Interventions: New Perspectives on Politics, Freedom, and Democracy

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 […]