Year: 2017

Deadline for Applications: September 21, 2017 9:00 a.m. EST

The University of California at Los Angeles writes to invite CREEES affiliates to submit brief abstracts to its ACLA seminar, to be held at UCLA March 29-April 1. Abstracts are due September 21 at 9:00 EST. Please see the website for more information.

Seminar proposal: Varieties of Russian Realism: Medium, Genre, and Form in the Nineteenth-Century Russian Arts

Continue reading “CFP: Varieties of Russian Realism – ACLA (UCLA)”

Deadline for Submissions: September 21, at 9 a.m. EST.

The American Comparative Literature Association is looking for participants in the panel “Nature/Culture: Environmental Narratives in the Contemporary World”

This seminar focuses on the intersection of ecology and environmental studies with literature, film, culture, politics, and religion in the contemporary world. We aim to explore the ways in which writers, cultural producers, thinkers, politicians, and non-governmental institutions produce a wide range of discourses on nature and ecology to formulate and shape ideas about national and religious identities, literary production, and social belonging. The 2015 awarding of
Svetlana Alexievich with the Nobel Prize in Literature brought international attention to the confluence of environmental catastrophe with literary narrative. What is more, the rhetoric of “natural disaster,” and its subsequent genres (sustainability narratives, ecotourism, disaster tourism, studies of climate injustice and climate refugees, etc.) often go hand in hand with both foreign and domestic politics, as well as regional identity building. In his recent study of the oil industry in Perm, Russia, for example, Doug Rogers reveals how the regional politics of the Lukoil corporation have played a key role in the revival of local non-Russian cultural identities (The Depths of Russia: Oil, Power, and Culture after Socialism 2015).

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Deadline for Submissions: September 30, 2017

Call For Papers
Reclaiming the Swamp (Thing): Popular Culture and the Public Academy
The 14th Annual
Graduate Conference in Comparative Literature
In Association with the “Barbara Harlow, The Sequel” Conference
27th-28th October 2017
The University of Texas at Austin

Keynote Speaker:

Richard T. Rodriguez
Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies and English
at the University of California, Riverside
on “Latino/U.K.: Postpunk’s Transatlantic Touches”

When the DC comic Swamp Thing debuted in 1971, the border between human and vegetal was crossed.  This conference hopes to bridge the gap between the comic and the novel, the art film and the vine, Occupy and Gramsci, the poetry slam and the classical stage, that is to say, between the popular and the academic, so as to allow the academy to occupy a public space.  The Graduate Association of Comparative Literature Students presents the 2017 Graduate Student Conference, “Reclaiming the Swamp (Thing): Popular Culture and the Public Academy.” Focusing on the role of Popular Culture in the Humanities today, and remembering the contributions of Dr. Barbara Harlow to education and to the world as a public intellectual, this conference considers how academic scholarship has evolved in its relationship to popular forms of human expression, in whatever medium in a world that has always been filled with cultural objects and discourses.  It also imagines what future directions in such work might take.

Often dismissed as an insignificant, transient form, popular culture plays a persistent and powerful role with political and social consequences. In 2016, the Oxford English Dictionary named “post-truth” as the international word of the year, insisting that the affective had supplanted the analytical and that popular culture and media had erupted into the political sphere. Reality-TV, comedy skits, social media posts, and memes became the vehicle for public discourse in a historical moment that demands an understanding of how and why popular culture and media operate so effectively across borders and across spheres. Continue reading “CFP: Reclaiming the Swamp (Thing): Popular Culture and the Public Academy (UT-Austin)”