www.amerikanistik-uni-muenchen.de/ptf 

The highly diverse field of Video Game Studies has firmly established
itself on the academic scene in the last decades as a truly interdisciplinary
conglomerate that draws on the discourses of media studies, design, programming, literary and cultural studies, anthropology, philosophy, sociology, and numerous other disciplines without fusing them
into a singular streamlined approach. American Studies, an equally diverse discipline in itself, has provided a crucial (if not unproblematic) context in the constitution of Video Game Studies, and while the latter has certainly emancipated itself from any particular dependency, the two fields have now entered a productive dialogue in which they influence
and speak to each other rather than struggle for hegemony of
interpretation over a particular cultural field. This relationship is both budding and tenuous, as American Studies has only gradually turned its attention to video games even though the medium has grown in the last few decades from a niche phenomenon to a cultural industry that is
arguably the most important force in American popular culture today. Yet
research on this crucial topic in the institutional framework of American Studies is often either local or even personal, with no substantial wider network for scholars to participate and collaborate in.
This conference sets out to change that and provide the first opportunity
for scholars in American Studies working on video games to connect, share their research results, workshop their projects, and start building a network that so far exists in separate clusters at best. At the same time, the conference also sets out to discuss the particular perspectives that American Studies with its highly diverse toolbox of theoretical and
practical approaches may bring to the analysis of video games, and how in turn other approaches to video games (and the games themselves) affect and change these established theories and methods. Papers may draw on the rich repertoire of American Studies ‘ ranging from strategies of close reading to queer theory, from feminist analyses to ecocritical
approaches, from myths and symbols to postnationalism and may re-read this repertoire as it is modified by Video Game Studies and its unique approaches to notions such as performativity, embodiment, intermediality, narrativity, interaction, and many more.

Scholars are therefore invited to submit proposals that critically explore
these interconnections. This may occur on an entirely theoretical level or
through a detailed analysis of a single game, from a historical perspective or a political or economic one, focusing on gameplay mechanics, narrative immersion or their respective subversion; considering the global video game market or local contexts of production, reception and criticism; delving into the frameworks of technology and coding; interrogating the
production of virtual and real spaces and places; highlighting the
interplay of image, music, sound, touch, movement, and text; inquiring into notions of community and dissent among gamers; tracing the impact of video games as high, popular, and unpopular cultures; or describing the pedagogical use of video games or the socio-political controversies
around them. Anything is fair game: hardware and software and wetware; casual and hardcore; e-sports and streaming; mobile and stationary; PC and console; retro and contemporary; AAA and indie; achievements and high scores; gamification and metagaming;
cheating and modding; WASD and controller; VR and flatscreen; and anything in between. It’s dangerous to go alone, so let’s explore together how video games can play the field of American Studies.

If you would like to present a paper at the conference, please submit a
proposal of no more than 300 words. If you would like to discuss your work in progress in a small-group workshop at the conference, please submit a proposal of no more than 500 words.

The deadline for all submissions is August 1, 2017. Please send your
proposal along with a brief biographical statement to Sascha Pöhlmann at poehlmann@lmu.de.

This CfP for the 5th Biennial Conference of the International Association
of Inter-American Studies is available in English
(http://www.interamericanstudies.net/’p=6481), Spanish
(http://www.interamericanstudies.net/’p=6472), and Portuguese
(http://www.interamericanstudies.net/’p=6461).
*************

The struggle over social issues and the resistance to ruling elites have a long history in the colonies and nations of the Americas. They range from
wars of independence and slave uprisings to conventions for women’s
rights, workers’ and peasants’ rebellions, indigenous movements, and
protests against U.S. wars in Vietnam or in Iraq. Since World War II new
forms of international and national inequalities and new dynamics in
societies and in the media have increased our awareness of the many ways in which the social keeps being re-negotiated from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego.
Recent decades have been characterized by new approaches to time- and
space-binding and mediational and relational webs of the social; the
invention, invocation, and narration of tradition, history, and heritage
serve as key elements in the creation of new social bonds with earlier
generations; since the turn of the millennium formerly excluded social
groups have been prominent in reshaping the scope and the normativity of the social; a diminishing civil society has opened space to the influence
of extremisms; unemployed young people, deprived of prospects for the
future, attempt new forms of expression and intervention; the disenfranchised take to the streets and to the Internet; social media open
up new channels and formats for expression; literature raises consciousness for just causes; artists in every realm translate and give
form to many of these thoughts and feelings; sociologists and political
scientists bring up new interpretations of and theories on the social.

Whereas Justin Trudeau named the most diverse government in Canada’s
history, the Indigenous president Evo Morales in Bolivia and the African-American former president of the U.S.A., Barack Obama, promoted
multi- and pluricultural imaginaries and questioned social relations based
on coloniality, while the ongoing discussion of Indigenous concepts such
as ‘Buen vivir’ revives and reveals more balanced relations between nature and society. Even if the hegemony of the U.S.A. in the Americas has been waning, the election of Donald Trump and his nostalgic vision of ‘Make America Great Again’ will have global impacts, specifically on the
Americas. In focus are also issues of immigration and the targeting of
difference be it racial, ethnic, religious, or gender, the border wall
with Mexico, immigration reform policies, the treatment of Muslim
inhabitants, and the hosting of refugees, mostly from the Middle East, as
well as feminist issues, environmental policies, and human rights in
general.

The 2008 financial crisis in the U.S.A., followed by worldwide economic
recession, has reinforced the gap between North and South, caused a
shrinking of the middle-class, deprived the working-class, brought the
right wing back to power in many regions, and increased the tension
between right- and left-wing parties. The neoliberal far right is also
rising in many other countries in the Americas, such as Argentina and
Brazil. Along with economic problems and negative effects of globalization
on labor, political ineffectiveness in solving them, pervasive corruption
at the highest levels, and social intolerance against immigrants and
refugees have inspired new Nationalisms and new Fascisms, and have
severely shaken democracy.

Cultural producers often have a seismographic function in revealing social
frictions and fissures, while social movements connect discontent in daily
life with political expression, the media create and circulate ideas and
imaginaries, and academia reflects upon and theorizes changes in the
social. Bearing in mind conceptualizations of the community by
theoreticians such as Jacques Derrida (‘community under erasure’),
Jean-Luc Nancy (‘the inoperative community’), Giorgio Agamben (‘the coming community’), Bruno Latour (‘reassembling the social’), as well as the sociological imagination of Boaventura de Sousa Santos (‘epistemologies of the south,’ ‘ecology of knowledges’), we would like to encourage a lively discussion of ideas of the social in its old and new configurations.

But the social is also created in the think tanks of social technology as
well as by rumors, jokes, and whispers; a plurality of new social
formations, always in transition and process, resist fixation and
uniformity, whereas their heterogeneous, and perhaps contradictory, needs, aspirations, and motivations claim our attention. We intend to follow along these lines of inquiry, taking as case studies past or recent
theories on the definition of the social and how they may apply to the
context of the Americas, to past or recent social crises and struggles
together with the different responses and narratives they have
generated be they creative and emancipatory, or conservative and
reactionary.

Our purpose is therefore to explore past and present forms of
intervention, relation, knowledge, translation, negotiation, solidarity,
or alliance that promote the emancipation of those usually silenced by
hegemonic formulae and hierarchies. Through the debate and exploration of new ground we aim at contributing to the designing of a new grammar and a new pedagogy of the social from epistemological and practical perspectives on the Americas.

We shall be addressing questions such as:
Which forms have resistance and dissent taken in the Americas over the
centuries and which discourses and narratives have accompanied them?
How do narratives generate and interweave different voices, groups, and
communities’ aspirations about the future as well as the past?
Who are the new protagonists arising in social movements/in the media?
What kind of reactions and transformations have these protagonists been
able to cause and promote?
What are the effects of a reinvention of the social in both the more
traditional media and in artistic expression?
How have the new social formations and movements been acting in the Americas?
What are the new narratives in the social and who is responsible for them?
How do creative responses resist the growing culture of fear and terror
bred by the new security state?
What forms of social and creative expression have emerged, and how are
they being performed?
How do these recent expressions incorporate or retrieve previous colonized or imperial experiences and memories?
How do they relate to the state and to the street?
Which new alliances are in the making?
Which forms of conviviality, solidarity, and imagination do these alliances rely on?
Which realities are absent from the current discourses of the social, and
how are the emerging forms of resistance taking shape?
Which roles can body politics, transnationality, economics, and
cosmopolitanism play?
Which new social movements are emerging as part of a reinvented social?
If we consider all the forces at play in the reinvention of the social, how has integration, assimilation, and cultural appropriation been redefined?
Which space and roles are assigned to the so-called disposable
communities/individuals?
How are communities and cultural producers dealing with an expanding
politics of racial/ethnic/ gender profiling?
How are communities and cultural producers dealing with the politics of
criminalization, incarceration, violence, deportation, denial of asylum?
How are societies and cultural producers dealing with multiple sexual and
gender identities and categorizations?
How are societies and cultural producers dealing with the effects of
deforestation and ecological disruptions?
This cross-disciplinary forum of academic exchange invites contributions
from all academic disciplines concerned with social formations, social
movements, communities, social and cultural expressions, literature, art
and performance in the Americas.

Please send proposals for individual papers (only one proposal per person) or for panels (with a chairperson and 3 or 4 presentations) to
conference@interamericanstudies.net by August 31, 2017. Presentations can be given in English, Spanish, or Portuguese, and should usually be about 20 minutes long.

The participation of doctoral candidates is strongly encouraged.

Please include your name, affiliation, the title of your presentation
and/or panel, an abstract (300-400 words), up to 5 keywords, and email
address(es). You will be notified by the end of October whether your
proposal has been accepted.

More information: http://www.interamericanstudies.net/’page_id=6447.

Host institution: University of Coimbra, Portugal (Faculty of Letters/FLUC
and Center for Social Studies/CES)

Organizing Committee: Isabel Caldeira (FLUC/CES); Maria José Canelo
(FLUC/CES); Silvia Rodrigues Maeso (CES); Elsa Lechner (CES); Susana
Araújo (CEC, FLUL); Gonçalo Cholant (FLUC/CES); In’s Costa (FLUC/CES);
Rita Santos (FLUC/CES); Bego’a Dorronsoro (CES).

Program Committee: Isabel Caldeira (chair, University of Coimbra,
Portugal), Olaf Kaltmeier (Bielefeld University, Germany); María
Herrera-Sobek (UC Santa Barbara, USA); Alexia Schemien (University of
Duisburg-Essen, Germany); Ulla Kriebernegg (University of Graz, Austria).

Eleventh Biennial MESEA Conference
May 30 – June 2, 2018
University of Graz, Austria


“Individuals typically learn their assigned place in hierarchies of race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, nation, and social class in their families of origin,” argues Patricia Hill Collins in her study of the intersectionality of “race,” nationhood, and gender in racial/ethnic US American families. Hill Collins’s work shifts the focus from long dominant to less restrictive family models and their representation in literature, film, and other cultural and artistic expressions as well as in legal, economic, and social situations. There are two concurring trends in the study of family and kinship—the challenge to the “traditional” family model from critical race studies, ethnicity studies, queer theory, and feminism and the study of transnational kinship. Globalization—and its resulting mobilization of kinship structures—is a major factor for societal changes that push the limits of family concepts founded in parameters of Whiteness, heterosexuality, patriarchy, ability, and affective individualism. In the same vein, ethnicity as a cultural and social construct has an impact on a sense of belonging which shapes family and kinship patterns and practices of relating to collective memory and cultural heritage. If kinship, according to Linda Stone, is “an ideology of human relationships” which highlights the “cultural ideas about […] the nature and meaning of their biological and moral connections with others” (6), it is also a framework through which to investigate the intersection of other factors such as “race,” religion, gender, sexual orientation, class, language, and geography.

Taken together, queer, feminist, critical race theorist, and transnational revisions have liberated discussions of family and kinship from pressing assumptions about family values. The breadth of scholarship on ethnicity and kinship furthermore centers on present and historical counter-narratives to discursively and ideologically constructed family ideals. In particular, in times of increasing instrumentalization of “the family,” approaching notions of family, community, and difference from interdisciplinary angles facilitates engaging scholarship which focuses both on the way we are not and “the way we never were” (Stephanie Coontz).

The 2018 MESEA conference seeks to explore this diversity of approaches to ethnicity and kinship by inviting paper proposals from all disciplines and perspectives. Potential paper and panel submissions can but are not limited to work around the following topics:
o transnational family and kinship models: thinking and living relations globally
o cultural heritage: (re)negotiations of cultural knowledge, narratives, and intergenerational memory
o intersectional approaches to family: class, gender, “race,” ethnicity, religion, age, and nationality
o representations of family, nation, and community in ethnic and postcolonial cultures
o kinship as sentimental, or conversely emancipatory, political discourse
o family and kinship in literature, film, theatre, series, music, and other artistic and cultural forms of expression
o interracial dating and marriage: discourses of power and privilege in the past and present
o queerness in and beyond the family: LGBTQI families, queer communities in non-family settings, and other phenomena of kinship and gender parameters
o critical motherhood/ fatherhood/ sibling studies
o communicating kinship: the role of new technology and social media for creating, maintaining, shaping, and/or breaking off kinship relations
o social justice and the family: interdisciplinary approaches to the role of the family and kinship in the face of systemic racism and nationalism
o White privilege: reproducing Whiteness and reinforcing power through family and kinship
o transnational families in the New Economy: working parents in the diaspora; kinship and the care economy
o family and political upheaval: forced migration, families in transit, negotiating citizenship through kinship
o family as a site of (physical, psychological, emotional and epistemological) violence and abuse
Proposals should be submitted to our website at www.mesea.org between August 15 and November 15, 2017. Submitters will receive notification of acceptance by January 1, 2018.
Preference will be given to complete panel proposals with an inter/transdisciplinary and/or transnational focus. Panels may not include more than 2 participants from the same institution. Presenters must be members of MESEA or MELUS in 2018.

As in previous years, MESEA will award at least one Young Scholars Excellence Award.

Program Director:
Jopi Nyman, PhD DSocSc
Professor of English
School of Humanities
University of Eastern Finland
P. O. Box 111
FI- 80101 Joensuu
FINLAND
Tel. +358-2944-52143
Email: jopi.nyman@uef.fi
For more information please visit: http://www.mesea.org

Constructing America | Defining Europe
Perceptions of the Transatlantic Other, 1900-2000
Call for Papers: Due Date 12 May 2017
Conference Date: 8-10 November 2017
Location: Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands

The first hundred days of Donald Trump's presidency have fuelled the deep
feeling, on both sides, of a profound cultural difference between the
United States and Europe. At the same time, new and unexpected
commonalities have been created with the development of a "populist
international" or an "anti-globalist alliance" on both sides of the
Atlantic, the rise of anti-immigration feeling in both the US and in
Europe, alongside a re-intensification of racial tensions, and questions
about inclusion, exclusion, and ethnicity, in France, the Netherlands,
Eastern Europe, and the US.

The conference Constructing America | Defining Europe invites scholars to
take these developments as a starting point to consider how the mutual
perceptions of "America" and "Europe" have evolved in the twentieth
century. America's political and cultural influence has generated
controversy and resistance as well as inspiring emulation and adaptation.
However, since the late 1990s, the widespread perception of an
"Americanization" of  Europe, to which many scholars subscribed, has been
replaced by a focus on cultural interaction and local appropriation. This
shift in outlook, with its emphasis on the complexity and hybridity of
cultural interaction has opened new areas of study.  This conference
follows this shift and investigates the way cultures on both sides of the
northern Atlantic perceived, represented, interacted with, and changed
each other. It does so by drawing attention to cultural perceptions and to
the overarching patterns, domestic functions, and geopolitical contexts of
those constructions. We also welcome contributions that compare
transatlantic connections with perceptions from other parts of the world,
offering a comparative global perspective.

We invite scholars to examine how understandings of European culture, and
American culture, have been formed, have influenced each other, and how
references to America and Europe have circulated transnationally. How have
groups involved in transatlantic exchanges innovated cultural practices or
identities by adapting or rejecting features attributed to the other? How
have such transnational exchanges and relations created hybrid identities,
cultural objects, structures, institutions? We welcome contributions from
the fields of American studies, cultural history, transatlantic studies,
and interdisciplinary approaches, applying concepts such as reference
cultures, transnationality, entangled history, and cultural transfer.
These examinations will build a richer understanding of the long history
of the relationship(s) between America and Europe in the twentieth
century, and of how that relationship has evolved in a globalized and
globalizing century.

The conference will focus on the following three domains. Proposed papers
and panels should indicate how they connect to one of the following three
domains although the organizers will consider papers that fit the general
theme but do not fit precisely into one of these areas:

*         Mass Media and Popular Culture: From the banning of
German-American newspapers during WWI to the "Jazz invasion" of Europe in
the 1920s and the "British invasion" of the US in the 1960s, popular
culture - and the way it was disseminated - has always been a contentious
field of transatlantic relations. Which role did perceptions of the
transatlantic other play in contemporary debates about popular culture?
How has the development of modern mass media, from tabloid newspapers to
the internet, changed the mutual perceptions of Europe and America? How
did these perceptions influence the development of media technologies
themselves? How did they shape the evolution of formats and genres, such
as soap operas, romantic comedies, news, or reality tv? How have new and
interactive modes of viewing and consumer selection (Netflix, live
tweeting, and binge-watching) become part of a transnational cultural
exchange and how have they shaped perceptions of America and Europe in
popular culture? What are the historical continuities and discontinuities
in these cultural exchanges and developments?

*         Economics and Society: From the beginnings of the modern welfare
state to the neoliberal reconstruction of Eastern Europe after 1989, both
ideal and negative images of "Europe" and "America" have sparked vigorous
debates about economics and society. How did the rise of welfare politics
during the twentieth century influence mutual perceptions on both sides of
the Atlantic? To what extent did America and Europe serve as a utopia or
dystopia in debates about public policy issues such as health care, race,
drugs policy, and social welfare? How did changes in the economy - for
example, periods of high unemployment, stock market fluctuations,
technology booms and busts, and the outsourcing of jobs - interact with
cultural exchanges and perceptions?

*         Politics and Policy: The concept and practice of American
democracy, rooted in European Enlightenment debates but strongly
identified with consumerism and populist appropriation, has simultaneously
been perceived as appealing and fragile. This has resulted in strongly
divergent assessments of its civic culture and political institutions. How
have perceptions of American democratic virtues and pitfalls influenced
debates about democracy and citizenship in Europe? How have they been
perceived, received and transformed in transnational engagements? Which
role did the image of "Europe" play in the development of American
political culture? These questions are all the more pressing in light of
recent political developments, such as the rise of populism, reactions to
the European refugee crisis, and claims of outside interference in
national elections. Scholars are invited to engage with these issues as
they develop their submissions for this conference.

Confirmed keynote speakers include Mary Nolan and Thomas Bender. Limited
funding is available to subsidize the travel and accommodations of those
presenting at the conference. We plan to publish selected papers as an
edited volume or special issue of a journal.

Please send a 300 word abstract and a 2-page CV to
constructingamerica@uu.nl, by 12 May
2017. If you have any questions, please contact Jaap Verheul at
j.verheul@uu.nl, Jochen Hung at
j.b.hung@uu.nl or Rachel Gillett at
r.a.gillett@uu.nl and include "Constructing
America, Defining Europe" in the subject line. Authors of accepted
proposals will be contacted by 1 July 2017.

Université PARIS VIII Vincennes-St Denis/Université PARIS NANTERRE

Encounters with new populations in Africa and America during the early
modern period captured the interest of European naturalists, who developed
various discourses of human variety theory in view of categorising the
peoples of the earth. The premise of human classification, of course, was
that one group was innately and inimitably better or worse than another ?
and that the most superior human beings on earth happened to be the white
European elite. The taxonomies of human ?race? that took hold over the
seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries in Britain and America
were, and continue to be, inextricable from questions of class and social
precedence.

This conference will question how developing discourses of race came to
structure the societies of Britain and America in the early modern period.
It hopes to explore the way discourses of race and class interacted with
each other, and how the vocabulary of social strata overlapped with the
language of race. How were the bodies and minds of the upper ranks
considered to differ from those of other people during these periods? How
important indeed was the idea of the physical body in rank distinction,
and how did this square with the notions of pure blood that underpinned
both ?race? and hereditary privilege? In what ways were some groups
?naturally? privileged or ?naturally? excluded? Were social minorities
like indigents or women marginalized or stigmatized similarly to Africans
or Native Americans?



We will welcome proposals offering a comparative approach between British
and American societies as well as a diachronic approach.



Proposals for papers might include:

-        Studies of genealogy and family hierarchy

-        Human variety theory in philosophy and naturalism

-        Medical and scientific views on heredity and human hierarchy

-        The evolution of racial discourses

-        Biological justifications of slavery

-        Heredity and the patrilineal transmission of nobility

-        Inquiries into the human body and its representations

-        Representations of race and class in literature and art

-        Representations of the African or the Native American in Europe

-        Class and racial solidarity

-        Racialised representations of the indigent and the noble

-        The perception of the physical ideal and miscegenation

-        Race and nation: Anglo-Saxon ethnic/racial superiority

-        Race and the environment: the degeneration of American settlers
vs the superiority of the ?American race?

-        Studies of femininity, femaleness and ?effeminacy? in the context
of race and rank

The conference will consider proposals from all fields of study, and
welcomes both confirmed researchers and doctoral or post-doctoral
students.

The languages of the conference will be French and English.

A selection of papers presented at the conference will be published.

For consideration, please submit a paper proposal of 300 words and a
one-page CV by September 30, 2017 to Anne-Claire Faucquez
anneclaire.merlin-faucquez@univ-paris8.fr
<mailto:anneclaire.merlin-faucquez@univ-paris8.fr>, Tim Mc Inerney
tim.mc-inerney@univ-paris8.fr <mailto:tim.mc-inerney@univ-paris8.fr> and
Michaël Roy michael.roy@u-paris10.fr <mailto:michael.roy@u-paris10.fr>


Organisation committee:

Anne-Claire Faucquez, Université Paris VIII, Vincennes-St Denis, TransCrits.

Tim Mc Inerney, Université Paris VIII, Vincennes-St Denis, TransCrits.

Michaël Roy, Université Paris Nanterre, CREA.

Select bibliography:

Balibar, Étienne and Immanuel Wallerstein. Race, nation, classe: Les
identités ambiguës. Paris: La Découverte, 1988.

Brown, Kathleen M. Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs:
Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1996.

Chaplin, Joyce E. Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the
Anglo-American Frontier, 1500?1676. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 2001.

Curran, Andrew. Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of
Enlightenment. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013.

Dain, Bruce. A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the
Early Republic. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002.

Davis, David Brion, Alden T. Vaughan, Virginia Mason Vaughan, Emily C.
Bartels, Robin Blackburn, Benjamin Braude, James H. Sweet, Jennifer L.
Morgan, Karen Ordahl Kupperman, and Joyce E. Chaplin. ?Constructing Race:
Differentiating Peoples in the Early Modern World.? William and Mary
Quarterly, 3rd ser. 54.1 (January 1997): 7?252.

Harvey, Sean P. Native Tongues: Colonialism and Race from Encounter to the
Reservation. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015.

Horsman, Reginald. Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American
Racial Anglo-Saxonism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980.

Nussbaum, Felicity A. The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race
and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003.

Shoemaker, Nancy. A Strange Likeness: Becoming Red and White in
Eighteenth-Century North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Sidbury, James. Becoming African in America: Race and Nation in the Early
Black Atlantic. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Dates: September 14–16, 2017

Contacts: Mark Tardi (turlepin@yahoo.com); Dr. Krzysztof Majer (krzymajer@gmail.com)

CFP:
In his 1976 novel Ratner’s Star, Don DeLillo wrote “beauty was mere scenery unless it was
severe,” and in conceptions of the sublime from Longinus through Kant, Hegel, and more
recently, Mario Costa and others, severity –– in its myriad meanings –– has been a vital aspect of
what constitutes the sublime. Whether we are encountering the severe in the drama of nature’s
fury or a severing multiplicity while navigating applications and communications in the digital
world, we are confronted with the sublime dynamically (à la Kant) and/or disembodied and
atomized (à la Costa). Thus, in considering Romantic notions of the sublime with more
contemporary digitally-informed aesthetics, the sublime could be thought of as hovering like a
proverbial “ghost in the ravine,” a selfie taken in front of Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer
Above the Sea of Fog.

We invite papers on American and Canadian literature dealing with subjects including, but
certainly not limited to, the following themes:
*Technological and/or spiritual negotiations of the sublime in novels, poetry or plays
*Comparative sublimes
*Science fiction, futurity and the sublime
*[En]Gendering the sublime
*[Mis]Uses of technology in literature
*New literary genres
*Death/violence and/of the sublime
*Ecology, pastoral and the sublime
*Performativity/theatricality and/of the sublime

This is an interdisciplinary conference focusing on literature but not limited to it. We welcome
theoretical, historical, philosophical, and creative contributions on these and related themes
from [art] historians, literary theorists, artists, writers, philosophers, sociologists,
psychoanalysts, and others. Presentations are expected to take 20 minutes. Another 10 minutes
is planned for discussion.

The keynote speaker for the conference will be Dr. David E. Nye, Professor of History at the
University of Southern Denmark and author of numerous books, including the renown
American Technological Sublime, Narratives and Spaces: Technology and the Construction of American
Culture, Technology Matters: Questions to Live With.

Please submit abstracts and supporting information to Mark Tardi (turlepin@yahoo.com) and
Dr. Krzysztof Majer (krzymajer@gmail.com) no later than [March 31, 2017]. A complete
proposal should include the following: your complete contact information, the title of your
paper, an abstract of no more than 300 words, a brief biographical statement, and a note on any
audio/visual requirements.

DUE DATE EXTENSION - Call for Essays: “Rethinking Globalization: The Transnational and American Literature”

deadline for submissions: March 31, 2017

full name / name of organization:

JTAS (Journal of Transnational American Studies)

contact email: bsimal@udc.es (mailto:bsimal@udc.es)

*11-13 May 2017, Warsaw*

We invite papers looking at protest and dissent from different theoretical and methodological perspectives (Translation Studies, Literary Criticism, Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, Discourse Analysis, Feminist and Gender Studies, Queer Theory, Philosophy, Sociology, History of Ideas, Colonial and Postcolonial Studies), papers not only theorizing  protest and dissent but also papers engaged in broadly understood disagreement, disapproval, critique or resistance, potentials of conflict management and/or the educational and pedagogical dimensions of dissent.  We also invite papers showing how narratives of dissent and protest (novels, poems, stories, histories, films, news, press articles, protest songs) are renarrated/translated in different social and political contexts and the ways in which translators’ choices may be oriented or disoriented. If Jacques Rancire is right saying that “the essence of politics is the manifestation of dissensus as the presence of two worlds in one”, then translation, as an inevitably divided activity, may be a kind of discourse which reveals that oneness may be one of those ideas which harbour consensual dominance and the end of politics, the end of dissensual plurality and the beginning of the police which, in different disguises, finds these days its way to the streets of numerous places of the world.

*Keynote speakers:
Professor Mona Baker (University of Manchester)*

*Professor Ben Dorfman (Aalborg University)*

*Professor Hanna Komorowska (University of Social Sciences and
Humanities, Warsaw)*

*Professor Tadeusz Rachwał (University of Social Sciences and
Humanities, Warsaw)*

Proposals for 20-minute papers (ca 250 words) should be sent to
dissent@swps.edu.pl <mailto:dissent@swps.edu.pl> by *20 February 2017*.
We also encourage panel proposals (comprised of 3 to 4 papers, and an additional 100-150 words explaining how they are interlinked in addressing the panel theme).

Notification of acceptance will be sent by *28 February 2017*.

The deadline for registration and payment of the conference fee: *31 March 2017*.

Participants will be invited to submit extended versions of their presentations to be published in an edited volume.
The conference fee is *550 PLN | 130 EUR | 140 USD* for all participants.

Conference website: www.swps.pl/dissent http://www.swps.pl/dissent  

September 22-26, 2017

 

Overview

Ever since Salzburg Global Seminar was founded in 1947 as the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies, critical dialogue about American society, history, literature, culture, politics, economics and law has played a vital role in our organization’s development and legacy. The annual symposia now convened by the Salzburg Seminar American Studies Association focus on key questions and conflicts influencing American society and culture, in order to foster understanding of how these are influenced by, and influence, the rest of the world.

This landmark session in 2017 has particular resonance in the year of a new US Presidential Adminstration. Drawing on the seventy years of cross-border exchange that began at Schloss Leopoldskron in the aftermath of war, this multi-disciplinary conversation will examine what the “American Dream“ means in today’s world and assess progress in the United States towards fulfilling that potential. Participants will discuss the quality of life and sense of justice in the United States from a contemporary perspective, including the domestic and global implications of the new Administration in a visibly polarized society.

Life in America is predicated on fair and equal treatment and the expectation of protection by constitutionally-assured rights and justice. Issues such as civil rights, personal safety, pluralism, and access to educational and economic opportunities both challenge and contribute to the quality of life of Americans of every age, gender and ethnicity.

The session will explore historic events related to social progress and literary reflections of the nature and quality of life and justice in America. The function of legal and political institutions at federal, state, and local levels will be examined alongside qualitative dimensions of family, social and personal lives to better understand changing patterns and risks to the social fabric.

Our ultimate purpose will be to compare the historic “Promise of America“ with today’s realities, and to forge ideas and projects that help towards realizing a good life for all in America.

 

Participant Profile

Salzburg Seminar American Studies Association (SSASA) symposia connect scholars and thought leaders from around the world to build collaborative networks for research and critical debate.

The 2017 session - the 15th SSASA symposium - will bring together approximately 40 participants from more than 25 countries. In addition to public and private sector professionals, participants will include academics teaching about the United States in universities across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Central, Eastern and Western Europe, as well as the United States. We actively encourage participation by sociologists, representatives of the legal profession, immigration experts, civil rights activists, and other individuals working on issues at the heart of protecting and improving contemporary life in America and ensuring its constructive global involvement.

 

Program Format

The five-day session will be highly participatory. Daily thematic presentations by distinguished speakers will be followed by plenary discussions, as well as panels on topical issues focused on interaction with participants.  Afternoon sessions will include small thematic discussion groups, providing multiple opportunities for all participants to share their knowledge and expertise on equal terms and to build new alliances and research projects.

Focusing on the context of the Constitution and the judicial system, the 2017 session will consider such issues as: economic equality and the distribution of wealth as it relates to race and gender; the  management of policing and civil rights; fair application of legal protection; availability of employment and equal opportunity; as well as other aspects that contribute to or otherwise relate to the quality of life.

Participants will situate this analysis in the contemporary context and be able to discuss and evaluate the implications and likely impact of changes implied by the election proposals of the new President as well as policy decisions taken during the first months of the new Administration.

 

Key Questions

Issues to be addressed during the session include:

·         How do demographic changes and immigration issues reflect social tensions and raise questions and problems about the quality of life for those concerned?

·         How and in what way has the availability of education affected mobility and fostered success and/or failure in America?

·         How do social and economic class stratification relate to and affect the quality of life, fairness, well- being and justice in American life?

·         In what way does the distribution of wealth, parity of income and availability of employment opportunities affect and contribute to fairness and justice?

·         What does the nature and degree of incarceration indicate about justice and the quality of life?

·         How have these matters changed and/or evolved over the past seventy years?

·         Does the American justice system function fairly and in what way might it benefit from radical change?

·         How does the electoral system and congressional representation promote and support or otherwise affect and represent fairness, equality and justice?

·         How and in what way are policy proposals and changes by the new administration likely to affect life, justice, health and welfare of Americans?

 

Program Goals and Impact

·         The session’s primary goal is to foster intellectual analysis and discussion between professionals and academics about the factors that have contributed over the last seventy years to the contemporary reality of life and justice in America and which might affect the future.

·         University professors from around the world who teach about America will acquire and refine content to convey to their students through active discussions about America and its democratic future .

·         By sharing knowledge and expertise, participants will contribute to critical thinking on issues affecting life in contemporary America and suggest priorities and strategies for improvement and progress to fulfill the American promise of a better life for all.

As we examine the last seven decades of America’s progress, problems and challenges, and the promise to itself and the world to provide a good life with fairness and justice, we will try to identify challenges for the future to help fulfill the American Dream and the Promise of America.

For information about becoming a participant, contact Symposium Director Ms. Marty Gecek

mgecek@SalzburgGlobal.org 

The symposium website and a registraton form can be accessed at www.SalzburgGlobal.org/go/ssasa15  
Information on designated speakers will be posted there as they are confirmed.

Limited financial aid is available towards the symposium fee of 740 Euro (which includes all expenses in Salzburg, but not travel). One full scholarship will be awarded through the Emory Elliott Scholarship Fund, and one through the Clifton Scholarship Fund.

The Popular Culture Research Group at Liverpool Hope University is delighted to announce its seventh annual international conference, “Theorising the Popular”. Building on the success of previous years, the 2017 conference aims to highlight the intellectual originality, depth and breadth of “popular” disciplines, as well as their academic relationship with and within “traditional” subjects. One of its chief goals will be to
generate debate that challenges academic hierarchies and cuts across disciplinary barriers.

The conference invites submissions from a broad range of disciplines, and is particularly interested in new ways of researching “popular” forms of communication and culture. In addition to papers from established and early career academics, we encourage proposals from postgraduate taught and research students.

Papers should be 20 minutes in length. Please send abstracts of 300 words to Dr Jacqui Miller and Dr Joshua Gulam (ttpconference@hope.ac.uk) by *March 17th 2017*. The abstract should include your name, email address, affiliation, as well as the title of your paper.
Successful abstracts will be notified by April 3rd 2017.

15-17 December 2017

Deadline: May 1st, 2017

Venue: Aristotle University, Thessaloniki


The Department of American Literature of the School of English at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, in collaboration with the Hellenic Association for American Studies (HELAAS), invite scholars to submit proposals for the international conference ¨The Politics of Space and the
Humanities” to be held in Thessaloniki.

The latest socio-cultural and political developments on both sides of the Atlantic have again placed space at the center of attention of current scholarship in the Humanities. The relation between places, people, and geographies as caused by immigration, migration and refugee flows, demographic changes, war tensions and conflicts, environmental disasters, urban expansion, and mapping technologies has always been dynamic. Nowadays, finding ourselves in the midst of change, we need to reconsider the politicized nature of space, its impact on individuals and the shaping of identity in a number of contexts within Anglophone literary and artistic production that open up the Humanities to numerous other disciplines and spatial interactions.

Abstracts and/or panel proposals should be submitted by May 1st, 2017.

Please include the following in your submission:

- Name

- Affiliation (if any)

- Email address

- Title of Abstract or Panel Proposal

- Abstract (250 words)

- Bio

Please address e-mails to: trapatz@enl.auth.gr (Dr. Tatiani Rapatzikou); detsi@enl.auth.gr (Dr. Zoe Detsi).