CFP EGSU 2017 Conference: Finding Frontiers: Then, Now, and Beyond

Call for Papers for WVU EGSU Conference 2017

Finding Frontiers: Then, Now, and Beyond

Keynote speaker: Professor Holly Dugan, George Washington University

In 1893 at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Frederick Jackson Turner declared that “[by] moving westward, the frontier became more and more American…each frontier leaves its traces behind it, and when it becomes a settled area the region still partakes of the frontier characteristics.” For Turner, the frontier and the American pursuit of the ever shifting frontier line was the force that shaped our democracy. It left upon future generations a temporal residue that found its way onto coming frontier lines, and the future definitions that came out of them Where, then, is the frontier now? How do we identify it if/when we find it? Turner’s declaration, and the questions it elicits, recall parallel issues of space across ages, disciplines, and texts.

The students of the English Graduate Student Union (EGSU) at the West Virginia University Department of English invite you to explore the idea of frontiers and the complications that they entail. The conference this year will be titled Frontiers: Then, Now, and Beyond, and will be held March 11th, 2017 at the West Virginia University downtown campus in Colson Hall.

This interdisciplinary conference seeks to look further at the unexplored, undefined, indefinite nature of frontiers like those that Turner describes in his thesis. Presenters should feel free to explore the idea of frontiers in some of its broadest terms. Guiding questions include: what are the implications of imagined borders within the frontier narratives of 19th century America? How do literary borders situate, sustain, and undermine the British empire during the same period–and where do we find additional historic, scientific, and cultural parallels?  How does the rise of post-apocalyptic fiction in popular culture speak to the constant search for new frontiers? How does the proposed Anthropocene affect the drawing back or expansion of sensual or ecological frontiers? We urge you to broadly explore all questions of, or pertaining to, frontiers. You may consider one of, but are not limited to, the following categories:

• Ecocriticism and Environmental Studies
• African American Literature
• Women, Gender, and Sexuality
• Popular Culture
• Liminality
• Posthumanism
• American Literature
• British Literature
• Transatlantic Studies
• Hemispheric Studies
• Hispanic, Latino/a, and Chicano/a Literature
• Native American Literature
• Postcolonial Literature
• War and/or Trauma and Literature
• Film Studies and Film Theory
• Queer Theory
• Critical Theory and Aesthetics
• Architecture and Urban Planning
• Digital Humanities

Proposal abstracts of 250 words should be submitted electronically to egsuconference2016@gmail.com by January 13th, 2017. All proposals should include the title of the work, presenter’s name, institutional and departmental affiliation, and any technology requests. We also welcome and encourage panel proposals of three to four presenters. We encourage panel organizers to experiment with different formats, including more speakers and shorter papers, discussion groups, PechaKucha, etc. The subject line of your email should also indicate if your abstract is a proposing creative or academic work. Panels will run for one hour and fifteen minutes, and speakers should be prepared to give a presentation lasting approximately fifteen minutes. This allows for ample opportunity in the interim for discussion of each paper. Chairs will see that all panels start and end on time, and that no speaker or group goes over their allotted time. Notification of proposal status will be within two weeks of the submission deadline.

Creative writing panels are also encouraged. Possible panel topics for creative writers might include defying boundaries of genre and/or genre blending, the resurgence of fairy tales in contemporary creative writing, or influences on your work out of genre or that deal in any of the possible subjects listed above. Fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry panels should plan to read for 7-10 minutes per participant and field questions from their audience.

More information can be found at https://wvuegsuconference.wordpress.com/.

CFP for Gay, Lesbian, and Queer Studies at the PCA/ACA 2013 Joint National Conference

GAY, LESBIAN, AND QUEER STUDIES

Call For Proposals:  Sessions, Panels, Papers

POPULAR CULTURE ASSOCIATION & AMERICAN CULTURE ASSOCIATION

2013 JOINT NATIONAL CONFERENCE

Marriott Wardman Hotel, Washington, DC

Wednesday, March 27th, through Saturday, March 30th

For information on PCA/ACA, please go to http://www.pcaaca.org

For conference information, please go to http://www.pcaaca.org/conference/national.php

DEADLINE:  NOVEMBER 30, 2012

We are considering proposals for sessions organized around a theme, special panels, and/or individual papers.  Sessions are scheduled in 1½ hour slots, typically with four papers or speakers per standard session.  As always, proposals addressing any topic at the intersection of culture and queerness are welcome.

This year, we are especially eager to receive proposals concerning queers & youth culture and queers & popular music. 

Should you or any of your colleagues be interested in submitting a proposal or have any questions, please contact:

Bruce E. Drushel, Ph.D.

Associate Professor

Media Studies

Department of Communication

Miami University

Oxford OH  45056

(513) 529-3526

drushebe@muohio.edu

To submit your panel or presentation, go to http://ncp.pcaaca.org and follow the instructions for creating an account and making your submission.  Note:  beginning this year, ALL submissions must be made through the conference submission site.  For individual papers, please submit a title and 100-word abstract.  For sessions and panels, please submit paper/presentation titles and abstracts, along with a paragraph describing the central theme, and the names of chairs and respondents (if any).  For each participant, please provide a mailing address, institutional affiliation, and e-mail address. 

CFP: Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies (INCS) Conference

One of the interesting trends in academia in the past couple of years is a growing dissatisfaction with the standard conference format and various attempts to structure conferences in a way that allows substantially more discussion between participants than the traditional three paper panel with 30 minutes for questions. As Professor Komisaruk notes, this conference has an innovative structure. According to Adam, "The format is a little different: you submit your paper online to be read in advance, present for five minutes, then spend the remaining hour in discussion."

Call for Papers
Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies (INCS) Conference
Picturing the Nineteenth Century
March 22-25, 2012
University of Kentucky
Lexington, KY

Though its title foregrounds art and visual culture, this conference will treat"picturing" in all its many senses: imagining, representing, framing, mapping. We invite papers and panels that consider how the nineteenth century represented itself to itself - through depictions of subjectivity, history, and culture; through emerging technologies and disciplines; through self-conscious "meta" attempts to understand methods of representation - and how our own technologies and disciplines create multiple pictures of "the nineteenth century." Interdisciplinary papers and panels are especially welcome.

Featured speakers include Nancy Armstrong (English Department, Duke University), Julie Codell (Art History Department,Arizona State University), and Shawn Michelle Smith (Visual & Critical Studies, Art Institute of Chicago).

Themes include but are not limited to:

"The visual turn" and its technologies
Canons, institutions, and practices of art and literature
The materiality of the literary: illustrations, cover designs, advertising, publication
Display, exhibition, and spectatorship
Cartographies,real and imagined
Urban geographies and ethnographies; mapping and tracking people
Imperialism as visual practice; global mappings and re-mappings
Representations of selves and bodies; life writing
Modes of representation: narrative, image, statistics, chronology
Archives, libraries, and their histories
Digitizing the nineteenth century
Teaching the nineteenth century

Deadline: October 17, 2011. For individual papers, send a 250-word proposals; for panels, send individual 250-word proposals for each paper plus a 250-word panel description. Please include your name, affiliation, and e-mail address on the proposals.

Contact incs2012@uky.edu for more information

2012 Appalachian Studies Association conference to be held in Indiana, PA

This CFP caught my eye when it popped up in my mailbox.  The Appalachian Studies Association is a great organization, and I've heard good things about their annual conference, although I've never been.

But here's a terrific opportunity for anyone who's looking for a national conference venue that's close by (about a two-hour drive from Morgantown) and relatively inexpensive--registration is $125 for faculty and $75 for students; both rates include a one-year membership in the ASA.

The theme of next year's conference is "The Wide Reach of Appalachia," and organizers are especially interested in papers on northern Appalachia (that's here, folks):

As mapped by the Appalachian Regional Commission, Appalachia extends as far north as southwestern New York State, but this will be the first time that a national ASA conference has met anywhere to the north of Morgantown, West Virginia. It has been remarked that in the minds of many people, “Appalachia is always somewhere to the south”—but in reality, Appalachia is to the north, too. By a large margin, there are more square miles of the Appalachian Regional Commission’s “official Appalachia” in Pennsylvania than in any other state. We especially encourage proposals on any aspect of northern Appalachia—but also, considering “The Wide Reach of Appalachia,” proposals about the Appalachian diaspora and about Appalachian influences and connections in other parts of the country.

Featured panels will include, among others, literary readings and at least one on Marcellus Shale natural gas “fracking.”

For more information, visit the conference website or download the registration details here.  Deadline for proposals is October 15, 2011.

CFP: Bloodwork: The Politics of the Body, 1500-1900

Conference: “Bloodwork: the politics of the body 1500-1900”
May 6 and 7, 2011 at the University of Maryland, College Park
Sponsored by the Center for Literary and Comparative Studies, Department of English
Conference Organizers: Ralph Bauer, Kimberly Coles, Zita Nunes, Carla L. Peterson

This conference will explore how conceptions of the blood—one of the four bodily fluids known as humors in the early modern period—permeate discourses of human difference from 1500 to 1900. “Bloodwork” begins with the assumption that the concept of “race” is still under construction and that our understanding of the term would profit through an engagement with its long, evolving, history. Specifically, it asks how fluid transactions of the body have been used in different eras and different cultures to justify existing social arrangements.

Recent scholarship has opened up the question of the continuities and discontinuities between early modern and modern rationalizations of human difference. In early modern England, “race” commonly referred to family lineage, or bloodline, and relied upon pervasive notions of what were believed to constitute the properties of blood. The anxieties anatomized in Thomas Elyot’s Boke named the Governour (1537) about the degradation of “race,” or the corruption of noble blood, describe the physical technologies by which virtue—both physical and moral—was thought to be conveyed through bloodlines. Daniel Defoe’s later satire “A True-Born Englishman” (1708) echoes this rationale for difference. The language of his poem not only insinuates the crossover of the term “race” from family lines to national groups, but also supplies evidence that both kinds of racial ideology—whether affirming social hierarchy or national superiority—rest upon the invisible qualities of the blood. In late eighteenth-century Anglo-America, Thomas Jefferson invokes such notions as "White," "Indian," and "Negro" blood in order to suggest an essential difference between what he calls "the races," a difference that he sees as "fixed in nature," thereby anticipating modern racialism.

A comparative conference such as ours, that is trans-historical and transnational and draws literary critics and historians of cultures on both sides of the Atlantic world, will make a significant contribution to this ongoing debate about the “invention” of race.

Plenary Speakers:

Jennifer Brody, Department of African and African American Studies, Duke University
Michael Hanchard, Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University
Ruth Hill, Department of Spanish, Italian & Portuguese, The University of Virginia
Mary Floyd-Wilson, Department of English, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Questions:

•How does blood rationalize bodily difference in the period in which you work?
•How is blood used as a metaphor in your period? How is it contested?
•How—and why—is the idea of blood transforming? How does it operate in the body?
•What are the physical technologies of the body and how are these pressed into the service of difference? Conversely, how is the rationalization of bodily difference embedded in “scientific” discourse?
•Is religious difference figured in cultural or somatic terms?
•Does the body have a moral constitution?

PLEASE SUBMIT ABSTRACTS OF 500 WORDS FOR COMPLETE PANELS (ABSTRACTS PLUS PANEL DESCRIPTIONS), INCOMPLETE PANELS, OR INDIVIDUAL PAPERS BY November 5, 2010 TO: bloodwork@umd.edu. Questions may be directed to Maggie Ray at bloodwork@umd.edu

CFP: Gender Studies Conference at Idaho State University

ANDERSON CENTER ANNOUNCES THE ART OF GENDER IN EVERYDAY LIFE VIII
ISU Campus March 10th & 11th, 2011.

POCATELLO, 06/10/10 - A multidisciplinary conference, The Art of Gender in Everyday Life VIII, will take place at Idaho State University (ISU), March 10th & 11th, 2011. In addition to sessions, the conference will include: a keynote, by Andi Zeisler, the cofounder and editorial/creative director of Bitch Magazine on the evening of March 11th. A Friday lunchtime talk, "Gender, Popular Culture, and Media," by ISU faculty member, Nancy Legg; and a screening of LUNAFEST on Thursday, March 10th, at 8:00 in the evening in the Bengal Theater. All conference sessions and keynote are FREE and open to the public. We encourage people to drop by for as much or as little of the conference as they like. A complete final list of conference sessions, schedules, and other details will be posted on our website at http://www.isu.edu/andersoncenter

During our annual conference, we welcome gender scholars from across the country to Pocatello. The conference is an opportunity for scholars and students to present current research on gender issues. Participants from past years have consistently commented on the friendly atmosphere at The Art of Gender in Everyday Life conferences, and it is our principal mission to continue our tradition of creating a collegial, supportive and nurturing environment for the discussion of gender issues from across the disciplines.

CFP: 19th Annual British Women Writers Conference

19th Annual British Women Writers Conference
The Ohio State University
Columbus, Ohio
March 31-April 3, 2011

Call for Papers:

The theme for this year’s conference is “Curiosities.” We encourage submissions that consider how the concept of curiosity—in its dual meaning of intellectual pursuit and particular material objects—influenced the lives and work of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women writers, and continues to drive our scholarship today. We welcome interdisciplinary approaches to this topic, and are especially interested in both the ways in which women of this period expressed curiosity about their world through science, politics, philosophy, travel, religion, and art, and the ways in which these same questing, curious women became the subjects and objects of inquiry themselves. We encourage proposals for panels and individual papers that consider, but are not limited to, the following issues:

Curious Explorations
• Travel writings/art; ethnographies
• Colonialism and Empire
• Immigration and emigration
• Adventure stories
• Self-exploration: memoir, autobiography, biography
• Imaginative Exploration: fantasy, dreams

Curious Bodies
• Maternity; Sexuality; Race and ethnicity
• Women and disability
• “Freak” studies
• Bodies on display: actresses, dancers, “public women”

Morbid Curiosity
• The Gothic
• Supernatural investigations; spiritualism; afterlife
• Scandal; roman à clef
• Bluebeard Tales: the “dangers” of female curiosity

Shameful Curiosities & Curious Feelings
• Suspense and Sensation
• Affect; Desire; Disgust
• Forbidden Texts/ Banned Books
• Pornography

Curiosity vs. Privacy
• Voyeurism and eavesdropping
• Gossip
• “Private” Genres: letters, diary, closet drama
• Epistolary novels
• The private sphere
• Private legacies: wills, estates, inheritance

Cabinets of Curiosities
• Collections and collectors
• Women and/as commodities
• Domestic objects
• Consumerism; shopping; possessions
• Exhibitions and museums

Curious Inquiries
• Science and medicine; The Case Study
• Education/the pursuit of knowledge
• Philosophical and religious investigations
• “The Woman Question”
• Journalism
• Crime and investigation: women’s crime fiction;
mystery writing; the female detective
• Experimentation (artistic, scientific, personal)

Individual proposals should be two pages: a cover sheet including name, presentation title, university affiliation, address, e-mail address, phone number, and brief biographical paragraph; and a 500-word abstract.

Panel proposals should include a coversheet—including panel title, presenters’ names, presentation titles, university affiliations, addresses, e-mail addresses, phone numbers, brief biographical paragraphs, and the name of a moderator, followed by separate abstracts (500-word) that describe the significance of the panel topic and each presentation. Please do not include any identifying information on the abstracts.

Proposals must be submitted electronically as an attachment in .doc or .rtf format by Nov. 1, 2010 to the conference e-mail address at: bwwc2011@gmail.com.

CFP: NEMLA

42nd Annual Convention

Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)

April 7-10, 2011

New Brunswick, New Jersey

The 42nd Annual Convention will feature approximately 350 sessions, as well as dynamic speakers and cultural events. Interested participants may submit abstracts to more than one NeMLA session; however, panelists can only present one paper (panel or seminar). Convention participants may present a paper at a panel and also present at a creative session or participate in a roundtable.

More information here.
Abstract Deadline: September 30, 2010

CFP: Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900

The 39th annual Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900 will be held at the University of Louisville, February 24-26. Critical papers may be submitted on any topic that addresses literary works published since 1900, and/or their relationship with other arts and disciplines (film, journalism, opera, music, pop culture, painting, architecture, law, etc). Work by creative writers is also welcome.

Visit our new website for complete submission guidelines: http://www.thelouisvilleconference.com/ Click on “Call for Papers” Prearranged panels are also welcome. Group Societies are welcome

Deadline for submission is September 15, 2010 (postmarked). 

The Conference Facebook page. http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=131421218223

Victorian Studies conference

Victorian Epidemics
Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada
Banff, Alberta April 29-30, 2011

Keynote speaker: Pamela Gilbert, Albert Brick Professor of English, University of Florida Dr. Gilbert has published widely in the areas of Victorian literature, cultural studies and the history of medicine. Her first book, Disease, Desire and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels, was published by Cambridge University Press in 1997, followed by Mapping the Victorian Social Body (SUNY Press, 2004) and The Citizen’s Body (Ohio State University Press, 2007), and Cholera and Nation (SUNY Press, 2008).

This international conference will bring together specialists in
Victorian art history, history, gender studies, science, and
literature to contemplate the theme of disease in Victorian England
and its colonies. Papers will address medical and social histories of
disease, literary and artistic representations of disease, and disease
as metaphor in Victorian culture.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
-Victorian plagues: cholera, TB, venereal disease, influenza, smallpox
-histories and narratives of disease
-identity and pathology
-disease and the body
-disease as metaphor, languages of disease, contagion, illness
-disease and colonization, disease and globalization
-art as disease, mass culture as disease
-the spread of commercialism
-visual and literary representations of disease and illness
-sewers, filth, miasma
-slums, prostitution
-health and hygiene
-representations of illness
-mental illness
-imperial anxiety and disease

Please submit a 500 word abstract and short (50-75 word bio) by
September 15 to Kristen Guest, Program Chair, kguest@unbc.ca

The conference will take place in Banff, Alberta in the heart of the
Canadian Rockies. The town of Banff is surrounded by the spectacular
scenery of Banff National Park, which offers excellent opportunities
for both hiking and downhill skiing in late April. Banff is
approximately one hour from Calgary and is easily accessible by car or
air (regular and reasonably priced shuttles are available from Calgary
International Airport).

Accommodations and sessions will be held in the Banff Park Lodge.

CFP: THE DIGITAL AND THE HUMAN(ITIES): ACCESS, AUTHORITY & IDENTITY

THE DIGITAL AND THE HUMAN(ITIES): ACCESS, AUTHORITY & IDENTITY

http://www.utexas.edu/cola/insts/tilts-2011/

February 3-6, 2011, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas

250-word max abstract and 2-page vita due August 1, 2010

Plenary speaker: Laura Mandell, Professor and Director of Research Initiatives for Interactive Media Studies, Miami University

The Texas Institute for Literary and Textual Studies (TILTS), a yearly thematic institute series hosted by the Department of English at the University of Texas at Austin, invites paper proposals for the first of its 2010-2011 symposia, “The Digital and the Human(ities): Access, Authority, & Identity.”

This symposium will be the first of three events that aim to contribute significantly to the digital humanities by posing a series of hard questions about the tensions between its key terms. What can we say we have learned about the relationships between the digital and the human, and between the digital and the humanities? Efforts to promote collaboration and cross-fertilization between the humanities on the one hand and digital technology development on the other have overcome some conflicts between these areas of work. But to what extent have such efforts also revealed or repressed conflicts between the digital and the humanities that remain unresolved? Have they spawned new conflicts? Theorists routinely revise and extend concepts of the digital and of the human. But do practical initiatives in the digital humanities hold as yet under-articulated consequences for such theories? And, conversely, how might theoretical discussion of the digital humanities help clarify pressing practical problems in the field?

This symposium will focus on the threshold concepts of access, authority, and identity in relation to the electronic mediation of humanness. What do innovations in the digital provision of access and maintenance of authority mean for human identity, and, conversely, what do new ideas about, and forms of, identity mean for our evolving norms of access, authorship, and authorization? A number of high-visibility electronic experiments in radical access and the reconfiguration of authority have now come – and many have gone. What have we learned, and in what wayshave these experiments changed humanities conversations broadly?

Abstracts of 250 words or less and a 2-page vita should be submitted to the co-directors of the Institute (Brian Bremen, Matt Cohen, and Lars Hinrichs) c/o Andrea Golden at: amgolden@mail.utexas.edu by August 1, 2010. Papers will be roughly 15 minutes in length, presented in non-concurrent panels, so that all attendees can attend all sessions. For past and future TILTS themes, visit us at
http://www.utexas.edu/cola/insts/tilts/.