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 […]

The BACLS Biennial Conference The inaugural British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies – What Happens Now Conference (BACLS-WHN) is on 10th-12th July 2018 at Loughborough University, UK. Keynote Speakers: Dr Sandeep Parmar (University of Liverpool) Professor Alison Phipps (University of Sussex) Baroness Lola Young, in conversation with Dr Kaye Mitchell (University of Manchester) We invite contributions to the first official BACLS ‘What Happens Now’ conference. Understanding the contemporary as a fluid and hybrid ‘moment’, contemporary literary studies explores works of culture and their relation to the emerging political and social formations of the present. We welcome contributions on topics from across the field of contemporary literary studies, including modern languages, comparative and world literatures, eco-criticism, postcolonial studies, translation studies, linguistics, performance studies, media theory, comics studies, video games studies, adaptation studies, the study of popular music, cultural studies, critical theory, and digital humanities. BACLS-WHN will include readings and performances, as well as three […]

CFP: Don’t Look: Representations of Horror in the 21st Century One Day Symposium   28th April 2018   University of Edinburgh   Keynote Speaker: Dr. Sorcha Ní Fhlainn (Manchester Metropolitan University)     We live in scary, uncertain times. In recent years, we have witnessed the rise of hard-line nationalism, the ascendency of racist alt-right politics and attacks on the increasingly fragile-looking institution of democracy. We contend, daily, with the threat of seemingly inevitable ecological catastrophe. The Horror genre has always been understood as a potent mirror and bellwether, able to digest the socio-cultural and political currents of a given moment and feed them back to us in uncompromising and disturbing ways. This conference seeks to consider how representations of horror are changing in our own contemporary moment, where the line between fiction and reality, truth and lies appears to be fraying beyond recognition.   Recent academic scholarship on horror has diverged towards topics […]

CALL FOR PAPERS: DIGITAL⇌CULTURE 2018 A one-day conference hosted by the Digital Culture Research Network, and supported by the Midlands3Cities DTP (M3C) Cohort Development Fund Date: Friday 20th April 2018 Venue: University of Nottingham Abstract Submission Deadline: Friday 9th February 2018   'Digital⇌Culture 2018' explores the varied links between digital and cultural processes. Digital tools such as social media, mobile devices, video games, data analysis infrastructures, and networked technologies increasingly permeate our everyday lives. As a result, the production and expression of ‘meanings’ or ‘values’ – like the experience and performance of identity, gender, embodied lived experience, political activism, linguistic engagement, knowledge and power relations – are increasingly co-constituted by digital platforms. This one-day conference, which includes a keynote speech from Prof. Tim Jordan (Uni. of Sussex), aims to bring together researchers from a wide array of disciplines with an interest in digital culture. Submission We invite proposals from diverse disciplinary backgrounds to present theoretical and empirical research in response, […]

DISCO! An Interdisciplinary Conference University of Sussex 21-23 June 2018 From its origins as a New York City subculture amongst gay, black and Latino/Latina practitioners, and its transition into the mainstream, to its subsequent lives across international scenes, disco poses pivotal questions about the entanglements of art, industry, identity, and community. Disco is the site of many significant and lasting debates in popular culture, including those surrounding the figures of the DJ and the diva, the status and significance of dancing bodies, the tension between what is authentic and what is synthetic, and the historic maligning of society’s others. This major interdisciplinary international conference aims to examine and expand these debates. We therefore invite researchers from a range of academic backgrounds to re/consider disco cultures in their shifting historic and social contexts. We hope to explore disco as a tentacular phenomenon that reaches across multiple sites of production and consumption, […]

Call for Panels The 14th International Conference of the Spanish Association for American Studies (SAAS) April 10-12, 2019 University of Salamanca, Spain Word and image play an important role in perception. Under the landslide of innovation in the domain of communication and representation in the last half-century, the visual turn of culture enhanced by the postmodern digital turn has fundamentally changed traditional means of understanding culture and the expression of literature, image, film, and photography. Various philosophers and theoreticians, such as James Heffernan, Wendy Steiner, Barbara Stafford, W.J.T. Mitchell, have analyzed the “pictorial turn” of our present, claiming that the long dominance of the written book is giving way to the visual image—cinema, video, photography, and other forms of pictorial and digital representation. The mutual exchange of literature and visual arts has a longstanding history that goes back to classical debates on sister arts or the paragone. Postmodern paradigmatic changes […]