Category: Call for Submissions

Deadline: December 20, 2020

A Critical Discussion Forum proposal for the Slavic Review [SEE REVISED DEADLINES]

The Working Group for Solidarity in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, an ASEEES affiliate group, and the Slavic Review are soliciting submissions for a Critical Discussion Forum on the state of the field and the specific challenges of contingency. Slavic Review will host the forum tentatively titled Crisis, Contingency, and the Future of REEES: Perspectives on the Present and Future of the Field, to be published approximately in the Fall 2021. Contributions to this forum will focus on challenges our field faces, both in confronting the current COVID-19 crisis and grappling with long-lasting structural problems in our field, such as racism, xenophobia, sexism, classism, homo- and transphobia; discrimination based on nationality, ethnicity, and religious affiliation; as well as the lack of employment, housing, and healthcare security.

Deadline: January 15, 2021

We invite proposals for a special issue of Russian Literature dedicated to Cultural Biopolitics in Modern Russia.

The term “biopolitics” was coined by Michel Foucault to describe a historical shift that took place in the 17th and 18th centuries, when an earlier concept of sovereignty, grounded in the power to decide when “to take life or let live,” was replaced by one determined by the state’s power “to foster life or disallow it to the point of death.” With the emergence of liberal democracy and modern capitalism, new forms of governmentality appeared that centered on the administration of bodies at the level of the population. From government funded programs to increase birth rates to prohibitions on smoking, euthanasia, and certain kinds of sexual behavior, natural life began to be included in the calculations of the state. Sovereign power increasingly became identified with the management of life. Politics assumed the form of biopolitics.

Deadline: February 1, 2021

“During the war people avidly read Tolstoy’s War and Peace as a means of testing their reactions.” So begins Lydia Ginzburg’s The Siege of Leningrad: Notes of a Survivor. Now that the very fiber of our social life has been upended by the pandemic, whose reverberations will be undoubtedly with us for many years to come, the journal Russian Literature proposes to again turn to books for insights on our common predicament. In the Petersburg of Osip Mandelstam’s The Egyptian Stamp, library books “are inhabited by measles, scarlatina, and chicken pox.” Indeed, classics of Russian and East European literature are swarming with infection and more often than not contagion mixes with political conflagration in their fevered collective consciousness. And, even before the era of Covid-19, contemporary literature and film became infested with scenarios in which viruses, both biological and digital, are unleashed, either intentionally or accidentally, by either the West or the East upon the world with catastrophic consequences.

Deadline: December 23, 2020

Editors: Liudmila Klimanova (University of Arizona), Jason Merrill (Michigan State University/Middlebury College Kathryn Wasserman Davis School of Russian), Shannon Donnally Spasova (Michigan State University).

The sudden global outbreak of COVID-19 in late 2019 has led to an abrupt transition of Russian and Slavic programs to emergency remote, hyflex, and synchronous online modalities as a then-thought-to-be temporary alternative to face-to-face and hybrid instruction delivery modes. The transition disrupted established educational practices and put unprecedented pressures on administrators, program directors, instructors, graduate teaching assistants, and students. While online instruction traditionally offers a great deal of flexibility in teaching and learning, the speed with which this move to remote teaching took place was staggering, and the need to continue with remote teaching beyond one interrupted term was unexpected. In addition to administrative and emotional challenges, and a severe lack of technical and methodological support associated with this transition, faculty and instructors in university programs found themselves unprepared to lead interactive classes in a video conferencing environment, to design suitable digital materials and evaluation instruments for remote teaching modalities, or to develop new pedagogies of remote language teaching for regular and immersive programs, often having to improvise quick solutions in less-than-ideal circumstances. 

Deadline: August 30, 2021

In the last two decades, there has been a renewed interest in Decadent literature, and a reassessment of the Decadent movement in relation to a poetics of circulation and reception. Scholarship of Decadence have been especially productive in unveiling the crucial role of translation, the extent to which Decadent authors read, cited and plagiarized one another. Novels previously judged derivative or stylistically lacking have been re considered in light of their participation in a network; moreover, scholars have demonstrated that Decadence’s focus on style did not preclude engagement in socio-political issues. Most importantly, while studies of Decadence were until recently focused on France, or at the most on French-Anglo relationships, recent scholarship has highlighted how Decadence functioned as a transnational, cosmopolitical movement that found disciples across and beyond Europe.

This project builds on these developments to examine the work of the Italian author Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863-1938) within a world literature framework, from his own engagement with translation and multilingualism to the international circulation and reception of his work.

Deadline: November 20, 2020

The Working Group for Solidarity in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, an ASEEES affiliate group, and the Slavic Review are soliciting submissions for a Critical Discussion Forum on the state of the field and the specific challenges of contingency. Slavic Review will host the forum tentatively titled Crisis, Contingency, and the Future of REEES: Perspectives on the Present and Future of the Field, to be published approximately in the Fall 2021. Contributions to this forum will focus on challenges our field faces, both in confronting the current COVID-19 crisis and grappling with long-lasting structural problems in our field, such as racism, xenophobia, sexism, classism, homo- and transphobia; discrimination based on nationality, ethnicity, and religious affiliation; as well as the lack of employment, housing, and healthcare security.

Our primary goal is to present the stories and perspectives of colleagues in contingent positions: graduate students, international students, postdoctoral fellows, visiting and adjunct instructors, lecturers, academic hourly employees, independent scholars, as well as tenure track scholars.

Deadline: January 1, 2021

Given recent conversations in the field and ACTR’s statement concerning systemic racism and police brutality in the United States, the Russian Language Journal is dedicating a special issue to the topic of diversity, equity, access and inclusion. We invite submissions that address any aspect of DEAI in language study, instruction, and/or curriculum, including, but not limited to:

•       The implementation of critical pedagogies in K-16 language classrooms
•       Developing community engagement initiatives in the language classroom that promote equity and social justice
•       Redesigning curricula and language learning materials to promote learner identity and self-representation
•       Language ideology and public policy at the local and national level
•       Analysis of public discourse related to issues of race, gender, LGTBQ+, and marginalized ethnic communities in Russian-speaking countries
•       Methods of teaching, training, and mentoring graduate students and language instructors in addressing inequity and promoting inclusivity
•       Study abroad programing for students from underrepresented populations

Deadline: October 31, 2020

Folklorica, the Journal of the Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Folklore Association, is accepting submissions for a special issue on vernacular responses to the Covid-19 Pandemic.

The Covid-19 Pandemic has sent a ripple through a fraught and interconnected world, drastically shifting global currents towards stasis and seclusion. Countries have shut-down, hospitals have been overwhelmed, people have been relegated to their homes and the world has ground to a halt in a number of ways. It is in such times of crisis as these that folklore becomes a tool to fill the gaps of indeterminacy, to provide comfort, to attempt to explain how and why these events are unfolding and, in more insidious manifestations, to cast blame for the crisis on various real or imagined parties.