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 […]

Women in Hollywood One day symposium by the Cinema and Television History Research Centre at DeMontfort University, Leicester. We are now accepting proposals for our one-day symposium on the treatment of women in Hollywood.   Date of conference: Bank Holiday Monday, May 28th 2018. Deadline for submissions: midnight, Friday March 16th 2018. Submissions to be sent to: ellen.wright@dmu.ac.uk The focus of this event: 2017 has seen a number of high profile news stories around the poor treatment of women in the entertainment industry, from the Weinstein allegations and the explosion of #MeToo, to revelations about gender pay gaps and the under representation of female labour, both in front of the camera and behind. This symposium seeks to consider the range of intersecting factors that impact upon women working in Hollywood now and in the past and is intended as a platform to discuss the disadvantageous treatment of women and those who identify as female, and an opportunity to […]

Transatlantic Studies Association 17th Annual Conference University of North Georgia, Dahlonega, Georgia, USA 9-11 July 2018 Call for Papers The TSA is coming to America. For the time since it was established in 2002, the TSA is holding its annual conference on the other side of the Atlantic. TSA is a broad network of scholars who use the ‘transatlantic’ as a frame of reference for their work in political, economic, cultural, historical, environmental, literary, and IR/security studies. All transatlantic-themed paper and panel proposals from these and related disciplines are welcome. This conference thus welcomes papers in the following areas: *History *International Relations and Security Studies *Literature, Film, and Culture *Planning and the Environment *Economics Proposals that investigate the ‘transatlantic’ and explore it through frames of reference such as ideology, empire, race, religion, migration, political mobilisation, or social movements *Proposals that incorporate perspectives that involve north-south and south-south transatlantic connections, as […]

Understanding and Examining the Digital Advocacy Pioneers Dates: Thursday, 6 September — Friday, 7 September 2018 Location: University of Portsmouth, United Kingdom Convenors: Dr James Dennis (University of Portsmouth) and Dr Nina Hall (Johns Hopkins University) Sponsored by the Transnational Civil Society Project at the University of Portsmouth and the Political Studies Association Media and Politics Group.   Description and Objective A new generation of digital advocacy organizations have emerged around the world including: 38 Degrees in the UK, MoveOn in the US; GetUp! in Australia and Amandla.Mobi in South Africa. These organizations all share the same basic organizational form: they are progressive, multi-issue, and membership-driven. These organizations are at the forefront of digital campaigning. They are pioneering the use of new technologies — be it WhatAapp, analytics, or Facebook — to rapidly mobilise people online and offline.  The activism fostered by these groups has fundamentally changed how groups mobilise […]

CFP - Transnationalism and Imperialism: New Perspectives on the Western A conference organized by EMMA (Études Montpelliéraines du Monde Anglophone), CAS (Cultures Anglo-Saxonnes) and CORPUS (Conflits, Représentations et Dialogues dans le Monde Anglo-Saxon) Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 Site Saint Charles November 15-16, 2018 Keynote speakers: Matthew Carter (Manchester Metropolitan University) and Andrew Patrick Nelson (Montana State University) This conference is a follow-up to a symposium entitled “Politics of the Western: a Revisionist Genre” organized by Hervé Mayer (EMMA EA741) at Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3 on December 8, 2017. The aim of this conference is to question the film genre of the Western as being essentially American by focusing on the transnational dimension of Western narratives and images, as well as the circulation, reception, and production of Westerns outside the United States. The genre has been widely read within the confines of a national culture and cinema in the U.S. […]

Methods and Practice in American Studies: Postgraduate Symposium The Centre for American Studies at the University of Kent invites postgraduate students and early career researchers to submit proposals for papers discussing, interrogating, analysing and advocating for innovative and creative approaches to American Studies scholarship in 2018. Respondents are welcome to refer to the specifics of their own research projects, and indeed encouraged to do so where it will assist in elucidating their papers, but the object of this symposium is not the conventional sharing of scholarship in and of itself per se. Rather, this symposium is intended as a forum in which to share some of the many novel and original methodological, theoretical, and practical approaches (and problems) currently informing, motivating, and underpinning the multifaceted work of a new generation of American Studies scholars. Some potential areas for discussion are as follows, but this list is not intended to be exhaustive, and all relevant proposals […]