CFP The Historical Imagination in American Literature (9/15/2022; ALA Symposium Santa Fe 10/27-29/2022)

The Historical Imagination in American Literature

source: https://americanliteratureassociation.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/2022-Santa-Fe-cfp-Historical-Imagination.pdf

October 27-29, 2022

Drury Plaza Hotel in Santa Fe

828 Paseo de Peralta

Santa Fe, NM 87501

Conference Director: Olivia Carr Edenfield, Georgia Southern University

Keynote Speaker: Deborah Clarke, Arizona State University

Conference Fee: $175

For our 2022 Fall Symposium, the American Literature Association will return to beautiful Santa Fe, New Mexico. The Drury Plaza Hotel offers excellent rates and is perfectly located near the central plaza. Single and double rooms will be available for $135 a night plus taxes. This rate includes not only a free breakfast and wireless access, but also a “kickback” every evening at 5:30, featuring hot food and cold drinks. Valet parking will be $10 per night.

The Historical Imagination in American Literature: What does it mean to envision and embody history in American writing? How does a “usable past” shape our fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction? What philosophical, psychological, and political factors shape how writers look at a moment of time? How do regional differences shape our historical perspectives? How do race, class, and gender influence the perception and presentation of historical realities? How important is the historical novel to our culture? How do the alternate histories of speculative fiction transform our understanding of time? These and other related questions should provide for a lively weekend of literary exploration and good conversation. We welcome proposals for individual papers, complete panels, and roundtable discussions on any aspect of this important subject.

Please send all proposals to the Conference Director at carr@georgiasouthern.edu as soon as possible and no later than September 15, 2022.

Conference Details: Sessions run Friday and Saturday, October 28-29, 2022. There will be an opening event and welcoming reception on Thursday evening, October 27. The Conference Fee of $175 includes a luncheon as well as receptions.

Individuals may propose papers, panels, or roundtables by emailing the Conference Director, Professor Olivia Carr Edenfield (carr@georgiasouthern.edu) no later than September 15, 2022, and preferably earlier. The proposal should include the title of the presentation or panel, an abstract that provides a clear idea of the material that will be covered, a brief vita or description of the presenter’s qualifications, and the email addresses for all participants. The proposal should be both pasted into an email and sent as an attachment (preferably in WORD). All emails will be acknowledged in a timely manner.

Those proposing papers and/or panels will be informed of acceptances by September 20, and hotel reservations will need to be made before September 25. Participants will be asked to make their hotel reservations immediately and to pay the conference fee by pre-registering on-line by October 15. A program will be placed on the ALA website prior to our meeting, and printed programs will be available at the symposium.

ALA Guidelines: The most common ALA format is a time slot of one hour and twenty minutes with three papers and a chair. This permits time for discussion and three papers of approximately 20 minutes (or nine typed double-spaced pages). Organizers of panels are free to use other formats provided they respect the time limits. Furthermore, the ALA encourages panel organizers to experiment with innovative formats including discussion groups and panels featuring more speakers and briefer papers. Chairs will make sure that the panels start and end on time and that no speaker goes beyond the allotted time limit. We prefer that chairs not present papers on the panels that they are moderating, and no one may present more than one paper at an ALA symposium.

AV: Please note that we are not able to provide AV at this symposium.

Conference Registration: The conference fee of $175 covers the costs of the conference. We require all of those who are on the program to pre-register by October 15, 2022. Please see the website for the on-line registration link. If you wish to pay by check, you may find the mail-in registration form on our website. The conference fee is $175 for all participants. We regret that we are unable to offer a lower rate for graduate students and independent scholars. If you have a question or concern regarding registration, please contact Olivia Carr Edenfield, Director of the ALA, at carr@georgiasouthern.edu. 

ALA Membership: Membership in the ALA is not required in order to propose or present a paper. In fact, technically the members of the American Literature Association are the various author societies. Individuals may keep informed about the activities of the ALA, including our symposia and conferences, by checking our website (www.americanliteratureassociation.org).

Please note that the American Literature Association maintains the lowest conference fees of any major scholarly organization because it operates without a paid staff. If you have any questions that are not answered by this announcement, please contact the Conference Director, Professor Olivia Carr Edenfield, Director of the ALA, at carr@georgiasouthern.edu.

Thank you for your interest and your support of the American Literature Association.

CFP Speculative Souths (1/1/2019)

An intriguing idea for a collection:

Speculative Souths
https://www.theasa.net/jobs-opportunities/cfps/speculative-souths

Deadline: Tuesday, January 1, 2019

Review Begins: Tuesday, January 1, 2019



Speculative Souths

Ed. Amy Clukey, Erich Nunn, & Jon Smith

Edited Collection CFP


In the early years of science fiction, space frequently figured as the American West writ large—the final frontier. In the genre’s darker, grittier reboot era, however, it often looks more like the final plantation, from Blade Runner’s updated slavecatchers to the transnationally and transtemporally exploited Appalachians of William Gibson’s The Peripheral to Atlanta architect John Portman’s abstracted plantation-house columns looming over the Hunger Games films. And even as some white writers, in the twilight of American empire, set their dystopian survivalist fantasies in the region (The Road, The Walking Dead), self-consciously “southern” varieties of Afrofuturism and speculative blackness, ranging from OutKast to novels such as Kiese Laymon’s Long Division and Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing, represent it as a site of vibrant black futurity contesting and sometimes transcending both the nation’s plantation past and its carceral present. Meanwhile, cli-fi and ecofiction set in the South, from Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior to Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, is on the rise as the region’s coasts begin to sink.


This collection seeks to make sense of these and other“southern turns” in speculative fiction, broadly defined across multiple media and subgenres, and of earlier southern turns that, because they didn’t fit with dominant models, earlier scholarship may have missed or misread. What happens when speculative fiction goes from western to southern, for example, and/or when our understanding of “the South” shifts its gaze from past to future? How does the speculative allow writers to conceive of the South in ways that transcend the black/white binary that has long shaped how the region is imagined?


Send abstracts by January 1st, 2019 to Amy.Clukey@gmail.com. Final papers of 4000-5000 words will be due by January 1st, 2020.



Possible topics might include

• Southern Afrofuturisms in literature and music from Sun Ra to Outkast and beyond
• Speculative Souths in comic and graphic narratives: Swamp Thing, Black Panther, Bitch Planet, Kindred
• Nineteenth-century literature and speculative Souths: Edgar Allan Poe and lesser known southern innovators/imitators of the genre
• Southern iconographies that serve as sci-fi prop, backdrop, mood enhancers: architect John Portman
• Southern retro-futurism, futurity, and future’s futures
• Transnational, transtemporal, weird, queer, fantastic, or dystopian speculative Appalachias: The Hunger Games, The Peripheral
• The South and the (Old and/or New) Weird (e.g., Southern Reach)
• The presence or weird absence of “the South” in theorizations of science fiction, such as the work of Darko Suvin or North Carolinian Fredric Jameson
• Octavia Butler and the South, beyond Kindred
• Speculative fictions (e.g., Laymon’s Long Division) as counter-politics
• Alt-histories: Henry Turtledove’s white nationalist rehashes of the Civil War, more recent treatments like Omar El Akkad’s American War
• Cli-fi of or in the South
• Speculative poetry of or in the South
• Voodoo/hoodoo fantasy
• Time-traveling revisions of southern temporalities from Kiese Laymon’s Long Division to Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series
• Native southern speculative reclamations of space and time
• Even more Undead Souths
• Speculative southern modernisms
• NASA’s ties to Southern cultures or locales (Huntsville, Houston, Cape Canaveral)
• Southerners in space (e.g., Edgar Rice Burroughs’s A Princess of Mars)
• The construct of U.S./Global/Planetary “Souths” on Mars, Venus, and beyond (such as the appearance of the Jim Crow South in golden age SF like Ray Bradbury and Robert Heinlein’s work, or the icy southern polar settlements of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy, the agricultural terrains of The Expanse)
• Treatments of plantation agriculture, slavery, and incarceration in space
• Speculative southern camp in 60s and 70s sci-fi television

CFP Politics and Conflicts - ICFA 2019 (10/31/2018; Florida 3/13-17/2019)

CFP: “Politics and Conflicts,” the 40th International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts
https://www.fantastic-arts.org/2018/cfp-politics-and-conflicts-the-40th-international-conference-on-the-fantastic-in-the-arts/
On July 2, 2018

CFP: “Politics and Conflicts,” the 40th International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts

Please join us for ICFA 40, March 13-17, 2019, when our theme will be “Politics and Conflicts.”

We welcome papers on the work of: Guest Scholar Mark Bould (Reader, University of the West of England; winner of the SFRA Pilgrim Award; author of several books on sf including Science Fiction: The Routledge Film Guidebook) and Guest Author G. Willow Wilson (winner of a PEN Center award; writer of the Hugo-Award-winning series Ms. Marvel, author of Alif the Unseen).

Speculative texts have a tremendous power to help us envision how the world might be otherwise and to see the historical contingencies that have given us the world as we find it. Fantastic genres allow us to imagine other paths that history might have taken and to explore the power dynamics of conflicts among competing factions, from the local scale of family and gender arrangements to the global scale of transnational trade and migration. Such texts can often articulate critiques that would have been silenced by censorship of realist genres in times and places of government, religious, or other oppression. We invite papers that understand the concept of politics very broadly, from international relations and structures of governance, through to the politics of everyday life. If at times the genres of the fantastic can be complicit in naturalizing and perpetuating dominant power structures and the politics they endorse, more often they provide a rich set of tools for telling such stories from marginalized perspectives, visions that cannot be captured by a realism that is structured by default ideological assumptions. We also welcome proposals for individual papers, academic sessions, creative presentations, and panels on any aspect of the fantastic in any media. We will gather in 2019 to question, celebrate, argue over, and deduce speculative fiction’s contributions to thinking through the politics and conflicts of our past and its capacity to guide us toward more inclusive futures.

The deadline for proposals is October 31, 2018. We encourage work from institutionally affiliated scholars, independent scholars, international scholars who work in languages other than English, graduate students. Artists are encouraged to submit proposals for our Creative Track, which features sessions on writing, art, music, and poetry, as well as panel discussions on topics of interest for creative professionals.

For more information on the IAFA and its conference, the ICFA, see https://www.fantastic-arts.org/. The Submissions Portal opens on September 1st. To submit a proposal, go to https://www.fantastic-arts.org/icfa-submissions/.

To contact the Division Heads for help with submissions, go to https://www.fantastic-arts.org/about/governance/division-heads/.

For information on the Creative Track, go to https://www.fantastic-arts.org/annual-conference/creative-track/.

CFP Re-Collections: Memory, History and Mindspace in Science Fiction (9/30/2018; Te-Aviv 3/17-18/2019)

Re-Collections: Memory, History and Mindspace in Science Fiction
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2018/06/01/re-collections-memory-history-and-mindspace-in-science-fiction

deadline for submissions:
September 30, 2018

full name / name of organization:
Tel-Aviv University

contact email:
tausfsymposium@gmail.com




The Sixth International Symposium on the Poetics of Science Fiction

Re-Collections: Memory, History and Mindspace in Science Fiction

Department of English and American Studies

and the Porter School of Cultural Studies,

Tel-Aviv University

17-18 March 2019


While science fiction excels at alternating between hopeful and bleak visions of possible futures, perhaps the most unsettling scenario the genre has to offer involves modification of individual and/or collective memory. So often thought of as the foundation of identity, memory has been shown to be unstable, malleable and subject to falsification. Science fiction writers have poked and prodded at the basic tenets of cognition and memory, constructing nightmarish visions of identity crises, fractured psyches, and mental projections with the depth and detail of an entire world. But memory is also a collective endeavor, shaping our cultural ontologies and our perception of history. Here as well, SF has shown how manipulation of collective memory is capable of generating dystopian societies and altering our perception of both past and future.


Whether hard or soft, space opera or cyberpunk, technological and ideological encroachment on our memories and minds remains a subject that continues to fascinate authors across space and time: from Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward to George Orwell’s 1984 to Octavia Butler’s Kindred, from Philip K. Dick’s “We Can Remember It For you Wholesale” to Roger Zelazny’s The Dream Master to Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” (the basis for the blockbuster movie Arrival). Memory, both individual and collective, remains at the forefront of SF’s engagement with technological, social and psychological change.


Our conference, the sixth in the annual series of SF symposia, is jointly hosted by the Department of English and American Studies and the Porter School of Cultural Studies at Tel-Aviv University, and seeks to address cultural, historical, and narrative questions raised by representations of memory and the mental realm in science fiction. We welcome multimedia, transmedia and interdisciplinary proposals, from literary texts to film and television to video games and more. Topics can include, but are not limited to:

• Technological manipulation of memory (e.g. false memories, artificial memories, memory transfer/erasure, uploading minds)
• Artificial intelligence and memory
• The interrelation between mental, physical and virtual spaces in SF
• Alternative history and memory
• Memory and temporality (e.g. time travel)
• Posthuman and Transhuman memory
• Alien memory (e.g. “mind-melds” with alien species)
• Utopian/Dystopian memory
• Memory as commodity (e.g. cyberpunk)
• Memory and Nostalgia in the SF genre
• Digital ghosts and virtual memories

Proposals of up to 300 words for individual papers and/or panels are to be submitted alongside a short bio to egomel@post.tau.ac.il and tausfsymposium@gmail.com by September 30, 2018. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by the end of October 2018.


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CFP Alternate Earths (Themed Issue of Territory) (due date not provided)

Of possible interest; (with apologies to the organizers) it seems very vague to me:


CfP: Territory, Issue VII – Alternate Earths
https://www.fantastic-arts.org/2017/cfp-territory-issue-vii-alternate-earths/

Posted on September 5, 2017

Territory, Issue VII – Alternate Earths

Maps of the earth might be the most ubiquitous and recognizable type of map, but they also might be the most misleading and the most contested. There is the technical matter of projecting the planet, a three-dimensional object, onto the representational space of a two-dimensional plane, but at a more foundational level, we wonder: what is Earth?

Even the simplest answers aren’t so simple. The earth is round, but has been argued—often elaborately and compellingly—to be flat, hollow, expanding, eternal, illusory, embedded in platonic solids, resting on the back of a turtle that’s resting on the back of a larger turtle, and so on. The earth has seven continents and five oceans, but these are constantly shifting. The earth’s seven continents were once one, but this too is an argument, a narrative constructed from fossil records and glacial deposits. Many argue the earth is headed for destruction while others deny this claim. Many argue the earth is 4.5 billion years while others, less than 10,000.

Earth as planet, resource, globe, home, miracle, stage, habitat, mother, matter, worry, birthplace, and resting place. The earth is the ground beneath our feet, but it is anything but sure. There is always the possibility of an alternate earth, one that inverts, flattens, or otherwise undoes this sense of groundedness and centrality. The question is not whether alternate earths exist, but which you choose to inhabit.

Here are a few we find especially intriguing: Agartha & the hollow earth, Another Earth (2011), Antiterra, Atlantis, Aztlán, alternate histories, bhavacakra, The Books of Genesis & Revelations, brane cosmology, cli-fi, Cosmographia, creation myths, deep time, disaster films, The Drowned World, East of West, ecopoetics, ecumenopoles, eras & epochs, eschatons, the expanding earth, fictional universes, the flat earth & its societies, flood myths, geocentrism, The Global Village, heat death, heliocentrism, Hyperborea, hyperobjects, landfill, the last glacial maximum, Lemuria, ley lines, mappa mundi, Mother Earth / Gaia, Mu, the multiverse, Panthalassa, parallel universes, Pax Germanica, post-apocalyptic fiction, Saṃsāra, sea-level rise, The Southern Reach Trilogy, spirit worlds, supercontinents, T-O maps, terraforming, tidal islands, Waterworld (1995), the world tree, Yggdrasil, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union.

Issue VII will be published February 2018. To learn how to contribute, read our submissions guidelines.

CFP Imagining Alternatives (6/1/2017)

Imagining Alternatives
https://www.cfplist.com/CFP.aspx?CID=10038

Event: 06/01/2017
Abstract: 06/01/2017

Organization: Resilience: A Journal for the Environmental Humanities


CFP for a Special Issue of Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities

“Imagining Alternatives”

From Afrofuturism to dystopian, apocalyptic fiction to alternate history to ecofeminism and cli-fi, authors of speculative fictions have been interrogating alternative worlds in literature, film, television, comic books, and video games. These visions give us access to alien planets as well as alternative perspectives on our own pasts, presents, and possible futures. They reflect our hopes and fears; they offer new narratives of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nationality; they suggest the magic and the horror embedded in our own realities.

This special issue of Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities invites authors to interrogate imagined alternatives to existing systems of knowledge and distributions of power. We are interested in submissions engaging with a wide variety of subjects, genres, mediums, time periods, and national origins: from cyberpunk to steampunk, and from Gothic fiction to fan fiction. We also want to encourage authors to imagine alternative formats for their own work. In addition to traditional essays, we will also consider roundtables, interviews, photo essays, web comics, YouTube videos, Flash animations, web-based games, and other creative works.

To be considered for inclusion in the special issue, submit your work via the Resilience website (http://www.resiliencejournal.org/publishing-in-resilience/submission-form/) by June 1, 2017 for publication in the fall of 2017. Be certain to indicate in the abstract that you are submitting a piece for the “Imagining Alternatives” special issue.

Please direct any questions about the special issue to Megan Condis via email at megancondis.gmail.com or on Twitter @MeganCondis.


Contact Email: megancondis@gmail.com

CFP Nine Worlds' Academia and Geek Culture Conference (4/1/14; London 8/8-10/14)

Sorry for the late posting:

Nine Worlds' Academia and Geek Culture Conference (8-10 August 2014)
full name / name of organization:
Nine Worlds
contact email:
sffacademic@nineworlds.co.uk
Academia and Geek Culture

Last year, the Nine Worlds convention hosted an academic conference. You can find the details of it at www.sffacademic.wordpress.com. This year, we’re intending to do it somewhat differently. Instead of having an academic conference in its own devoted room, we’ll be placing talks, panellists and other speakers in tracks on their own topic.

With that in mind, we’re inviting submissions for papers and suggested panels, as well as volunteers to talk on pre-organised panels. All areas of study surrounding ‘geek media’ are accepted – from video games to classic fantasy, and we welcome submissions from anyone who is a current student or has graduated with a degree in a relevant field. Talks will be ideally 20-30 minutes in length, and the standard panel time is 1 hour, 15 minutes.

Nine Worlds will take place in London (Heathrow) between the 8th and 10th of August 2014. Tickets are available for purchase on www.nineworlds.co.uk, and they will grant you access to the whole convention – not just the academic content.

Suggested areas of submission include:

- Video Games and the surrounding culture
- Board, Social and Role-playing Game
- Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature*
- Diversity and representation in geek culture
- ‘Geek’ film and TV
- Comics
- Religion/culture and geek culture
- Steampunk/other alternative history movements
- Fanfiction
- Science and its relation to geek media/culture

* We’re especially looking for some Game of Thrones content here.

Please ensure your paper/panel is suited to non-academics. Ideally, you may assume the audience has full knowledge of primary sources, but little secondary, so please take this into consideration. We intend to each session be accessible and understandable to those outside of the usual academic groups.

Please send a title, a 300 word abstract, your name and affiliation (university) to sffacademic@nineworlds.co.uk

The deadline for submissions is April 1st, 2014. This deadline is for abstracts only – the completed papers will be due mid-July.

Registration will be completed through the purchase of a ticket to the convention as a whole. Accommodation is available at the hotel, but should be booked separately by individual participants. All profits from the conference/convention will go to charity. Please do email if you have questions.

Nine Worlds deliberately tries to include parity of race, sexual orientation, genders and creeds as a part of its programming remit, wherever possible. We aim to follow this in our selection of panellists, and would also be interested in including papers or panels that address these issues. However, we are aware that some people do not want to discuss these as direct topics, and wish to be sensitive to this, so you will only be asked to speak on topics that you offer to.


By web submission at 02/13/2014 - 15:32