Calls for Papers

Deadline extended to March 26, 2021

Narrative, like science, empathy, and anger, can be conceived of as a powerful but amoral tool that may be used for a wide range of means and ends. Many educators, with varying degrees of success, use stories to teach or nurture compassion for nonhuman animals. Stories for children, videos for adolescents, books and movies for adults, whatever the media the focus for this panel is on compelling storytelling, framed by educators who are deliberately employing the narrative(s) to ...

Deadline extended to March 24, 2021

How are religious traditions, religious communities, religious practices or theologies implicated in the current crises of pandemic, climate change, and social unrest? How might new religious narratives offer ways forward for rectifying inequities and addressing the consequences of religions’ roles in precipitating global crises? If your work addresses these or other issues involving religion, you may want to join this panel. Send me your proposal by March 18, 2021 for consideration.

2021 ASLE Virtual Conference,  July 26-August 6, 2021

Conference ...

“Experimental Writing in the Anthropocene”: ASLE-sponsored panel at MLA 2022 (Washington DC) Organized by Dr. Eric Schmaltz (Co-Chair) and Dr. Orchid Tierney (Co-Chair, ASLE member)

In The Poethical Wager (2003), Joan Retallack investigates poetry’s relationship to direct social action to interrogate its affordances as a mode of intervention into the conditions of catastrophe, crisis, and precarity. Following Retallack, we wonder what responsibilities does experimental poetry––poetry that swerves away from conventional forms of linguistic and formal meaning-making––has during times of complex social, political, and ecological turbulence? ...

“Apocalyptic Realisms: An Environmental Humanities Roundtable” (MLA 2022) Organized by Rebecca Oh

A non-guaranteed roundtable with the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment

The sixth extinction, ecological collapse, resource exhaustion, forced migration, megaslums, intensifying inequality, and every IPCC report suggest that apocalyptic futures have become the global present, that the end times are our times. But the new sense that the end of the world has arrived is old news for many, including residents of the global South, indigenous communities under settler colonialism, and ...

Each year the Hemingway Society accepts applications for its Lewis-Reynolds-Smith Founders Fellowship grant, and typically makes up to two awards of up to $1,000 each to support the development of a Hemingway-related project. Projects on Hemingway and the environment, animals, hunting, travel, modernization and other topics of particular interest to ASLE members are welcome. For more information or to apply please visit https://www.hemingwaysociety.org/lewis-reynolds-smith-founders-fellowship

The International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture is a community of scholars interested in religion, nature, and culture. We are dedicated to helping scholars think across disciplines and foster critical inquiry and engaged scholarship. Registration is now open for the upcoming Religion and Environment: Relations and Relationality online conference at Arizona State University from Feb. 19-28, 2021.

This is a year of pandemic, a year of disruption, a year in which struggles for racial and economic justice can no longer ...

Crises: Climate and Critique in the Literature and Arts of the English-Speaking World after 1800

International conference in Paris · November 18 – 20, 2021

University Sorbonne Nouvelle

Our times are marked, perhaps even defined, by crisis: sanitary, economic, social and epistemic crises but also (and perhaps more prominently) ecological and climate crises, which gave rise to the “crisis of the imagination” identified by Lawrence Buell in 1995. Twenty years later, the matter stands unresolved, driving writer Amitav Gosh to declare in 2016: “the climate crisis ...

Virtual Graduate Student Colloquium of the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures University of Maryland, College Park March 5-6, 2021 via Zoom

This interdisciplinary graduate conference seeks to investigate how literary, cinematic, and other mediums interrogate, shape, and embody strategies of resistance and resilience and imagine alternative futures in contemporary and historical contexts across the globe. In the midst of a deadly pandemic, among other social, political, economic, and environmental crises on local and global scales, envisioning the future can become an act of resilience and resistance. ...

The 29th annual Midwestern Conference on Literature, Language and Media at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois, is currently accepting proposals for 20-minute presentations from individuals and panels for the 2021 conference, which will take place ONLINE this year, April 2-3, 2021.

This year’s conference theme, “Third Space,” encourages argument-driven papers and original creative works that explore topics concerned with representation and participation among a variety of identities (race, class, gender, etc.) in private, public and third spaces, and across mediums (literature, film, television, ...

In After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene (2015), Jedediah Purdy describes what he calls the “environmental imagination,” which comprises “how we see and how we learn to see, how we suppose the world works, how we suppose that it matters, and what we feel we have at stake in it. It is an implicit, everyday metaphysics, the bold speculations buried in our ordinary lives” (6-7). Amidst the gravity of the Anthropocene today, Purdy examines the linkages between environmental imagination and “ways of ...