The Wire: A Site for the MLA Commons Community
The PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature returns to New York from May 4 – May 10, this year with a focus on Africa. Co-curated by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who will deliver the closing address, the festival’s events—from readings and performances to interviews, workshops, and roundtables—will feature writers as varied as Angella…
Perhaps for reasons related to intellectual elitism or simply because of the lack of an effective means of analysis, African popular arts (Modern African music in particular) keep on being pushed to the margins of academic discourse on postcolonial cultural identities. To this day and more than not, in classroom…
Joint Atlantic Seminar for the History of Medicine October 16 – 17, 2015, University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania is pleased to host the 13th Joint Atlantic Seminar for the History of Medicine on October 16 – 17, 2015 in Philadelphia. JAS Med is convened annually for the presentation…
Underpass, a new online journal for international literature, is accepting submissions of short fiction and narrative nonfiction from established and new writers from around the world. For the launch edition, we’re accepting submissions of short stories, narrative nonfiction pieces, and excerpts from longer work that has been translated into English….
Scholarships for graduate students, postdocs, and early career scholars are available for the Advancing Research and Collaboration Conference in Philadelphia this month. Scholarships cover conference fees and accommodation. For more information and to apply, see the conference website. From the conference organizers: By engaging diverse communities of scholarship and practice, ARCS…
MLA Commons member Gregory F. Tague draws our attention to the publication of his new book, Making Mind: Moral Sense and Consciousness in Philosophy, Science, and Literature. From the publisher: Making Mind: Moral Sense and Consciousness in Philosophy, Science, and Literature posits the genesis of narrative as an adaptive function stemming from…
2015 Midwest Modern Language Association Convention Border(ing) Anxiety: Constructions of a Biopolitical Other The force of biopolitics in contemporary society marks boundaries beyond geopolitical borders, inscribing otherness on bodies simultaneously necessary to the functioning of society, while abjecting them as dangerous to the very fabric of that society; an anxiety…
Kenyan born and internationally acclaimed, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is the author of more major works of fiction, nonfiction, and drama than any African writer. His groundbreaking first novel Weep Not, Child recently celebrated fifty years, and he has since published over thirty works in English and his native language, Gikuyu….
Commons member Keith Tse has launched a new group for the discussion of teaching Chinese language, literature, and linguistics. If you’re interested in participating, contact Keith on the Commons or visit the group’s page.
The Clean Reader app, launched by a couple in Idaho in the US, has announced that after significant feedback from authors, many of whom did not want their work being sold in connection with the app, it has “taken immediate action to remove all books from our catalogue”. Clean Reader…