McGill.CA / Department of English / Research

CFPs/Announcements

Calls for papers (CFP) and other announcements related to publication and research dissemination opportunities for students are listed below by year. CFPs are categorized by for posted for graduates and undergraduates but see also open calls.

For further CFPs, see the call for papers website, hosted by the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania.

Undergraduate

ACLA Undergraduate Seminar

From Heinrich von Kleist’s “The Earthquake in Chile” to Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, literature teems with warnings about the perils of “bad reading”: when characters who over-identify with fantasies, archetypes, and plotlines face dire consequences.

This seminar will offer an opportunity for comparing representations of “bad reading” along with the situations and repercussions they generate.

What are the cultural, intersectional, geopolitical, and historical vectors of bad reading in and beyond imperial nations and their canons?

Please fill out all necessary fields to propose a paper for the Undergraduate Seminar at the 2024 Annual Meeting. Abstracts must be received by November 13, 2023.

Submitting a paper here does NOT guarantee acceptance of your paper to the ACLA 2024 Annual Meeting.

NeMLA Undergraduate Forum 

The Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) is hosting its 6th Annual Undergraduate Forum this year in Boston, MA, from March 7-10th. The Undergraduate Forum offers a unique research and professionalization opportunity for undergraduates in the humanities. Accepted students will present their research to leading scholars in their field in the form of a poster presentation. They will also receive a discounted registration rate, as well as mentorship on writing and structuring their presentations.

Undergraduates are invited to submit a 300-word abstract, a bibliography, and a 100-word bio by November 15. Students can receive mentorship on writing and structuring their presentations.

For guidelines and example abstracts from previous years, please consult the NeMLA website.

For questions and further details, please contact Undergradforum [at] nemla.org.

CFS: The Paper Shell Review

The Paper Shell Review is the University of Maryland, College Park's only undergraduate journal of essays on literary topics, and we are looking for captivating essays of a scholarly, critical nature to publish in our Spring 2024 edition.

Our theme this year is Through Reflection, Rationality, and Rememory. While it is suggested that students submit critical essays that align with this theme, it is not mandatory. Undergraduate students from any accredited institution of higher education may submit papers to The Paper Shell Review. Submission by a single author should not exceed three essays. Submit papers through our Google form. Submissions for this year's issue will be accepted until Wednesday, December 6th, 2023, at 11:59 pm (EST).

  • All papers must be double-spaced, in Times New Roman font, numbered, and formatted with one-inch margins.
  • Papers should not exceed 20 pages, but exceptions may be made for essays of superb quality.
  • Essays must follow the Modern Language Association style guidelines as defined in the MLA Guidelines for Writers of Research Papers (latest edition). Documents must be removed of the author's name, institution name, and all other identifiers.

The Google form will ask for the author's full name, undergraduate institution, current year (freshman, sophomore, junior, or senior), paper title, and contact information (e-mail, phone number). The journal is published in print in April and online in May on the UMD English Department website.

CFA: Lang Family Text in Performance Award

The Lang Family Text in Performance Award was established in 2011 by Kim N. Lang, BA ’89, to enhance and promote the appreciation and study of theatrical texts. The award provides an opportunity for undergraduate students in the Department of English to attend plays in performance at a Canadian venue such as the Stratford Festival as an adjunct to course work at McGill. Awards will partially or fully offset the cost of theatre tickets and corollary educational activities, as well as lodging, meals, and transportation to and from the venue.

Eligibility: Awards are open to undergraduate students in all streams in the Department of English. Students in their final year of studies are not eligible unless they are continuing in the MA program.

Value: The value of the award varies from year to year. Minimum: $750

Application: Applications should be submitted via email as a pdf document addressed to Prof. Sean Carney, Associate Professor, Department of English: sean.carney [at] mcgill.ca. The application should include the following:

  • Statement describing the applicant’s interest in specific plays, the theatre at which the plays are being produced, and their relationship to previously completed or forthcoming course work.
  • Budget giving an estimate of costs for tickets, lodging, transportation and other expenses.
  • Letter of recommendation from a professor (submitted separately).

Criteria: Applicants who establish a link between one or more plays being staged and previously completed or forthcoming course work will receive stronger consideration. If only an indirect link exists between the play being staged and relevant course work, the applicant should establish sufficient reasons for attending the play; such reasons might include enhancing knowledge of the author, period, or genre. Applicants who have applied for and/or secured independent funding to study or work at one of the theatres mentioned above will receive particular attention, especially if the work or study is complementary to, or coextensive with, the purpose of the Lang Family Text in Performance Award.

Deadline: 19 April 2024

Graduate

CFP: Ninth Annual Post45 Graduate Symposium

Concordia University and McGill University
March 22nd-23rd, 2024
Submission Deadline: December 1st, 2023

Keynote Faculty: Mary Esteve (Concordia) and Alexander Manshel (McGill)

Post45 seeks graduate-level works-in-progress related to post-1945 literature, media, and culture. We welcome submissions that expand our conception of post-1945 literary and cultural histories, boundaries, and future trajectories, or place them in a comparative, transnational, or hemispheric frame. We also welcome contributions that generate traction on the urgency of intersections of race, gender, sexuality to post-45 studies, especially any engagements and conceptualizations with futurity (e.g. future of the fields, alternative futures, dystopia, utopia, gender abolitionism, afro-futurism, anxieties of the future, queer futures, digital futures, climate crisis, altered states of consciousness).

Works-in-progress may range from conference papers to articles or dissertation chapter drafts. We welcome works-in-progress from disciplines that don’t center the literary and also those that take non-traditional forms. All works-in-progress will be pre-circulated two weeks in advance of the conference date. This will allow participants to consider papers carefully and to generate thoughtful critical feedback—a benefit often absent in traditional conference formats. Each individual paper will also receive feedback from a faculty respondent and 30 minutes of discussion amongst all symposium participants. In addition to paper workshops, the symposium will feature a keynote address and a roundtable discussion concerning "the future of the field" led by Mary Esteve and Alexander Manshel.

As Concordia and McGill are both located in Montreal, we are delighted that ACLA’s annual conference will be held at the Palais de Congres, in Montreal March 14th-17th. We hope this allows participants to attend both the symposium and conference during the same stay.

Where participants are not able to secure adequate funding from their institutions, there will be some financial support for international travel that will be allocated based on need. While this support will not cover all related expenses, we are also hoping to establish a housing network of graduate students in Montreal who can host out-of-town participants.

Post45 is a collective of scholars working on American literature and culture since 1945. The group was founded in 2006 and has met annually since to discuss diverse new work in the field. The Post45 Graduate Symposium meets annually to discuss works in progress. Now in its ninth year, it has convened in the past at University of Washington, Northwestern, UC Irvine, Rutgers and Princeton University, Michigan State University and the University of Michigan, Yale University, UC Berkeley and Stanford University, and UNC Chapel Hill.

Submissions:

Those interested should submit 250- to 300-word abstracts through the following Google Form by December 1st, 2023.

Note: the form will collect your name, academic affiliation, a brief academic biography, paper title, and an arbitrary four-digit code of your choosing (e.g., 6459). To facilitate the anonymized submission process, it will also require you to upload your abstract, titled only with the same four-digit code. This abstract should not include your name or your institution’s name. The form will also ask you to indicate your interest in the housing network and need for funding support.

CFP: 29th Annual History in the Making Graduate Conference

April 5-6, 2024
Department of History
Concordia University
Tiohtiá:ke/Montréal

Submissions due: February 16, 2024 [hitmconcordia [at] gmail.com]

Commonplace Post-Interruption: the ‘return to normal’?

Since March 2020, we have witnessed an on-going social desire to ‘go back to normal.’ This echoes the calls for a return to normal following the First World War and the 1918-1920 flu epidemic. The years following, however, saw the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the United States, a global rise in fascism, an age of excess, and financial irresponsibility that led to a global depression and another global war. As we emerge from the global experience of COVID-19 and are pushed to resume our daily lives despite the virus continuing to have high infection rates, the pandemic experience itself has become commonplace. Accordingly, to understand if a ‘return to normal’ is possible, we must first investigate normalcy itself.

To celebrate the 29th edition of the History in the Making, an annual graduate history conference hosted by the History department at Concordia University, we are seeking scholarship from all fields that explores ‘normal’ as a concept, and places it in its historical context. We encourage you to ask: how are normalcy and abnormalcy historically constructed and what are their implications?

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

  • How is normalcy constructed in partnership with, or in opposition to, historical knowledge and experiences?

  • How do everyday objects and material culture contribute to the construction and deconstruction of normalcy?

  • How does normalcy highlight or erase trauma and violence and what role have emotions historically played in what becomes accepted as normal?

  • What is “normal” from the perspective of a state? How has the state historically enforced their desired normalcy? Who has historically opposed the state, why, and what were the outcomes?

  • How do sociohistorical systems—and systems of oppression such as race, class, heteropatriarchy, and ableism among others—dictate normalcy?

  • What do histories of health, medicine, disability, and disability activism have to teach us about the construction of a “normal” or “able” body?

  • How have uprooted or marginalised communities, such as those in diaspora, constructed normalcy on their terms? How have they fought against status quos that harmed their communities?

  • How have diverse experiences of gender and sexuality contributed to disrupting normality? How have they been regulated and policed?

  • As the Anthropocene disrupts previous understandings of “normal” earth-system processes, resource extraction, and human-non-human relations, what alternatives can climate and environmental histories reveal?

  • Is “normal” a human construct? If so, how is it at odds with the “normal” ways that ecosystems, ecologies, and non-humans operate?

  • What relationship does normalcy have with tradition? What is traditional knowledge and how has it been incorporated or ignored in historical study?

  • What social and/or political movements emerge out of a desire to return to prior lifeways and social conditions? How is ‘normal’ constructed under fascism, settler colonialism, and other systems of oppression?

  • How have the arts influenced ideas of normalcy and how have they stood in opposition to it? Moreover, what role does nostalgia play in challenging or sustaining social norms?

  • Under capitalism, what is “normal” and how is it enforced? What is the labour movement’s role in challenging the status quo? How does it achieve or fail to achieve its goals?

  • How are academic disciplines, departments, and theories targeted for challenging normalised societal expectations and injustices? How should we as emerging scholars respond?

All scholarship across all fields that explores norms and normativity in historical contexts is encouraged.

Presenters will be given 15 minutes on an assigned panel with a moderator to present their paper. A discussion period will follow the conclusion of each panel.

We invite paper and panel proposals for the 2024 History in the Making Conference. Please send a 300-word abstract and a maximum 250-word biography to hitmconcordia [at] gmail.com by February 16th, 2024, at 11:59 p.m. Please include the subject line “2024 H.I.T.M. Conference” and your name. Abstract and biography should be formatted in 12-point Times New Roman in a .doc or .pdf file.

CFP: Unruly Borders

March 1-3, 2024

“Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants.” Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera

The English Graduate Students Association of the University of Ottawa is excited to review your submissions for our 2024 Conference

Borders demarcate relations, often serving to protect people, environments and institutions from violence and prejudice. Whereas borders can create a sense of communal belonging and protect marginalized members of society, they can likewise insulate privilege and obscure the disenfranchised. By necessity, the border-defining process produces archives completed by liminal differentiation according to the archiver.

Neither archives nor borders are static; they are in a constant state of flux. Archives attempt to document, classify, and account for our world which changes just as frequently. How do we critically engage with the contradictions of joyful belonging and violent oppression that constitute the borders of our lives? What are the effects of these imaginary yet tangible divisions on our ways of knowing, and when is it time to modify, enforce, or reject them? Ultimately, how might we (re)construct borders with empathy and approach archival productions of difference with compassion?

Works may address but are not limited to: 

  • (Un)natural Topography: 
    • ‘protected’ Ecosystems
    • liminal spaces
    • human-made enclosures
    • cartography
  • Genre:
    • reality & fiction
    • gatekeeping
    • academization
  • Gender:
    • (un)paid labour
    • the domestic sphere
    • non/normativity
  • Autonomy & Nationalism:
    • settler colonialism
    • policing identity
    • bodies & pathologization
    • segregation
    • gentrification

In an effort to resist definitive borders, works in any narrative form, and concerning any era, are welcome. This includes spoken, written, recorded, and remembered narratives of academic and non-academic origin. Presentations of 15-20 minutes are encouraged. The EGSA’s goal is to make space for dynamic, interdisciplinary conversations.

“For an incomplete archive to speak with the fullness of a voice, it has to be created, not out of nothing but out of the debris of information, on the very site of the ruins, the remains and traces left behind by those who passed away. For this to happen ... [i]t must provide them with a home or place where they might be at peace.” Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics

This conference will be held on the unceded lands of the Anishinaabe Algonquin People in the settler colonial city of Ottawa. Panels will be multi-modal to ensure that individuals from all parts of humanity can contribute, participate, and learn together.

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words to uottawa.conference [at] gmail.com by 15 February 2024. Please include a biography of no more than 300 words with your submission.

CFP: The Nineteenth Annual Yale University American Art Graduate Symposium

Theme: Condition
Date: April 6, 2024
Keynote Speaker: Dr. Monica Bravo, Assistant Professor of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University

What do we mean when we speak of condition? Condition rhetorically encompasses vast references: an immediate state (flaking on a canvas reveals the poor condition of a painting), a manipulable nature (leather must be conditioned before use), the overarching atmosphere (weather conditions or the human condition), and a temporal position (the conditional tense). It also implies intimate ties with the body, the condition of the individual and the collective. To condition a body involves training towards optimal health, whereas a body with a condition must grapple with illness. Social conditions—semiotic systems, political hegemony, nation-state borders—prescribe and constrain our capacity to move through the world while we, in turn, condition ourselves and our surroundings to enact desired states of being, living, and working. In the words of Tina Campt, condition enacts the tense of the “will have had to happen.” Art can imagine multiple ideas of the past and of contingent futures. Art can embody transformations that must take place to bring about a liveable world or remake the past to claim a different present.

The Nineteenth Annual Yale University American Art Graduate Symposium asks: what possibilities might thinking through condition offer in response to urgent calls for new forms of community, meaning, and direction amidst environmental, social, political, economic, and public health crises? What conditions illuminate and/or complicate ongoing relationships to history and the archives? What are the material enactments of conditioning? As a tool in building worlds, realities, and relations, how can we think through the multifacetedness of condition(-ing, -al, -ed, pre-)?

Condition reflects the conference’s conception of the Americas as a dynamic and expansive geography that is not limited to one nation-state. As such, we welcome submissions exploring art, architecture, visual, and material culture across all of the Americas, including the Caribbean, North, Central, and South America. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Activation of the conditional tense as an art historical method
  • Engagements with conditions of being, whether that be human, work, social and/or artistic conditions
  • Durational performance and the conditioning of the body, including as it relates to health and/or illness
  • Conditions needed for particular outcomes
  • Weather and manipulated atmospheric conditions
  • Conditioning as it pertains to behavior, change, and acceptance
  • Materials used by artists and makers that require conditioning
  • Condition assessment, condition reports, condition and attribution, condition and monetary value
  • Speculative and conditional world-(re)building from archival speculation to digital art

Interested participants are invited to submit an abstract of no more than 350 words, along with a CV, to americanist.symposium [at] gmail.com by January 31, 2024. Accepted participants will be notified in mid-February. We are planning for a day-long, in-person symposium, with accommodations provided for all speakers.

CFP: BHPC Colloquium Call for Papers

Deadline January 20th 2024 

The University of Toronto’s Book History & Print Culture program is hosting its annual Graduate Student Colloquium in March 2024. The Colloquium is a multidisciplinary event which encourages graduate students, keynote speakers and independent scholars to present their research in a series of panels. The Colloquium will host two separate events in order to accommodate both in person and online participation.   

We invite submissions from graduate students, independent scholars, artists, and emerging academics working in any discipline, period, and geographical region.  

This Year’s theme is “The Book in Global Perspectives: Networks and Exchanges”   

Our interactions with books situate us in the global communicative networks of which books are a part. The book as an idea has traveled across time and space and contributed to the way in which we see the world. These global networks of exchange have also shaped our typical notions of what constitutes the book.  

Thinking of the book in global terms also complicates our idea of what constitutes the book. We welcome broad interpretations of the theme, as well as discussions of diverse materials such as manuscripts, illustrations, maps, films, photographic plates, or digital documents through historical or bibliographic approaches. We encourage you to think about such material in transhistorical and transcultural contexts.   

Topics and Approaches may include, but are not limited to:   

  •  The Book and Cartography
  •  The Book as and in Transnational Spaces
  •  Diasporic Circulations of The Book
  •  The Book and The Literature of Travel
  •  The Book and The Nation
  •  The Book in Colonial and Anti-colonial contexts
  •  The Book in Memory Studies
  •  The Book and the Circulation of Print Technologies
  •  Narrating Stories Beyond The Book
  •  Histories of Contestation of The Book
  •  The Book and The World In The Digital Age 

The deadline for paper and panel proposals is January 20th 2024.  

How to Apply:   

You can fill out the submission form linked on our website. We accept individual abstract submissions as well as group panel proposals. Please note if you would like to submit a proposal for a panel, please individually fill out the submission forms and state in the abstract your proposed panel members and topic.     

Information about the Event:   

Date:  

Online Event – March 22nd 2024
In person Event – March 23rd 2024   

Location:
Massey College, University of Toronto,
4 Devonshire Pl,
Toronto, ON   

If you have any questions or concerns please feel free to reach out to bhpccolloquium2024 [at] gmail.com   

CFP: New Sonic Futures for Canadian Poetry, Spoken Web Symposium 2024 

The poetry reading holds a unique place in poetic discourse; it is both textual and performative, permanent and ephemeral. Poetry readings are the key site for the dissemination of poetic works—a permanent textual object—but as performances, they add non-semantic layers such as breath, hesitation, bodily movement, and ambient sound that indicate the emotional and cognitive engagement of both reader and listener. Vocalic elements of pitch, timbre, and tempo carry supplementary, non-textual information which differ according to each poet, elements which are lost when encountering only the written word. The proliferation of centers such as Penn Sound, Ubu Web, and Spoken Web indicate the importance of preserving this work, as they seek to subvert this ephemerality by developing sound archives and repositories of work like sonic poetry. Sonic poetry, as a form, is resultingly both old and new; although it dates back into the 50s with the rise of Beat poetry, because of the precarity of the form, sonic approaches to poetry feel new and futuristic in our present moment.

This panel seeks submissions of sonic poetry performances, either pre-recorded or to be recorded during the session, that will serve as a discussion point for the future of sonic poetry. What is gained in the transition from text to sonic performance? How might we typologize different reading styles? What is revealed when our performance contradicts the scansion of the page? How does the poet acknowledge or interact with the audience, and does this affect the experience of the poetic work? And, importantly, how can the registers of music and sound collaborate with poetry to create sonic poetry, a genre that we conceive of as both old and new? These are questions that we seek to consider through the performances of this panel.    

Please submit abstracts of 300-400 words, along with a short biographical note, to Kelly Baron and Andrew Whiteman at k.whitehead [at] mail.utoronto.caand a_hitema [at] live.concordia.ca by January 12, 2024.   

CFP: F[R]ICTION, University of Toronto English, Graduate Conference

Conference date: April 26, 2024 | Abstracts due: December 17, 2023

In Anna Tsing’s ethnography Friction (2005), Tsing offers “friction” as a metaphor for thinking about global connection: “A wheel turns because of its encounter with the road; spinning in the air it goes nowhere. Rubbing two sticks together produces heat and light; one stick alone is just a stick. As a metaphorical image, friction reminds us that heterogenous and unequal encounters can lead to new arrangements of culture and power.”

Friction, defined by the OED as the “action of chafing or rubbing,” is not always benign. Our contemporary moment bears witness to devastating frictions such as the atrocities of international conflict and the erosion of our environment due to anthropogenic impact. Friction, as a material and abstract force, can be a source of pain, violence, and suffering. Yet, under some circumstances, might friction also be a site of relationality and world-making? Amber Jamilla Musser’s Sensual Excess (2018) invites us to think about “the pleasures of friction” in relation to black lesbian feminism, suggesting that “the surface ... offers a space to think toward brown jouissance and its alternate choreography of pleasures, relationality, and self-making.” Marquis Bey’s critique of gender politics in Cistem Failure (2022) similarly explores the relational possibilities of friction. Bey posits a theory of “nonsanctioned coming- togethers,” arguing that “coalition’s nonexclusivity means that we cast no one out, that no one is disposable, that in the rubbing and generative friction in the work is the always present possibility of one being changed, radically, by the rubbing and friction.”

How do we work with and against the concept of friction in fiction? How is friction narratively and formally represented in literature? How do we encounter the text as a material object? In what ways do our social identities rub against our readings? How do we shape texts? How do texts shape us? How does friction wear us down? What kinds of imaginative possibilities might friction enable?

The Graduate English Association at the University of Toronto invites conference papers that consider friction in fiction and other literatures. We welcome submissions across disciplines. Approaches may include but are not limited to:

  • Aesthetics
  • Affect theory
  • Archival research
  • Creative practices
  • Critical race theory
  • Disability studies
  • Environmental humanities
  • Embodiment and the senses
  • Gender and sexuality
  • Health humanities
  • Indigenous studies
  • (Post)colonial theory
  • Phenomenology
  • Queer theory
  • Surface reading/close reading
  • Theatricality and performance

F[r]iction will be held in-person April 26th, 2024 at the University of Toronto. Please submit abstracts of 250-300 words and a brief bio of 50 words to uoftenglish.gradconference [at] gmail.com by December 17th, 2023.

CFP: Ecologies of Creation and Criticism in Canada 

Deadline for Submission: December 30th, 2023

The University of Calgary English Department Graduate Association invites both creative and critical proposals for our 2024 Free Exchange graduate conference.

This two-day conference will take place March 22-23rd in Calgary, with a particular focus on eco-criticism in literatures in Canada. We aspire to see proposals for research-creation works that face the grounded intricacies of land and habitat, climate and displacement, Indigenous resurgence, resource extraction, and other relevant subjects through various literary and hybrid genres, as well as critical papers that engage with the existing eco-critical and creative literatures in Canada grappling with our present ecological realities.

Literary traditions and focuses of particular interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Biotexts
  • NDN Poetics
  • Decolonial Poetics
  • Environmental Posthumanism
  • Indigiqueer Literature
  • Solarpunk Literature
  • Cyberpunk Literature
  • Energy Humanities
  • Petroculture/Petrofiction
  • Blue Ecology
  • River Writing
  • Ocean Literature
  • Speculative Literature (SF, Fantasy, Horror, Slipstream, etc)
  • Futurisms (Afr-, Africanfuturism, Indigenous futurism, Queer futurity, Ecotopias, Eco-dystopias)

Abstracts of 250 words accompanied by 100-word biographies and relevant contact information can be submitted by Google Form with responses to be sent out by the end of January. Virtual proposals will be equally considered.

CFP: Reorienting the Sublime

McGill University
Department of Art History and Communication Studies Graduate Student Symposium

Deadline for Submissions: December 29, 2023

“The sublime is something added that expands us, overstrains us, and causes us to be both here, as dejects, and there, as others and sparkling. A divergence, an impossible bounding. Everything missed, joy—fascination” -- Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror.

The Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University is pleased to invite submissions for the Annual Graduate Symposium “Reorienting the Sublime,” to be held on Thursday, April 4 and Friday, April 5, 2024.

The sublime has held a steady yet complex position within the discourse of art history and visual culture, and encourages a consideration of its relationship to media and communication studies. Its perhaps best known form can be traced to Edmund Burke in the 18th century, who defined the sublime through a dual emotional quality of attraction and fear, which Immanuel Kant honed to describe a magnitude of unlimited feeling that humans are unable to possess. Jacques Lacan, who follows from a Freudian notion of the sublime as a positivised or aestheticised counterpart to the uncanny, also suggests that the “sublime object” points us towards that which has the power to de-realise and dematerialize, revealing the contradictions at the center of a law.

As such, the sublime has provided a rife affective terrain for artists to draw from that could elicit awe, power, and a certain delight in transgressing limitation. It has also offered a useful framework to think through the meanings and affects circulating new communication technologies, which are often simultaneously feared and viewed as opportunities for human transcendence. At the same time, the sublime has provided the means to bolster colonial understandings of “taming the unknown” and efforts to seek command of that which appears to be out of order. What can be said of the sublime as revelatory, a call to re-translate or re-visit the foundational systems of meaning which structure the world and our

place in it? How might we position the sublime in relation to contemporary politics, culture, and technologies? In what ways do awe, terror, beauty, and overwhelm play into our current objects of research, and how might these aspects of sublimity reorient the objects and approaches within our fields of study?

Following this history of contestation, our symposium seeks to consider the state of the sublime today and how its discourse continues to take shape within the interdisciplinary realms of art history and communication studies. We invite papers from all periods of art history, communication studies, and related disciplines to consider these questions, as well as the following topics as prompts for further thought:

  • Beyond the worldly, transcendence, (dis)embodiment

  • Affect, desire, aversion, horror, tragedy

  • Consumption, glut, excess, control

  • Technological sublime

  • Hyperreality, capitalist/cyber/digital sublime

  • Landscape painting, romanticism, colonial origins and post-colonial critiques

  • Gestalt, Gesamtkunstwerk

  • Historical reconfigurations of Kant, Burke, Hegel, Lacan, etc.

  • Incomprehensibility, inspiration, confusion

  • The non-human, anthropocene, pre-linguistic

  • (Against) the uncanny, the beautiful, the harmonious

The Art History and Communication Studies Graduate Symposium committee invites proposals for fifteen-minute-long paper presentations. Current and recently graduated Masters, Doctoral, and Postdoctoral students from various Humanities fields whose research addresses this year’s theme are encouraged to apply. Applicants should submit an abstract of no more than 300 words with the title of the paper, along with a separate document that includes a 250-word bio, to ahcs.pgss [at] mail.mcgill.ca by Friday, December 29, 2023. Please include your full name, affiliation, and contact information in your bio. A blind panel will be reviewing all submissions, so please ensure that your name and other identifying marks do not appear in the abstract document.

While we encourage in-person participation at the symposium, we will have limited spots for presentations over Zoom. If you would like to be considered for a virtual presentation, please indicate so in your abstract, in addition to any other accommodations or considerations you would like the committee to know of.

CFP: Dreamworlds, Endnotes 2024 - UBC English Graduate Conference

University of British Columbia - Vancouver Campus March 8 - 9, 2024

The University of British Columbia’s annual English Graduate Conference invites proposal submissions for academic papers, creative works, and organized panels under the theme of Dreamworlds.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha in Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice writes:

But I am dreaming the biggest disabled dream of my life—dreaming not just of a revolutionary movement in which we are not abandoned but of a movement in which we lead the way. With all of our crazy, adaptive-devised, loving kinship and commitment to each other, we will leave no one behind as we roll, limp, stim, sign, and move in a million ways towards cocreating the decolonial living future.

I am dreaming like my life depends on it. Because it does. (112)

What does it mean to dream? What worlds do you dream of? What worlds do you want to work towards?

Today, we find ourselves in a crisis. With the intense violence and genocide in Palestine, continued Indigenous land dispossession, mass incarceration of non-white populations, Islamophobia, racism and Black Death, the killing of trans and queer people, dehumanized refugees, ableism, and environmental degradation, we wrestle with hope and our abilities to dream of better worlds. What does dreaming promise and make possible in the face of these catastrophes?

Endnotes, The English Department Conference at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, invites papers for its 2024 Conference, “Dreamworlds” to be held on March 8 - 9, 2024. We invite papers that explore a variety of “dream worlds,” including those exploring: the place of dreams and dreaming in our lives, relationships, and communities; dreams as phenomenon; dreams as possibility; American dreams; MLK’s dreams; dreams and disillusionment; dreams of labor; how capitalism governs, limits, and dictates our dreams, nightmares, and visions; the pathologization of dreams; utopian dreaming and its many critiques; dream time; dreams and fantasies; dreams and realities; queer dreams and desires; dreams as spiritually gathered knowledge; dreams as care; dreams as storytelling; dreams as vessels.

We want to think about dreaming up worlds as an epistemological shift, as method, as activism that resists the limits that our systems place on our imagination; we want to dream of radical and liberated presents and futures. We hope to bring together scholars, activists, practitioners, teachers, and learners, from a wide variety of fields to dream, gather, collaborate, teach, learn, and build.

We do not limit the Endnotes theme to the above interpretation. While this is an academic conference hosted by the English graduate department, we are also interested in inter/multi/transdisciplinary academic and creative works and encourage submissions from all areas of language and literature studies. We welcome submissions from scholars and artists in any career phase, but we particularly emphasize graduate-level work.

Individual proposal submissions should include a 250 word abstract, a presentation title, and a short 75 word biography including your name and school attended. Presentations should be 15-20 minutes in length.

If you would like to submit a panel, please include a short description, the name of the panel chair, and a single document including presenters’ names, schools attended, titles of each presentation, 250 word abstracts for each presentation, and a short bio per presenter.

Submissions must be sent as a PDF attachment to endnotesconference [at] gmail.com by December 8 December 29, 2023 (extended deadline).

CFP: ACCUTE CONGRESS 2024

ACCUTE will accept proposals to the General Call for Panels, Member-Organized Panels, Creative Writing Panels, and Joint-Sponsored Panels until Friday, November 17, 2023. You will find the ACCUTE 2024 Conference CFP at this link and on our website.

You may use the Online Submission Form to submit your proposal.

Please note that while it is not necessary to hold an active ACCUTE membership to submit a proposal, you are required to be a member of ACCUTE to present at the conference. For information on ACCUTE membership and to join or renew, please click here.

CFP: The Nineteenth Annual Yale University American Art Graduate Symposium

Theme: Condition

Date: April 6, 2024

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Monica Bravo, Assistant Professor of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University

What do we mean when we speak of condition? Condition rhetorically encompasses vast references: an immediate state (flaking on a canvas reveals the poor condition of a painting), a manipulable nature (leather must be conditioned before use), the overarching atmosphere (weather conditions or the human condition), and a temporal position (the conditional tense). It also implies intimate ties with the body, the condition of the individual and the collective. To condition a body involves training towards optimal health, whereas a body with a condition must grapple with illness. Social conditions—semiotic systems, political hegemony, nation-state borders—prescribe and constrain our capacity to move through the world while we, in turn, condition ourselves and our surroundings to enact desired states of being, living, and working. In the words of Tina Campt, condition enacts the tense of the “will have had to happen.” Art can imagine multiple ideas of the past and of contingent futures. Art can embody transformations that must take place to bring about a liveable world or remake the past to claim a different present.

The Nineteenth Annual Yale University American Art Graduate Symposium asks: what possibilities might thinking through condition offer in response to urgent calls for new forms of community, meaning, and direction amidst environmental, social, political, economic, and public health crises? What conditions illuminate and/or complicate ongoing relationships to history and the archives? What are the material enactments of conditioning? As a tool in building worlds, realities, and relations, how can we think through the multifacetedness of condition(-ing, -al, -ed, pre-)?

Condition reflects the conference’s conception of the Americas as a dynamic and expansive geography that is not limited to one nation-state. As such, we welcome submissions exploring art, architecture, visual, and material culture across all of the Americas, including the Caribbean, North, Central, and South America. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Activation of the conditional tense as an art historical method
  • Engagements with conditions of being, whether that be human, work, social, and/or artistic conditions
  • Durational performance and the conditioning of the body, including as it relates to health and/or illness
  • Conditions needed for particular outcomes
  • Weather and manipulated atmospheric conditions
  • Conditioning as it pertains to behavior, change, and acceptance
  • Materials used by artists and makers that require conditioning
  • Condition assessment, condition reports, condition and attribution, condition and monetary value
  • Speculative and conditional world-(re)building from archival speculation to digital art

Interested participants are invited to submit an abstract of no more than 350 words, along with a CV, to americanist.symposium [at] gmail.com by January 31, 2024. Accepted participants will be notified in mid-February. We are planning for a day-long, in-person symposium, with accommodations provided for all speakers.

CFP: "Witnessing / Becoming," University of Toronto, Centre for Comparative Literature’s Annual Conference

Date: March 22-23, 2024

Witnessing is more than seeing, more than recounting testimony. A witness to an event is its participant, whether central or peripheral. In its continuity, the act of witnessing carries us past the immediate crisis of an event, into a post-event life. Processes of witnessing have manifested as fluid, ongoing testimonies, conveyed through various mediums such as novels, memoirs, autobiographies, reports, and films, among others. One could argue that at the core of these testimonies lies what Nadine Gordimer describes in “Literary Witness in A World of Terror: The Inward Testimony” (2009) as “the duality of inwardness and the outside world” (Gordimer 68), the dual exploration of one’s inner self and the external world, the quest to reconcile oneself with the uncertainties inherent in evolving events and the imperative to conceive new meanings of self-identity.

We invite papers that consider how testimony has been represented not only as a form of documented eyewitness literature, but also as a process that entails transformations, and encounters that elicit new forms of becoming. By conjugating witnessing with becoming, we invite you to move past the eventuality of crisis, to understand language as irrevocably tied to the process of bearing witness, remaking itself continuously against the possible threat of erasure, “as if it were being invented at every step, and if it were burning immediately” (Jacques Derrida The Post Card 11). Differing subjectivities, selves, and life stories emerge in different environments. How might the act of bearing witness to uncodified subjective experiences and marginalized social realities challenge narratives of dominant power structures?

To return to the temporal disconnect between the witnessed event and the performance of testimony, becoming can take a similar form. To become is to recognize the same temporal disconnect, to look backwards at what once was, yet no longer remains. Becoming might be a reading of the past, enacted in tandem with the witness’ attempt to reconstruct it, which remains eternally out of reach. How do these two forms interact with one another? How else might they intertwine?

As an interdisciplinary conference, we encourage submissions from a variety of fields, such as literature, philosophy, history, ethnography, anthropology, media studies, disability studies, sociology, art history, religious studies, and gender studies. We welcome papers related (but not limited) to the following topics:

  • Testimonial Literature
  • Ethics of Bearing Witness
  • Living & Writing
  • Socio-political events in literature
  • Performativity
  • Transnationality & the Diaspora
  • Queerness & Alterity
  • Black Studies
  • Indigeneity & Decolonial thought
  • Planetary Subjectivity vs. Capitalist Globalism
  • Language & Translation
  • Temporality & the Self

Those who wish to participate in the conference should submit an abstract of no more than 250 words, along with a short bio. Abstracts must be sent, as attachments, to utorontocomplitconference [at] gmail.com before December 1, 2023. Emails should include the author’s name, institutional affiliation, and contact information. Presentations should not exceed 20 minutes.

CFP: Échappées Belles Correspondence of Surrealist Women

Organized by Andrea Oberhuber (Montreal University), Sylvano Santini (University of Quebec in Montreal) et Eve Lemieux-Cloutier (University of Quebec in Montreal)

Montreal, October 23-25 2024

Where do we stand, almost 100 years after André Breton published the First Manifesto of Surrealism, in our understanding of what Georgiana Colvile and Kate Conley, in La femme s'entête (1998), have called "the feminine part" of the third historical avant-garde? Is it still necessary in 2023 to add a question mark, as the curators did in the case of the Surréalisme au féminin? exhibition at the Musée de Montmartre in summer 2023? Would this symbolize a doubt about the historical presence and aesthetic contribution of numerous female creators - writers and artists, often both at the same time - to the Surrealist movement? It's true that, in the first pages of the manifesto, Breton evokes a castle in a "rustic setting, not far from Paris" where his "handsome and cordial" friends have taken up residence. He names them all, one by one, before concluding by imagining "and gorgeous women, I might add", without bothering to specify their names.

Over the past thirty years, a growing number of literary critics and art historians have put names and images to these "gorgeous women " (Rubin Suleiman, 1990, Caws, Kuenzli and Raaberg, 1991, Conley, 1996, Rosemont, 1998, Colvile, 1999, among others). We now know that Simone Kahn and Mick Soupault were immortalized in Man Ray's group photographs, that the young Gisèle Prassinos was the "femme-enfant" par excellence (Conley and Mahon, 2023) for quite some time, and that the group generally became more welcoming of creative women in the post-war period (Bonnet, 2006). Nor is there any need to revisit the triple role of muse-model-mistress in which young women authors and artists were mostly confined, and which for many was a means of drawing closer to Breton's "group", finding new ideas and values, while others have settled for a deliberately marginal position within the Surrealist nebula. Whether their relationship was one of proximity or distance, varying according to the key moments in their careers, their contribution to Surrealist aesthetics and ethics - since the two are intimately linked in the avant-garde movements of the first half of the 20th century - is no longer in doubt today. It seems to us that the centenary of the publication of the founding manifesto offers an opportunity to consider the past-present-future of Surrealism from a perspective that gives pride of place to the feminine. This bias in favor of women's legacy, particularly in the field of correspondence, is intended to go beyond a binary vision of masculine and feminine, to breathe new life into movement studies and perpetuate creative practices to the present day.

No progress, however radical, can be made without a return to the past. Surrealist women creators were witnessed to an era of upheaval that profoundly changed the conditions of art and forms of life. This was the desire of the avant-garde in general and Surrealism in particular, although it has been a long time coming. Women's art made an original and integral contribution to the creation of these new conditions. And the reasons that explains

the late realization of the will to change life are the same that might clarify the delay in the discovery of women's work. We must avoid repeating this delay by hesitating to join their works to the forms of life that produced them. If the end of art's autonomy is an essential contribution of the historical avant-gardes, despite their failure, as Peter Bürger (1984) demonstrated long ago, it goes beyond the question of gender. We must recognize, however, that its ultimate consequences affect women more intensely, whose subversive works have not been as decontextualized and neutralized by bourgeois recuperation and the art market as those of men. Besides, in his thesis on the historical failure of the avant- garde, Bürger never mentions the existence of women's Surrealist works. Without wishing to deny their access to economic capital - they have the same right to it as men - their works still retain their subversive power. It's this power that we need to bring to light, by revisiting and questioning the forms of life that gave rise to them.

As part of the 100th anniversary of Surrealism in 2024, we propose to organize a colloquium on what we might be called a blind spot in surrealism studies to date, prompting us to reflect on it together: the correspondence of writers and artists whom we associate closely or remotely with the movement.

They (hers) - Claude Cahun, Leonora Carrington, Lise Deharme, Leonor Fini, Simone Kahn, Nelly Kaplan, Dora Maar, Lee Miller, Suzanne Muzard, Gisèle Prassinos, Dorothea Tanning and Unica Zürn, to name but a few - knew each other from close and far-flung Surrealist circles. Although they sometimes maintained an ongoing correspondence with one of the eminent representatives of Surrealism, there are few examples of letters they addressed to each other. Examples include the correspondence between Simone Kahn and her cousin Denise Lévy, or the few letters exchanged between Claude Cahun and Adrienne Monnier. In the majority of cases, female Surrealist artists corresponded with their male counterparts: Nelly Kaplan and Leonor Fini with André Pieyre de Mandiargues, Gisèle Prassinos with Henri Parisot, Lise Deharme with Pierre Reverdy, Unica Zürn with Henri Michaux and, of course, Jacqueline Lamba with André Breton.

While it is generally believed that male writers and artists pursue their work by shaping and editing their correspondence - they somehow know that it will be read - we shouldn't think that women don't care. We need to get rid of all gendered stereotypes about epistolary writing, such as the one suggesting that women neglect the literary value of their letters in favor of spontaneity. As Brigitte Diaz (2006) rightly points out, the various gendered stereotypes associated with correspondence should no longer have a place in epistolary studies. This will be all the more true in our colloquium, which, rather than redoing the history of Surrealism, aims to extend and refine it by questioning the modes of sociability favored by women, their desire to collaborate, their friendships and loves, their criticisms, their ambitions, their moods - in short, their aesthetic, political and social sensibilities. In short, it will explore the multiple links - from everyday life to political reflections to questions of advice on a work in progress, for example - that several generations of Surrealist creators established between writing, creation and life in an era that, in more ways than one, can still inspire our own.

Proposals for papers - whether for research or research/creation - which may concern published or archival correspondence by women, or, from a broader perspective, the question of epistolary writing by women, should be around 300 words long and accompanied by a brief bio-bibliographical note. Written in French or English, they should be sent simultaneously to Andrea Oberhuber (andrea.oberhuber [at] umontreal.ca), Sylvano Santini (santini.sylvano [at] uqam.ca) and Eve Lemieux-Cloutier (lemieux- cloutier.eve [at] courrier.uqam.ca) no later than January 27, 2024. In the subject line of your message, please indicate "Colloque. Échappées belles".

Please note that the colloquium organizers are planning to submit a funding application to cover part of the travel and subsistence expenses of colloquium participants. Further information will be sent to candidates whose proposals have been accepted by the scientific committee.

CFP: 2024 Conference of the Bibliographical Society of Canada

Topographical: The Place of Books
17–18 June, McGill University

Working with books is in many senses an effort to relate them to places. Writers in all genres describe journeys, encounters, visits, or homecomings in persistent patterns of excursion and return. Readers follow them, searching for the cultural, scientific, informational, or touristic meaning of places – while also trying to find the right place for books in their own lives and dwellings. In its creation and its criticism, literature is classified in geopolitical terms – nation, region, community, locale – and contested by further terms that cut across them spatially – indigeneity, empire, diaspora, fugitivity.

The book trade also has its crucial places: printshop, publishing office, community, warehouse, bookstore, library, classroom, home. These are and have long been embattled places for the book, exposed to changes brought by politics, the economy, and technology. The book itself, through its capacity to bring news and ideas from afar, has participated in technological efforts to cancel space. Thus while books powerfully give voice to or guide people to a place, it must also be acknowledged that places elude the book.

For its 2024 conference, the Bibliographical Society of Canada invites papers on the conjunction of the topographical with the typographical. New research is solicited on any of the myriad ways of making books in or about specific locations, by or about the people who live there, and with reference to the things and the concepts that disclose or impose identity. How do books represent places – and what is the place of books? Papers on other topics will also be considered.

Proposals may be in English or French. Proposals, which must be submitted via this online form, should include the following elements:

  • Title of presentation
  • Abstract indicating argument, context, and methods (max. 250 words)
  • Bio (50–100 words) including full name, professional designation (e.g., graduate student, assistant professor, independent researcher, etc.), and institutional affiliation or place

Proposals from early career professionals and graduate students are especially welcome. Presentations must be made in person: the conference will not be online or hybrid.

Deadline: 31 January 2024

Opens Calls

Hong Kong University (HKU) Summer Research Programme

Hong Kong University (HKU), is conducting their Summer Research Programme for Undergraduate and Graduate students.

HKU has been organizing the Summer Research Programme since 2021 to groom research talents. During the 10-week programme, participants will be supervised by one of their professoriate staff to plan and carry out a research project, present their project proposal and outcome, and attend a series of tailor-made research-related workshops and seminars. Upon satisfactory completion of the programme, a scholarship/financial support of up to HK$20,000 (~3,460 CAD) will be awarded to participants to subsidize the travel and accommodation costs. A small number of top-performing participants will be awarded an entrance scholarship to pursue PhD studies at HKU.

HKU has reached out to us to nominate students (no restriction on the number of students McGill can nominate) for this programme and we would like for you to spread information to your student body and get back to us with a list of interested students by end of day, November 15th. I’m aware the turnaround is very quick but we hope we can spread the information and have a few interested students for this round. Please find more info on the following website: Summer Research Programme 2024 | HKU Graduate School

PDF icon HKU Summer Research Programme Flyer

Pathy Foundation Fellowship

The Pathy Foundation Fellowship is an intensive 12-month experiential learning opportunity for graduating students to lead a self-directed project in a community they have a meaningful connection with. Fellows are provided with comprehensive training, personal and professional development coaching, up to $40,000 in funding, and wrap-around supports to design, plan, and implement an innovative project in their community. This year-long Fellowship is designed for students who show a demonstrated capacity and potential to develop and evolve as leaders and change makers and have a meaningful connection with a community of their choosing.

Applications for Cohort 9 of the Pathy Foundation Fellowship are open until January 5th, 2024! Visit https://linktr.ee/pathyfellowship to learn more and start your application today.

Austin Clarke Prize in Literary Excellence

Submission Deadline: Wednesday, November 1st, 2023

The Austin Clarke Prize in Literary Excellence serves to honor the memory of Austin Clarke (1934-2016). Clarke was, above all else, an exceptional writer, one who disrupted the expectations of what Canadian literature could and should become. His literary career was characterized by impressive productivity. In the span of his lifetime, he published eleven novels (including his 2002 Giller-winning The Polished Hoe), nine short story collections, two poetry collections, along with a number of memoirs. In this large body of work, he continually questioned the homogeneity implied with the development of a Canadian cultural establishment. He was deeply critical of the official Canadian position of multiculturalism, but to consider his work a “realist or sociological account of Black life in Canada” would be, as Paul Barrett notes in the introduction to his 2017 “‘Membering Austin Clarke: A Puritan Special Issue,” a fundamental misreading of the value of his writing. Although Clarke began his writing career as a reporter at the Timmins Daily Press and The Globe and Mail, his vast body of literary work has “never been realist, nor has it ever been reportage: it is a polyvocal, hybridizing, experimental, introspective, satirical, patriarchal, offensive, provocative and—at times—outraged artistic reflection on life in Canada” which “demands” a stylistic account.

We at The Ex-Puritan agree. We have long been admirers of Clarke’s work, and with this renaming of our annual literary award, we want to encourage our readers and writers to think through what it means to rebuke the Canadian cultural establishment. We want our writers to continue Clarke’s legacy by reimagining the boundaries of Canadian literature. Equally important to this, however, is a focus on style. Although we divide this award by entries into fiction and poetry, we want our submitters to reimagine the boundaries of what fiction and poetry can look like. We actively encourage submissions that are experimental with form and unrelentingly demand an attention to their style. We believe that Austin Clarke would’ve wanted nothing less.

To enter the Austin Clarke Prize in Literary Excellence, simply follow this link. All entries must be previously unpublished, original work, and must be written in 11 or 12-point font. The documents must be .doc, .docx, or .odt files and must not have identifying information on them to ensure a blind process reading process (remove your name, address, and contact information from the document itself). For short story submissions, please include a word count. No works over 7,500 words or under 1,000 will be accepted or read. Each submission to the poetry prize can include up to 4 poems, or up to 4 pages (whichever comes first). We welcome multiple entries in either genre, but no simultaneous submissions are permitted. We also do not accept any collaborative work for the prize.

The 2023 judges are Cody Caetano (fiction) and Billy-Ray Belcourt (poetry). The winning submissions and runners-up will be published in our fall issue and will win cash prizes of $1000 or $200 (winner and runner-up, respectively, in each of fiction and poetry). The deadline to submit is Nov 1, 2023.

CFP: Creative Approaches to Open Social Scholarship: Canada

17-18 June 2024 (McGill U. Montréal, QC, Canada)
An INKE-hosted gathering aligned with the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences’ annual Congress and Coalition Publica's Canadian Scholarly Journals Symposium (19 June 2024)

Proposals: by 15 March 2024 via this link.
Registration: via https://www.federationhss.ca/en/congress/register [Note: This is a free event, though Congress registration is required. If you are coming only for this event, consider the ‘community member’ rate ($30)].

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How do we create open social scholarship in the 2020s?

Over the past several decades, academic work has evolved alongside substantial and far-reaching changes in communication and collaboration. One example of this evolution is the rise of open, digital scholarship: a movement that prioritizes access to information, social knowledge creation, and cross-community engagement. Now, in the 2020s, academics and other knowledge workers can produce, publish, and share their research findings much more openly and more publicly than previously possible. In a recent report for the Canadian Commission to UNESCO, Leslie Chan, Bud Hall, Piron, Rajesh Tandon, and Lorna Williams “offer a vision of Open Science that is just, fair and decolonial, but also realist and lucid. [The authors] have drawn attention to an understanding of science based on an inclusive universalism, open to Indigenous ways of knowing and all other theories, epistemologies and viewpoints” (2020). Such a vision is evidence of shifting attitudes and practices in academia. But how we actually go about creating research that is more open, more fair, and more social bears further examination and discussion.

We would like to continue these conversations at Creative Approaches to Open Social Scholarship: Canada, the 11th Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) Partnership annual gathering in Montréal, QC, Canada, 17-18 June 2024, occurring at the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences’ annual Congress. Those coming to our event may also wish to consider Coalition Publica's Canadian Scholarly Journals Symposium (19 June 2024), as well as our very informal welcome / hello gathering at the Congress President’s Reception on Sunday 16 June which follows a presentation of the Canadian Humanities and Social Sciences Commons (HSS Commons, https://hsscommons.ca/).

Creative Approaches to Open Social Scholarship seeks to highlight open social scholarship activities, infrastructure, research, dissemination, and policies. The INKE Partnership has described open social scholarship as creating and disseminating research and research technologies to a broad, interdisciplinary audience of specialists and non-specialists in ways that are both accessible and significant. At Creative Approaches to Open Social Scholarship we will consider how to model open social scholarship practices and behaviour, as well as pursue the following guiding themes:

  • Community: How do we best foster humanities and social sciences research, development, community building, and engagement through online, omnipresent, and open community spaces?
  • Training: How can we adapt existing training opportunities and develop new opportunities in emerging areas to meet academic, partner, and public needs for open scholarship training?
  • Connection: How can humanities and social sciences researchers collaborate more closely with the general public? What are the best ways to bring the public into our work, as well as for bringing our work to the public?
  • Policy: How do we ensure that research on pressing open scholarship topics is accessible to a diverse public, including those who develop organizational or national policy?

We invite you to register for this event to join the conversation and mobilize collaboration in and around digital scholarship, with specific focus on:

  • open social scholarship now and in future
  • knowledge diversity, epistemic injustice, and knowledge equity
  • multilingual digital scholarship
  • community building, engagement, and mobilization
  • collaboration and partnership for shared initiatives and activities
  • digital scholarly production
  • open access and open technologies
  • knowledge sharing and preservation
  • alternative academic publishing practices
  • FAIR and CARE principles for data
  • digital research infrastructure
  • social knowledge creation
  • stakeholder roles and activities
  • social media
  • public humanities
  • research data management
  • AI for humanistic pursuit
  • teaching (with) digital scholarship

We invite proposals for lightning papers that address these and other issues pertinent to research in the area, and are open to considering proposals for other types of presentations as well. Proposals should contain a title, an abstract (of approximately 250 words, plus list of works cited), and the names, affiliations, and website URLs of presenters. Longer papers for lightning talks will be solicited after proposal acceptance for circulation in advance of the gathering. Please send proposals on or before 15 March 2024: via this link.

This action-oriented program is geared toward leaders and learners from all fields and arenas, including academic and non-academic researchers, graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, librarians and archivists, publishers, members of scholarly and professional associations and consortia, open source practitioners and developers, industry liaisons, community groups, and other stakeholders. Building on previous INKE-hosted events in Whistler and Victoria (2014-23), the 2019, 2022, and 2023 Canadian-Australian Partnership for Open Scholarship (CAPOS) conferences, and our combined, online INKE-CAPOS conferences (December 2020 & 2021), we hope to simultaneously formalize connections across fields and open up different ways of thinking about the pragmatics and possibilities of digital scholarship.

Creative Approaches to Open Social Scholarship: Canada includes featured talks by Jonathan Bengtson (University of Victoria) and Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Michigan State University), as well as:

  • lightning talks, where authors present 5 minute versions of longer papers or reports circulated prior to the gathering, followed by a brief discussion (papers may be conceptual, theoretical, application-oriented, and more)
  • a next Steps conversation, to articulate in a structured setting what we will do together in

the future

CFP: RhetCanada 2024, “Where’s the Rhetoric?”

Our theme this year broadly inquires as to where rhetoric might be found in any and all endeavours, and perhaps if it is there in the first place. Such an inquiry can be appreciated both in itself and as it serves the overall Congress theme of “Sustaining Shared Futures,” futures which will be imagined and negotiated through the joint labours of persuasion and rhetorical critique.

Consider: “Where’s the Rhetoric?” Pragmatically speaking, asking where something is also asking whether it (still) exists in the first place (and perhaps, as in “where’s the beef?,” if there’s enough of it). In this general way, then, our theme invites presenters to consider the rhetorical dimensions, obvious or hidden, of conversations, happenings, and phenomena. More specifically, however, the word where may beckon toward a range of directions in rhetorical studies that are literally or figuratively spatial. Classical rhetoric had its topoi and loci, the places for finding arguments; the modern CFP as a genre inadvertently renews this mission, hinting where one might end up with one’s presentation. On the more interdisciplinary front, the rhetorical construction and understanding of spaces, geographies, environments, and sundry whereabouts continues to be of interest. From ancient memory palaces for storing speeches to the modern study of visual rhetoric, rhetors and rhetoricians profit from locating persuasion in real and represented spaces.

More rhetorical prospects emerge from the Congress project of “sustaining shared futures.” “Sustainability,” as the theme explains, “transcends even the immense challenges posed by climate change, urging recognition of the interconnectedness of human existence and global action on the overlapping social, economic, environmental, and technological issues that threaten our future.” Since rhetoric is part of our social connective tissue, and rhetorical actions readily reach a global scale, presenters may wish to bring a rhetorical lens on sustainability, be it environmental, or interpreted more liberally.

See the full CFP and conference information here.

To submit your paper, you’ll need to fill out a form, deciding on the following beforehand:

  • The title of your presentation.
  • The proposed format for your paper. Indicate whether your paper is a regular or lightning paper; we’ll do our best to accommodate it.
  • The proposed venue for your paper. Choose one of the following:
    • “I intend to present online”
    • “I intend to present in person; I’m not willing to present online if my paper isn’t accepted into the in-person conference”
    • “I intend to present in person; I’m willing to present online if my paper isn’t accepted into the in-person conference”
  • If you’re a student, you’ll need to state your willingness to submit your draft by May 10th, 2024 (see “Student Paper Feedback” below).
  • A brief abstract (20-50 words) for inclusion in the programme. Please make the abstract clear and interesting to the educated public and to journalists who may seek to interview conference presenters.
  • A proposal of 200–350 words that indicates the central importance of rhetoric to the inquiry and how it contributes to existing rhetorical scholarship.
  • A brief selected bibliography (ten items maximum), including all works cited in your proposal and other key works you plan to refer to in your presentation.

Proposals can be in English or French, but French proposals must also supply a full English translation for the review committee.

By January 20th, 2024, complete this submission form; should you encounter problems, please contact Jonathan Doering, RhetCanada President (jonathan_doering [at] cbu.ca).

Building 21 Fellowships

Paid fellowships at McGill’s most innovative lab!

Do you have an idea for an interdisciplinary research project that explores unconventional ideas, patterns and solutions? Maybe you want to teach bacteria to write poetry? Or study how aesthetics change in zero gravity—or completely reinvent democracy? 

McGill’s Building 21 will award 10 Fellowships of $3,000 to McGill students for the 2024 winter semester to work on a BLUE (Beautiful, Limitless, Unconstrained Exploration) project.

More info on the BLUE Fellowship and link to the application here

What is Building 21?

Building 21 is a unique laboratory, open to all McGill students, that supports, promotes, encourages and nurtures original and unique ideas, thinkers and scholars. At Building 21, you will find a community of faculty and students passionate about finding new solutions to new problems. Building 21 is located at 651 Sherbrooke West (the green door).

Time in a Bottle: Containers and Criticisms of Nostalgia Symposium 2024

What: Symposium critically looking at our relationships with nostalgia in everyday life, profitable commercial uses, political promises, journey to fast futures (X to Mars), or a past (Titan sub).

When: February 2nd, 2024.

Where: 4TH SPACE at Concordia University, Montréal, Canada. Hybrid also available.

Who: Emerging and established scholars, artists, students (Undergraduate to Graduate) enthusiastic or interested about an active and socially generative kind of nostalgia.

Key Dates: 

  • Research-creation AND symposium presentation abstract - Friday 5th January, 2024.

  • Final notice of acceptances sent out by - Friday 12th January, 2024.

  • Time in a Bottle symposium happens - Friday 2nd February, 2024.

Symposium Theme:

As we emerge from a global period of great loss, sacrifice, and patience into a “new normal” fraught with conflict, ecological crisis, and rapid sociotechnical change…digital nostalgia has taken a turn towards encapsulation.

Specifically, how does the cultural significance of 1) NOSTALGIC OBJECTS and thus the 2) OBJECTS WE USE TO BE NOSTALGIC of other things influence the digital nostalgia we engage in? These containers of time are comparable to bottles full of ideological messages which recall a rose-tinted past, a somber future, a present tinged with grief. 

On social media, custom-made pop-culture dioramas are sold out to buyers eager to preserve the set of their favorite childhood video game or TV show. Meanwhile, costs of supporting digital cloud storage to hoard our pasts mount while we risk forgetting it anyway. Large language models “speak” from the frozen moments of their training data, stuck between the past and the next update. Those who itch for clairvoyance seek their own remembrance as cold comfort: in 2019, over 25,000 Koreans engaged in therapeutic “living funerals,” donning burial shrouds, posing for their own memorial portraits, and lying inside real coffins as the living chant prayers for the “dead”.

  • If these items could talk, what “message in a bottle” do they have for us? 

  • What are the social, ecological, and cultural impacts left in the present by our pursuit of the nostalgic past or future? 

  • How far will we go to preview, pay, and pursue a time outside the present? 

Topics for Submission:

Please consult our website for a list of possible topics that relate to the prompt (https://nostagain.ca/2023/10/26/cfp2024/)

  • Socially, culturally, or politically, how do they (nostalgic objects) remain so pervasive?

  • Why do we hoard so many things? Or, why do we “collect”, “curate”, or “store” them?

  • What is strategically made to be remembered and forgotten?

  • Does the ideological memory belong to any particular group? Who benefits/loses?

  • How effective are these nostalgic objects at impacting or overriding the present?

  • Socially, culturally or politically, how do they remain so pervasive today?

  • What are its effects on the existential, environmental or ethical domains of social life?

  • How big is the empire of nostalgia that “was and is a business” (Niemeyer 2016:29)?

Submission Guidelines:

Symposium Presentations (Due: 5th January, 2024)

Research-Creation Projects (Due: 5th January, 2024)

Note: **Submissions are reviewed on an ongoing basis.** The availability of spaces for presentations and research-creation showcases are therefore based on a first-submitted-first-accepted basis. 

Contact: projectlostagain [at] gmail.com to Derek Pasborg or Richy Srirachanikorn

Website: https://nostagain.ca/cfp2024

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