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ACLA Conferences and Calls for Papers Listings

The ACLA maintains a listing of conferences and calls for papers, aside from the ACLA's Annual Meeting. Please email the ACLA to post conference information.

The ACLA also has links to other conference lists. This list is not meant to be exhaustive. Please email the ACLA with information and addresses of other websites that list conferences or calls for papers related to comparative literature.

December 2009

“Space and Identity: The Politics of Expression in Latin America”, a conference hosted by The Latin American Graduate Student Association (LAGO) of Tulane University will be held December 4-5, 2009 in New Orleans, Louisiana. The history of Latin America has maintained a legacy of struggle at the intersection of space and identity. The manifestation of this struggle has been expressed in various forms ranging from political, social mobilization, artistic expression, literary movements, and multifaceted trends in music and popular culture. The keynote speaker will be Professor Jean Franco of Columbia University.

"Living on the Edge: Perceptions of Liminality in Classical Antiquity", a graduate student conference hosted by the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, will be held April 10, 2010. This conference seeks papers examining manifestations of liminality in the classical world. Just as liminal settings bring together disparate aspects and entities, we invite submissions that use material, artistic, historical, literary, or other types of evidence to address situations exhibiting ambiguity and transcendence. Graduate students interested in presenting a paper of 15 minutes should submit an abstract (300 words or less) to colloquiuminlimine@gmail.com. Please email your abstract as a Word file by December 11, 2009. Notifications will be sent in January. Questions may be addressed to conference chair Michael Goyette at colloquiuminlimine@gmail.com.

A workshop on "Philosophy and Kafka" will be held at the 12th international conference of ISSEI (International Society for the Study of European Ideas) at Cankaya University, Ankara, Turkey on August 2-6, 2010. The theme of the conference is “THOUGHT IN SCIENCE AND FICTION.” Possible concerns of the workshop include, but are not confined to, the following: Kafka-commentaries (Adorno, Benjamin, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Agamben, Arendt, Anders, Blanchot, Bataille, Cixous); examination of Kafka's writings from a specific philosophical perspective; relationship of Kafka's stories and novels with more obviously philosophical aspects of his Nachlass, diaries, and letters; “philosophical” affinities or divergences between Kafka's writings and writings by other figures in literature; philosophical themes in Kafka's literature. Proposals (500 words) or entire papers (3000 words, including notes) may be sent to Brendan Moran at bmoran@ucalgary.ca until December 15, 2009.

"Significant Readings", is the 4th Annual Graduate Student Conference, hosted by the Department of French Studies at Louisiana State University on March 12-13, 2010. The conference aims to explore the continued importance of signs and symbols in French literature and linguistics. We welcome abstracts of 250-300 words for 15-minute papers (in English or French) discussing any aspect of the conference topic. Please sent your abstract, including your paper title and contact information to frenchconference@gmail.com by December 15, 2009.

The Turning Point: Crisis & Disaster, the 17th Annual Charles F. Fraker Conference will be held March 25-27, 2010 at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The impetus of this conference is to discuss the rethorical use (and/or abuse), of this word by examining how ideas of crisis and disasters have been thought and expressed through aesthetics, history, and theory. Through the examinations of textual representations and textual manifestations of crisis, we seek to resuscitate the idea of crisis as a turning point that requires judgement and discernment and whose implications extend to: Culture, Identity, Sexuality, Politics, Economics, Nature, Ethnics, Religion, Representations of Death and Life, History and its Constructions, Technology. Presentations may be given in English, French, Italian, Portuguese or Spanish and should be related to Francophone, Hispanic, Lusophone or Italian cultures. Please send abstracts (250-300 words) to fraker2010abstracts@ctools.umich.edu by December 21, 2009. For further information please contact the Organizing Committee at fraker2010@umich.edu.

January 2010

The Center for Jewish Studies, Harvard University invites applications for the "2010-2011 Harry Starr Fellowship in Judaica". This year's theme is "Modern Hebrew/Jewish Literatures." The topic includes, but is not limited to, the relationship of modern Hebrew literature to other modern literatures; literature as an expression of Jewish identity; the relationship of modern non-Hebrew Jewish literatures to Hebraic and other sources; post-Holocaust Jewish literatures. Projects that place their subject in historical context or employ a comparative perspective are especially welcome. Junior faculty are especially encouraged to apply. Ph.D. degree required. For more information please visit http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~cjs/ or contact cjs@fas.harvard.edu. Submissions are due on January 4, 2010.

Weltliteratur: Crossing Boundaries", an interdisciplinary conference on world literature hosted by The PhD in Literature Program at the University of Notre Dame, will be held March 19, 2010. This conference is dedicated to considering literature as a space that extends beyond historical, linguistic, and traditional disciplinary boundaries and welcomes papers that approach literature as an alternative and/or minority discourse across cultural, political, national, institutional and social limitations. Submissions may address, but are not limited to, the following ways in which literature crosses boundaries: Transmission, Translation, Transference, Transaction, Trangression. The conference organizers invite abstracts for individual 15-20 minute papers on any related theme. 300 word abstracts should be submitted by January 15, 2010 to gbusl@nd.edu.

"Mimesis, Ethics and Style", hosted by the Department of Finnish Language and Literature, University of Helsinki, Finland, will be held August 25- 27, 2010. The conference aims to bring together the interconnected though often separately studied questions of style and mimesis and open up a new kind of discussion not only on the relationship between style and representation but also on the ways literary texts engage ethics and ideology. We invite Professors, Scholars and Doctoral Students to send proposals for original twenty-minute papers. Please e-mail proposals for papers (max. 500 words) with a short CV or a biographical summary to mimesisconference@gmail.com by January 31st, 2010.

February 2010

Voices from the In-Between: Aporias, Reverberations, and Audiences, a conference hosted by the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, will be held April 16-18, 2010. This conference seeks to foster a space to discuss, problematize, and rethink possible ways of approaching the elusive concept of the in-between, as it relates to various modes of cultural production and global phenomena. The committee invites proposals that question how specific objects of study resist clear-cut categorization or placement in genres or domains, abstracts that theorize on the potentiality of the in-between, as well as case studies that investigate the diverse meanings and manifestations of "in-between-ness." Please submit abstracts of 300-500 words to culturesoftheinbetween2010@gmail.com by February 1, 2010.

The VII Annual SOCIAL THEORY FORUM (STF) on "Critical Social Theory: Freud & Lacan For the 21st Century " is an annual conference organized by the University of Massachusetts, Boston in order to creatively explore, promote and publish cross-disciplinary social theory—and to develop new, integrative theoretical structures and practices. The 2010 meeting welcomes submissions in feminist theory, queer theory, literary criticism, social linguistics, conversational analysis, philosophy of mind, etc. that critically engage and interrogate Freud or Lacan. Conference organizers ask authors to submit a one page-page abstract as an email attachment to SocialTheoryAbstracts@libraryofsocialscience.com no later than February 9, 2010.

The 2010 Susan Sontag Prize for Translation is a $5,000 grant which will be awarded to a proposed work of literary translation from Swedish, Norwegian, Danish or Icelandic into English and is open to anyone under the age of 30. The translation must fall under the category of fiction or letters, and the applicant will propose his or her own translation project. The project should be manageable for a five-month period of work, as the grant will be awarded in May 2010, and the translation must be completed by October 2010. Acceptable proposals include a novella, a play, a collection of short stories or poems, or a collection of letters that have literary import. Preference will be given to works that have not been previously translated. All applications must be submitted via regular mail to the Foundation’s P.O. Box address, which will be posted online at www.susansontag.org// on December 15, 2009. All application materials must be received by February 13, 2010.

Insects and Texts: Spinning Webs of Wonder Explora International Conference will be held May 4-5, 2010 at the Toulouse Natural History Museum/CAS (UTM). This conference proposes to examine man's fascination with the world of insects as reflected not only in the rich history of entomological research, from amateur or professional collecting to scientific expeditions, but also in more artistic forms of expression - myth, literature, painting, photography, cinema and music. Whether insects stimulate man's curiosity or inspire fear, whether parallels or contrasts are seen between human society and the astonishing skills of insects, this conference aims to explore the relation between man and insects. Through the study of either scientific and technological developments in entomology, or artistic concerns with insects, we invite specialists of entomology and/or the arts to reconsider the relationship of man to nature through the magnifying glass of an entomologist. Papers that offer an interdisciplinary approach on science and art are especially welcome. Please send abstracts (300 words, attached as a .doc-file) and a short biographical note to exploraentomology@gmail.com by February 15, 2010.

The City and the Ocean: Urbanity, (Im)migration, Memory, and Imagination, the 4th International Conference of the Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences will be held 16-17 October 2010 at National Sun Yat-sen University, 80424 Kaohsiung , Taiwan. Papers in the conference examine the problematics of urban identities in cities at the ocean in the context of memory, (im)migration, and imagination in order to offer interpretations on the multiple and parallel versions of the city today. Abstracts of papers in 200 words with CV are invited by 15 February 2010 to Professor I-Chun Wang at chsc705@mail.nsysu.edu.tw.

The 4th International Conference of IBERIAN AND SLAVONIC CULTURES IN CONTACT AND COMPARISON: “Res Publica(s)” will be held between 13 and 15 May 2010 at the University of Lisbon. The conference intends to promote an Iberian-Slavonic debate on the differing republican concepts and traditions, as well as the corresponding cultural imprints. Abstracts should be of maximum 250 words with 5 keywords for 20 min. Papers should be submitted using the attached pre-registration form. The deadline for submission of abstracts is 15 February 2010. Please visit our website or contact us at compares.ibs5@gmail.com for further information.

The 5th Annual Graduate Student Comparative Poetics Symposium will host a symposium in comparative poetics titled “Poetry of the Americas”. We wish to explore how poets express and interpret the idea of “America” and “the Americas,” as lands and nations, in conjunction with political and cultural changes.   We are pleased to invite papers that offer questions, challenges, elaborations, and interpretations of this year’s theme.  We are interested in papers that work with poetry in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French, as well as other languages.  We are especially interested in proposals that take a comparative or interdisciplinary approach. Paper proposals should include a title, 250-word abstract, brief biography (including department affiliation and areas of interest) and contact information.  Please include at least one close reading in your paper and send us attachments of the poems before the symposium. Please send proposals via email attachment, as well as any questions, to poetryoftheamericas@gmail.com by February 19, 2010.

March 2010

Transverse, the graduate journal of the University of Toronto’s Centre for Comparative Literature welcomes academic papers, literary reviews, creative writing, and art on the topic of Censorship. Critical essays should be between 3000 and 4000 words, in Microsoft Word, MLA format with appropriate citations. Literary reviews can be on any work relating to the topic. We are looking for submissions 500-800 words in length, with publication information attached. Contributors must be graduate students at the time of submission. Please direct all documents and inquiries to transversejournal@gmail.com by March 1, 2010.

The Editorial Board of PMLA invites essays that focus on work as an analytic category. They may address any literary or cultural genre, historical period, or region and may take any theoretical perspective. Submissions must be by MLA memebers and meet the other requirements in the statement of editorial policy. Manuscripts should be submitted by March 01, 2010.

The Center for Renaissance & Baroque Studies at the University of Maryland, is pleased to announce “Re-mapping the Renaissance: Exchange between Early Modern Islam and Europe,” a 3-week summer seminar for college and university teachers funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. From June 13 through July 2, 2010, selected scholars will explore the ways in which the European Renaissance was shaped by interaction between Europe and the rest of the world, in particular, the world of Islam. Participants will enjoy lectures, seminar discussions, and visits to the Library of Congress and the National Gallery of Art, both in Washington DC. For additional information, please visit our website or contact the Center for Renaissance & Baroque Studies at crbs@umd.edu.

"Found in Translation", is an international conference on translation and multiculturalism jointly organized by the University of Malaya's Department of English, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, the Faculty of Languages and Linguistics and the Malaysian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (MACLALS). The conference will take place at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Malaya, 23-25 July 2010. Deadline for abstracts is March 07, 2010.

International Conference on Comparative Literature, will be held November 20, 2010 at Soochow University (Waishuanghsi Campus), Taipei, Taiwan. Prospective contributors should send the title of the proposed paper, 500-600 word abstract in either English or Chinese, and a brief CV (containing name, academic experience, institutional affiliation, e-mail address, postal address, and telephone number) as an e-mail attachment to Department of English, Soochow University at liaowei@scu.edu.tw by March 15, 2010.

“Articulation(s)”, a workshop hosted by the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) will be held in Amsterdam, Netherlands March 22-24, 2010. In this workshop articulation(s) is presented in relation to four distinct themes that we will (re)articulate and/or interrogate to see whether they help us express the relationships between theories, discipline, and object(s) from our various fields.

"Postcolonial Praxis: Theories, Cultural Practices and Movements for the Global South", invites participants from other parts of the Philippines and from other former colonies /countries in the “Global South” (i.e., “underdeveloped , “developing”, “Third World”, decolonizing societies) to re-examine and to re-territorialize Anglo-American, English, American, French, German, Dutch, Hispanic, Latin American Studies, programs and projects. The conference aims to provide a venue for the construction of a general programmatic of postcolonial knowledge-production and other postcolonial cultural practices which can be disseminated through formal educational institutions as curricula and courses; informal/alternative educational groups; professional organizations; mass media; computer-aided technologies, and through cultural networks. Please submit panel and paper/multimedia proposals to the Conference Convenor: “Professor Priscelina Patajo-Legasto" to pplegasto@gmail.com by March 30, 2010.

April 2010

"Sjani" ("The Thoughts"), an annual peer-reviewed international journal of literary theory and comparative literature published by Shota Rustaveli Institute of Georgian Literature and Georgian Comparative Literature Association, seeks submissions for an upcoming issue. The publication welcomes articles covering philology, literature, literary theory, criticism, comparative studies, culture and aesthetics. Articles can be written in Georgian, English, German, Russian or French languages. Please see the citing style for scientific publications of Shota Rustaveli Institute of Georgian Literature at http://www.litinstituti.ge/english/cit-ingl-stile.htm. For further information please contact maillit@litinstituti.ge. Submissions are due on April 01, 2010.

"Conceptualising Literary History: Foundations of Arabic Literature, 7th-17th Centuries," a conference held in cooperation with the Universite de Paris VIII-Saint Denis, will be held April 16-18, 2010, at Yale University. The conference invites participants to identify and examine the foundations that Arabic literature laid down from the 7th to 17th centuries, across the whole geographical area to which the practice of Arabic literature spread. The suggested emphasis is on the social and cultural interactions that led to the laying down of new points of departure, regardless of whether these proved durable or ephemeral. The aim is to find a new framework in which Arabic literary history is no longer seen as impervious for centuries to vernacular and foreign interference. Issues to be addressed are: the elaboration of the `arabiyya; the consciousness of the uptake into Arabic literature of the Indian, Middle Persian and Ancient Greek heritages; the imagined community of Arabic; the relationship between mainstream Arabic literature and other Arabic literatures; the relationship between Arabic and non-Arabic literatures; and the emerging and vanishing of Arabic genres.

The American Studies Association of Turkey, invites proposals that consider the art of language as a cultural expression, broadly conceived. We particularly encourage abstracts which incorporate transdisciplinary explorations of the subject, and welcome submissions from any branch of American Studies. The time allowance for all presentations is 20 minutes. An additional 10 minutes will be provided for discussion. Proposals for papers, panels, performances, exhibits, and other modes of creative expression should be sent to Tanfer Emin Tunc asat2007@gmail.com and should consist of a 250-300 word abstract in English, as well as a 1­2 paragraph biographical description for each participant. Deadline for submission of proposals is April 30, 2010. More information will be posted on our website as it becomes available.

May 2010

The Other City: Emergent Urban Cultures, a collected volume edited by Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek, Tutun Mukherjee, Christopher Larkosh, Agata Anna Lisiak, and Asuncón López-Varela Azcaráte, invites papers to be considered for publication. The volume is considered to be published pending peer review once the ms is complete by Cambridge University Press India. Contributors to the volume examine urban cultures in a global context but beyond the conventionally limited and so-called A-list of global cities. Among others, contributors investigate the phenomenon of the second city, a space that defines itself in opposition to the first city and, at the same time, embraces its empowering international/global identity. Please submit papers (5500-6000 words, including a works cited in the MLA style with endnotes) to Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek at clcweb@purdue.edu by May 31, 2010.

August 2010

The XIXth Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA) will be held August 15-21, 2010, at Chung-Ang University in Seoul, Korea.

October 2010

"Europe in its Own Eyes / Europe in the Eyes of the Other", a three-day international conference on representations of European identity, will be held October 1-3, 2010, at the University of Guelph, Ontario. The conference is intended to be as wide-ranging as possible in addressing the manner in which European identity has been and continues to be represented, including European self-representations as well representations by others, whether 'internal' or 'external' to the entity that is Europe. The deadline for submissions of special sessions is January 15, 2010. For the general sessions, prospective delegates are invited to submit an abstract (250 words) by February 15, 2010.

GENERAL CALLS FOR PAPERS

Intertexts, a journal of comparative and theoretical reflection, publishes articles that employ innovative approaches to explore relations between literary and other texts, be they literary, historical, theoretical, philosophical, or social. In particular, the editors are looking for work which engages issues on a sufficiently theoretical or comparative level to interest people in a variety of disciplines. Hybrid methodologies that combine elements from a range of disciplines are encouraged. For more information and for submission details, please visit the journal's website at http://www.intertexts.org/id2.html.

Symposium, a quarterly journal in modern foreign literatures, welcomes contributions pertinent to modern languages and literatures. Research on authors, themes, periods, genres, works, and theory, often through comparative studies, is regularly featured. For more information and for submission details, please send an email to sym@heldref.org.

Please visit these sites for more calls for papers:
 

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