CFP The Souths and Science Fiction (6/1/2023; SAMLA Atlanta 11/9-11/2023)

The Souths and Science Fiction

deadline for submissions:
June 1, 2023

full name / name of organization:
The Society for the Study of Southern Literature, SAMLA

contact email:
zhuesing3@gatech.edu

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2023/01/27/the-souths-and-science-fiction.

The Society for the Study of Southern Literature invites papers on the South and science fiction for a panel at the South Atlantic Modern Language Association’s 94th Annual Conference from November 9-11, 2023 in Atlanta, GA.

This conference’s theme of “(In)Security: The Future of Literature and Language Studies” presents a unique opportunity to consider the imagined futures offered within SF works, including their representation of social inequalities and the possibilities of the SF genre to raise awareness to the value of Literature and Language studies.

Papers may discuss any of the sub-genres of science fiction, including Afrofuturism, post-apocalyptic, or alternate history and may focus on any media including video games, novels, poetry, movies, television, or comics. The chosen texts should share the South, “Southern-ness,” or Global Souths as a concern. We welcome presentations that offer to 'expand' the canon of Southern literature and science fiction itself, especially papers that focus on works by BIPOC, AAPI, or LGBTQ+ writers.

Please direct any questions to Cameron Winter and Zita Hüsing at cameron.winter@gatech.edu and zhuesing3@gatech.edu.

Submit 200-500 word abstracts, 50 word bionotes, and A/V requirements via the following Google form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfarFqg-qrrbHkES62aC7Q3W-Za7eIq89o6snqnQ2pKmKR97w/viewform by June 1, 2023.



Last updated February 2, 2023

CFP Southern Studies Conference (10/22/2018; Montgomery 2/1-2/2019)

CFP: Southern Studies Conference (10/22/2018; 2/1-2/2019)
https://www.navsa.org/2018/09/07/cfp-southern-studies-conference-10-22-2018-2-1-2-2019-2/
Sep 07, 2018

Southern Studies Conference

Auburn University at Montgomery, AL

February 1-2, 2019

Now in its eleventh year, the AUM Southern Studies Conference, hosted by Auburn University at Montgomery, explores themes related to the American South across a wide array of disciplines and methodologies. Registrants to the two-day interdisciplinary conference enjoy a variety of peer-reviewed panels, two distinguished keynote speakers and a visiting artist, who gives a talk and mounts a gallery exhibition.

The 2019 Conference Committee invites proposals for twenty-minute academic papers, creative presentations, or pre-formed panels on any aspect of Southern Studies (broadly defined), including those relating to the fields of anthropology, geography, art history, history, literature, theater, music, communications, political science, and sociology. Disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches to this theme are welcome. Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Southern food studies
• Pedagogy and the teaching of Southern topics
• Canonicity and the South
• Slavery and the American South
• Civil War narratives
• Southern archives, museums, and collections
• Civil Rights narratives
• Southern Geographies
• Explorations of race and conflict in the South
• Religion in the South
• Southern literature
• History of science or medicine in the South
• Southern arts (in any medium or genre)
• Southern architecture
• Explorations of the Southern worker
• Southern politics
• Anthropological studies of the South
• Sociological studies of the South
• Southern music
• Cross-cultural exchanges between the South and other geographic areas
• Native American topics of the South
• Stories of immigration/migration and border-crossings
• Contemporary re/mis-conceptions of "The South"
• Presentations by artists/performers/writers working in the South/making work about the South

Proposals can be emailed to southernstudies@aum.edu and should include a 250-word abstract and a 2-page CV. The deadline for submission is October 22, 2018. Please note that submission of a proposal constitutes a commitment to attend, if accepted. Presenters will be notified of acceptance by November 2018. For more information, please visit the conference website, or contact Naomi Slipp, Conference Director and Assistant Professor of Art History, Auburn University at Montgomery: nslipp@aum.edu.

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 Southern Studies Conference (10/22/2018; Montgomery 2/1-2/2019)

Of potential interest:


CFP: Southern Studies Conference (10/22/2018; 2/1-2/2019)
https://www.navsa.org/2018/06/15/cfp-southern-studies-conference-10-22-2018-2-1-2-2019/
Jun 15, 2018



Southern Studies Conference

Auburn University at Montgomery, AL

February 1-2, 2019

Now in its eleventh year, the AUM Southern Studies Conference, hosted by Auburn University at Montgomery, explores themes related to the American South across a wide array of disciplines and methodologies. Registrants to the two-day conference enjoy a variety of peer-reviewed panels, two distinguished keynote speakers and a visiting artist, who gives a talk and mounts a gallery exhibition.
The 2019 Conference Committee invites proposals for twenty-minute academic papers or creative presentations on any aspect of Southern Studies (broadly defined), including those relating to the fields of anthropology, geography, art history, history, literature, theater, music, communications, political science, and sociology. Disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches to this theme are welcome.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Southern food studies
• Pedagogy and the teaching of Southern topics
• Canonicity and the South
• Slavery and the American South
• Civil War narratives
• Southern archives, museums, and collections
• Civil Rights narratives
• Southern Geographies
• Explorations of race and conflict in the South
• Religion in the South
• Southern literature
• History of science or medicine in the South
• Southern arts (in any medium or genre)
• Southern architecture
• Explorations of the Southern worker
• Southern politics
• Anthropological studies of the South
• Sociological studies of the South
• Southern music
• Cross-cultural exchanges between the South and other geographic areas
• Native American topics of the South
• Stories of immigration/migration and border-crossings
• Contemporary re/mis-conceptions of "The South"
• Presentations by artists/performers/writers working in the South/making work about the South

Proposals can be emailed to southernstudies@aum.edu and should include a 250-word abstract and a 2-page CV. The deadline for submission is October 22, 2018. Please note that submission of a proposal constitutes a commitment to attend, if accepted. Presenters will be notified of acceptance by November 2018. For more information, please visit the conference website, or contact Naomi Slipp, Conference Director and Assistant Professor of Art History, Auburn University at Montgomery: nslipp@aum.edu.

CFP Southern Studies Conference (10/15/14; Alabama 2/6-7/15)

SOUTHERN STUDIES CONFERENCE 6-7 February 2015
full name / name of organization:
Auburn University at Montgomery
contact email:
jhavard@aum.edu

Now in its seventh year, the AUM Liberal Arts Conference in Southern Studies invites panel and paper proposals on any aspect of Southern literature. Topics may include but are not limited to:

--Southern food studies
--Slavery and the American South; slave narratives
--Civil War narratives
--Civil Rights narratives; explorations of race and conflict
--Southern religion and literature
--Ecocriticism and the landscape of Southern writing
--Regionalist writers of the American South
--Explorations of the Southern worker
--The plantation novel
--Changing conceptions of Southern aristocracy in literature
--Southern women writers
--Southern travel writing
--Southern children’s literature
--Cross-cultural exchanges between the South and other geographic areas
--Native American literature of the South
--Stories of immigration / migration and border-crossings
--Contemporary reconceptions of "The South"
--Contemporary literacy and writing programs of the American South
--Studies of works by canonical Southern authors such as Twain, Welty, and Faulkner
--Studies of works by lesser-known Southern writers

This two-day conference includes two keynote presentations. The first will be given by Thomas Hallock (University of South Florida), an expert in eco-studies who has written about how the environment of the South affected the creation of literature in early America. The second will be given by Stephen Ash (University of Tennessee), a historian of the Civil War with particular expertise on the southern home front. The featured artist for the conference is José Galvez, a noted Mexican-American photographer whose latest work depicts the life of Latino immigrants in the American South. Registrants to the conference will also be able to enjoy a variety of peer-reviewed panels and exhibits on southern topics representing all of the liberal arts disciplines.

Proposals can be emailed to aumlac@aum.edu and should include a 250-word abstract and a brief CV. The deadline is 15 October 2014. Proposals will be refereed by established scholars in each discipline. For more information, please visit the conference website:

http://www.liberalarts.aum.edu/southern-studies-conference

or contact

John C. Havard
Assistant Professor of English
Auburn University at Montgomery
jhavard@aum.edu


By web submission at 05/08/2014 - 17:58