Calls for Applications, Papers, and Submissions
Calls for PapersCritical Health: Feminist Perspectives on Health and Well-Being in the Nineteenth-Century United States Paris, France, October 17-18, 2025 Conference Organizers: Dr. Alice de Galzain (Sorbonne Université) and Dr. habil. Johanna Pitetti-Heil (Universität zu Köln) In a letter addressed to Ralph Waldo Emerson written in October 1843, Margaret Fuller invited his wife, Lydia (Lidian) Jackson Emerson, to take part in her Boston conversations for women, which she had previously attended: “Will not Lidian come to our Conversations this Winter if I get a class [on] the subject Health.” Health precarity was a central issue for women in the nineteenth century, and Transcendentalist women writers, who suffered daily from health oppression despite the relative and varying levels of privilege they enjoyed, sought to resist it through activist and pedagogical enterprises. In the nineteenth-century United States, health care and treatment of illnesses were often not available due to reasons of racialization, scientific racism, enslavement, economic precarity, and gendered and racialized assumptions about health and the experience of pain. During this period, explorations and discussions of health included alternative approaches and ancestral and syncretic practices, advocating for structural changes, and a general rethinking of the relationship of nature and the body to the soul and the spiritual world. Critical thinking about matters of health in the nineteenth century often coincided with discussions on women’s rights, and it lends itself to inquiries from feminist and intersectional perspectives today. We invite contributions that discuss matters of agency, resistance, empowerment, and emancipation in respect to health and healing in the nineteenth century. We also welcome reflections on the connections that can be drawn across the Atlantic—including both connections that were actively engaged in (via travel or correspondence) and nineteenth-century practices in the Atlantic world in general that address the relationship between the spiritual and the material. Additionally, we encourage contributions on the links between health and literature in relation to academic work, as well as presentations pertaining to feminist/health pedagogical practices. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
Please send paper proposals (350 words) and panel proposals (350 words per paper plus a short framing statement) as well as a short bio containing your affiliation (if any) and contact details to Johanna Pitetti-Heil and Alice de Galzain at [email protected] by 10 February 2025. The conference will be held at Sorbonne Université. Funding options will be available to support travel and accommodation costs, please get in touch to discuss this with us by e-mail at [email protected] once proposals have been accepted. For those who may not wish to travel, hybrid participation will also be an option. Attendance fees: 75 EUR for all university staff and professional attendees, free for students and early career researchers. Further information will be available here: www.criticalhealthconference.wordpress.com IDENTITY AND POETICS OF UKRAINIAN CANADIAN LITERATURE March 14, 2025 The University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada We invite scholars, writers, and literary enthusiasts to submit proposals for the international conference IDENTITY AND POETICS OF UKRAINIAN CANADIAN LITERATURE. Ukrainian Canadian literature occupies a unique space in the broader context of Canadian multiculturalism and diaspora studies. It is shaped by the historical and cultural experiences of Ukrainian immigrants and their descendants. Despite the substantial amount of fiction written and published in English by Canadian-born Ukrainians featuring authors such as Myrna Kostash, Janice Kulyk Keefer, Lisa Grecul, Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch, Maurice Mierau, Laisha Rosnau, Randall Maggs, Laura Langston, Daria Salamon, Lindy Ledohowski, Elizabeth Bachinsky, Erin Moure, Barbara Sapergia, Thomas Trofimuk, and many others Ukrainian Canadian literature remains largely invisible in university curricula, academic programs, and research. We hope that this conference will draw active attention to Ukrainian Canadian literature, highlighting its rich topicality, diverse genre, and poetic forms that not only preserve cultural heritage but also enrich Canadian literary tradition as a whole. Possible Topics for Submission Include (but are not limited to):
We welcome proposals for papers, panel discussions, and roundtables. Submissions should include a title, an abstract (250-300 words), a brief bio (100 words), and contact information. Submission Guidelines: Please submit your proposals by February 15, 2025, to Prof. Mariya Shymchyshyn ([email protected]) or https://forms.office.com/r/QSrNq3xMQ3. Notifications of acceptance will be sent out by March 1, 2025. This conference will offer a hybrid format, allowing participants to join either in person at the University of Manitoba or virtually. ASLE 2025 Biennial Conference Collective Atmospheres: Air, Intimacy, and Inequality July 8-11, 2025 https://www.asle.org/conference/biennial-conference/ Call for Proposals Reflecting on the use of tear gas and other chemical weapons during the 2016 Standing Rock protests, Paiute scholar Kristen Simmons notes that “[t]he conditions we breathe in are collective and unequally distributed. … The atmosphere is increasingly a sphere to be weaponized.” A few years later, this weaponization became clear as the unequally-experienced COVID-19 respiratory pandemic overlapped with protests over the chokehold murder of George Floyd at the hands of police—giving heartbreaking new relevance to the Black Lives Matter rallying cry, “I can’t breathe.” Meanwhile, deforestation and air pollution are again on the rise. The Amazon rainforest, for instance—dubbed the “lungs of the world” due to its ability to absorb carbon dioxide and produce oxygen—has come under intensified threats. Wildfires stoked by climate change fill the air with toxic smoke. And new research finds that unhoused people are disproportionately exposed to air pollution. Breath and air, as has become palpably obvious, are phenomena necessary for life, yet often overlooked and not equally available to all. As historian Achille Mbembe states, what humanity currently faces is “a matter of no less than reconstructing a habitable earth to give all of us the breath of life.” Fittingly, in our fields of ecocriticism, ecomedia studies, and environmental humanities, we find a nascent wave of work attending to the idea that air/atmospheres are at once specific to our individual bodies, unequally experienced, and shared by all biotic life across time and space. This work contributes to an emerging “respiratory humanities” and “atmospheric humanities” —the latter of which, as the International Commission on Science and Literature and the International Commission on History of Meteorology recently declared in a joint call for papers, considers “the atmosphere’s agency as it becomes manifest as a medium, life-giver, carrier, nutrient source, threat and a concern in modern life, politics, and art.” Meanwhile, the prominent subfield of affect studies engages with more figurative conceptions of “atmosphere,” including mood and ambience. In sum, atmospheres become increasingly visible as sites of contestations and convergences where the intimacy of breath is bound up with wide-ranging environmental and cultural crises. Of course, atmospheric thinking has a very long history. The idea of "bad air" as a disease vector is an ancient one, and it persisted into the 19th century in the miasma theory of disease transmission. In the 1800s, polymath Charles Babbage wrote of the air as a “one vast library” that serves as a repository of human and more-than-human history. Scientists Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin recently concurred, suggesting with their “Orbis Hypothesis” that the European colonization of the Americas left an atmospheric trace. And since the late 1970s, the ozone layer and greenhouse gasses have been major topics of scientific as well as public concern. We seek papers, creative works, and other forms of inquiry that engage with these concerns, broadly construed. Possible topics include but are not limited to:
We also welcome work that engages in other ways with the larger concerns outlined above—including climate change, environmental health and justice, settler colonialism—and/or with the vision and mission of ASLE, which seeks to inspire and promote intellectual work in the environmental humanities and arts. Our vision is an inclusive community whose members are committed to environmental research, education, literature, and art, as well as service, environmental justice, and ecological sustainability. See more here: https://www.asle.org/discover-asle/vision-history/. Confirmed keynote speakers include:
Calls for ChaptersUnsettling the Heartland: Black Americans and the Making of the MidwestEdited by: Dr. Sara Gallagher, PhD Description: The Midwest has long been a pivotal yet underexplored region in the history and cultural expression of Black Americans. From Black homesteading communities that shaped the rural landscape to the literary voices that captured the complexities of migration, labor, and identity, the Midwest holds a unique place in the Black American experience. This edited volume seeks to explore the intersection of history and literature, focusing on Black homesteading, migration, and cultural production in the Midwest. We invite scholars, historians, and literary critics to contribute original essays that examine the Black Midwest through historical, cultural, and literary lenses. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
Key Questions: This collection seeks to answer a range of questions, including but not limited to:
Target Audience: This collection is intended for scholars, researchers, and students in the fields of African American Studies, American History, Literary Studies, Cultural Studies, and Midwest Studies. It will also be valuable to educators, writers, and general readers interested in Black history and literature. Chapter Submissions: We seek well-researched and original chapters between 6,000 and 8,000 words. Submissions should be grounded in historical and/or literary analysis and should align with the themes outlined above. Details for Abstract Submissions: Interested contributors should submit a 300–500-word abstract outlining their proposed chapter, along with a brief biography (150 words), by April 27, 2025. Important Dates:
Editor information/Biography: Dr. Sara Gallagher is a scholar and professor at Durham College in Canada, specializing in the Black American West and Western Studies broadly. She earned her PhD from the University of Waterloo in 2022. Her research focuses on Black literature and cultural production in the Midwest and West. She is the author of Black Wests: Reshaping Race and Place in Popular Culture (forthcoming from OU Press in Spring 2025) and has published widely on Black Western narratives in literature and film. Contact/For all inquiries please email: [email protected] Calls for ApplicationsThe Newberry Library, Chicago The Newberry Library's long-standing fellowship program provides outstanding scholars with the time, space, and community required to pursue innovative and ground-breaking scholarship. In addition to the Library's collections, fellows are supported by a collegial interdisciplinary community of researchers, curators, and librarians. An array of scholarly and public programs also contributes to an engaging intellectual environment. Short-Term Fellowships are available to scholars who hold a PhD, PhD candidates, and those who hold other terminal degrees. Short-Term Fellowships are generally awarded for 1 to 2 months; unless otherwise noted the stipend is $3,000 per month. These fellowships support individual scholarly research for those who have a specific need for the Newberry's collection and are mainly restricted to individuals who live and work outside of the Chicago metropolitan area. The deadline for short-term opportunities is January 3rd. Long-Term Fellowships are available to scholars who hold a PhD or other terminal degree for continuous residence at the Newberry for periods of 4 to 9 months; the stipend is $5,000 per month. Applicants must hold a PhD or equivalent degree by the application deadline in order to be eligible. Long-Term Fellowships are intended to support individual scholarly research and promote serious intellectual exchange through active participation in the fellowship program. The deadline for long-term fellowships is November 1. Many of the Newberry's fellowship opportunities have specific eligibility requirements; for those details, as well as application guidelines, please visit their website. |