Calls for Applications, Papers, and Submissions

 

Calls for Papers

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):

  • · Memory and nostalgia in Ukrainian Canadian literature
  • · The Ukrainian Canadian identity in contemporary fiction and poetry
  • · Diaspora and transnationalism: Ukrainian Canadian literature in a global context
  • · Intersections of language, culture, and identity in Ukrainian Canadian writing
  • · Representation of historical events and collective memory in Ukrainian Canadian literature
  • · The impact of migration and settlement on literary expression
  • · Gender and feminist perspectives in Ukrainian Canadian literary works
  • · The Ukrainian folklore and mythology in Canadian literary contexts
  • · Comparative studies of Ukrainian Canadian literature and other ethnic literatures in Canada
  • · The role of Ukrainian Canadian literature in cultural preservation and resistance to assimilation
  • · The contribution of Ukrainian Canadian writers to Canadian multiculturalism
  • · Religious and spiritual themes in Ukrainian Canadian literature
  • · Ukrainian Canadian literary responses to political and social changes in Ukraine and Canada

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
University of Maryland, College Park,
ancestral lands of the Piscataway People

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: 

  • “Settler atmospherics” (Simmons) and Indigenous activism 
  • Climate and/as history; histories of weather 
  • Sensing air pollution; citizen science around air pollution
  • The emergence and role of the “respiratory humanities” or “atmospheric humanities” 
  • Relationship of the above to the “blue humanities,” “green ecocriticism,” and/or “energy humanities”; waves of ecocriticism
  • Aesthetics of visibility/invisibility and air 
  • Representing air inequality in haptic, olfactory, or other non-visual media
  • Unhoused populations and air inequality  
  • Environmental racism and air inequality  
  • Wildfires and smoke; prescribed burns and Indigenous fire knowledge as alternative technologies
  • Respiratory pandemics and the media
  • Rhetoric of anti-AAPI hate during COVID-19
  • Masking and dis/ability rhetoric; long COVID and “crip time” (Alison Kafer)
  • Air purification technology and the commodification of air (see Yangdon Li)
  • “Atmospheric rivers,” flooding, and representation  
  • Representations of atmospheric layers (troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, thermosphere, exosphere) 
  • Air travel and alternatives 
  • Space environmentalism: space debris, cosmic dust, extraterrestrial exploration
  • Airwaves, radio waves, soundwaves—from podcasts to birdsong
  • Affect studies and intangible/figurative atmospheres

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: 

  • Hsuan Hsu, author of The Smell of Risk: Atmospheric Disparities and the Olfactory Arts, and Air Conditioning
  • Craig Santos Perez, winner of the 2023 National Book Award for poetry
  • JT Roane, author of Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place in Philadelphia, and co-leader of the Black Ecologies Lab at Rutgers
  • Kaia Sand, poet, activist, and Executive Director of Street Roots (Portland, OR)

Calls for Applications

The 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