Call for Papers: HOTCUS Winter Symposium   Eccles Centre for American Studies, British Library, London Saturday 18 February 2017 War and Conflict in Twentieth Century US Society and Culture Keynote Speaker: Professor Joanna Bourke (Birkbeck, University of London)   2017 marks the hundredth anniversary of US entry into the First World War. That conflict saw the emergence of the US as a global military power, but also had a profound impact on American society and culture. In subsequent years, war and conflict of various sorts have shaped the way that Americans think about their place in the world and their relationships with each other, and has molded the way that the US is viewed in international and transnational contexts.   This one-day symposium seeks to explore and re-assess the impact of war and conflict on US society and culture during the twentieth century. Panel and paper proposals are encouraged on […]

American Politics Group of the Political Studies Association Annual Conference 2017 ‘Change and Continuity in U.S. Politics’ Call for Papers The forty-third annual conference of the American Politics Group of the Political Studies Association will be held at the University of Leicester (UK) from Thursday 5 to Saturday 7 January 2017. The keynote speaker will be Dr Lara Brown, Associate Professor at George Washington University (https://gspm.gwu.edu/dr-lara-brown) There is a broad conference theme: ‘Change and Continuity in U.S. Politics’. This theme can be approached in various ways; papers might, for example, take a long term historical perspective when thinking about political development or might reflect on the more immediate consequences of the 2016 election results.  We will also be happy to receive proposals considering subjects and material beyond this particular theme. For example, papers or panel proposals examining contemporary US political institutions or processes, foreign policy issues or political history are […]

CFP Special Issue: The Literature of the Anthropocene The concept of the Anthropocene, deemed by Bruno Latour “the best alternative we have to usher us out of the notion of modernization”, blurs the distinction between human and geological history (Dipesh Chakrabarty). It speaks, too, to contemporary fiction’s concern with the place of humans on the planet, the ways in which they shape - and are shaped by - the natural and technological environments through which they move, and the broader relation between the early twenty-first century moment and ‘deep’ time. Although the value of the Anthropocene as an official geological epoch is still being considered by the International Commission on Stratigraphy, the term is already widely in use to denote the era in which human beings have become a major geological force with significant socio-political implications. Indeed, “In the Anthropocene, social, cultural and political orders are woven into and co-evolve […]

10th Annual African American Studies Spring Symposium The University of Texas at San Antonio Thursday, April 6, 2017 Keynote Speaker Jericho Brown Abstract Submission Deadline | October 31, 2016 @ 5:00PM EST $300 Honorarium* Each year the University of Texas at San Antonio hosts a daylong African American Studies Spring symposium. On this 10th anniversary, the symposium invites presentations from across the disciplines that examine the complexity of Intersectional Black Identities. The event offers a space to explore all that “intersectionality” has signified and all that it has become. This stimulating symposium will set the stage for collective exploration and celebration of Intersectional Black Identities across social and cultural realities. Topics will include a broad range of lived experiences, intellectual inquiries, and creative representations. The work of keynote speaker Jericho Brown, Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University, provides a pathway for (re)considering the axes and edges […]

The International Auto/Biography Association Chapter of the Americas Conference: May 15-17, 2017 Lives Outside the Lines: Gender and Genre in the Americas A Symposium in Honour of Marlene Kadar To be held at the Centre for Feminist Research, York University, Toronto. We invite proposals for the third biennial meeting of IABA Americas that will be held at the Centre for Feminist Research in Toronto with support from the US Fulbright Program. The conference will explore the multiple lines that gendered lives in the Americas cross, both physical borders and intangible boundaries. The conference is dedicated to the celebration of the scholarship of Marlene Kadar, a Canadian theorist and critic whose contributions have dramatically changed the field by pushing the conceptual boundaries of what constitutes life writing and expanding its interdisciplinary methods of study. The themes suggested below relate to and amplify Kadar’s research interests and are clustered around issues of […]

The Fictional First World War: Imagination and Memory Since 1914 An International Conference at the Centre for the Novel Sir Duncan Rice Library, University of Aberdeen, 6-9 April 2017 Plenary Speakers: Oliver Kohns, University of Luxembourg; Randall Stevenson, University of Edinburgh; and Steven Trout, University of South Alabama. The First World War was a very real event. However, since August 1914, authors have been writing their own versions of it. During the war, novels and short stories shaped public opinion about the conflict. After its close, fiction became a means of recalling and re-examining events. The war was ‘fictional’ in other ways too. Many supposedly truthful accounts of the war, whether in newspaper reports or in personal memoirs, were not as factual as they seemed. Wartime writing in combatant nations was heavily censored; post-war writing was often flawed by the passing of time and the experience of trauma. So, while […]