Please circulate amongst your colleagues and tutors. We are looking for other projects/papers to
complete our panel proposal for the IWCA 2010 conference in Baltimore, MD, Nov 4-6, 2010.
In keeping with the IWCA’s theme for this year’s conference, we acknowledge that writing
centers often represent the kinds of safe havens in which students, tutors, and administrators can
seek refuge. Likewise, these spaces frequently send students into a diverse world of academic disciplines
and intellectual conversations. With this in mind, we recognize that writing centers can often occupy
interesting and unique positions that offer scholars the opportunity to facilitate larger conversations about
literacy issues within the university.
Our panel seeks to interrogate the roles that writing centers, in unique institutional configurations, can
have in the institutional dialogues. By “configuration,” we here include factors such as people, practices,
services, size, place in the institution, sources of funding, space and time, to name but a few. We are
especially interested in the following questions and concerns:
•What is a “conventional” writing center configuration? What is “unconventional”? Do such things
even exist? How can we problematize our understandings of these definitions? How do different
configurations affect discourse within the institution?
•How and why has your institution’s writing center come to be? How is it different from others? Does
it purposely set itself apart in this way? Or are there external factors that drive it to be so?
•Even with a high degree of difference in demographic, geographic, and institutional contexts, why do
we vouch for “best practice”? How do we negotiate the universal and the contextual in terms of writing
center configurations?
•How do the writing center’s interactions and collaborations with others in the institution (composition
classes, WAC, the English department, central administration, etc.) create unique and interesting
configurations? And how do they create dialogue or collaborate?
•…or any other topics that may be pertinent to writing center configurations and institutional
discourse.
We welcome other graduate student projects as well as works in progress. Please email your 200-300
page abstract or any questions to both Robert Cedillo (cedillor@unr.nevada.edu) and Al Harahap
(harahap@msn.com) with subject line “IWCA 2010 Abstract” by Monday, Feb 15, 2010. We will inform
you of our decisions by Mar 1, 2010.
We look forward to hearing about your projects,
Robert Cedillo, University of Nevada, Reno
Al Harahap, San Francisco State University
Shakespeare Session, 2010 RMMLA Convention, October 14-16, 2010 (Albuquerque, NM)
Ruben Espinosa, Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association
respinosa2@utep.edu
Twenty-minute papers that address any theme pertaining to Shakespeare. Topics of interest
include gender, religious, and race studies in Shakespeare. Submit a 300-500 word abstract to Ruben
Espinosa at respinosa2@utep.edu. The deadline for submitting abstracts is March 1, 2010. Notification will
be given by March 15.
Julie DesJardins and I are looking for a historian with an expertise in the area of women in
higher education and/or the professions to serve as chair and discussant to complete our panel
proposal for the 2011 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women. The panel focuses on women’s
work in academic disciplines in the second half of the Twentieth Century. The current papers, one on
women scientists and one on historians of women, consider how women intellectuals and academics
placed their work and established professional lives in predominantly male intellectual and
professional cultures.
We are also accepting proposals for a third panelist working in a similar area, though preferably with
an international or non-U.S. focus.
Please contact me off-net at jtomas1169@yahoo.com or jtomas1@binghamton.edu if you are currently
working on something that would be a good fit or would be interested in chairing or serving as discussant.
The deadline for panel submissions is March 1, 2010 so I would need to hear from interested parties very
soon and have paper abstracts of 250 words by February 20. The Berkshire Conference will be held in
Amherst, Massachussetts June 9-12, 2011
Changing Lives Through Literature is a nationally recognized alternative sentencing program
for criminal offenders founded in 1991 on the power of literature to transform lives. CLTL sentences
criminal offenders to a series of literature seminars instead of traditional probation. Studies have
confirmed that program graduates are half as likely to commit additional crimes than their
counterparts in the justice system.
Earlier this year, we launched a new blog, Changing Lives, Changing Minds (found at
http://cltl.umassd.edu/blog ), that features guest essays from professors, scholars, graduate students,
and law enforcement officials in the United States and Canada. Some essays focus on Changing Lives
Through Literature and other incarceration alternatives, but we are also interested in broader issues
such as the transformative power of literature, reading, and writing.
We are especially interested in featuring perspectives from up and coming scholars around the
country. We would like to invite you to submit a 500-900 word piece to be featured on the site. Any
topic that deals with literature or writing and the way in which they affect individuals (now or historically),
or relevant issues relating to criminal justice and alternative sentencing are fair game. You might consider
using one or more of the questions below as a jumping off point for an entry or bring ideas of your own to
the blog.
* Is there a book that has profoundly impacted your life or way of thinking? Tell us about how you,
yourself, have been transformed by a piece of literature.
* What do you see as the most pressing obstacles facing those who argue for incarceration alternative
programs as options in criminal sentencing?
* What are the strengths and weaknesses of the current incarceration and judicial systems in reforming
the lives of offenders?
* How do individuals or groups of people create identity through reading and writing (either
historically or currently)?
* How important is it for students to be able to see themselves in the texts they read in classes? What
role should one's personal connections with the text play in classroom discussions?
* How have your writing experiences changed you? Is there a particular writing endeavor (such as a
book, an essay, or a creative piece) that made you understand something about yourself or others? These
are just a few ideas. If your interests include criminal justice, politics, law, etc. we encourage you to bring
those to the table as well. No technical expertise required. Send us your essay submission as an email
attachment, we'll do the rest.
Beth Ayer
English department
University of Massachusetts Dartmouth
Old Westport Rd, North Dartmouth MA
508-999-9225
860-690-4959
Email: eayer@umassd.edu
Visit the website at http://cltlblog.wordpress.com
The editors at Southern Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of the South, a peer reviewed
journal published quarterly from the Southern Studies Institute, invite scholars of southern
literature, culture and history to consider reviewing books for the journal. Please send book title,
mailing address and a C.V. to our book review editor, Dr. James A. Crank at cranka@nsula.edu
Our books available for review for the Spring/Summer of 2010 are:
What Virtue there is in Fire by Edwin T. Arnold ISBN-13: 978-0-8203-2891-1
The Photographic Legacy of Frances Benjamin Johnston by Maria Elizabeth Ausherman ISBN:
9780813032955
Gender edited by Nancy Bercaw and Ted Ownby ISBN: 9780807859483
Fanning the Spark by Mary Ward Brown ISBN-13: 978-0-8173-1645-7
The Art of the Magic Striptease by H. Casey Clabough ISBN: 978-0-8130-3176-7
Big Enough to Be Inconsistent by George M. Fredrickson ISBN-13: 978-0-674-02774-9
With Music and Justice for All by Frye Gaillard ISBN: 978-0-8265-1588-9
Neo-Confederacy edited by Euan Hague et. al. ISBN: 9780292718371
Black Power in Dixie by Alton Hornsby, Jr. ISBN: 9780813032825
Black Manhood and Community Building in North Carolina by Angela Hornsby-Gutting ISBN: 978-08130-3293-1
The Packhorseman by Charles Hudson ISBN-13: 978-0-9173-5540-1
Sweet Tea by E. Patrick Johnson ISBN: 9780807832097
Category 5 by Thomas Neil Knowles ISBN: 978-0-8130-3310-5
Children and Youth in a New Nation edited by James Marten ISBN: 9780814757499
Conterfeit Gentlemen by John Mayfield ISBN: 978-0-8130-3337-2
A Very Mutinous People by Noeleen McIlvenna ISBN: 978-0-8078-3286-8
The Beauty of Holiness: Anglicism and Architecture in Colonial South Carolina by Louis P. Nelson
ISBN: 9780807832332
Corra Harris and the Divided Mind of the New South by Catherine Oglesby ISBN: 9780813032474
Time's River by Janet Rafferty (Editor) and Evan Peacock (Editor) ISBN: 0-8173-5489-1
Education for Liberation by Joe M. Richardson and Maxine D. Jones ISBN-13: 978-0-8173-1657-0
A Brief Guide to Florida's Monuments and Memorials by Roberta Sandler ISBN: 9780813032580
Burning Faith by Christopher B. Strain ISBN: 978-0-8130-3239-9
Law and Society in the South by John W. Wertheimer ISBN: 978-0-8131-2535-0
Americanization in the States by Christina A. Zeigler-McPherson ISBN: 978-0-8130-3361-7
The First Hollywood: Florida and the Golden Age of Silent Filmmaking By Shawn C. Bean ISBN:
978-0-8130-3243-6
When Steamboats Reigned in Florida By Bob Bass ISBN: 978-0-8130-3235-1
The Southern Mind Under Union Rule: The Diary of James Rumley, Beaufort, North Carolina, 18621865. by Judkin Browning. ISBN 978-0-8130-3407-2.
Pursuit of Unity: A Political History of the American South. By Michael Perman. ISBN: 978-0-80783324-7
Ditch of Dreams: The Cross Florida Barge Canal and the Struggle for Florida's Future. by Steven Noll
and David Tegeder. ISBN: 978-0-8130-3406-5
Four Centuries of a Mississippi Landscape: Strawberry Plains Audubon Center. By Hubert H.
McAlexander. ISBN: 978-1-60473-002-9
A New Day in the Delta: Inventing School Desegregation as You Go. By David W. Beckworth ISBN:
978-0-8173-1633-4
Long, Obstinate, and Bloody: The Battle of Guilford Courthouse. By Lawrence E. Babits & Joshua B.
Howard. ISBN: 978-0-8078-3266-0
Migration and the Transformation of the Southern Workplace Since 1945. Edited by Robert Cassanello
and Colin J. Davis ISBN: 978-0-8130-3403-4
The Varieties of Women's Experiences: Portraits of Southern Women in the Post-Civil War Century.
Edited by Larry Eugene Rivers and Canter Brown, Jr. ISBN: 978-0-8130-3412-6
We Ain't What We Ought To Be: The Black Freedom Struggle from Emancipation to Obama. by
Stephn Tuck. ISBN: 978-0-674-03626-0
Slavery On Trial: Race, Class, and Criminal Justice in Antebellum Richmond, Virginia. by James M.
Campbell. ISBN: 978-0-8130-3091-3
Mary Chesnut's Civil War Epic. by Julia Stern. ISBN: 978-0-226-77328-5
Alabama's Civil Rights trail: An Illustrated Guide to the Cradle of Freedom. by Frye Gaillard. ISBN:
978-0-8173-5581-4
http://socialsciences.nsula.edu/southern-studies/
ANTHOLOGY. Try this on for size. Take these six words—Anteros, crippled, spindles, stairwell,
threshold, and whirligig—and incorporate them into a poem for possible inclusion in an exciting and
daring anthology. Submit up to three poems by March 8. E-mail submissions and queries to:
thelistanthology@gmail.com. Please visit www.kennesaw.edu/thelistanthology for more information.
Marshall Festival 2010 is now accepting proposals for readings in fiction, poetry, and creative
non-fiction; panel discussions concerning topics pertaining to rural writing, culture, and art; and
mixed media presentations. Proposals should appeal to rural culture in the broadest sense possible. Work
specifically pertaining to the Upper Midwest including Minnesota, the Dakotas, Wisconsin, Iowa and
Nebraska, will be given priority.
The festival will be held at the Southwest Minnesota State University on October 28-31, 2010. There is no
registration fee for this conference. Please visit this site for more details:
http://marshallfestival.wordpress.com/
Dr. Anthony Smith
Southwest Minnesota State University
1501 State Street
Marshall, MN 56258
(507)537-7295
Email: anthony.smith@smsu.edu
American Literature I: Literature before 1900 (03/26/10; SCMLA, 10/28/10-10/30/10)
Tracy Hoffman
Tracy_Hoffman@baylor.edu
The topic is open to any pre-1900 American discourse, but discussions which include “New Frontiers,”
the theme of the conference, are encouraged. Please send a shortened CV and 200-word abstract to
tracy_hoffman@baylor.edu. For more information about SCMLA and the Fort Worth conference, visit
www.ou.edu/scmla.
Harriet Beecher Stowe's Bicentennial of Her Birth 2011; 5/1/2010
Philip J. Kowalski/Wake Forest Univeristy
kowalspj@wfu.edu
I am searching for anyone who is interested in contributing to, as well as editing, a collection of
essays that spans Harriet Beecher Stowe's writing career. I am supposing that since 2011 is the
bicentennial of her birth, interest might be garnered among presses. All approaches, suggestions, and topics
are welcome.
The Washington Irving Society invites proposals on any Irving topic. Please send a shortened CV
and 200-word abstract to tracy_hoffman@baylor.edu by February 14, 2010. Discussions which
include “New Frontiers,” the theme of the Fort Worth conference, are encouraged. For more information
about the Washington Irving Society, please visit http://irvingsociety.wordpress.com.
The 'Shakespeare: Puzzles, Mysteries, Investigations' day conference at the University of
Chichester, England, will now take place on Friday 29 October 2010.
A full schedule for the day with details of keynote speakers and those giving short papers will be
published shortly.
Enquiries to d.salkeld@chi.ac.uk or l.sargent@chi.ac.uk
Dr. Duncan Salkeld,
Department of English,
The University of Chichester,
Chichester, UK.
Call for Papers
Hawthorne in Concord: Eden and Beyond
On July 10, 1842, newly-married Sophia Hawthorne wrote to her mother of her arrival with
husband Nathaniel at The Old Manse: "It is a perfect Eden round us. . . . We are Adam and Eve and
see no persons round." The organizers of the 2010 Hawthorne Conference invite paper proposals
relating to the Hawthornes' years in Concord: 1842–45 (The Old Manse), 1852–53, and 1860–64 (The
Wayside). We invite abstracts on a range of topics, including Hawthorne and his family, his short fiction,
Hawthorne and the Transcendentalists, his reading, his reputation, his politics, Hawthorne and the Civil
War, and his unfinished manuscripts.
Please send paper proposals of 200 words by January 31, 2010, to:
Sam Coale
39 Pratt Street
Providence RI 02906
OR
E-mail: samcoale@cox.net
The conference will be held at The Colonial Inn in Concord, Massachusetts, from June 10 to 13, 2010.
Featured speakers will be Jane Langton and Lawrence Buell.
Shakespeare Journal is accepting articles that are concerned with any aspect of Shakespeare and
sports, athletics, or exercise for the 2011 issue, “Shakespeare and Sport.” We welcome articles of
6,000 words (including notes) that examine the presence and nature of sport in Shakespeare’s works. We
are looking for a wide variety of theoretical and historical approaches to Shakespeare and sport, which
could include but is not limited to investigations of Shakespeare’s use of sport, physical exercise, sporting
events, physical fitness, and competitive games.
Shakespeare is a major peer-reviewed journal, publishing articles drawn from the best of current
international scholarship on the most recent developments in Shakespearean criticism. Its principal aim is
to bridge the gap between the disciplines of Shakespeare in Performance Studies and Shakespeare in
English Literature and Language. The journal builds on the existing aim of the British Shakespeare
Association, to exploit the synergies between academics and performers of Shakespeare. Please include a
brief bio and 200-word abstract with your electronic submission, all in Word documents (.doc not .docx).
Please visit the website at http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/17450918.asp/ for more specific
submission guidelines and to read past issues.
Send submissions to the guest editor: John J. Norton, john.norton@cui.edu
Essays are invited for a collection of essays on the television series House. The series, starring
Hugh Laurie as a skilled but misanthropic doctor, began its run in the fall of 2004. Now in its sixth season
(2009-2010), the series was the “most watched” series in 2008. Principally set in Princeton-Plainsboro
Teaching Hospital, the series features Gregory House, who heads a team of diagnosticians, who take on the
most difficult and perplexing cases. Initially, his diagnostics team was composed of Dr. Allison Cameron
(Jennifer Morrison), Dr. Robert Chase (Jesse Spencer), and Dr. Eric Foreman (Omar Epps). In subsequent
years, his team shifts to include Dr. Remy Hadley (Olivia Wilde), Dr. Lawrence (Choudray) Kutner (Kal
Penn), and Dr. Chris Taub (Peter Jacobson). Two other principal characters are House’s best friend, the
oncologist Dr. James Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard), and the hospital administrator and Dean of Medicine
Dr. Lisa Cuddy (Lisa Edelstein).
As with any television series, a critic might approach House from many perspectives. This volume
proposes to examine the House—overall and through close readings of specific episodes—in relation to
other medial comedy and dramatic series and the ways in which it treats gender, race, class, and sexuality,
in its characters, character interactions, and story lines. Essays might compare and contrast the ways in
which House represents questions of racial, gender, and sexual identity, though they may also examine
those issues solely in relation to House. Because the series is both critically and popularly successful, what
it says about these issues is significant and reveals something about what we as a culture think about them.
The book is under contract; all submitted essays will go through a blind review process before inclusion in
the volume.
Final essays should not exceed 7,000 words. They must conform to MLA standards for manuscripts
and citations.
Please send submissions via e-mail (as Word .doc, .docx, or .rtf files) or snail-mail (hard copy and CDR with .doc, .docx, or .rtf file). Deadline for submissions is May 7, 2010. Earlier inquires and abstracts are
welcome, but completed manuscripts are due May 7.
E-mail: rcalvink@ic.sunysb.edu
Snail-mail:
Ritch Calvin
Women’s and Gender Studies
115 Old Chem.
SUNY Stony Brook
Stony Brook, NY 11794-3456
(631) 632-7607
‘Diggin’ Dancing Queens and Wedding Scenes: The Phenomenon of Mamma Mia!
Call for abstracts deadline: 19th April 2010
Full name: Louise FitzGerald
Contact email: louise.fitzgerald@uea.ac.uk
This cfp invites submissions for a proposed collection exploring the 2008 film Mamma Mia! and the
cultural phenomenon that surrounded it. To date, the film is positioned as the 42nd highest grossing film of
all time, the most successful musical of all time, and the 5th highest grossing film of 2008. In Britain, the
box office success of Mamma Mia surpassed the phenomenal success of Cameron’s 1997 film Titanic and
it has been estimated that at least one in four British households owns a DVD copy of Mamma Mia. Indeed,
on the day of the film’s DVD release, Amazon reported that it had become the fastest selling product.
Reports from America, Sweden, Finland, Japan, Australia, Germany, France and Greece have also testified
to the phenomenal success of the film.
Critics debating the film’s outstanding success have suggested that its popularity resulted from the dire
economic recession that was enveloping so many countries in 2008 ( the idea of the musical functioning in
terms of escapism has been debated since at least the classical Hollywood period). The film offered
relatively cheap, escapist entertainment that, as many have argued, raised the spirits of audiences dealing
with higher mortgage payments, bankruptcy and the threat of unemployment. Despite Mamma Mia’s
outstanding international success amongst filmgoers, film critics have lauded the musical as a “cumulative
weight of terribleness” and warned that those who loved the film would have to “prove their intelligence”.
Such sentiments reflect an established tension that functions to polarize films as either ‘high’ or ‘low’ brow
entertainment, and the audiences as either critically engaged or an uneducated mass of consumers. These
sentiments are often couched in gendered terms and serve to reinforce the idea that films addressed to a
male audience have more cultural capital than those addressed to women.
This edited collection aims to study Mamma Mia! in terms of its success, and how this success can
also be contextualised within the film’s cultural politics. Indeed, the film has often incited debate at the
level of gender politics, and can variously be read as empowering ‘mature’ woman, as rejecting marriage as
the pinnacle of young women’s lives and as foregrounding a more positive representation of cinema’s lone
mother figure. However others have commented on its apparent infantilization of Greek characters, and
have pointed to Mamma Mia as an example of the cultural reiteration of regressive post-feminist gender
politics. As such, this collection will explore the ways in which issues of class, gender and popular culture
are articulated in Mamma Mia and debates about it. Topics might also include (but are not restricted to);
The mother and daughter relationship
Portrayals of the ‘older’ woman
The music and cultural status of ABBA
Spectacle and the liminality of the film’s Greek location
The film’s representation of homosexuality
Mamma Mia! and the contemporary musical
Critical reception
Audience reception/fan culture
Adaptation
Female authorship
Stardom
Contributor guidelines:
Please provide a chapter abstract (maximum 500 words) and a brief biography (250 words). These should
be submitted by e-mail to Louise.Fitzgerald@uea.ac.uk by 19th April, 2010