Black Love: A Symposium The 80th Anniversary of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God September 14-16, 2017 CALL FOR PAPERS On September 18, 1937, Zora Neale Hurston’s seminal novel Their Eyes Were Watching God was published. It initially received tepid praise, at best, along with needlessly harsh criticism from fellow fiction writer Richard Wright for its supposed counterrevolutionary minstrel image. Ushering in a new era of protest literature, Wright objected to Hurston’s publication of a love story at the height of Jim Crow oppression during the Depression. Yet Hurston’s work, with themes of sensuality, self-discovery, spirituality, and voicedness inspired by the writer’s own bittersweet love affair, has endured in African American literary history. Black women writers and scholars, such as Alice Walker and Sherley Anne Williams, began to reclaim Hurston as a pivotal writer in the African American literary tradition in the 1970s. By 1980, Hurston’s significance was […]

Journal of Design History Special Issue Locating Design Exchanges in Latin America and the Caribbean   Guest editors: Patricia Lara-Betancourt (Modern Interiors Research Centre, Kingston University, London, UK) & Livia Rezende (History of Design Programme, Victoria & Albert Museum/Royal College of Art, London, UK)   Call for Papers The Journal of Design History is calling for submissions to a special volume of research articles on Locating Design Exchanges in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) to be published in 2018. Its aim is to unearth exchanges, connections and comparisons in design and material culture among Latin American and Caribbean nations and between the region and other global geographies since 1800. With 626 million inhabitants who speak mostly Spanish and Portuguese, but also English, German, Dutch, Italian and many native languages, the Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) region is a culturally rich area whose economic prosperity, social movements, biodiversity and natural […]