As our current political and cultural climate elucidates, the modern world has become increasingly fascinated by surveillance systems. Popular television series’ such as Westworld and The Handmaid’s Tale speak of our fears of being controlled by those watching us, whilst remastered movies such as Blade Runner 2049 harness our inherent desire for, and ultimate reliance upon, technology’s advancement. The systems of hypersurveillance shored up in these examples demonstrate not only our Orwellian fear of being immersed in such systems, but also our active participation in their creation and perpetuation. In both examples, it is the architectural frames and division of boundaries which plays a fundamental part in controlling and dominating the individual. Westworld’s Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins) controls his androids and their ‘roles’ via the vast network system at Westworld’s headquarters, which in turn controls the space of the ‘game’; Offred is controlled by Gilead’s network of spies and informers, […]

Writing, the State, and the Rise of Neo-Nationalism: Historical Contexts and Contemporary Concerns  In January 1868, John William De Forest took to the pages of The Nation with a call that would resound over the next century and a half: the writing of the "Great American Novel." In so doing, he asserted both the shaping force of the nation on the arts, and the importance of the arts for the national imaginary. On the sesquicentennial of De Forest's essay, the College of General Studies at Boston University will host a conference to explore the broader intersection of writing and the nation. This conference will meet on Boston University’s campus in London, England, on June 30, 2018. The conference will feature a keynote address by Daniel Karlin, Winterstoke Professor of English at the University of Bristol. The exigency of ongoing scholarly consideration of the relation between the nation and writing could not be […]

Call for Papers: The Cartographic Imagination: Art, Literature and Mapping in the United States, 1945-1980 A two-day international conference funded by the Terra Foundation for American Art, in conjunction with the Centre for American Studies at the University of Kent and the Départment d’Etudes Anglophones at the University of Strasbourg. Dates: 18-19 May 2018 Venue: Reid Hall, 4 Rue de Chevreuse, 75006, Paris, France Organizers: Monica Manolescu (University of Strasbourg); Will Norman (University of Kent) Keynote speakers: Pamela Lee (Stanford University), David Herd (University of Kent) and Stephen Collier (Simon Fraser University) This conference investigates spatial representations and practices in postwar US literature and art, and their intersection with mapping. We are particularly interested in the ways in which American space is constructed, imagined, reconfigured, displaced, and questioned in writing and in artistic form. The conference will examine the specificity of the literary and artistic appropriation of cartographic tropes, as well as […]

43rd Annual Conference of the British Association for Canadian Studies, Senate House, London/ 19-21 April 2018 Keynote: Professor Margaret Macmillan 2018 - A Century Later: Memory, Remembrance and Change  On the centenary of the end of the First World War, BACS’ 2018 Annual Conference will look beyond the war itself, at its impact upon Canada, engagement with and use of memory, and Canada’s place in the wider world. Change in the past century will very much be explored in the broader context of today’s Canada and its future. We are extremely pleased to announce that we will have Professor Margaret Macmillan as one of our keynotes. As per usual practice, therefore, papers addressing other themes in Canadian Studies will be very welcome, including those that look at the 50th Anniversary of Pierre Elliott Trudeau becoming prime minister and Canada’s role in the ever-shifting politics of 21st century North America. The organisers of […]

Special Issue Call for Papers: Foodways in the South Guest Editor: Angela Jill Cooley, Minnesota State University Publication Schedule: Volume 56, no. 1 (Fall 2018) Submission Deadline: December 1, 2017 The Southern Quarterly invites submissions for a special issue on foodways in the South. We are interested in interdisciplinary scholarly articles, unpublished archival materials, and photo essays that examine how food and drink, and the culture, literature, and practices surrounding them, express the ethos of the South. We are looking for articles that encompass a broad chronology from the 16th to 21st centuries. Some topics that would fit this issue include foodways in the Global South, food justice initiatives, food and intersectional feminism, LGBTQ issues surrounding food or drink, Southern chefs or cookbooks, Southern restaurants or cafes, food festivals, regional drinkways, ethnographies, literary theory, critical race theory, food and the environment, public health, and dietetics. This is not an exclusive list. We would be interested in […]

LIT-TV: A Two-Day Symposium Exploring Contemporary US Television and “the Literary” Organisers: Dr Arin Keeble (Edinburgh Napier) and Dr Sam Thomas (Durham). Keynote: Professor Stephen Shapiro (Warwick University) We are seeking proposals for a symposium to be hosted by the School of Arts and Creative Industries at Edinburgh Napier University on May 5-6, 2018. Contemporary US television is frequently conceived of, promoted and analysed as “literary”. Following the game-changing impact of The Sopranos (1999-2007), The Wire (2002-2008) can potentially be identified as a paradigm case here: it was originally pitched to HBO as a “novel” for television; it has been famously compared to the serial works of Dickens; it has received enthusiastic endorsements from writers such as Junot Díaz and Zadie Smith; its creator David Simon has been suggested by some commentators as a worthy recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature; it has been studied and taught in university English Departments. Beyond The Wire, there […]

Theatre Annual: A Journal of Theatre and Performance of the Americas  Call for Articles: 2018 Issue - The American Theatre and Drama Society www.atds.org Theatre Annual is the oldest theatre periodical continuously published in the United States. It is dedicated to examining theatre and performance of the Americas. We construe “America” broadly to include North, Central, and South America and the Caribbean Islands. Articles may treat work in these geographic areas or work from these areas that is presented elsewhere in the world. We welcome articles on the history and ethnography of performance, drawing from such areas as theatre studies, performance studies, popular culture, music, anthropology, communication, dance, philosophy, folklore, history, and areas of interest that cross disciplinary lines. For the 2018 issue, we invite articles on the topic of Theatre of Protest/Theatre of Revolt. We are interested in essays that examine theatre productions and performances from/in the Americas that seek to intervene […]

Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory Special Issue: Medical Women in 19th-Century American Literature This special issue of Arizona Quarterly seeks essays that engage with literature containing medical women or women in the sciences in 19th-century America. In the midst of a controversy between William Lloyd Garrison and the Gynecological Society of Boston, the Society referred to women physicians, or “skirted practitioners,” as a “third sex,” as inhabiting a space somehow between or outside the male/female gender binary. Despite the Gynecological Society’s intent at harm, their claim can be reinterpreted as a description of the way 19th-century women in the sciences transgress gender binaries by inhabiting a queer, third, liminal space—a space that resists restrictive categorizations. These are women who transgress the boundary between the private and the public, between the female space and the male dominated one. Perhaps a way to reinterpret the Gynecological Society’s […]

Call for Papers: Women and New Hollywood Maynooth University, Ireland 29-30 May 2018     Recent decades have witnessed no shortage of critical or academic writing on the industrial upheaval and creative innovations of New Hollywood (1967-80). But as scholarship has shaped the era, it has done so around a very narrow set of concerns, the overriding one casting New Hollywood as an era of great directors, which, by default, has meant an era of “great men.” Such a vision relies on the kind of identification of creativity with masculinity that Geneviève Sellier has discussed in relation to the French New Wave, and its construction has required a marginalisation, erasure even, of the creative labour of countless women practitioners.      In reality, the late ‘60s and ‘70s saw women begin to re-enter Hollywood production in numbers never before seen. While achieving nothing close to real parity, women nevertheless wrote, edited, […]

Call For Papers Media, War and Conflict Journal 10th Anniversary Conference Spaces of War, War of Spaces May 22nd-23rd 2018 Media, War & Conflict Journal’s tenth anniversary conference will be held on 22-23 May 2018at Accademia Europea Di Firenze, Florence, Italy. Deadline for abstracts: 10th January 2018 Keynote: Professor Andrew Hoskins: MWC Founding Editor and Interdisciplinary Research Professor, University of Glasgow Film Screening: ‘The Faces We Lost’ Film Screening with Q&A with Director and Scholar Piotr Cieplak, University of Sussex  Editor’s Special All Women Plenary on Women, Conflict and Journalism: Organised by MWC editors Sarah Maltby, Ben O’Loughlin, Katy Parry and Laura Roselle. Details to be confirmed. The journal was born in the midst of a global war on terror that locked down time and space such that all conflicts seemed to become part of a single campaign. Since then there have been significant transformations in the way war and conflict is produced, enacted, negotiated, remembered and ‘felt’ in, through and with […]

CFP: William Birch and the Complexities of American Visual Culture: A Symposium Celebrating the Tenth Anniversary of the Visual Culture Program at the Library Company of Philadelphia Library Company of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, Pa., October 5, 2018 “This country is new and flourishing. The mechanical arts are at their highest pitch, but the fine arts are of another complexion. They are the last polish of a refined nation… From an insignificant conceit of merit we have generally no knowledge of or feeling for, our imitations of nature, however beautiful, are mechanical altogether. But may be considered as the first lesson necessary for the fine arts... I do not profess myself a member of the fine arts; I am a copyist only, but from my knowledge of them have been allowed judgment and taste, which is competent to give me a relish for them …” --William Birch In celebration of the tenth anniversary […]

‘Foreign Bodies and Native Sons’   The Annual Conference of the Irish Association for American Studies April 27-28, 2018 University College Dublin Call for Papers Although the relationship between the ‘native’ and the ‘foreign’ has been a longstanding, evolving site of contention in American cultural history, the Trump presidency has brought both terms (and their histories) to a new level of exposure and debate. The assumptions about ‘foreign bodies’ that fuelled the recent election and its aftermath—from the ‘wall’ to the travel ban— invite sustained analysis, especially in relation to the construction of a seemingly antithetical body of ‘native sons’ that invokes superficial concepts of white working-class masculinity. The divisions and fault lines such constructions facilitate within the American ‘body politic’, in relation to race, ethnicity, sex-gender, class and sexuality, inform debate about contemporary American culture and form the basis of the conference. Although drawing on contemporary formulations of both […]