The Black Queer Sexuality Studies Collective Presents
Queer Urbanity: A Black Queer Sexuality Studies Graduate Student Conference
With Keynote Speaker Professor Shane Vogel, Indiana University
Location: Princeton University
Date: Saturday, October 19, 2013
Abstract Submission Deadline: August 31, 2013

This conference seeks to create a public forum for dialogue on innovative research across disciplines and fields that interrogates the intersections between blackness, queerness and the urban/metropolitan landscape. How have black studies’ and queer studies’ engagement with urban spaces elucidated or obscured black queer experiences and expressions? How have major political, economic, and spatial changes in cities and the surrounding metropolitan area affected the (in)visibility of black queer communities? This conference seeks to ask these and other questions engaging blackness, queerness, and urbanity. While we seek papers interested in the intersection of these disciplinary, methodological, and spatial categories, we also welcome papers that question the centrality of the urban in black queer experiences, expressions and epistemologies. Our theme, purposefully broad, aims to include a range of disciplines including but not limited to history, sociology, literary and cultural studies, black studies, queer studies, media studies, and art history. We especially seek scholarship from disciplines where a lacuna exists with regard to queer experiences and/or those of people of African descent.
Possible topics include but are not limited to:

• The role of the city in Africa and African diasporic communities in the Americas and elsewhere
• Blackness, queerness, and the city in artistic expressions  (literature, performing arts, etc.)
• The relationship between urban political, economic and spatial developments and black queer communities
• Cities as sites of collaboration or conflict between racial and sexual communities/ individuals
• The relationship between rural/ suburban/ urban spaces and black queer identities

Professor Shane Vogel of the Department of English and the Cultural Studies Program at Indiana University will deliver the keynote address for this one-day conference. The conference will feature 16 presentations of original scholarship. Submission and acceptance to this conference will be based on blind reviews of 250-300 word abstracts. Please submit your abstracts and CV to bqsgraduateconference@gmail.com by August 31, 2013. All other inquiries should be directed to Brittney Edmonds (bedmonds@princeton.edu) or Jennifer D. Jones (jdjones@princeton.edu).

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

This panel will explore the relationships between space and place and the ways French heritage women rethink place as a potential for personal and social creation, for transformation and connection. Some themes to consider: how is the virtual site of the page a place where narrator and reader connect? How do old memories and new geographical place interact and connect? How do urban environment, nature, gender, sexuality or class affect the reconfiguring of place? Send 200/300w abstracts in English or French to Carole Salmon Carole_Salmon@uml.edu and Anna Rocca arocca@salemstate.edu

Deadline: September 30, 2013
Please include with your abstract:
Name and Affiliation
Email address
Postal address
Telephone number
A/V requirements (if any; $10 handling fee with registration)

http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=204690

Spaces, whether domestic, social, or political, often carry symbolic or metonymic meaning. As Nicole Pohl points out in Women, Space and Utopia 1600-1800, there is a “complex linkage between space, knowledge and power, identity and the body” (1). However, the occupants of a space can transform, alter, or redefine its significance. In early modern England, women employed a number of strategies to question, defy, and change the traditional authoritative and often oppressive spaces in their world/lives. For example, by forming bonds with other inhabitants of the prison, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria undermines the punishing isolation of the jail cell and converts it into a communal space defined by equality. By placing her body on display in a sustained trance Anna Trapnel transforms an inn into a sight of political protest calling into question Cromwell’s authority in England. This panel seeks to examine the multitude of strategies early modern women used to redefine spaces associated with or symbolic of, power and oppression. Spectacle, physical suffering, literacy, travel, and community are some of the tactics women used to accomplish the transformations that this panel aims to explore. By investigating the ways in which women represent their alterations of these spaces we will also address the essential question, once ruptured, what emerges? How do women modify, resist, usurp and/or escape the spaces that bind them? What do these women accomplish? Please send 300 word abstracts and a brief curriculum vita to Andrea Fabrizio or Ruth Garcia: at FabrizioGarciaabstracts@gmail.com

Deadline: September 30, 2013
Please include with your abstract:
Name and Affiliation
Email address
Postal address
Telephone number
A/V requirements (if any; $10 handling fee with registration)

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

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.” NeMLA’s Keynote Speaker will be David Staller, Producer and Director of Project Shaw. Mr. Staller presents monthly script-in-hand performances of Bernard Shaw’s plays at the Players Club in New York City.

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. http://www.nemla.org/convention/2014/cfp.html

The nineteenth century was an era that changed the way people experienced time on both sides of the Atlantic. New modes of transportation such as the railroad and the steam engine shortened the time spent traveling across long distances, while new forms of communication such as the telephone and the transatlantic cable promoted faster and more reliable transatlantic exchange. As time speeds up, distances shrink—enabling new opportunities and disabling old ones for both men and women. The fast tempo of factory work and groups such as the “Ten Hours Movement” fixed new importance on the relation between a man’s work and his time, while debates about “redundant women” were based on the threat posed by a large number of women who, according to Florence Nightingale, had nothing to do with their time. On the other hand, the scientific theories of Charles Darwin, Charles Lyell, Herbert Spencer, and John Fiske complicated the understanding of temporality by emphasizing the experience of “deep” geological time and “natural” evolutionary patterns.

This panel questions how changes in temporal experience influenced the perception of race, gender and class in 19th-cent. British and American contexts, especially with regard to theories of transnationalism and cosmopolitanism, and the genres of realism and naturalism. We are interested in papers that open the geography of transatlantic studies to a discussion of time across literary, political, and scientific contexts. Please send a 300-word abstract and a bio to Jacob Jewusiak (jmjewusiak@valdosta.edu) and Myrto Drizou (mdrizou@gmail.com).

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

Deadline: September 30, 2013
Please include with your abstract:
Name and Affiliation
Email address
Postal address
Telephone number
A/V requirements (if any; $10 handling fee with registration)

Eco-feminist Readings of 19th-Century American Women’s Fiction

Eco-feminism focuses on depictions of the natural world which help to illuminate ‘the oppression, subordination, or domination of women,’ revealing associations between the ‘unjustified domination of women [. . .] and of non-human nature’ (Warren 1-2). The domestic sphere of the nineteenth century necessarily included interactions with animals and the natural world, and women writing in nineteenth-century America were often uniquely situated to examine human relations with non-human nature from a different vantage point than those that centered on a more traditional patriarchal perspective. Annette Kolodny has written extensively about the process by which male writers gender the landscapes they survey as female in order to justify conquest, a construct which also reinforces the domination and oppression of women. Even into the nineteenth century, as westward expansion continued and urbanization increased, the male gaze surveyed and appropriated the female landscape and its resources. How do women writing in the 19th-century represent the environments in which they live? How do they characterize their relationships with nature, if not as conquerors or explorers? And how might such relations with non-human life forms reflect strategies of empowerment, or alternatives to patriarchal society? This panel would like to explore eco-feminist readings of 19th-century fiction — texts which illuminate some aspect of the parallel domination of women and non-human nature and/or that challenge these oppressive constructs.

Please submit 1-page abstracts to Jane Rosecrans at jrosecrans@reynolds.edu

Deadline: September 30, 2013
Please include with your abstract:
Name and Affiliation
Email address
Postal address
Telephone number
A/V requirements (if any; $10 handling fee with registration)
http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=204232

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

Panel: Women Writing War Trauma

“To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” Theodor Adorno famously pronounced in 1949, indicating, among other things, that the Holocaust presents a radical problem of representation. Indeed, the paradox at the heart of Trauma Theory is that traumatic experience both demands a story and defies communicability; it is the unspeakable that nevertheless has to be told. And in the past decade or so, scholars have begun to investigate how gender factors into this problem, a problem that extends to trauma literature in general. Thus the testimonials by female survivors of the Holocaust are gaining considerable attention, while memoirs by female soldiers of Iraq and Afghanistan bear witness to the trauma of a combat experience made all the more catastrophic by institutionalized sexual persecution.

This panel seeks to investigate how gender affects not only the traumatic experience itself, but also the narration of traumatic experience, by women writing about war. The “writing” may take the form of memoir, fiction, poetry, film, or other, more experimental modes of narration, such as blogging. The goal of this panel is to bring together a diverse range of material and perspectives that will move the discussion of gender and trauma beyond a simple comparison of men’s and women’s trauma, and into the gendered politics of writing itself.

Please send 300-500 word abstracts and brief biographical statements to Jenny Kijowski, profkijowski@gmail.com

Please include with your abstract:
Name and Affiliation
Email address
Postal address
Telephone number
A/V requirements (if any; $10 handling fee with registration)

http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=203809