Current Calls for Papers

Please consult this resource for information on conferences you might wish to present at or attend. Deadlines for calls for proposals are listed first; conferences of interest have dates of the actual conference listed first. If you would like to submit a call for papers to be posted, please email Amy McIntyre, ASLE Managing Director.

Calls for Proposals

Posted July 21, 2010. Critical Natures/ Unruly Environments/ Emerging Ecologies. The University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee is hosting the 17th Annual Mini-Conference on Critical Geography this November 5 & 6, 2010. We would like to add a focus on Nature to the themes presented at this conference
As a historical pillar of geography, the study of 'nature' both as an external phenomena and as the locus of human activity has a rich and varied past. This call for papers seeks contributions to new ways of understanding these traditional and emerging concerns from critical/unorthodox perspectives.

Possible approaches include:
Political ecology, cultural ecology, environmental/new social movements, social natures, conservation theory and practice, non-equilibrium ecology, chaos theory, intellectual property rights, environmental science
Possible topics include:
Land tenure, commodification of nature, soil degradation, water rights, genetic materials, climate change, public lands, environmental regulation, biodiversity, history of ecological thought, de/aforestation, transboundary ecologies, resource conflicts, peak oil

Papers presenting a critical perspective on nature from a human or physical geography perspective are welcomed, as well as contributions from allied disciplines. This call is intentionally broad in order to put the disparate concerns of ecology, critical social science, and the (co)modification of environments into dialogue with one another. Both theoretical and applied contributions are welcomed, and the above list is in no way exhaustive of possible topics.

If you are interested in presenting a paper which fits under this broad umbrella of critical perspectives on nature please contact the University of Kentucky Political Ecology Working Group at: UKPEWG@gmail.com

We are also looking for discussants, so if you or someone you know fits the bill and would be interested in engaging with a diverse group of physical/social environment scholars in this exciting and intimate setting, please let us know.

Patrick Bigger, Brian Grabbatin, and Jairus Rossi, Political Ecology Working Group, Department of Geography, University of Kentucky.

July 23, 2010. Literature and the Sacred Conference, October 14–16th, 2010, Brigham Young University. Sponsored by Literature and Belief, a semiannual publication of the Center for the Studies of Christian Values in Literature, Brigham Young University.

The conference will include sessions on Literature, the Sacred, and Texts; Literature, the Sacred, and the Environment; and Literature, the Sacred, and Philosophy. Within this context both literature and the sacred are defined quite broadly, and presentations on any topic, theme, or perspective within those general categories are welcome. Participants are also encouraged to propose their own category-specific sessions if necessary.

The conference will be held Thursday, October 14th, through Saturday, October 16th, at the Museum of Art at Brigham Young University. Presentations should run approximately 15 minutes. Selected presentations from the conference will be published in a 2011 conference-specific issue of Literature and Belief.

The deadline for abstracts and the deadline for proposals for category-specific sessions is July 23rd. Abstracts should be no more than 250 words. Abstracts and/or proposals for category-specific sessions should be sent to daniel_muhlestein@byu.edu or jesse_crisler@byu.edu

July 31, 2010. A panel on American literary naturalism at the American Literature Association Symposium on American Fiction 1890 to the Present, October 8-9, 2010, Savannah, Georgia.

Proposals are invited for a panel on American literary naturalism at the American Literature Association Symposium on American Fiction 1890 to the Present, October 8-9, 2010, Savannah, Georgia. Papers may address any aspect of American literary naturalism. Studies on Crane, Norris, Dreiser, Wharton, London, Glasgow, Wright, Chopin, Garland, Frederic, and others are welcome. Papers focusing on later modern and contemporary varieties of naturalism are also encouraged.

Submissions: Proposals can be completed papers or 200-word abstracts. Please send proposals via e-mail to Kenneth K. Brandt at kbrandt@scad.edu by July 31st.

August 1, 2010. Panel on Animal Rights and Deepwater Horizon at the 2nd Annual Florida Gulf Coast University Humanities and Sustainability Conference. October 8-9, 2010 at FGCU, Fort Myers, FL.

The U.S. popular media had constructed the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico as an environmental, ecological, economic, and even political disaster. While all of these are undeniably fair readings of the catastrophe, these same outlets have not expended much of an effort considering the effect that this event can and should have on how we perceive our duties and responsibilities toward the individual animals impacted by it. While there are discussions about how many animals may be dying in the Gulf; how many tarred birds have been appearing on beaches; and how many fish are dying in the near-shore, oxygen-depleted environments to which they have fled, these discussions have been careful to avoid holding BP or others ethically responsible to those individual animals.

There is no question that the general public is concerned with these animals. For most of us, we have a vague feeling that we are responsible, or that at least someone is, to them. However, the public debate is doing little to help us understand this feeling. Because the disaster has been framed almost entirely within conservationist terms, terms that privilege ecosystems above individuals in those systems, the media has decidedly framed our emotional understanding in ways that absolve us from considering our duties to animals who are suffering right now in the Gulf. One of the major philosophical implications of our public failing to consider these individual animals is that we risk widening the rift between conservation and animal-rights positions to the point where a conservationist understanding totally eclipses rights based one. The danger there is that this denies us access to what a rights approach brings to the table in helping us to better understand our emotional, ethical, and public feelings regarding this unthinkable tragedy.

This panel seeks to call attention to the ethical issues that a moral individualist approach raises in the aftermath of the BP disaster. Papers from all disciplinary and methodological viewpoints are encouraged. Sample topics might include:

* treatment of the Deepwater Horizon disaster from positions in traditional and non-traditional animal rights/welfare philosophy

* the larger issue of ethical responsibility to non-human animals in light of the oil spill

* theoretical musings about the implications that this event will have for future animal rights debates

Please send 500 word abstracts along with a brief bio to Sean Kelly at skelly@fgcu.edu. Deadline for abstracts is August 1, 2010.

September 1, 2010. Call for Panelists Writing Original Eco-fiction, ASLE Biennial Conference, Bloomington, IN, June 21-26, 2011.

When we write creative nonfiction prose about the natural world, we are free to write as essayists, science popularizers, journalists, and the like, mingling natural history with factual (or quasi-factual) information about ourselves and other historically real human beings. But when we write fiction and wish to say something ecologically significant, we have additional, or perhaps altogether different, conventions to consider, conventions most readers expect from stories and novels--e.g. dramatic action, dialogue, character development, plot, and symbol. If you are struggling with these considerations as you write original eco-fiction and would like to take part in a panel discussion on the topic at next year's biennial conference in Bloomington, please e-mail Allison Wallace at allisonw@uca.edu by September 1, 2010. Briefly describe your project and include a short excerpt of your work within the text of your message.

September 1, 2010. Staging Sustainability: Arts, Community, Culture, Environment, April 20-22, 2011, York University, Toronto, Canada.

How can we produce art that reflects, celebrates, critiques and advances the cultural life of our community without contributing to the destruction of the setting that inspires these artistic endeavours? The Faculty of Fine Arts at York University (Toronto - Canada) invites proposals for papers for "Staging Sustainability: Arts, Community, Culture, Environment," a conference taking place April 20-22, 2011.

The conference will provide an opportunity for artists and those who support the arts in a myriad of ways – from scholars, critics, producers and designers to policy-makers, industry and government – to engage in interdisciplinary dialogue about issues associated with the creation of environmentally sustainable arts practice and performance.

The conference committee welcomes proposals for papers that consider the relationship between the cultural and ecological aspects of sustainability in the arts, and may encompass aspects of subjectivity with respect to community and identity.

Please forward a 250-word abstract of your proposal, including your name, affiliation, mailing and email address to:

Ina Agastra, Executive Assistant to the Dean
Faculty of Fine Arts, York University
ffadeanasst@yorku.ca

September 15, 2010. Material Cultures: Canadian Literature Symposium, University of Ottawa, May 6-8, 2011.

How do objects circulate in our social, imaginary, and textual worlds? What are the politics of material culture and how do these politics inform our reading of historical and contemporary texts? In what ways do we perceive and come to know the material world, and in what ways does the material make and unmake this “we”? Proposals for papers are invited for a conference on Material Cultures in Canadian and Transnational Contexts, the 2011 edition of the Canadian Literature Symposium at the University of Ottawa. Interdisciplinary, hemispheric, and theoretical approaches to the conference theme are welcome.

Proposed papers may consider, but are not limited to: things; physical environments/nature/architecture; the human/extrahuman/animal; art objects/craft; commodities, goods, resources; artifacts; collectibles; dirt/waste/garbage/junk/treasure; miniatures/gigantica; objects and ideology; book-as-object/materiality of the text; theories/philosophies of technology; machines and the machine-made; affect and objects; toys; animate objects.

Send electronic or paper proposals of 300-400 words by September 15th to: Tom Allen: tallen@uottawa.ca, and Jennifer Blair: jennifer.blair@uottawa.ca

http://www.canlit-symposium.ca/cfp.html

September 15, 2010. International Conference: Marking the Land in North America. May 14, 2011, Organized by the North American Studies Group,
University of Toulouse le Mirail, Toulouse, France.

Scientific committee: Nathalie Dessens, Université de Toulouse, Wendy Harding, Université de Toulouse, Scott Slovic, University of Nevada, Reno

This conference will explore the various traces left by human beings in their interactions with the environment in North America. Our daily existence has a social, historical and ecological impact that leaves visible or invisible marks in space, while the land imposes its mark on the communities that it welcomes. The mark is thus double-faced and interactive. Recent environmental disasters show how devastating these traces can become but also in what ways they can alter the awareness that the general public has of eco-crises. Whether we degrade or protect the land, our existence alters it and marks it. We welcome papers investigating how the American landscape has been shaped and fashioned, deliberately or accidentally, by the various populations inhabiting it. At the same time, we are interested in the ways in which art constitutes a different kind of trace of human activity on the land. The visual arts, especially the “land arts,” contribute to our ongoing interaction with our surroundings. In American literature, in a variety of styles—polemical, lyrical, elegiac, humorous—writers have responded to their environments and left their own distinctive traces.

September 17, 2010. Trading Places: The Changing Climate of English Studies International Conference. Sponsored by Ewha BK, National Taiwan University & Tsukuba University, held at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, Korea, November 27, 2010.

Trading in commodities, culture, and capital is the business of life. New connections, transfers, mutations characterize the catastrophic ruptures as well as the new beginnings of a global culture of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic mapping of a world where there is no mother-tongue nor ideal speaker-listener offers multiple points of entry for a re-evaluation of the changing climate of English Studies. The organizers of the conference invite papers that address any aspect of the multiplicities that fracture and fertilize our field. Topics may include but are not restricted to: Adaptation, connection, crisis, encounter, environment, disaster, diversity, flow, future, heterogeneity, intersubjectivity, minority, multiplicity, mutualism, reconstitution, rupture, transfer.

"Trading Places: The Changing Climate of English Studies" is the sequel to the conference "Reorienting English: Paradigms in/of Crisis," which was held at National Taiwan University on December 5, 2009. This year the conference is sponsored by Ewha English Department’s BK project team, National Taiwan University and Tsukuba University. The joint conference will take place on November 27 (Sat) at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, Korea.

The Ewha English Department is one of the few college departments in Korea to have received generous government funding (BK 21) for research in English Studies. Our BK project is pursuing a goal of setting “A New Model for English Studies in Korea: Scholarship, Cultural Translation and Professional English for the Global Context.” You can find out more about our project at http://bk21.epasia.org/eng/.

Please submit an abstract of no more than 500 words as a Word document. Include in your submission your name, presentation’s title, a short biography, plus contact information (address, phone number, and email address).
Proposals should be emailed to Dr. Hisup Shin at hshin@ewha.ac.kr by Sep. 17, 2010. All entrants will be notified by the end of September.

September 19, 2010. Literary Darwinism and Social Justice, panel at 42nd Annual Convention, Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA), April 7-10 2011.

In recent years, Literary Darwinism has made rapid advances as a methodology for literary exploration with many seeing it as potentially “the next big thing.” This panel addresses an important issue in the field that arises specifically out of the contrast between Literary Darwinism, and Post-Modern methods of criticism that focus on culture and cultural constructs. Many in literary studies see the promotion of social justice as a major goal of both their scholarship and pedagogy. This session addresses the question of how Literary Darwinism as a methodology is, or could be, consistent with the long held goal of many in literary studies to create better citizens, defeat harmful stereotypes, and, generally, to promote greater social justice. As we move forward in the twenty-first century, Literary Darwinism appears destined to play a prominent role in literary criticism. This panel seeks to further clarify the nature of that role.

In relation to literature, of course, topics may include but are not limited to,
• Misappropriations of Darwinism
• Tensions between the cultural and the universal
• Self-awareness
• The centrality of competition to survival
• The adaptive value of cooperation
• The adaptive value of empathy
• Environmental elements of adaptability
• Essentialism
• Biology and culture

Broadly theoretical papers, papers addressing pedagogy, or treatments of specific texts are welcome. Email 250-300 word abstracts to Todd O. Williams. williams@kutztown.edu

Name and Affiliation
Email address
Postal address
Telephone number
A/V requirements (if any; $10 handling fee with registration)

Interested participants may submit abstracts to more than one NeMLA session; however panelists can only present one paper (panel or seminar). Convention participants may present a paper at a panel and also present at a creative session or participate in a roundtable. Do not accept a slot if you may cancel to present on another session.

September 19, 2010. Gardens (joint session sponsored by the SEA and the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment). The Society of Early Americanists’ Seventh Biennial Conference, 3-5 March 2011, Philadelphia.

Panel Chair Name: Thomas Hallock
Affiliation: University of South Florida St. Petersburg
Email contact: thallock@mail.usf.edu

Early Americanist scholarship on literature and the environment has typically focused upon exchanges across vast space: explorations of unfamiliar territories, trans-Atlantic networks, the kind of imperial imaginings that Mary Louise Pratt defined as "global consciousness." How did the smaller space of a garden serve as a setting for new identities and/or forms of sociability? What possibilities for friendship, affection and affiliation did maintaining a garden – whether for work and leisure – open? How do we unpack the human relationships that were transacted within a commercial, ornamental, or kitchen garden?

September 30, 2010. Animal Minds: proposed panel at the Biennial ASLE Conference, June 21-26, 2011 in Bloomington, Indiana.

Seeking abstracts for a pre-formed panel to be proposed for the ASLE Biennial Conference at Indiana University. Literary, cultural, scientific, media studies, or other approaches to the notion of non-human animal “mind,” including but not limited to animal consciousness and subjectivity; animal “voices” and literary ventriloquism; animal narrators; animal communication or emotion; concepts of animal souls, afterlife, etc. Please email a 300-word abstract and a brief bio by September 30 to:

Mary Ellen Bellanca
Associate Professor of English
University of South Carolina Sumter
bellanca@uscsumter.edu

September 30, 2010. Ecocriticism Sessions at NeMLA: Northeast Modern Language Association 42nd Annual Convention. April 7-10, 2011, New Brunswick, NJ – Hyatt New Brunswick, Host Institution: Rutgers University.

Among the 370 Sessions accepting abstracts are the following looking for essays on ecocritical issues:

* “‘Quit the road to ill-being’: Nineteenth-Century Ecocriticism”; Chair: Margaret Wright, Stony Brook University, mswright@ic.sunysb.edu

* “The Ecogothic in Italian Literature and Culture”; Chair: David Del Principe, Montclair State University, delprinciped@mail.montclair.edu

* “American Fiction Reflecting Global Ecological Concerns”; Chair: Linda Cook, Sam Houston State University, LindaCook@shsu.edu

* “Women and Wilderness: Ecofemism in Early American Literature”; Chair: Ashley Bourne, J Sargeant Reynolds Community College, abourne@reynolds.edu,

* “Geocritical New England”; Chair: Rachel Collins, Syracuse University, racollin@syr.edu,

* “Transnational ‘Environmentalities’ in Nineteenth-Century Anglophone Literature” ; Chair: Margaret Finn, Temple, pfinn@temple.edu,

* “Issues on Ecology in Latin American Literature and Culture”; Chair: Jorge Marcone, Rutgers University-New Brunswick, jmarcone@spanport.rutgers.edu,

Abstract deadline for most sessions is September 30, 2010. Please include with your abstract:
Name and Affiliation
Email address
Postal address
Telephone number
A/V requirements (if any; $10 handling fee with registration)

December 15, 2010. Literature: Ecocriticism & Environment. PCA/ACA & Southwest/Texas Popular Culture and American Culture Associations Joint Conference, April 20-23, 2011, San Antonio, TX.

Panels are now being formed for presentations regarding Literature, Ecocriticism and the Environment. Specific areas might include:

*ecocritical approaches to literature
* environmentally-focused artists and their art
* representations of nature and the environment in popular and American culture
* interdisciplinary approaches to the environment by environmental historians, philosophers,
geographers, ecologists, governmental agencies, etc.
* environmental/ecocritical pedagogy & environmental education
* environmental discourse in the media
* the environment in film
* ecofeminism
* environmental issues in the Southwest
* urban environmentalism
* nature writing and its authors
* environmental activism, non-profit, governmental issues, etc.

Submit proposals to:
Dr. Ken Hada, Chair, Literature: Ecocrticism & Environment
khada@ecok.edu
East Central University
1100 E. 14th St.
Ada, OK 74820
http://www.swtxpca.org

Conferences of Interest

August 1-6, 2010. Ecological Society of America Annual Meeting: Global Warming: The legacy of our past, the challenge for our future. Pittsburgh, PA.

Increases in surface temperatures on a global scale over recent decades support past predictions of global warming as a theory. Although this pattern may be attributable to long-term cycles in global temperatures and atmospheric CO₂, data sets examining climate phenomena at multi-millennial time scales (e.g., the Lake Vostok data) clearly demonstrate that current trends are far out of range of cyclic change alone. The accumulation of such data has led the United National Environment Programme’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to the unavoidable conclusion: human activity has brought about unprecedented rates of temperature increase on a global scale through release of greenhouse gases primarily associated with combustion of fossil fuels.

In contrast to the high level of certainty of the phenomenon of global warming, environmental scientists—including and especially ecologists—have been less certain of its far-reaching effects, although recent evidence suggests that these effects can be far ranging: from altered plant phenology to enhanced occurrence of disease to exacerbated glacial retreat to increased frequency and intensity of tropical storms. Indeed, global warming will continue to exert influence at virtually all levels of ecological organization, from individuals to landscapes. At its 2010 Annual Meeting in Pittsburgh, PA, the Ecological Society of America will place global warming at center stage to draw a critical combination of scientists, policy makers, and concerned citizens to understand further its causes and consequences and to elucidate a clear scenario for addressing what is perhaps the most serious environmental threat facing the biosphere.

Current Conference Calls For Papers

Calls for Proposals

Conferences of Interest