Women, Gender, and Sexuality,
Southwest Popular Culture Conference
Feb. 19-22, 2014
Proposals Nov. 1, 2013

Proposals are welcomed on any aspect of Women, Gender, and Sexuality in Popular/American Culture. Topics which address the conference theme of “Popular and American Culture Studies: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow” are especially invited. Topics may include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Television, Film, & Fictional Depictions of Women, Gender, and Sexuality
• Western & Non-Western Queer Identities
• Polyamorous /Polyandrous, GQ, and/or Transsexual Subjectivities
• Women, Gender, and Sexuality in Folk Culture, Art, History
• Women, Gender, and Sexuality in Politics, Business, or Industry

Submit your proposal directly into the conference database at: http://conference2014.southwestpca.org/

http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=205649

Writing Women’s Lives: Auto/Biography, Life Narratives, Myths and Historiography Symposium.
Yeditepe University, Istanbul.
April 19 – 20, 2014.

The symposium calls for papers from a broad, interdisciplinary field of women’s life writing including biography and autobiography, letters, diaries, memoirs, family histories, case histories and other ways in which women’s lives have been recorded. The call is open to various genres and national, regional and global cultural traditions of women’s life writings as well as to papers on the related areas of women’s oral traditions, oral history research, testimonies, and the representation of women’s lives in all possible verbal and non-verbal art forms, such as documentaries, video, art, etc.

We welcome proposals for individual papers, roundtables, workshops, films and other presentations. The abstracts should be sent in English, but the presentations might be either in English or in Turkish. The maximum time allowed for any presentation will be 20 minutes. The organizing committee is working to provide simultaneous translation during the symposium. Abstracts of papers should be 250-500 words in length (in English only) and must include “the name of the writer and the affiliation”, a “short biodata” and the “contact addresses” (e-mail, postal address, phone and fax number). All documents must be submitted electronically via email to symposium@kadineserleri.org.

Selected papers will be published in the symposium proceedings.

Organized by Women’s Library and Information Center Foundation and Yeditepe University, Department of History, Istanbul.

Deadline for submission of abstracts: November 30, 2013.

For further information: http://www.kadineserleri.org/download/duyuru/CALL_FOR_PAPERS_19-20_April_2014.pdf

College of Arts and Letters
Stevens Institute of Technology
October 17-18, 2013

The College of Arts and Letters at Stevens Institute of Technology is pleased to invite you to participate in our upcoming conference celebrating the achievements and legacy of Ada Byron King, Countess of Lovelace (1815-1852), to be held on our scenic campus 17 and 18 October 2013. Presenters will speak about Lovelace’s many achievements as well as the impact of her life and work, which reverberated through the sciences and humanities since the late nineteenth century. This conference heralds a recent resurgence in Lovelace scholarship thanks to the growth of interdisciplinary thinking and the expanding influence of women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Our institute-wide commitment to the development of innovative thinking in a culture of collaboration makes Stevens an ideal venue for sharing ideas about Lovelace, a luminary figure whose life and works connect academics across disciplines and cultures. In addition, this conference reflects our dedication to fulfilling the mission of the College of Arts and Letters, which is, in part, “to advance research and scholarship at the intersection of science, technology, the arts, and the humanities […] through our unique and distinctive programs, centers, conferences and resources.” We anticipate an exciting, intellectually stimulating event attended by scholars, teachers, and students from around the world as we gather to explore this important thinker.
Featured Speakers

Our keynote speaker, Valerie Aurora, is Executive Director and co-founder of of The Ada Initiative, a non-profit collective founded in 2011 to promote women in open technology and culture. Aurora tirelessly helps women to get and stay involved in communities dedicated to changing the future of global society such as open source, open data, open education, and other areas of free and open technology and culture. She was recognized in 2011 as one of Femme-o-nomics Top 5 Women to Watch in Tech and, in 2012, she was cited as one of the 6 Most Influential Information Security Thinkers by SC Magazine. Aurora lives and works in San Francisco, California.

Our plenary speaker, Dr. Tom Misa, is Director of The Charles Babbage Institute. He is a historian specializing in the interactions of technology and modern culture and he has been active in the Society for the History of Technology, the international Tensions of Europe network, and several collaborative research and book projects. Dr. Misa is Professor in the History of Science and Technology at the University of Minnesota. His recent publications include: Gender Codes: Why Women are Leaving Computing. Editor (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley/IEEE Computer Society Press, 2010), Urban Machinery: Inside Modern European Cities. Co-edited with Mikael Hård (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), and Leonardo to the Internet: Technology and Culture from the Renaissance to the Present (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).

Learn more and register: http://www.stevens.edu/calconference/

http://hastac.org/events/ada-lovelace-interdisciplinary-conference-celebrating-her-achievements-and-legacy

45th Annual Convention
Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)
April 3-6, 2014
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
Host: Susquehanna University

Maxine Kumin asserts, “I now feel that we poets have to serve as witnesses at least to the injustices around us.” Echoing the intentions of many Jewish women writers to write about the “underdog,” Kumin writes on topics that include historic persecutions of Jews and contemporary Israeli society. Similarly, other Jewish women writers memorialize past and present iterations of discrimination and persecution by bearing witness. In genres that range from poetry to fiction to memoir, Jewish women writers represent instances of oppression and persecution in the 20th and 21st centuries, such as the Holocaust, as Alicia Ostriker does in “The Eighth and Thirteenth” (1994); the conflict in the Middle East, as Valérie Zenatti does in A Bottle in the Gaza Sea (2008); and racial and ethnic persecution in “Israeli” society, as Nehama Pukhachevsky does in “Aphia’s Plight” (1925). Given their own histories of discrimination and repression, as Jews and as women, Jewish women are understandably motivated to bear witness in their writing to the circumstances around them and to memorialize those in the past.

This panel seeks to bring together scholars of Jewish women writers-as-witnesses and hopes to have an array of themes from an array of events in the last century represented to theorize the ways in which Jewish women writers demonstrate sensitivity to the victimization of others.

Please include with your abstract:

– Name
– Affiliation
– Email address
– Postal address
– Telephone number
– A/V Requirements (if any; $10 handling fee with registration)

The 2014 NeMLA convention continues the Association’s tradition of sharing innovative scholarship in an engaging and generative location. This capitol city set on the Susquehanna River is known for its vibrant restaurant scene, historical sites, the National Civil War museum, and nearby Amish Country, antique shops, and Hershey Park. NeMLA has arranged low hotel rates of $104-$124.

The 2014 event will include guest speakers, literary readings, professional events, and workshops. A reading by George Saunders will open the Convention. His 2013 collection of short fiction, The Tenth of December, has been acclaimed by the New York Times as “the best book you’ll read this year.” The Keynote speaker will be David Staller of Project Shaw.

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.

Lois Rubin
Pennsylvania State University

Rachel Leah Jablon
University of Maryland
Email: lxr5@psu.edu and rjablon@umd.edu
Visit the website at http://www.nemla.org/convention/2014/cfp.htm

CFP: War, Memory, and Gender: An Interdisciplinary Conference
Location: Mobile, Alabama
Conference Date: March 27-29, 2014
Deadline for Proposals: October 15, 2013

The past several decades have seen an explosion of scholarly interest in the subject of war and gender. At the same time, the study of collective or cultural memory, especially in connection with armed conflict, has become a veritable cottage industry. This conference seeks to bring these two areas of intensive study into dialogue with each other, exploring the complex ways in which gender shapes war memory and war memory shapes gender. Comprised of a select number of presentations (so that all participants will be able to hear every paper), together with a keynote address by Professor Jennifer Haytock (SUNY-Brockport) and a panel discussion featuring women military veterans, the conference will address multiple conflicts and nationalities from the perspectives of multiple disciplines.

Hosted by the Center for the Study of War and Memory and the Gender Studies Program at the University of South Alabama, “War, Memory, and Gender” will be held in the History Museum of Mobile, a beautiful structure located in the heart of the city’s scenic and historic downtown. Restaurants in the downtown area will host receptions for conference registrants, and a downtown hotel (to be announced) will offer a block of rooms at a reduced rate. Local attractions include Alabama Gulf-Coast beaches, the U.S.S. Alabama Memorial Park on Mobile Bay, the African-American Heritage Trail, the Bellingrath mansion and gardens, the Blakeley Civil War battlefield, the Mobile-Tensaw River Delta, and the charming nearby towns of Daphne and Fairhope.

Interested scholars should email a 350-word proposal, along with a CV, to conference co-directors Martha Jane Brazy (mjbrazy@southalabama.edu) and Steven Trout (strout@southalabama.edu) before October 15, 2013.

Possible topics include (but are not limited to) the following:

Remembering male and/or female bodies at war
War propaganda and gender
Women and forgotten conflicts
Gender, Race, and War
Women of color and war memory
Sexuality and War
Restoring women to the so-called Greatest Generation
Women and veterans’ organizations
The Vietnam War and the crisis of American masculinity
Remembering women combatants
Women as custodians of war memory
War, gender, and grief
Gender, war, and modernism(s)
Male and female war films
Women writers, male war stories
Medicine, war, and gender
LGBTQ memories of war
Trauma and gendered memory
Women artists/architects and public war memorials
Gender and military video games
Gender and historical writing about war
Gender and war reenactment