The Wire: A Site for the MLA Commons Community
May 8-10, 2015, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH *What is the future of illustration studies? *What can comics scholars learn from animation studies and vice versa? *Do illustrated books or graphic novels resist the supposed obsolescence of the book? *What do pictures want (now)? These and related questions will be explored…
Integrating studies of memory and literature: e.g. memory as metaphor, personal or collective practice, neuroscience, narrative hindsight, cinematic flashback. 250 word abstract by March 15 to Martha Rust (martha.rust@nyu.edu) and Suzanne England (suzanne.england@nyu.edu).
The organizers invite proposals for papers on cultural representations that make it possible for sustainability studies and southern studies to meet on productive critical grounds. How does culture define relations between the U.S. South and the global imperative of sustainability? How might depictions of southern agricultural practices, industrial processes, and…
Papers examining the representation of patients’ experiences with tuberculosis. How do these narratives, metaphors, or images intersect with or actively shape prevailing public health initiatives? Send 300-word abstracts to Amy Rubens, PhD at arubens@fmarion.edu by March 15.
To many observers, the job market for PhDs in English (and other humanities fields) may seem to be in crisis, but as has recently been pointed out by Anthony T. Grafton and Jim Grossman (2011), it is not, at least as the term crisis is usually defined. This job market…
Whatever happened to readers, and do they have a future? For all the work that has been done on the state of reading in today’s world, the audience remains a problem. Or does it? In film studies, a discipline once entwined with literary scholarship, archival research on historical audiences continues…
From Texas to Florida, the Dirty Coast shifts, contains, nurtures, kills. I welcome abstracts (and should you submit, please send a brief bio, too) on the ecologies, economies, or peoples making this coast dirty and beautiful, alluring and disgusting. All media. By 10 March 2015. To Sharon O’Dair.
Engaging with the presidential theme for MLA 2016, “Literature and Its Publics,” this panel focuses on the material history of the production of texts – in both manuscript and printed forms – and of their public reception throughout Latin America’s colonial period. We are especially interested in papers that address…
Five-minute “flash paper” roundtable: Trauma, triage, testimony; gender and medical practice in wartime hospitals; related themes welcome. Medical Humanities & Health Studies Forum. Vita, 300-word proposal to Thomas Long (thomas.l.long@uconn.edu) by March 15, 2015.
It’s not as if all of us at the MLA hadn’t dutifully read our Barthes back in graduate school. But it’s one thing to autopsy the death of the author from the safety of the seminar table; it’s quite another when the author (with some 157,000 Twitter followers) nixes one’s…