The American Weird: Ecologies & Geographies (Call for Papers) “The one test of the really weird is simply this—whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers.” —H.P. Lovecraft, "Supernatural Horror in Literature” (1927) “This whole world’s wild at heart and weird on top.” —David Lynch, Wild at Heart (1990) For H.P. Lovecraft, the weird conveys “a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe’s utmost rim.” Taking its cue from Lovecraft’s enduringly influential conceptualization, this conference examines and broadens the notion of weirdness towards an ecology and geography of the weird as a new field of theoretical and practical resonances. What we call The American Weird comprises not only an aesthetics evoked by literary practices or films from the […]

Reinventing the Social: Movements and Narratives of Resistance, Dissension, and Reconciliation in the Americas (Coimbra/Portugal, 2018) The struggle over social issues and the resistance to ruling elites have a long history in the colonies and nations of the Americas. They range from wars of independence and slave uprisings to conventions for women’s rights, workers’ and peasants’ rebellions, indigenous movements, and protests against U.S. wars in Vietnam or in Iraq. Since World War II new forms of international and national inequalities and new dynamics in societies and in the media have increased our awareness of the many ways in which the social keeps being re-negotiated from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. Recent decades have been characterized by new approaches to time- and space-binding and mediational and relational webs of the social; the invention, invocation, and narration of tradition, history, and heritage serve as key elements in the creation of new social […]

Call for papers: The Art of Artertainment: Nobrow, American Style Many of our current cultural practices are marked by a union of art and entertainment. Underlined by all-pervasive processes of globalization and digitalization, this union comes in all shapes and sizes, transforming culture so that it can no longer be comfortably classified as high or low, art or genre. Surprisingly, this ‘art of artertainment’ has not, as yet, attracted much scholarly interest. It is with the aim of overcoming this omission that we launch this call for papers. As editors of a collection titled The Art of Artertainment: Nobrow, American Style, we warmly invite articles that focus on all aspects of American culture, such as literature, television, cinema, music, painting, material culture, photography, theater, and all other that are influenced by the crossovers of highbrow with lowbrow. Of special interest are historical and/or analytical approaches illuminated by colorful studies of cases where […]

BRITISH ASSOCIATION  OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICANISTS PANELS AT THE BAAS/EAAS JOINT CONFERENCE, LONDON 2018 The British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists invites submissions to two panels to be submitted to the joint British Association for American Studies/European Association for American Studies Conference, taking place in London, April 4-7 2018. More information on BrANCA and its activities can be found here: http://www.branca.org.uk/ 1. OPEN PANEL ON 19th CENTURY AMERICANIST TOPICS Each year BrANCA hosts a special panel at BAAS showcasing progressive, interdisciplinary work on the United States in the long nineteenth century. This year BrANCA invites paper proposals on any relevant topic to be included within a sponsored panel at the BAAS/EAAS Conference in London, April 4-7 2018. We invite proposals for papers from all researchers working in the field. We are particularly interested in global, hemispheric and transatlantic approaches to key themes in nineteenth century literary studies, and papers that propose new ways […]

Updated Call for Papers The 11th International Conference and Festival on Global Cult Film Traditions Birmingham City University Presents: Cine Excess XI Fear and the Unfamiliar: Wrong Time, Wrong Place, Wrong Crowd Birmingham City University (and related screening venues) 9th-11th November 2017 www.cine-excess.co.uk Keynote: Professor Mark Jancovich (UEA) Over the last 11 years, the Cine-Excess International Film Conference and Festival has brought together leading scholars and critics with global cult filmmakers for an event comprising a themed academic conference with plenary talks, filmmaker interviews and UK theatrical premieres of up and coming film releases. Previous guests of honour attending Cine-Excess have included Catherine Breillat (Romance, Sex is Comedy), John Landis (An American Werewolf in London, The Blues Brothers), Roger Corman (The Masque of the Red Death, The Wild Angels), Stuart Gordon (Re-Animator, King of the Ants), Brian Yuzna (Society, The Dentist), Dario Argento (Deep Red, Suspiria), Joe Dante (The Howling, […]

Call for Papers: Special Issue of the European Journal of American Culture: American Horror Story Guest Editors: Harriet Earle, Sheffield Hallam University, UK Jessica Clark, University of Suffolk, UK This call for papers seeks submissions that engage with the television series American Horror Story (produced by Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk) as part of a Special Issue for the European Journal of American Culture. Over six seasons (so far), American Horror Story has received massive popular and academic interest for its bold and often apposite reworkings of a wide range of cultural tropes and folk stories, set against uniquely American backgrounds and played out through a distinct cast of characters. Papers should be between 6000-8000 words and the deadline for final submission is 31stJanuary 2018. Papers should be submitted to the Special Guest Editors Harriet Earle and Jessica Clark via AHSspecialissue@gmail.com. Submissions to this journal could include, but are not […]

As part of the Manchester University Press series, Contemporary American and Canadian Writers, this volume will chart recent and emerging critical opinion on the celebrated author, Marilynne Robinson. Having issued an earlier call for papers, the editors now seek proposals that specifically address the following areas:  Robinson and her contemporaries; Robinson’s nonfiction writing; Robinson and race; Robinson’s role as a public intellectual; Literary review culture, prize giving, and the production of “literary” fiction via the Iowa Writers’ Workshop; Robinson’s engagement with history, particularly the ongoing relevance of the American Civil War, Reconstruction, and/or Civil Rights Movement to her work; Robinson and US intellectual history.   Please email abstracts of no more than 300 words with your institutional affiliation and brief bio (c. 250 words) to robinsonsymposium@gmail.com no later than 15th September 2017.   All chapters will be subject to a blind peer review process and full details and submission guidelines will be provided to contributors on […]

Lizzy Pournara (Ph.D. Candidate at the department of American Literature in Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece) is looking for panel participants for the upcoming conference organized by the European Association of American Studies that will take place in King’s College London, University College London, and the British Library, 4th - 7th April 2018 The panel is entitled “Avant-Garde as Protest: Experimental Literature and Its Role in the American Avant-Garde” and  participants are sought for 20 minutes presentation papers concerning but not limited to digital literature and multimodal narratives, experimental poetics, innovative poetry and fiction, interdisciplinary artistic practices, visuality, experimental typography. The deadline of the submission is on 22nd September 2017.   Please send an abstract (250 words), including a title and a short CV by 22nd September 2017 at lizzypournara@gmail.com

CFP: “Illness and the environment in American Literature and Cinema”, EBAAS Conference 2018 Panel organized within the framework of the European Association for American Studies (EAAS) and the British Association for American Studies (BAAS) conference King’s College, University College, and the British Library, London. 4-7 April 2018. “Environment, Place and Protest.” Deadline for abstracts: September 25, 2017 In Toxic Exposures: Contested Illnesses and the Environmental Health Movement (2007), Phil Brown, American sociologist and specialist in environmental studies, examined the relationship between disease clusters and the environment. He concluded environmentally provoked illnesses (EPI) to be “contested illnesses” as they involve scientific disputes and extensive public debate. The environment as an agent in health has long been an issue in American cinema and literature. Literary scholar Heather Houser’s recent volume Ecosickness in U.S. Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect (2014) speaks to this issue looking at a variety of productions including Todd Haynes’ Safe (1995) and Richard Powers’ Gain (1998), to mention only a few. Literary and filmic narratives that […]

IAAS Postgraduate Symposium Trinity Long Room Hub Arts & Humanities Research Institute November 25th, 2017 In their 1789 Constitution, the founders of the United States aspired to “form a more perfect Union”. Over two hundred and twenty years later, what is the state of this “more perfect Union” today? Have modern exclusionary tactics led to an “America for Americans only” feeling immanent in Trump’s speeches? How has American literature, music, film and philosophy been used to enforce or challenge these feelings of  “America for Americans only”? What can an examination of history and politics do to illuminate the United States’ relationship with the rest of the Americas and the wider world? These are some of the questions we hope to examine in our one-day symposium. We welcome proposals for papers that deal with personal, national, international, unions of any kind. Topics include, but are not limited to: Union and/or disunion […]

CALL FOR PAPERS:  Coming to Terms? Confronting War and Peace through the Visual and Material in the Atlantic World, 1651-1865 Conference at the University of Pennsylvania, McNeil Center for Early American Studies, and The University of Delaware 8 – 10 November 2018 Keynote Speaker: Professor Leora Auslander, University of Chicago. Program Committee: Dr Zara Anishanslin (University of Delaware), Dr Manuel Barcia, (University of Leeds), Professor Kathy Brown, (University of Pennsylvania), Dr Joshua Brown, (The Graduate Center, CUNY), Dr Joanna Cohen, (Queen Mary University of London), Dr Christian Crouch (Bard College), Dr Catherine Dann Roeber, (Winterthur Museum), Dr Bronwen Everill, (Cambridge University), Dr Ignacio Gallup-Diaz, (Bryn Mawr College), Dr, Benjamin Irvin (Indiana University and Editor, Journal of American History). How does war end and who ends it? Historians often turn to diplomacy and formal politics to answer this question. It is clear, however, that a much broader population, both military and civilian, […]

Call for Panelists (EBAAS 2018): Emotions and American Protest We are recruiting panelists for a session on the role of emotions in 20th century U.S. protest and activism, as part of the upcoming EBAAS conference in 2018. In his seminal The Art of Moral Protest, James Jasper calls on scholars to pay more attention to the variety of emotions in social movements: “First, individuals have emotional allegiances and experiences that help propel them into protest. Fear, dread and an accompanying sense of threat are key motives. Grief could also play a role, either following the loss of a loved one or as a more general sense of cultural loss. An alternation between shame and anger drives much political conflict. Anger and outrage will almost always play a part, as will pre-existing negative and positive affects toward symbols, places, individuals, and groups.” Although protest is inherently an expression of dissatisfaction with the […]