Transatlantic Fictions of 9/11 and the War on Terror: Images of Insecurity, Narratives of Captivity (New Horizons in Contemporary Writing)
Global Emersons at ALA
Global Emersons at American Literature Association
full name / name of organization:
Ralph Waldo Emerson Society, American Literature Association
contact email:
roger.thompson@stonybrook.edu
Global Emersons
This panel examines the way that Emerson has been figured as an international (transatlantic, global) figure or been appropriated across national boundaries as relevant to local histories, politics, and culture. We are interested in Emerson as an international figure, and we welcome presentations that investigate Emerson’s travels abroad, his engagement with literatures and philosophy from across the globe, his understanding of international politics and cross-border conflicts, and his reputation–contemporary or contemporaneous–abroad. We also welcome presentations that examine Emerson in translation, and we are especially interested in presentations from international scholars whose work examines Emerson as a global figure or whose papers describe or theorize the state of Emersonian scholarship in their home countries.
E-mail 300 word abstracts to Roger Thompson (roger.thompson@stonybrook.edu) by Dec. 20, 2015. Membership in the Emerson Society is required of presenters, but it is not required to submit proposals for consideration. The Emerson Society also provides grants that may be of interest to presenters, including a Research Grant and a Graduate Student Travel Grant. The travel grant provides $750 of travel support to present a paper on an Emerson Society panel at the American Literature Association Annual Conference (May 2016) or the Thoreau Society Annual Gathering (July 2016). Further information can be found athttp://emerson.tamu.edu/content/awards-announcements-2016.
CFP: Canada, Brazil, and Beyond
CFP: Canada, Brazil, and Beyond (abstract due by March 1, 2016)
full name / name of organization:
Canada, Brazil, and Beyond: Call for Papers, a special issue of Canada and Beyond
contact email:
Diana.Brydon@umanitoba.ca and Almeida3@myumanitoba.ca
Guest Editors: Diana Brydon and Vanessa A. Nunes
The Brazilian comparison makes good sense for Canadianists yet our different histories of colonialism, indigenous relations, and cultural debates about capitalism, democracy, multiculturalism, and globalization have seldom been investigated with the sustained attention they deserve. In literary studies, only a few names such as P.K. Page, Elizabeth Bishop, Jan Conn, and (more recently) Priscila Uppal have attracted much attention in their portrayals of Brazil, while the presence of Canada in Brazilian literature is even scarcer. This call for a special issue on Canada, Brazil, and Beyond begins to address the question of what might be learned from thinking about Brazil and Canada together. What creative works and new angles of analysis have been missed by neglecting this comparison? What revised frameworks might such a focus call for?
Canadian Studies has traditionally been oriented toward an Atlantic Studies paradigm working in English or French. Pacific and Northern studies functioned as supplements to this transatlantic orientation. Neither multicultural nor postcolonial studies succeeded in fundamentally dislodging it. A shift away from Europe toward situating Canada within the Americas was signaled by a few texts, which, however, paid scant attention to Brazil. Albert Braz proposes the label “Outer America” for Canada and Brazil as these two large countries are often forgotten in continental dialogues (119). With the exception of a few special journal issues and the journal Interfaces Brasil/Canadá, the journal of the Brazilian Association for Canadian Studies, the Canada-Brazil relation remains under-discussed.
Indigenous and Latin American decolonial studies, developing concurrently with the rise of interest in global and hemispheric studies, are creating an environment more receptive to thinking about Canada and Brazil, their changing relations, and the varied contexts in which they might illuminate each other. Canadian studies scholars, an international community, now look, not only to the east and west but also south and north from Canada as disciplinary alignments react to changing pressures. This contextual broadening, indicated by the launch of the journal, Canada and Beyond, from its base in Spain, now works across languages as well as across oceans and continents. It is in the light of these changes that we issue a call for papers rethinking the relations between Canada, Brazil, and Beyond.
We invite original papers on any dimension of this theme from scholars working within and across disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Essays should be 6,000 – 8,000 words, double-spaced, and follow MLA style. Please email queries any time and completed papers toDiana.Brydon@umanitoba.ca and Almeida3@myumanitoba.ca by March 1, 2016. Papers will be reviewed with an aim of publication in the Spring 2017 issue.
SSSL Conference: The South in the North
Society for the Study of Southern Literature Conference Boston, March 10‐12, 2016 The South in the North
full name / name of organization:
Society for the Study of Southern Literature
contact email:
ssslboston2016@gmail.com
SSSL’s meeting in Boston will be the first the organization has held in a location north of the Mason‐Dixon line. Ironically, in many ways this has never mattered less, as Southern literary studies’ formative focus on regional difference and distinctiveness has been retrained to take in a broader view of the South’s reciprocal material and imaginary relations with the US North, other regions, the nation, and transnational permutations of North/South dynamics. As scholars of a regional literature, we have been invigorated by innovative scholarship on the way the imagining of region figures in the imagining of nation, on the construction and consequences of Southern exceptionalism, on the continued expansion of analytical concepts of Southernness (and Northernness) in hemispheric, transatlantic, and global contexts. Now well‐established, the shift from east‐west to north‐south axes in cultural as well as economic, political, and other fields, invites continued exploration of its local, regional, national, hemispheric, and global manifestations.
Some broad issues with literary consequences the conference hopes to explore under the rubric of “The South in the North” include:
*regional fantasies and the national imaginary: the South as projection, the North as disavowal of region?
* climate change and Northern “tropicalization”
* alternatives to north/south dyads in conceptualizing region, area, hemisphere
* effect of native studies on north/south monoliths
* continental, Caribbean, hemispheric, transatlantic and global Norths and Souths
* circuits of production, consumption; foodways
* geography and periodization of the US civil rights movement
* Southern expatriation
* southern and post-southern imaginaries
Please see the full description of the conference topic and detailed cfp on our website: Southernlit.org
We welcome proposals for individual papers and full panels. Pre‐arranged panels are also welcomed. We invite calls for papers for panels, and will post them on the SSSL Facebook and webpage. Feel free to contact us as early as you’d like about preliminary ideas and suggestions. Please direct all correspondence to John Matthews at ssslboston2016@gmail.com.
Deadline for proposals is November 15, 2015.
Purdue Early Atlantic Reading Group Graduate Student Colloquium
Purdue Early Atlantic Reading Group Graduate Student Colloquium, April 8-9, 2016 (Abstract due December 31, 2015)
full name / name of organization:
Purdue Early Atlantic Reading Group
contact email:
earg.purdue@gmail.com
10th Annual Purdue Early Atlantic Reading Group Graduate Student Colloquium
April 8-9, 2016
Theme: Transatlantic Circulation: Ideas out of Bounds
Purdue’s Early Atlantic Reading Group (EARG) invites graduate student scholars to participate in the tenth annual graduate student colloquium. Continuing in its tradition of widening the scholarly spectrum, this year’s colloquium will consider the circulation of ideas, trends, material objects, and texts across continents in the seventeenth, long eighteenth, and early to mid-nineteenth centuries. The conference theme aims to spark re-visions of the texts, images, objects, people, places, literatures, and languages of the early Atlantic world through inter- and multi-disciplinary scholarship. Proposals are welcome that employ a transatlantic, transnational, or other spatial lens, or that illuminate a particular North or South American, British, African, or Caribbean facet within these literary or historical frameworks.
The colloquium will take place from April 8-9, 2016. Dr. Melissa J. Homestead, Professor of English and Program Faculty in Women’s & Gender Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, will serve as our featured speaker. Dr. Homestead is known for numerous articles on eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and early twentieth-century American women writers such as Susanna Rowson, Catherine Maria Sedgwick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, E.D.E.N. Southworth, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Willa Cather, as well as four books including an edition of Sedgwick’s Clarence (1830) and American Women Authors and Literary Property, 1822-1869 (2005). The keynote will be entitled: “Adventures in Transatlantic Circulation: Tracking Women Authors and their Books, the 1790s to the 1850s.”
We welcome individual papers, panels, and non-traditional presentations, such as pre-circulated papers, roundtables, or poster sessions. All disciplines are encouraged to participate.
We encourage paper and presentation topics including, but not limited to:
• Representations of Nature & the Natural World
• Constructions of Nationalism(s) & Creole Experience
• Discussions of Science, Medicine & Natural History
• Aesthetics and Literary Form
• Women’s Writing
• Native Writings
• Children’s Literature
• Reform writing
• Transoceanic/Terraqueous Studies
• Caribbean Literatures
• Cultural Studies
• Queer Theory
• Trans, Circum, & Cis Atlantic or Hemispheric Studies
• Print & Material Culture
• History of the Book
• Media Transformations & Visual Culture
• Modern Rhetorics
• Creative Interpretations (visual, prose, verse, etc.)
Please send abstracts of about 300 words by December 31, 2015 to the colloquium organizers at earg.purdue@gmail.com.
Panels will be finalized and participants notified by no later than January 31, 2016.
New Seminar: MVSA SEMINAR: The Transatlantic Periodical Press (April 8-10, 2016)
full name / name of organization:
Midwest Victorian Studies Association
contact email:
phegleyj@umkc.edu
MVSA SEMINAR: The Transatlantic Periodical Press
Seminar Leader: Jennifer Phegley, Department of English, University of Missouri – Kansas City
Midwest Victorian Studies Association (MVSA) 2016
Conference Topic: Victorian News: Print Culture & The Periodical Press
April 8-10, University of Missouri, Columbia
Recent studies of nineteenth-century transatlantic culture have overturned the standard narrative of Anglo-American literary relations that cast British literature as original, dominant, or colonizing and American literature as derivative, subservient, or rebellious. As Paul Giles points out in Transatlantic Insurrections, transatlantic culture is often characterized by the “more discomfiting figures of mirroring and twinning” indicative of two cultures developing in parallel rather than in opposition to each other. The conception of an American literature borne primarily out of insurgence against British cultural production becomes even more tenuous when we abandon our focus on authorial and national identities to examine the development of the periodical press, which frequently involved collaboration, imitation, homage, borrowing, copying, repurposing, and reprinting of authors, formats, images, serials, poems, and articles on both sides of the Atlantic. In The Culture of Reprinting in America, Meredith McGill argues that our author-centered nationalist frameworks have, until recently, prevented us from examining the importance of the ways in which “foreign literature is repackaged and redeployed” on both sides of the Atlantic. While American editors, publishers, and readers engaged with cheap reproductions of British authors and texts, the more established and centralized British publishing system was also seeking new writers, periodical genres, and markets in the United States.
This seminar welcomes scholars interested the interdependence of the two national literary cultures or the ways in which British and American authors, editors, and publishers knowingly collaborated or covertly adapted each other’s work. Possible topics include but are not limited to the publication and reception of British writers in the United States and American writers in Great Britain; novel serialization, poetry publishing, and illustration in periodicals on both sides of the Atlantic; the international exchange of news and information through the press; the creation and imitation of magazine formats; and reader responses to transatlantic print culture.
Participants in MVSA seminars will write 5-7 page papers that will be pre-circulated to the other participants prior to the conference. During the seminars, the seminar leader and participants will identify important points of intersection and divergence among the papers and identify future areas of inquiry and collaboration. The seminar format allows a larger number of scholars to participate in MVSA and to seek financial support from their respective institutions to attend the conference and discuss a shared area of scholarly interest. Seminars are limited to 12 participants.
Send a 300-word abstract and 1-page vita (both as MWord documents) by October 15, 2015, to Jennifer Phegley at phegleyj@umkc.edu.
For more information, please visit www.midwestvictorian.org
The Midwest Victorian Studies Association is an interdisciplinary organization welcoming scholars from all disciplines who share an interest in nineteenth-century British history, literature, and culture.
Call for Monographs 2015: Book Series on East‐West Cultural Encounters in Literature & Cultural Studies
full name / name of organization:
National Taiwan University Press
contact email:
lucr0110@gmail.com
This Series seeks scholarly works on intercultural encounters in literature, particularly East‐West precolonial, colonial, or postcolonial contacts that expose, problematize, or re‐create the sense of locality, historicity, and subjectivity. The Series especially welcomes monographs written in English or other languages translated into English. Conference volumes or edited volumes by multiple authors will not be considered at this time. Volumes of essays with a thematic focus written by a single author, however, are welcome. We also encourage the submission of revised doctoral dissertations which employ innovative concepts related to our topics. Suggested topics include but are not limited to the following:
● Colonial literature in the countries of the Asian Pacific Rim
● Transpacific or transatlantic cultural or literary routes/roots
● New cultural identities in literature in neocolonial and global Asia
● The relationship between Asia and Oceania
● The contacts between Asia and Europe or the Americas
● Theoretical paradigms of globality and worlding
● Convergences and divergences of exile, diaspora, and expatriation
● Asian diasporic writing in the new millennium
● Canons and genres
● Classics in modern contexts
● Cultural translations of Sinophone, Anglophone, Francophone and/or Hispanophone literatures
A leading university in the world, National Taiwan University is striving for more international collaborations and scholarly exchanges. NTU Press, playing an important role in disseminating
top‐notch research and scholarship in the Chinese‐speaking academy, is now expanding its scope of publication in English. All submissions will be assessed by the Editors and reviewed by anonymous readers. Once the book project is approved, the author(s) will receive a contract from NTU Press. Please send a book prospectus, the author’s CV, and a sample chapter to the Editors. The manuscript should employ the MLA format and style, and only a completed manuscript will be considered.
Series Editors
Dr. Bennett Yu‐Hsiang Fu (bennettfu@ntu.edu.tw)
Dr. Chi‐She Li (jisheli@ntu.edu.tw)
New Conference: Transatlantic Connections, January 13-17 2016: Drew University, Ireland
Transatlantic Connections Conference 3 January 2016 13-17
full name / name of organization:
Drew University
contact email:
drewtransatlantic@gmail.com
Call For Papers
The Transatlantic Connections Conference is a unique, multi-disciplinary gathering that aims to encourage conversation between scholars and researchers of Irish and Irish-American culture and the writers, artists, local historians, surfers, musicians, skaters, chefs, poets, thinkers and readers of Irish and Irish-American culture.This is the third year of Transatlantic Connections, and the overall theme of this year is Ireland and the Diaspora.
The location is in Bundoran, in County Donegal, an incredibly cultural and scenic county, sandwiched between the province of Northern Ireland to the east, the counties of Sligo and Leitrim to the south, and the wild Atlantic Ocean all along the west coast. Bundoran is a small seaside town that has experienced the vicissitudes of Ulster history, a community of people who share a love of Irishness, hospitality, the ocean and the craic (that’s a Gaelic word for fun!)
History and Culture matter in Ireland. It has always been a country that is very aware of its political and cultural past. But there are less well-known aspects of Irish culture. Irish creativity is well-known in literature, it was inevitable that it would spill into other areas of popular culture, especially where subcultures such as surfing and skating began to thrive. Interesting things are happening in Irish film and media, music, art and design. The same talents that launched a thousand books and poems are now busy being creative in all sorts of contemporary directions. This deserves our attention.
American influence and opinion has always been important in Ireland, and Irish people have made very important contributions to the culture of the United States. This conference aims to identify some of these experiences, discuss them, celebrate them and encourage their continuity. Our range of panels reflects the eclectic nature of these experiences, and our objective of integrating the academic conference experience with an authentic experience of a vibrant and current Irish Culture.
Papers are invited in the following areas:
Diaspora Studies
History
Literary Studies
Creative Writing
Popular Culture
Traditional Irish music
Film & Media Studies
Irish Language: An Ghaeilge
Medical Humanities
Peace Studies
For further information, please email drewtransatlantic@gmail.com or visitwww.taccireland.com
New Book: Romantic Education in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: National and Transatlantic Contexts by Monika M. Elbert and Lesley Ginsberg (Eds)
From Routledge: The essays in this collection examine the on-going influence of Romanticism in the long nineteenth century on American and transatlantic educational practices, as well as in an array of print texts, including but not limited to literary publications. A useful reference for scholars of Romantic studies, American studies, and cultural histories of education, this collection underscores, also, the centrality of debates about education within social networks that included thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic.
New Book: Gothic Subjects: The Transformation of Individualism in American Fiction, 1790-1861 by Siân Silyn Roberts
From the University of Pennsylvania Press: Beginning in the 1790s, North American readers developed an appetite for the gothic novel, as imported, reprinted, and pirated editions of British and European romances flooded the market alongside homegrown works. In Gothic Subjects, Siân Silyn Roberts accounts for the sudden and considerable appeal of the gothic during this period by contending that it prepared a culturally diverse American readership to think of itself as part of a transatlantic world through which goods, people, and information could circulate. By putting gothic literature in dialogue with the writings of Locke, Hume, Reid, Smith, Rousseau, and other major figures of the European Enlightenment, Silyn Roberts shows how the early American novel participated in the process of revising and transforming the figure of the modern individual for a fluid, contingent Atlantic population.
Exploring works of fiction by Charles Brockden Brown, Leonora Sansay, Sally Sayward Barrell Keating Wood, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Montgomery Bird, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and William Wells Brown, among others, Silyn Roberts argues that the gothic helped post-Revolutionary readers to think of themselves as political subjects. By reading the emergence of a national literary style in terms of its appropriation and reinterpretation of British cultural forms, Gothic Subjects situates itself at the crux of several important issues in American literary history: transatlantic literary relations, the connection between literature and political philosophy, the paradoxes of sovereign power, and the form of the novel. In doing so, Gothic Subjects powerfully rethinks some of our previous assumptions about the cultural work of the American gothic tradition.