An Agenda for Digital Humanities  and Digital Culture
First Meeting of the Italian Association for Digital Humanities and Digital Culture

Florence, 13-14 December 2012
Via dell’Arte della Lana, 1, 50123 Florence

The Italian Association for Digital Humanities and Digital Culture is passing through a crucial moment. After the important works and results reached by the first researchers in this field, there is now in Italy a wide and lively community who shares methods, theories and practices, both on a national and an international level. One year ago this community has organized itself and it is represented by a national Association. The aim of this first meeting is to present Digital Humanities and Digital Cultures as a fundamental component for the development of humanities research in Italy.

Goals
During the meeting the discussion will focus on some fundamental issues so to define an agenda of the priority activities.

The questions which will foster the discussion will be:

– What are the infrastructure requirements? What are the current research centers, libraries, archives and other services supporting research and teaching in digital humanities?
– What are the standards for the evaluation of digital publications in the humanities? And what about the evaluation of research in digital humanities?
– How to stimulate multidisciplinary research experiences? How to create synergies with other academic communities, starting with the computer science one?

Attendance to the meeting is free, but registration by 10 December 2012 at http://aiucd.eventbrite.it/ is mandatory.

Provisional programme
13 December
9:00 am – 1:00 pm
Infrastructures

3:00 pm – 6:00 pm
Research, evaluation and dissemination of results in digital humanities

14 December
9:00 am – 1:00 pm
Italian projects and experiences of multidisciplinary convergence

3:00 pm – 6:00 pm
Members meeting

The definitive programme will be published on the Association website (http://www.umanisticadigitale.it) and on related mailing lists as soon as it will be available.

Call for Papers
The organizing committee is proposing a Call for Papers for the third session “Italian projects and experiences of multidisciplinary convergence”.

Abstract proposals (maximum of 500 words) should be sent by email by 15 November 2012 to cunsolo@rinascimento-digitale.it.

The authors of the selected proposals will receive the acceptance communication by the end of November 2012.

Papers presentation should have a maximum length of 20 minutes, including Q&A. Papers will be published as conference proceedings.

Emerging Perspectives on Race and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century United
States: A Workshop for Junior Faculty, Post-Doctoral Fellows, and Advanced
Graduate Students

March 15-16, 2013: The Pennsylvania
State University (University Park Campus)

The past two decades have seen an explosion of exciting new perspectives
on the subjects of race and gender in nineteenth-century US history.
Scholars have demonstrated the integral role of these categories in many
of the century’s major developments: from the emergence of a global
capitalist economy and the origins of American empire to the making of new
regimes of health, medicine, and body care. Along the way, scholars have
reinvigorated old conversations and engendered new ones. Historians and
other scholars have enriched and enlivened a venerable literature on free
and enslaved African-Americans while bringing histories of Latino/a and
indigenous Americans into the mainstream. They’ve uncovered previously
unknown aspects of women’s lives while exploring the stories of trans- and
ambiguously-gendered persons. And they’ve subjected the ‘unmarked,’
taken-for-granted categories of manhood and whiteness to extensive
critical scrutiny. In the process, this community of thinkers has
shattered the binaries – black/white, woman/man – that have traditionally
structured work on
race and gender, and provided ample evidence of the benefits to be gained by
interdisciplinary and theoretical engagements. Many have embraced the
‘spatial turn’ or employed the human body as a site of scholarly
investigation. Others have incorporated theories of performativity or
intersectionality into their work, emphasizing the ‘constructed-ness’ of
race and gender and the way in which the meanings of these categories
inform one another. Taken together, the result of these developments has
been a simultaneous expansion and redefinition of what scholarship on race
and gender entails.

Some of the best work on these topics is being done by advanced graduate
students and scholars in the early stages of their careers. To highlight
and encourage this work, the Richards Civil War Era Center at the
Pennsylvania State University, in conjunction with the Africana Research
Center and the Department of Women’s Studies, invites proposals from early
career scholars within three years of receiving their PhD and advanced
graduate students who are writing their dissertations for the first annual
emerging scholars workshop. Taking place March 15-16, 2013 at the
University Park campus
of the Pennsylvania State University, the workshop will provide a forum for
innovative young scholars to discuss new projects involving race and gender
with faculty and graduate students from the departments of history, Women’s
Studies, and African and African-American Studies. Papers should be no more
than ten pages in length and pertain to works-in-progress rather than
dissertation projects or book manuscripts nearing completion. Submissions
will be pre-circulated to registered attendees and Penn State faculty,
including select scholars chosen to provide detailed commentary on papers.
Presenters will therefore have the benefit, not only of expert faculty
feedback, but informed audience commentary and questions – extending from
the immediate context of their papers to broader conversations around race
and gender.  Presenters can and should assume that commenters and audience
members will have a basic familiarity and comfort with feminist and
critical race theory and historical literature on race and gender. The
workshop will feature a keynote address on the state of the field from an
invited scholar.

Potential Paper Topics Include:

– Africa, empire, and the Atlantic World: imagining unconventional Atlantic
(and hemispheric) narratives for the nineteenth century.

– Black politics and white allies: the long African-American freedom struggle
and its complex links to white political and social organizations.

– Masculinity, femininity, and gender performativity: incorporating
performative perspectives on gender (and race) into nineteenth-century
historical scholarship.

– Sex, slavery, and intimate relations: enslaved women, desire, and sexual
labor beyond the ‘production/reproduction’ binary.

– Youth, children, and elders: the role of age difference and life-cycle
position in shaping the meaning and experience of race and gender.

– Labor, bodies, and objects: scholarship on race and gender and its links
to the ‘producerist turn’ and the ‘new materialism.’

– Medicine, science, and technology: the construction of ‘raced’ and
‘gendered’ bodies of knowledge and practice and their relation to
configurations of power.

Interested parties should submit a complete CV and a proposal of no more
than 500 words to Kelly Knight (<mailto:kmk404@psu.edu>) or Sean Trainor
(<mailto:sxt261@psu.edu>) by December 15, 2012. Travel funding is
available, courtesy of the Richards Civil War Era Center. Questions or
inquiries should be directed to Matthew Isham, Richards Center managing
director at <mailto:mri113@psu.edu>.

The Popular Culture Association and the American Culture Association annual conference will be held March 27 – March 30, 2013 at the Wardman Park Marriott in Washington, DC. Scholars from a wide variety of disciplines will meet to share their Popular Culture research and interests.

The Libraries, Archives, Museums, and Popular Culture area is soliciting papers dealing with any aspect of Popular Culture as it pertains to libraries, archives, museums, or research. Possible topics include descriptions of research collections or exhibits, studies of popular images of libraries or librarians, relevant analyses of social networking or web resources, Popular Culture in library education, the future of libraries and librarians, or reports on developments in technical services for collecting/preserving Popular Culture materials. Papers from graduate students are welcome.

Prospective presenters should enter their proposals in the PCA/ACA 2013 Event Management database at http://ncp.pcaaca.org. The deadline is November 30, 2012. Please direct any queries to the Libraries, Archives, Museums, and Popular Culture area chair, Allen Ellis.

Allen Ellis Professor of Library Services W. Frank Steely Library Northern Kentucky University Highland Heights, KY 41099-6101 USA 859-572-5527 Email: ellisa@nku.edu Visit the website at http://pcaaca.org/national-conference-2/

Freedom, Rights and Power: Recasting Women’s struggles across the Americas since 1900.
26th-27th April 2013
St Mary’s University College, Twickenham,
London, UK.

This two-day multidisciplinary conference seeks to explore the intersection between gender, revolt
and power across the Americas. Women have been central in stretching the definitions of legal rights,
challenging old concepts of power, and establishing new parameters of freedom across the Americas
throughout the twentieth century. Not all of these struggles have been exclusively for the rights of
women; feminist and womanist interpretations of power structures have in turn encouraged dynamic
protest among many subaltern groups. Our conference seeks to create links between historical,
regional and current movements for change, and to capitalize on a new momentum that has emerged
in relation to discourses of gender and power. We encourage scholars and delegates to think anew
about the ways that women have challenged prevailing systems, to examine women’s efforts to
renegotiate power paradigms and to consider how the past informs the future as we extend our
concepts of freedom within the context of the whole continent. The conference aims to address two
areas which merit further scholarly development. Firstly, we want to challenge the tendency to see the
struggles of women in North America as separate from those struggles in Central and Latin America,
and we aim to encourage comparative transcontinental discussions. Secondly, we wish to encourage
new and interdisciplinary approaches to the issue of women’s agency. This conference will bring
together complementary strands of research on the experiences of women in the Americas, and
include the voices of activists, and will contribute to our understanding of gender, rights and power in
a broad American context.

Potential themes for papers include but are not limited to: labour activism, civil rights,
suffrage, environmental activism, approaches to feminism, developments in feminist theory,
women in government and foreign policy, women in protest organizations, environmental
activism, legal rights, LGBTQ activism, religious and spiritual interests, reproductive rights,
anti-war activity or pacifism, and the development of gendered strategies against sexualized
and racialized violence.

Proposals for papers should not exceed 500 words and must be accompanied by a working
title and CV. Abstracts should be submitted to the organizers by Friday 4th January 2013. A
selection of papers from the conference will be published in an edited volume. We ask
potential contributors to indicate with their abstract as to whether they wish for their
submission to be considered for the edited volume. Complete papers for the edited volume
must be submitted by 30th June 2013.

Submissions should be emailed to the organizers at: freedomrightspower2013@gmail.com
Sinead McEneaney
Imaobong Umoren
Dawn-Marie Gibson
Althea Legal-Miller

CFP — Hysteria Manifest: Cultural Lives of a Great Disorder / Deadline 15 March 2013

English Studies in Canada (ESC) invites submissions for a special issue entitled “Hysteria Manifest: Cultural Lives of a Great Disorder,” guest edited by Ela Przybylo and Derritt Mason.

Hysteria, a largely feminized disorder of great cultural invention and investment, continues to hold the contemporary imaginary. Although repeatedly declared “dead” and removed from the DSM-III in 1980, hysteria persists in the folds of medicalization and in the soon-to-be-released DSM-V (2013) as “conversion disorder” or “functional neurological symptom disorder,” buttressing Elaine Showalter’s (1997) claim that “hysteria has not died, it has simply been relabeled for a new era.” Markedly, hysteria has recently surfaced on the big screen in three films (Alice Winocour’s Augustine (2012), David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method (2011) and Tanya Wexler’s Hysteria (2011)), onstage in Sarah Ruhl’s 2009 Pulitzer-nominated In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play), and in the widespread media coverage of a winter 2012 outbreak of mass conversion disorder amongst female high school students in upstate New York. Despite this ongoingness of hysteria’s manifestations and the vast academic interest in hysteria, there is a real dearth of considerations of hysteria that map not only its histories, but also its presents, not only its death, but also its enduring afterlife as a compelling cultural and diagnostic trope.

“Hysteria Manifest: Cultural Lives of a Great Disorder” aims to read hysteria’s present—its current representations, manifestations, embodiments, deployments, and iterations—while drawing on its diverse genealogies and violent, tangled past: a past that weaves its way through Jean-Martin Charcot’s spectacular theatre of hysteria at the Salpêtrière hospital, the birth and fruition of Freudian psychoanalysis, and more recently, feminism’s reclamation of the disorder as an index of female oppression under patriarchy. Such a “history of the present” looks at hysteria’s past in an effort to understand its present, traces its transformations and mutations, and maps its circulations as a provocative and critically salient trope for considering issues of gender, sexuality, psychoanalysis, performance, visuality, illness, dis/ability, biopolitics, colonialism, and mass media. “Hysteria Manifest,” then, will challenge hysteria’s grand histories and unearth its minor ones, defy myths of hysteria’s origins, teleology, progress, and its ties to medico-scientific objectivity, while emphasizing its present-day potency.

For this special issue of ESC, we are seeking an array of contributions which will engage contemporary manifestations and representations of hysteria. Specifically, we invite submissions of academic papers, art-based work, cultural commentaries, and creative pieces (short stories, poetry, photo essays) from scholars, writers, and artists. We also welcome interdisciplinary approaches informed by (but not limited to) literary theory, feminist theory, film studies, cultural studies, critical race and postcolonial studies, queer and critical sexuality theories, psychoanalysis, critical disability studies, medical sociology, and performance studies.

Submissions should, in some way, draw on hysteria’s past to convey a sense of hysteria’s haunting and persistent presence in the cultural imaginary. Topics of inquiry may include:

>Representations of hysteria in contemporary film, literature, and art

>Hysteria and literary criticism (e.g., James Wood’s concept of “hysterical realism”)

>Hysteria and the image

>Transnational and transcultural approaches to hysteria

>The body, trauma, medicalization, and biopolitics

>Hysteria and fan culture; the image of the hysterical teenage fan

>Mass hysteria and vampires, zombies, dystopias

>Hysteria and consumer culture

>The legacies of hysteria’s feminization

>Feminist approaches to hysteria

>Masculinity and hysteria

>Hysteria and sexuality; sexual excess and lack

>Hysteria and the child

>The spectre of hysteria in psychoanalysis

>Hysteria as performative illness; the theatre/spectacle of hysteria

Deadline for submissions (maximum of 8500 words) is 15 March 2013. Creative pieces or cultural commentaries—i.e., critical responses to cultural representations of hysteria—should be between 500-2500 words, with the exception of short poems.

Note to contributors: ESC normally accepts black and white images, up to a limit of six per article. Contributors are responsible for securing permissions.

Please forward completed essays, in MLA format, along with a 100-word abstract and a 50-word bio to przybylo@yorku.ca and derritt@ualberta.ca. The journal’s style sheet is available at http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/~esc/submit.php.

ESC: English Studies in Canada is a quarterly journal of scholarship and criticism concerned with the study of literature and culture. Recent special issues include “Traffic” (Eds. Cecily Devereux and Mark Simpson), “Guilt” (Ed. J. Faflak), “Sound/Poetry/Event” (Eds. L. Cabri, A. Levy, P. Quartermain), and “Skin” (Ed. J. Emberley). For more information visit ESC Digital at www.arts.ualberta.ca/~esc.

Ela Przybylo Gender, Feminist & Women’s Studies York University Email: przybylo@yorku.ca Visit the website at http://www.facebook.com/events/448266485217246/?notif_t=plan_user_joined

Call for Papers: Black Sexual Economies: Transforming Black Sexualities Research

Black sexualities have been constructed as a site of sexual panic and pathology in U.S. culture. Viewed as a threat to normative ideas about sexuality, the family, and the nation, Black sexualities are intimately linked to and regulated by political and socioeconomic discourses and institutions. Slavery rendered Black sexuality irrevocably deviant, and at the same time produced economies of desire and flesh that made Black sexual deviance desirable,
accessible, and even profitable. In light of the historical and continuing forces of commodification, exploitation, and appropriation of Black sexuality and Black bodies, Black people have struggled to represent, recuperate, and re-imagine their own sexualities.

Despite the dynamic ways that Black people attempt to define and negotiate their own gender and sexual identities, practices, and communities, there has been a paucity of scholarship examining Black sexual economies. While research on Black sexuality has interrogated the powerful traumas, silences, and invisibilities that influence sexuality within the Black community, Black Sexualities scholarship still has work to do to untangle the complex mechanisms of dominance and subordination as they are attached to political and socioeconomic forces, cultural productions, and our own academic lenses.

The Black Sexual Economies Project and The Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Work and Social Capital at Washington University invites papers that advance cutting edge scholarship in the field for its international conference Black Sexual Economies:
Transforming Black Sexualities Research, September 27-28, 2013 at Washington University School of Law in Saint Louis, Missouri.

Topics and Themes may include:

• Queer of Color critique
• Black Feminisms and Black Sexualities
• Critical Race studies and Black sexuality
• Critical Legal studies and Black sexuality
• Gender Theory and Sexuality
• Black Sexuality and Performance
• Black Sexual Historiography
• Black Sexual Genealogies
• Black Sexuality and Eroticism in film, art, literature, music,
• television, gaming, or digital/online technologies
• Black Sexuality in Popular Culture
• Black Sexual Icons
• Black Bodies and Aesthetics
• Black Sexual Revolution
• Black/White/Latino/Asian Inter(sex)zones
• Black Love and Intimacy
• Black Sexual Labors and Sex Work
• Black Sexual Undergrounds
• Pornography, Erotica, or Obscenity
• African Diasporic/Transnational frameworks
• Neoliberalism and Black Sexuality
• Black Sexual Cartographies and Space
• Black Sexuality and Class
• Black Sexual Social Movements
• Black Sexuality and the Environment
• Sexuality and the Black church or Religion
• Black Sexuality and the Prison Industrial Complex

Submit individual paper abstracts (350 words max), bio (150 words max), and 1-2 page CV to blacksexualeconomies@gmail.com

Call For Papers: “Intersections of Sexuality, Gender, Race and Ethnicity” a one-day  symposium sponsored by the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Morgan State University, Baltimore,  MD

March 9, 2013

Location: Maryland
Date: 2013-03-09

Description:  The Women and Gender Studies program at Morgan State University  announces a one-day conference on “Intersections of Sexuality, Gender, Race and Ethnicity” on March 9, 2013.

Send one-page abstracts via e-mail to intersectionssymposium@gmail.com with the following information:

Author’s name,

Title of paper

Contact: Mary.Fay@morgan.edu
Announcement ID: 197357
http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=197357