Testimony, Memory and Reading Trauma in Representations of the Holocaust 15 July 2017, University of East Anglia, Norwich (UK) “I am choking, I am drowning. This pencil and these scraps of paper aren't enough. I need colours, sounds – oils and orchestras. I need something more than words.” -Martin Amis, The Zone of Information (2014) “Postmemory is a powerful form of Memory precisely because its connection to its object source is not mediated through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation. Postmemory characterizes the experiences of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by stories of the previous generation, shaped by traumatic events that can be neither fully understood nor re-created.” –Marianne Hirsch, Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile (1996) This symposium proposes a critical insight into contemporary representations of the Holocaust in Fiction, Poetry, Film, Historical and artistic interpretations. An intention to showcase research […]

Bluecoat 300: Charity, Philanthropy and the Black Atlantic A weekend conference and public participation event Liverpool 24-25 November 2017 Conference 24 Nov: Dr Martin Luther King Building Public Participation 25 Nov: Bluecoat Arts Centre Keynote Speaker: Prof. Catherine Hall (UCL) The weekend is set against the backdrop of two anniversaries in Liverpool: the tercentenary of the Bluecoat building, which was built in 1717 as a charity school for the poor, and has been a centre for the arts since 1907; and it is ten years since the International Slavery Museum opened. As part of the Bluecoat’s year-long anniversary programme, one strand aims to reveal and evaluate the presence of slavery and the black Atlantic in the history of Bluecoat. Like many Liverpool institutions founded in the 18th century, Bluecoat was built to a large degree with funds derived from the expanding port. Initial findings from recent research by Sophie Jones into […]

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 […]

CALL FOR PAPERS – HELAAS INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE The Politics of Space and the Humanities 15-17 December 2017 Deadline: May 1st, 2017 Venue: Aristotle University, Thessaloniki The Department of American Literature of the School of English at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, in collaboration with the Hellenic Association for American Studies (HELAAS), invite scholars to submit proposals for the international conference ―The Politics of Space and the Humanities‖ to be held in Thessaloniki. The latest socio-cultural and political developments on both sides of the Atlantic have again placed space at the center of attention of current scholarship in the Humanities. The relation between places, people, and geographies as caused by immigration, migration and refugee flows, demographic changes, war tensions and conflicts, environmental disasters, urban expansion, and mapping technologies has always been dynamic. Nowadays, finding ourselves in the midst of change, we need to reconsider the politicized nature of space, its impact […]

Call for Papers for a special issue of Comparative American Studies: American Networks: Radicals Under the Radar (1868-1968) Networks are the life-blood of many collaborative artistic and political movements. The aim of this special issue is to explore the confluence of American art and radicalism transnationally in the hundred-year lead up to 1968, a high-point in radical artistic and political expression. In focusing on the precursors to this watershed, its editors seek essays that investigate American networks and challenge conventional scholarship about the makeup, shape and associations of such artistic and political collaboration. Affiliations between American artists and radical thinkers have led to paradigm shifts that have changed world history. Communists, Wobblies, revolutionaries, socialists, Fabianists, Pan-Africanists, Pan-Americanists, revolutionaries, anarchists, political exiles and Garveyites all played their role in shaping American literature, art and politics. Whether such networks existed in tangible social enclaves—homes, bars, cafés, offices and neighbourhoods—or virtually in an […]

Studying the South: Approaches and Orientations A one-day colloquium organised by the Southern Studies in the UK Network (www.ssukn.com) 26th August 2017, University of Hertfordshire Studies of the U.S. South have radically changed across the last century, and especially so in the twenty-first. As Michael Bibler (2016) has argued recently, southern studies scholars “begin with the assumption that there’s no such thing as a solid South. We are interested in all kinds of Souths, bringing a dazzling range of theoretical approaches” to the region. This one-day colloquium will explore the variety of perspectives or “orientations” (Bibler) that open up discussion of the U.S. South today. Where historically the South has been considered as the “nation’s region” (in Leigh Ann Duck’s words), southern studies scholars see the region in smaller and larger scales and frames. The South can be read in relation to other American regions like the West or Midwest; it can be thought […]

The Apollonian Vol. 4, Issue 3 (September 2017) Special Issue on Troubled Identity and the Continuing Relevance of Cultural Studies Deadline: 1 June 2017 Guest edited by Jonathan Wright and Susan Flynn (London College of Communication, University of the Arts, London) Our increased attention with new forms of citizenship, changing social landscapes and emergent sets of social relations suggest that Cultural Studies and its analyses of cultural products must rapidly evolve in order to stay relevant.  Our visions of the future seem to be replete with fears of new social realities; new media technologies call us to question privacy, location, marginality, the ability to relate meaningfully with others, and the unequal distribution of material wealth. Are Cultural Studies equipped to deal with the theorization of these new realities? Popular culture would have us believe that traditional identity categories are undergoing profound changes; gendered norms are called into question, the structure of the conventional […]

CFP: Social Cohesion in Times of Uncertainty, 24-25 September 2017 The annual Cumberland Colloquium stimulates discussion on areas of pressing social and ethical importance. This year’s theme is ‘Social Cohesion in Times of Uncertainty’. We live in an increasingly uncertain world. In recent years we have seen a chain of overlapping and intersecting crises – from the financial crisis to the refugee crisis, the ecological crisis and the crisis of liberal democracy. These crises pull us unevenly in every direction: pressing strangers together and pulling neighbours apart, creating new forms of hate and new forms of kinship. In these uncertain times, what are the prospects for social cohesion? How do we make sense of these issues from diverse disciplinary positions and professional backgrounds, and where are the commonalities between our understandings? We welcome proposals for presentations of research papers, roundtable discussions, film screenings and other events, from both academics (of all disciplinary backgrounds) and practitioners interested in social cohesion, broadly conceived, from community volunteers to […]

Exploring Identity: Between Being and Belonging AHRC NWCDTP Postgraduate Conference 2017 Dates: 25-26 October 2017 Venue: The University of Liverpool and FACT The AHRC North West Consortium Doctoral Training Partnership is delighted to announce that this year’s postgraduate conference, Exploring Identity: Between Being and Belonging, will be hosted by The University of Liverpool and FACT on Wednesday 25th and Thursday 26th October 2017. The conference aims to bring together postgraduate researchers and academic staff in the Arts and Humanities to explore the concept of ‘identity’ from a range of interdisciplinary perspectives. Scholars, performers and creative practitioners are invited to reflect on ‘identity’, as representing a stable condition of being, a collective notion of belonging, and a continual process of becoming, in the light of current, progressively challenging contexts. This interdisciplinary conference seeks to examine the concept of ‘identity’ against this backdrop as it manifests across literature, language, and culture. We […]

Deadline for submissions: July 1, 2017 Full name/name of organization: Jody Baumgartner, editor Contact email: ABCCLIOSATIRE@GMAIL.COM Seeking contributors for ABC-CLIO’s two-volume forthcoming encyclopedia, “American Political Humor: Masters of Satire and Their Impact on U.S. Policy and Culture.” This two volume set, due out in the fall of 2019, will have a total of approximately 110 profiles, 2,000 words in length, of important individuals or media outlets (specific magazines, television shows, websites, and specific vehicles of political humor). These will be divided into 12 chronological chapters. In exchange for agreeing to contribute, all authors will have complimentary e-book access to the set and an ABC-CLIO gift card worth $100 as a token of appreciation. The complete list of the topics to be covered in the encyclopedia can be found at http://satire.jodyb.net (entries that are already “claimed” are in strike-out, italicized text). If you are interested, send an email to ABCCLIOSATIRE@GMAIL.COM listing […]

CALL FOR PAPERS Slavery’s Untold Stories in the Era of Trump and M4BL University of Liverpool, Friday 27th October 2017 We announce this call for papers at a profound and troubling moment in American life and politics. Persistent structural inequalities remain acute within healthcare, education, housing and the deeply discriminatory criminal justice system; while the M4BL has emphasized that the vulnerability of the black body remains at the very heart of the American-African experience. Historians now see the deep roots of these problems in slavery’s racialized discrimination and violent exploitation, and have recognised that the history of slavery cannot be told without taking into consideration the long and ongoing process of black emancipation. We invite researchers (postgraduate and established academics) from any discipline, as well as writers, artists and other creatives to participate in a one day workshop that aims to open up new ways of thinking about slavery and […]

CFP: North American Women and World War One (November 4 2017) The University of Worcester’s annual Women’s History Conference seeks papers for this year’s event under the heading of: ‘North American Women and World War One’.  Send an abstract of 300 words to Dr Wendy Toon w.toon@worc.ac.uk by 31 July 2017. The United States entered World War One to make the world “safe for democracy” on April 6 1917.  As in other belligerent countries, women would participate in the war effort in unprecedented ways in the twentieth century’s “war to end all wars”.  Women’s lives were affected by the conflict whether they contributed to the home front; worried about, or lost, loved ones; carried out “war work” of a host of different types; inspired patriotism and rallied public support or became involved in humanitarian organizations such as the American Red Cross, YMCA, Salvation Army and others or served in the military. In the armed services […]