CFP: Doing It Themselves: Radical Homemaking in the 21st Century (ASA; Deadline 12.15.13)

Doing It Themselves: Radical Homemaking in the 21st Century. Due Dec. 15

full name / name of organization: 

American Studies Association 2014. “The Fun and the Fury: New Dialectics of Pleasure and Pain In the Post-American Century”

contact email: 

andersonwires@gmail.com

Until now writers and bloggers have argued that radical homemakers (sometimes called “femivores”), people who have turned toward a more self-sufficient, DIY-centered approach to domesticity, allows practitioners to live “lives that honor ecological sustainability, social justice, family, and community,” as Shannon Hayes points out. With the publication of Emily Matchar’s Homeward Bound: Why Women are Embracing the New Domesticity in 2013, along with Hayes’s Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture, and Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen’s Making It: Radical Home Ec for a Post-Consumer World, both in 2010, radical homemaking has both theoretical and practical approaches. This panel seeks to explore the various and divergent aspects of radical homemaking, its intersections with class, gender, sexuality, race, as well as with the conference’s themes of investigating the “various flows of feeling good, furiously good.”

CFP: Society for Novel Studies Conference at the University of Utah April 4-6, 2014 (Deadline:12.1.13)

Call For Papers

Society for Novel Studies Conference at the University of Utah

April 4-6, 2014

Organizers: Vincent Pecora, Scott Black, Jeremy Rosen

Land and the Novel

The history of the novel is in some ways a history of how populations left the land, and their political-theological connection to it, behind—or at least tried to. The novel never really left its chthonic roots behind, however. Like the ancient Greek tragedies, novels from Defoe and Scott on continually recalled those putatively archaic ties to land—both the soil itself and sovereign territory—even as they became the surest signs of an urban and urbane modernity. Instead, it is the critical tradition that seems to have overlooked these traces in the dust, with the consequence that the novel has become increasingly portrayed as the purely secular instrument of efficient nation-state governmentality. The fact that governmentality and the chthonic consciousness actually came to reinforce one another in a Nazi sympathizer such as Knut Hamsun no longer gets any attention at all. This conference is designed to promote a re-thinking of the novel in its relation to the land (again, both as soil and territory). It aims at something like a reconstruction of the entire nexus of land and the novel from the ground up, including broader considerations of political theology and conflict, the cosmopolitan and indigenous. The panel topics are intentionally diverse, ranging from specific historical-geographical moments (that is, using a somewhat different figuration of Bakhtin’s chronotope) to broader considerations of the lands in and of the novel.

CFP: Emily DIckinson’s Reading Culture (Extended Deadline: 10.15.13)

DEA2: CALL FOR PROPOSALS FOR VOLUME 3 (2014)

Emily Dickinson’s Reading Culture

 

“For Poets-I have Keats-and Mr and Mrs Browning. For Prose – Mr Ruskin – Sir Thomas Browne – and the Revelations.”

                                —Letter to T. W. Higginson, 25 April 1862

 

Why should we care what Emily Dickinson really read or about her relationship to reading, books, and authors? In Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s Atlantic article for “young contributors”—the article that prompted Dickinson’s account of her reading, oft-cited, and her subsequent correspondence with Higginson—he noted: “For purposes of illustration and elucidation, and even for amplitude of vocabulary, wealth of accumulated materials is essential; and whether this wealth be won by reading or by experience makes no great difference.” For Dickinson, separated by location, situation, and temperament from the “wealth of… experience” that presumably characterized the lives of many professional writers, this counsel must have seemed pure balm. If she could write from the “wealth… won by reading,” then, as a dedicated reader, she would be on firm ground. Emily Dickinson’s reading  provided a vital foundation for her writing. 

SSAWW Conference 2015 – Philadelphia

Hi, everyone,

I am happy to let you know that Beth L. Lueck has agreed  to serve as the Associate Conference Director. Beth, as many know, has extensive experience in conference planning. Thanks, Beth, for your willingness to work on the 2015 SSAWW conference in Philadelphia.

Another great addition to the planning team is Miranda Green-Barteet who has agreed to serve as Program Coordinator. She will be playing a major part in the program planning and handling some of the specific tasks that come up as we move from planning to implementation.

We look forward to having the graduate student assistants in place (see below), and to hearing from the membership on ideas and thoughts for the conference as we move forward to 2015.  — Rita Bode

Call for Graduate Student Positions with SSAWW (Deadline: 10.15.13)

Dear SSAWW Colleagues:

Your board remains hard at work for you!  Start getting excited about the 2015 conference now!

As many of you know, several major SSAWW officer positions will have a corresponding graduate student position attached to them. These early career professionals will help their officers on a voluntary basis and be able to attend the SSAWW triennial conference without having to pay the conference fee. For those graduate students who also volunteer to help with the 2015 conference, financial assistance for attending the conference will be provided, thereby maximizing their ability to support the officers and gain experience relevant to professional development.

Kristin Allukian (already on the board) is now working with Kristin Jacobsen, Vice President, Development. (Thank you!!)  The SSAWW Executive Board is issuing a call for nominations, including self-nominations—by way of its Nominations Committee—for 3 further positions, which will be matched with:

Rita Bode, Vice President, Organizational

Beth Lueck, Associate Conference Director

Donna Campbell, Vice President, Publications

CFP: MELUS Special Issue: African American Print Cultures (Deadline 12.15.13)

MELUS CFP for 2015 Special Issue

African American Print Cultures

Guest Editors Joycelyn Moody and Howard Rambsy  

In 2015, a special issue of MELUS will showcase under-studied aspects of black print culture studies or book history. We are seeking scholarship that addresses, but is not limited to, the following questions: 

·         How are contemporary print matters—ranging from concerns such as the publication of new print editions of literary texts by emergent and historical US black writers to online and open access publishing as well as to the operations of the mainstream publishing industry—shaping our understanding of what African American literature is becoming?

·         To what ends might K-12 language arts teachers and literature professors utilize racialized or racially-charged paraphernalia, pamphlets, postcards, and other artifacts to best enhance the learning experiences of US students in African American literature courses?

CFP: Dickinson Institute (Deadline: 1.15.2014)

Call for Papers: Dickinson Institute

 

On Friday, August 8th, 2014, the EDIS “Dickinson Institute” will be held in Amherst, Massachusetts. The topic is “Emily Dickinson and New England Writers.” Individuals doing work on Dickinson’s relationship to other writers of her region should send 250-word abstracts of a paper to Elizabeth Petrino (EPetrino@fairfield.edu) and Alexandra Socarides (socaridesa@missouri.edu) by January 15, 2014. Accepted participants will be notified by Feb. 15th and will be asked to circulate completed, conference-length (8-10 page) papers to a small group by June 15th. Members will meet at the Institute with this group to discuss their work in detail. The Institute will also involve a plenary speaker and a gathering of all Institute members at its close to reflect on their work and the larger themes of the conference. The Institute is scheduled for the first day of the Emily Dickinson Annual Meeting, which all participants are welcome to attend.

Grants and Fellowships: Winterthur Research Fellowship Program (Deadline: 1.15.2014)

Winterthur Research Fellowship Program Application Due Date January 15, 2014

Winterthur, a public museum, library, and garden supporting the advanced study of American art, culture, and history, announces its Research Fellowship Program for 2014–15. Winterthur offers an extensive program of short- and long-term fellowships open to academic, independent, and museum scholars, including advanced graduate students, to support research in material culture, architecture, decorative arts, design, consumer culture, garden and landscape studies, Shaker studies, travel and tourism, the Atlantic World, childhood, literary culture, and many other areas of social and cultural history. Fellowships include 4–9 month NEH fellowships, 1–2 semester dissertation fellowships, and 1–2 month short-term fellowships.

Fellows have full access to the library collections, including more than 87,000 volumes and one-half million manuscripts and images, searchable online at winterthur.org. Resources for the 17th to the early 20th centuries include period trade catalogues, auction and exhibition catalogues, an extensive reference photograph collection of decorative arts, printed books, and ephemera. Fellows may conduct object-based research in the museum’s collections, which include 90,000 artifacts and works of art made or used in America to 1860, with a strong emphasis on domestic life. Winterthur also supports a program of scholarly publications, including Winterthur Portfolio: A Journal of American Material Culture.

Fellows may reside in a furnished stone farmhouse on the Winterthur grounds and participate in the lively scholarly community at Winterthur, the nearby Hagley Museum and Library, the University of Delaware, and other area museums. Fellowship applications are due January 15, 2014. For more details and to apply, visit winterthur.org/fellowship or e-mail Rosemary Krill at rkrill@winterthur.org.

 

Portraits of American Women Writers Appearing in Print before 1861

At The Library Company, Portraits of American Women Writers Appearing in Print before 1861

http://www.librarycompany.org/women/portraits/gallery.htm

Below: Portrait of Caroline M. Congdon: http://www.librarycompany.org/women/portraits/congdon.htm

Emily Dickinson’s Music Binder Digitized

From Ellen Gruber Garvey on SSAWW-L:

I just learned of a recently digitized Emily Dickinson resource that may interest SSAWWers. .Harvard has digitized ED’s music binder — sheet music that she collected and played on the piano. Here’s a link to a blog description of it:

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/houghton/2013/09/05/emily-dickinsons-music-book-edr-469/

and the digitized binder:

http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/46653089