The deadlines have passed for the following listings, orthey are notices of new issues of life writing journals. We provide this information here for points of reference for scholars interested in trends in the field.
Deadline for Submissions, February 15, 2021
The Legacies of Exchange by 19th-Century Black Women
Society for the Study of American Women Writers
Triennial Conference November 4-7 2021, Baltimore, Maryland
We propose a panel for the SSAWW Triennial Conference “American Women Writers: Ecologies, Survival, Change” in Baltimore, Maryland, November 4-7, 2021:
This panel highlights forms of representation and exchange by black women that look beyond narratives of enslavement. We welcome papers that explore how nineteenth-century black women built networks of kinship and support through forms of correspondence (letters, periodicals, allusions) and materials that illustrate artistic intimacies (albums, scrapbooks, autograph books, marginalia, ephemera). Building on the work of scholars like Nazera Sadiq Wright and Jasmine Nichole Cobb, we ask: what ecologies and networks are illuminated when we look at these items? We are especially interested in discussions of archival resources, recovery work, sentimentality, citizenship, and writing as care-taking.
By February 15th, please send your abstract (250-300 words), institutional affiliation, contact information, and a brief bio (no more than 50-60 words) to Victoria Baugh at vlb57@cornell.edu or Charline Jao (cj422@cornell.edu).
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Call for Papers:
Fragmented, Evolving, Precious: Scholarly Writing across Life Contexts
500-word proposals with 50-word bios due 15 February 2021
Scholarly writing can be a scattered process, with research and composing time eked out in fits and starts as teaching, administrative, and familial responsibilities can overwhelm even the most dedicated scholars’ best intentions for scheduled writing time. Writing and research processes also change over time as circumstances change–as graduate student life morphs into tenure-track or adjunct life; as single life morphs into partnered life, or vice versa; as faculty have children who require different intensities of attention at different stages; as bodies are or become differently dis/abled; and/or as administrative roles replace writing time with back-to-back meetings. This collection seeks to examine, explain, and even exult in how writing processes change over time by exhibiting what is both lost and gained through successive rounds of transformation and adaptation. How do writers, in their own words, respond to significant disruptions of their established processes? How do they develop “writing workflows” (Lockridge and Van Ittersum) to meet new demands, or that are capable of responding to unstable conditions? How do they understand the variables that prompt changes and what resources do they draw on to meet that change?
This kairotic moment finds many scholars newly challenged to develop different writing processes as they wrestle with new ways to teach, administrate, parent, and navigate the world. As various researchers (Boice, Tulley) have demonstrated, scholars successfully produce scholarship even when their focus and time are fragmented. Boice recommends that faculty writers ensure their writing success in part by arranging “external situations to ensure regular writing productivity.” Boice’s advice articulates well with the “environmental-selecting and structuring practices (ESSPs)” Paul Prior and Jody Shipka describe in their study of scholarly writers’ processes. What this collection takes up in part is the current context in which many scholars are, due to pandemic restrictions such as school and library closures, unable now to “arrange external situations to ensure regular writing productivity” as they have in the past. These same pressures also call scholars to respond to the neoliberal demands of limitlessly increasing personal productivity.
Drawing inspiration from Jessica Restaino’s pledge to “determine anew [her] use value” as a scholar (137) after a devastating personal loss, this collection seeks to determine anew the use value of scholarly writing and the processes that produce it, both within and beyond the context of losses, constraints, and adaptations associated with Covid. We want to explore how scholars have navigated various workflow changes throughout various phases of their lives and careers. The pandemic context provides an opportunity to examine how writing processes can be adapted. When the most reasonable “normal” writing advice may be impossible to follow and writing is necessarily slowed and further fragmented, might writing activity be also deepened and made more precious?
We seek both personal and scholarly contributions that examine the advantages and possibilities as well as the frustrations concomitant with evolving scholarly writing processes. We invite proposals for chapters that take up, challenge, or augment questions such as these:
- How have you reinvented your writing process(es) at one or more stages of your scholarly career or for different types of projects?
- What resources or tools have you adopted for that reinvention? What was your affective experience before, during, and after?
- How does your personal engagement with writing processes shape your engagement with process scholarship or writing studies writ large, or vice versa?
- How does your teaching of writing shape your own writing processes?
- How does your scholarly writing occur within your home, work, and community context?
- How is your scholarly writing process affected by gendered, raced, and/or classed work-life expectations?
- What are the possibilities and challenges associated with your scholarly writing process?
- How could past examples of ideal and/or problematic scholarly writing processes speak to the present? How do you relate to your past processes?
- What do you see as the challenges of creating or sticking to a productive process, and/or how do you push back against a culture that over-values speed and “productivity”?
Submit 500-word proposals and 50-word bios no later than 15 February 2021. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by 15 March 2021. Full chapter drafts (6000-8000 words including Works Cited) will be due 1 July 2021. Requested revisions will be due 1 October 2021. Please send queries and proposals to: fragmented.writing@gmail.com.
Kim Hensley Owens
Derek Van Ittersum
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Deadline for Submissions, 15 February, 2021
Contemporary South Slavic Victimhood Narratives and Performances in Arts and Cultures
Founding myths of South Slavic nation-states have been centred around victimhood narratives since the emancipatory struggles within several occupying empires. Rarely have those narratives been stand-alone founding myths – they were interwoven with narratives of the heroic and the oppressed. Notions of being ‘a historic victim’ (or a victim of history) can be found among all South Slavs, not only in the post-Yugoslav region. The political function of such founding myths in in the construction of collective identities has been a research focus of South Slavic and South Eastern European Studies for quite some time already. The instrumentalization of victimhood narratives in the process of South Slavic nation-state formations, also in the context of Yugoslavia’s breakup and the Yugoslav Wars, has been explored, yet less attention has been given to victimhood narratives and performances in the very current South Slavic regions and contexts.
We are interested in narratives and performances of South Slavic victimhood in arts (literature, theatre, performance, film, music and art), in media and in places and performances of remembrance (memorial days, memory in public space, museums and memorials). Therefore, we are inviting scholars from different fields (South Slavic Studies, Film and Media Studies, Theatre and Performance Studies, Art History, Cultural and Memory Studies and other closely related disciplines) to contribute to the edited volume “Contemporary South Slavic Victimhood Narratives and Performances”.
Proposals for research articles will be peer reviewed for an edited book to be published by a reputed publisher in 2022.
Original and unpublished texts are invited (but not restricted to) the following areas and research questions:
- How have already established victimhood narratives changed after the end of the Yugoslav Wars?
- What new victimhood narratives have emerged in the 2000s until today?
- How are South Slavic victimhood narratives intertwined and are they mutually dependent?
- Are new narratives and performances of victimhood changing former constructions of collective identities?
- Who are perpetrators and victims in new victimhood narratives in arts and culture and what is the role of the spectator (bystander)?
- What are the aesthetic strategies in various art forms to de-construct and question those narratives?
- What are the roles of South Slavic victimhood discourses in the diaspora?
Proposals consist of a short abstract (250-300 words, including 3-4 keywords) and a short bio note of the author. Last date of submission of abstracts to the editors is February 15th 2021, to be sent to: senad.halilbasic@univie.ac.at and miranda.jakisa@univie.ac.at
The authors will be notified within 4 weeks
The first draft of selected contributions is due in August 2021 (length: 5.000-7.000 words)
Contact Email: senad.halilbasic@univie.ac.at URL: https://suedslawistik.univie.ac.at/
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CFP: Promising Journeys, Perilous Roads: Women’s Journey Narratives in Neoliberal India (Edited Collection)
Call for chapter proposals (With a strong publishing interest from Lexington Books, USA)
Traditionally, men have had more access than woman to Indian public spaces, especially the cities, roads, and streets. Not surprisingly, then, the presence of women in patriarchal public spaces such as roads poses a threat to traditional spatial associations of the home and the woman that in turn are significant in the construction of Indian femininity. More important, women on Indian roads have felt threatened and experienced numerous and unbelievable instances of violence, some of which in the recent past have been globally and vocally condemned. Curiously, if narratives of traveling, self-sufficient women and their outdoor experiences remain scarce, what is rarer are theoretical and critical discourses surrounding and analyzing women’s predicaments on the road. Stressing this, academicians such as Manish Madan and Mahesh K. Nalla in their study tilted “Sexual Harassment in Public Spaces: Examining Gender Differences in Perceived Seriousness and Victimization” (2016) note that while a considerable amount of research has been done on domestic violence in India, which mostly occurs indoors in private spaces, “the treatment of women in the public sphere, particularly with regard to sexual harassment (one of the most pervasive forms of violence against women)” (1) has only received public attention post the notorious Nirbhaya rape case (2012) due to media coverage and international outcry. Likewise, keeping mainly the Nirbhaya rape case and the gang rape of a young photo-journalist in Mumbai (2013) as a contextual backdrop, Shilpa Phadke in her article “Unfriendly Bodies, Hostile Cities Reflections on Loitering and Gendered Public Space” argues that the “overarching narrative appears to be that [Indian] cities are violent spaces that women are better off not accessing at all” (50). Arguably, while empirical and data driven research has to some extent taken into account the issue of women’s travel experiences, theoretical research dealing with fictionalized representations of women’s road journeys in millennial India is palpably missing. The present edited collection attempts to bridge this unfortunate gap in scholarship.
Where international research is concerned, the issue of women’s safety within public spaces such as the road has been a central problematic for space theorists and feminist geographers such as Linda McDowell, Gillian Rose, and Doreen Massey who declare that spaces are governed by patriarchal power relations which exclude women. Doreen Massey, for instance, in Space, Place, and Gender (1994) claims that “spatial control, whether enforced through the power of convention or symbolism, or through the straightforward threat of violence, can be a fundamental element in the constitution of gender” (180). According to feminist geographers therefore public spaces such as roads are inherently gendered and exclude women with the threat of sexual violence. In a deeply patriarchal society such as India, spatial politics along with explicit and implicit threats of violence plague millions of women who try to accesses public spaces, beginning with the roads.
In neoliberal India, especially after Nirbhaya rape case, one encounters a growing engagement with women’s travel narratives most significantly on several OTT (over-the-top) digital platforms including Netflix and Amazon Prime Videos. Many fictionalized series telecast on these platforms have presented the problem of female vulnerability within public spaces to expose physical, mental, sexual, and epistemic violence that traveling women face. Here Richie Mehta’s Delhi Crime proves to be a powerful case in point. Likewise, mainstream Hindi films such as Chhapaak (2020) in the recent past have also exposed how women are extremely vulnerable to the male gaze and to patriarchal violence, especially on the roads. Literature, too, has responded to this vexed issue and writers such as Janhavi Acharekar and Namita Gokhale have attempted to reveal how structural violence mars the outdoorsy experiences of many Indian women. Other fictionalized narratives that underscore women’s promising albeit perilous road journeys include films such as Nagesh Kukunoor’s Dor (2006), Leena Yadav’s Parched (2015), Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury’s Pink (2016), Ashtar Sayed’s Maatr (2017), Ravi Udyawar’s Mom (2017), and Gopi Puthran’s Mardaani 2 (2019). In addition, there are also well-received web series such as The Good Girl Show (2017) and She (2020) which unravel the regressive rape myths, stigma, victim-blaming, and misogyny that are entrenched in Indian society and channeled against women exploring the world outside their homes.
The present volume entitled Promising Journeys, Perilous Roads: Women’s Journey Narratives in Neoliberal India hopes to inaugurate a much-needed scholarly discussion on women and their experiences on the road in the present times. By focusing on the complex negotiations that women make with the challenges posed by the gendered space of the road, this edited collection hopes to bring together critical and scholarly voices that together address a deep rooted and pressing problem fettering Indian women’s mobility today. It invites essays that attempt critically informed analyses of literature, graphic novels, films, web series, and other popular cultural representations of Indian women’s experiences on the road, and ultimately initiate localized feminist interventions against gendered violence.
Themes addressed may include, but are not limited to:
• Literary representations of Indian women’s vulnerability on the road
• Graphic narratives of female road journeys
• Films, web series, television, popular culture vis-à-vis violence and spatial politics
• Sororities and female bonding in the face of violent road journeys
• Wandering mothers: women, violence, and caregiving on the road
• Women’s aging, destitution, and violence of the road
• Rape myths, stigma, and sexual offences
• Intrusive male gaze and objectified female bodies
• Class, caste, female oppression, and violent roads
• Female fortitude, resistance, and survival on gendered roads
Lexington Books, USA has expressed a strong interest in publishing this edited collection. Please submit an abstract of 750 words and a short CV by February 10, 2021 to Swathi Krishna S. swathi@iitrpr.ac.in and Srirupa Chatterjee srirupa@la.iith.ac.in The final articles will be 6000-7000 words in the latest MLA Handbook format and will be due by August 31, 2021.
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Deadline for Submissions–Feb. 5, 2021
The Register & Visitors’ Book in Historical Scholarship: A Virtual Colloquium, June 1, 2021
The value of the institutional guest book/register as a source has become evident in recent historical scholarship. Studies have engaged registers from a broad range of approaches and interests, including the histories of travel and tourism, book history, historical geography, literary tourism, and legal history.
The form, legal status, and uses of these books varied markedly by site and jurisdiction: in some, their completion was required by law. In others, the ‘visitors’ book’ was a site of whimsical inscription, filled with prose, verse, and illustration. The material affordances of the books, and the regimes of surveillance enacted over them, also varied widely. In many cases, institutions maintained both the legally compulsory register and a voluntary book for guests’ inscriptions.
As scholars have unearthed these books in local, regional, and national archives, explored the legal, economic, social, and cultural contexts in which they were used—as tools of surveillance, as business records, as tableaux for leisure travellers—and used them extensively as sources in historical scholarship, they have developed fruitful intellectual exchanges. Beyond places of accommodation, research has encompassed books that were at other institutions and sites—stately homes, museums, universities, and places associated with the lives of famous authors, for instance—in the early modern and modern periods.
On Tuesday 1 June 2021 a workshop will bring together scholars using these books as evidence in diverse historical research programmes. We invite participation (through pre-circulated papers to be discussed in the virtual event) from scholars working on a range of projects that employ these sources in historical research, including (but not limited to):
- Hotel guest books and registers as legal and social instruments
- Guest books and registers as sources for the study of mobility and tourism markets
- Institutional visitors’ books and practices of inscription and reading
- Cultures of travel illuminated by guest books
- Practices of travel illustration as revealed in guest books and related sources
- Transnational vs national dimensions of guest book use
- Early modern forms of the institutional guest book
Please submit a title and 250-word proposal, as well as a one-page résumé, by Friday 5 February 2021 to Kevin James at kjames@uoguelph.ca, to whom any enquiries may also be directed.
Professor Kevin James
Scottish Studies Foundation Chair and Professor of History
University of Guelph
Guelph, ON N1G 2W1
Canada
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General Call for Papers
Interdisciplinary Studies in Diasporas
Irene Maria F. Blayer and Dulce Maria Scott
ISSN: 2378-0975
www.peterlang.com/view/serial/ISD
Interdisciplinary Studies in Diasporas opens a discursive space in diaspora scholarship in all fields of the humanities and social sciences. The volumes published in this series comprise studies that explore and contribute to an understanding of diasporas from a broad spectrum of cultural, literary, linguistic, anthropological, historical, political, and socioeconomic perspectives, as well as theoretical and methodological approaches. The series welcomes original submissions from individually and collaboratively authored books and monographs as well as edited collections of essays. All proposals and manuscripts are peer reviewed.
For more information, or if you’d like to discuss a proposal, please contact: :
Dr Irene Blayer, Series Editor, iblayer@brocku.c
Dr Dulce Scott, Series Editor, dmscott@anderson.edu
Dr Philip Dunshea, Acquisitions Editor , p.dunshea@peterlang.com.
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Deadline for Submissions, February 1, 2021
Biographers International Organization (BIO)
is pleased to announce the inauguration of the
Frances “Frank” Rollin Fellowship
$2000 for an Exceptional Biography-in-Progress
about an African American Subject
Named for the first African American biographer, the Frances “Frank” Rollin Fellowship awards $2,000 to an author working on a biographical work about an African American figure or figures whose story provides a significant contribution to our understanding of the Black experience. This fellowship also provides the recipient with a year’s membership in BIO, registration to the annual BIO conference, and publicity through BIO’s marketing channels.
The Rollin Fellowship aims to remediate the disproportionate scarcity and even suppression of Black lives and voices in the broad catalog of published biography. This fellowship reflects not only BIO’s commitment to supporting working biographers but to encouraging diversity in the field.
Deadline for applications: February 1, 2021.
To apply, go to https://biographersinternational.org/award/the-frances-frank-rollin-fellowship/#apply
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