Papers The Course of Empires:  American-Italian Cultural Relations, 1770-1980 Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. This international conference will examine the persistent fascination of American and Italian artists with the cultural achievements of ancient Rome and the Renaissance.  In creating national identities, both countries turned to history for similar reasons:  to find inspiration for enlightened political practices; to locate models of artistic, political, and economic preeminence; and to seek ways to ward off imperial decadence and decline.  Yet alongside this tendency toward emulation, some American and Italian artists looked askance at the myths of antique and Renaissance glories, demonstrating a skepticism toward the notion of imperial greatness. They utilized imagery of the Roman Colosseum, for example, as a multivalent symbol to articulate the rise, grandeur, terrors, and fall of empire. This conference seeks to update and broaden our understanding of American-Italian cultural relations from the Revolutionary Era […]

The Reading Interdisciplinary Research Network for the Study of Political History and Politics in the Americas launch conference University of Reading 2 May, 2017 PRESIDENT TRUMP’S FIRST 100 DAYS Keynote Address: Professor Andrew Rudalevige, Bowdoin College The newly established Interdisciplinary Research Network for the Study of Political History and Politics in the Americas at the University of Reading is pleased to invite proposals for panels and papers for a one day conference on President Donald J. Trump’s first 100 days. We welcome papers (fully developed or in the early stages) on all aspects of the new administration but also historical perspectives and comparative analyses of the Office of the Presidency during its first 100 days. Please send a brief CV and a summary of the proposed paper or panel (no more than three speakers per panel and 300 words per abstract, please) by March 1, 2017 to the conference organisers: […]

Call for Papers/Call for Art “The Summer of Love”: A One-Day Countercultural Event in Celebration of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Summer of 1967 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 overage 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. The interdisciplinary focus of the newly formed School of Arts, English and Languages at Queen’s will be stressed as collaborative research projects in writing, poetry, film, and a number of other disciplines will highlight cooperative learning […]

The International Ralph Ellison Symposium September 28-30, 2017 Oxford University The Rothermere American Institute (www.rai.ox.ac.uk) at the University of Oxford and the Ralph Ellison Society (https://ellisonsociety.wordpress.com) are pleased to announce the first International Ralph Ellison Symposium. The symposium will bring together Ellison scholars and readers from the United States, the United Kingdom, and other international locales. The symposium will explore a variety of themes vital to Ellison’s life and work, in particular the relevance that his self-fashioned American and African-American identity has around the world. The likely session topics include: Ellison in translation (Invisible Man is in print in more than twenty different languages, including a Mandarin edition published in 2016). The reception, past and present, of Ellison’s fiction and essays in different countries. The status and future direction of Ellison scholarship. Ellison’s own engagement with the world: for example, his urge (thwarted by tonsillitis) to fight in the Abraham […]

The International Ralph Ellison Symposium September 28-30, 2017 Oxford University The Rothermere American Institute (www.rai.ox.ac.uk) at the University of Oxford and the Ralph Ellison Society (https://ellisonsociety.wordpress.com) are pleased to announce the first International Ralph Ellison Symposium. The symposium will bring together Ellison scholars and readers from the United States, the United Kingdom, and other international locales. The symposium will explore a variety of themes vital to Ellison’s life and work, in particular the relevance that his self-fashioned American and African-American identity has around the world. The likely session topics include: Ellison in translation (Invisible Man is in print in more than twenty different languages, including a Mandarin edition published in 2016). The reception, past and present, of Ellison’s fiction and essays in different countries. The status and future direction of Ellison scholarship. Ellison’s own engagement with the world: for example, his urge (thwarted by tonsillitis) to fight in the Abraham […]

South Carolina State University’s Department of English and The South Carolina Project on Language and Culture (SCPLC) will host an inter-disciplinary Conference on October  6, 2017. Conference Theme:  America’s southern cultures and identities:  language, customs, literature. The organizing committee is soliciting proposals for 20-minute presentations on topics related to language, culture, dialects, literature, film, communities, and other  areas that highlight research and documentation studies on  South Carolina’s cultures and languages as well as Southern regional cultures, languages and communities.  Please send a 250-300 word abstract by March 1, 2017.  Please send it via email to ssalone@scsu.edu.  Please send the following information with the abstract. Name and affiliation of the presenter. Email address Title of the presentation. Abstract (approximately 250-300 words) AV equipment requests, if any. Possible topic areas: Southern Regional Cultures Southern Regional literatures South Carolina literatures African-American Cultures European ethnic communities of The South Caucasian-American communities of The South Hispanic […]