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

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 […]

The deadline for abstracts is 1 October 2017 and the full call for papers can be found here: http://journals.kent.ac.uk/index.php/transmotion/announcement/view/19. In the contemporary moment, the world has seen an increase in transnational and decolonial activist movements around indigenous rights. Idle No More, Rhodes Must Fall, the BDS movement for a Free Palestine and the Dakota Access Pipeline protests have all garnered international attention and trans-indigenous calls of solidarity. These politics have found their ways to literary productions, and many have dubbed the increase in Native American writings and the rapid growth in Indigenous Studies a cultural, literary, and academic renaissance. Building on this historically significant moment, Transmotion is currently seeking submissions for a cross-disciplinary special issue on the topic of Native American Narratives in a Global Context: Comparative and Transnational Perspectives. The special issue builds on a panel entitled “Native American Literature in a Global Context” that took place at the 2017 meeting of the Native […]

Call for Papers: Native American Narratives in a Global Context Special Issue to Appear in Transmotion http://journals.kent.ac.uk/index.php/transmotion/announcement/view/19 Deadline for Abstracts: 1st October 2017 In the contemporary moment, the world has seen an increase in transnational and decolonial activist movements around indigenous rights. Idle No More, Rhodes Must Fall, the BDS movement for a Free Palestine and the Dakota Access Pipeline protests have all garnered international attention and trans-indigenous calls of solidarity. These politics have found their ways to literary productions, and many have dubbed the increase in Native American writings and the rapid growth in Indigenous Studies a cultural, literary, and academic renaissance. Building on this historically significant moment, Transmotion is currently seeking submissions for a cross-disciplinary special issue on the topic of Native American Narratives in a Global Context: Comparative and Transnational Perspectives. The special issue builds on a panel entitled “Native American Literature in a Global Context” that took place at the 2017 […]