Category Archives

Call for Presenters: The North American Conference for British Studies

Where: Washington, D.C.

When: November 11-13, 2016

Abstract due: January 30, 2016

Panel Topic: The Eighteenth-Century Transatlantic Britain

As part of the NACBS protocol, I’m soliciting for paper proposals to be submitted as a full panel to this year’s conference in Washington. The panel will give focus to new scholarship on transatlantic Britain in the eighteenth century. As it strives to be interdisciplinary, scholars from all fields may submit an abstract.

The eighteenth-century British Atlantic is a dynamic space and time, when the formation of the modern world evolved though colonization, displacement, enslavement, and revolution. In understanding the British metropole in the eighteenth century, it is important to contextualize it by the flows and counterflows generated by its trade and social networks with its North American and Caribbean colonies. The following topics will be of special interest to the formation of this panel:

• Piracy and Privateering
• The Rise of the Novel
• Slavery and Emancipation
• Hemispheric Connections
• Revolutions (American, Haitian)
• Empire and the Social Imagination
• Commercial Trade, Consumable Goods (coffee, tea, chocolate)
• Commercial Trade, Non-consumable Goods (Mahogany)
• Plantation Life
• Art and Architecture
• Medical Discourse and Sciences

This is just a brief listing of possible topics, and by no means excludes other paper proposals related to the eighteenth-century Transatlantic Britain.

For more information or to send your 250-300 word abstracts, please email Victoria Barnett-Woods at vab@gwu.edu. Abstract deadline is January 30th, 2016. You will be informed of your acceptance by February 12th. Should your paper be selected for this panel, it will then be forwarded to the NACBS committee members as a part of a full panel proposal. Unfortunately, your acceptance in the panel does not guarantee your acceptance into the conference. Feel free to contact me should you have any questions.

Border Crossings:Translation, Migration, & Gender in the Americas, the Transatlantic, & the Transpacific

Society for the Study of American Women Writers & Université Bordeaux Montaigne

Dates: 5th – 8th July 2017

Venue: Université Bordeaux Montaigne, France

Conference director: Stéphanie Durrans

To maintain a continuity with our previous conference (in Philadelphia, November 2015) on liminality and hybrid lives, we would like this first SSAWW conference in Europe to address the significance of “border crossing[s]” in the lives and works of American women writers.

Such experiences have always been important to American women. Early diaries and travel notes left by 17th– and 18th-century women provide us with valuable records of and about their migratory experience to the New World and their lives and experiences in America. Besides offering more records of such experiences, the 19th century also witnessed an explosion in travel writing, fiction, and poetry treating with travel, as growing numbers of American women writers could afford to travel across Europe and more widely. Throughout the 20th century, more American women writers found in foreign lands a source of inspiration and creativity (e.g. Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Kay Boyle, and Djuna Barnes in France, Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil, Katherine Anne Porter in Mexico) and some of them even made the choice to write from abroad. Meanwhile, women writers originating from other countries drew on their first-hand experience of migration, border-crossing, and uprooting to add to the growing canon of American literature (e.g. Jumpa Lahiri, Bharati Mukherjee, Shirley Geok-lin Lim).

No study of border-crossing can afford to neglect the rich mine of writing contributed by Chicana writers throughout the 20th century. As pointed out by Carmen Tafolla, “[Chicanos] did not cross the border; the border crossed [them].” This was also true of many other women, moving into or across America. From such a perspective, crossing borders lends itself to the most radical strategies of subversion and defamiliarization. Last but not least, such writers as Toni Morrison explored the darker side of border-crossing by seeking to express and represent the trauma of the Middle Passage for whole generations of Africans, and the multiple dilemmas facing African American women down the decades.

The conference theme invites participants to explore the broad spectrum of possibilities generated by such cross-cultural interactions, as well as the challenge consequently posed to literary canons. How has this experience affected women writers’ worldview and conception of language? To what extent do their modes of exploration differ from that of their male counterparts? How important were such contacts in allowing women writers to develop a consciousness of otherness and/or forge a community of feeling and experience transcending national and/or cultural barriers? “Chroniclers bind the inner and outward history of isolated humanity, but travellers connect all humanity together,” stated Grace King in one of the first entries to her diary. More often than not, indeed, geographical borders assume an ontological dimension, and crossing them amounts to an exploration of the self as much as to a confrontation with otherness.

Crossings have always involved a necessary stage of transition, transformation, and consequent redefinition of the self that questions the very stability and permanence traditionally associated with women’s conventionalized roles. Thus we are very happy to consider writers using the idea of border crossing and travel symbolically or metaphorically as well as literally: early female travellers, explorers, and adventurers crossed borders in more ways than one, often by transgressing gender expectations, using this experience or awareness to reshape the conventions of many genres. One might also approach the topic by focusing on what happens when literary works cross national borders to reach foreign readers in translation. In this respect, translation studies and studies of American women writers’ reception abroad constitute another potentially fruitful arena.

As a multiethnic, multilingual society, the U.S. undoubtedly provides fertile terrain for the development of a transnational consciousness that will be pivotal to our questioning on the topic. Possible approaches to the conference theme may include but are not limited to such keywords and ideas as:

Women writers and travel writing
The migratory experience
Expatriate American women writers
Expatriate women writers in Paris
The Lost Generation
Redefining the national canon
Transnationalism
Transatlantic studies
Transcontinental/Transpacific/Transatlantic literary relationships
Geographical borders/ontological issues
Representations of otherness
Cross-cultural interactions
Cross-linguistic perceptions/living between two languages
Women and frontier experiences
Translation studies
American women writers’ reception in foreign countries
Women writers’ reception in America and Europe

Submission Instructions
Deadline: August 31, 2016 (Individual Papers)

Submissions are electronic. Submit individual proposals and completed panel proposals to ssaww2017.bordeaux.montaigne@gmail.com both attached in Word or rtf, and pasted into the body of the message.

The conference organizers welcome and encourage complete session submissions as well as individual paper abstract submissions. Affiliate associations and regional groups should follow the submission guidelines for complete session submissions.

Conference participants may appear on the program twice as presenters: once on a panel presenting a formal academic paper, and once in an additional way (for example, on a roundtable, as a respondent, or in a “professionalization” session).

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.

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’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.

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.

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