The non-profit digital scholarly database The Literary Encyclopedia was founded in 1998 to provide a scholarly online resource for university-level teaching and research. 

We are in the process of expanding our offerings in the field of African American Literature and Culture.  

We’re interested in commissioning reference articles (2,000…[Read more]

The journal Comparative Literature Studies invites proposals for a special issue titled “Redesigning Modernities Part II,” edited by Waïl Hassan (U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) and Maria Truglio (Penn State U). The issue solicits inquiries into the divergences, inequalities, and commonalities that define “modernity” in different parts of the w…[Read more]

Passages of Water and Labor Cultures of the Coastal South and the Caribbean

In Edwidge Danticat’s short story “Without Inspection,” an undocumented Haitian immigrant, Arnold, dies from unsafe working conditions at a construction site in south Florida. In the news coverage about the event, the construction company and developer release a state…[Read more]

Disability and Public Health in the U.S. South 

A key part of colonizing in the U.S. South depended on the rhetoric of health, such as Ponce de Leon’s mythical fountain of youth and nineteenth-century boosterism claiming Florida as the “winter sanitarium of the country” (qtd in Knight 5). The semi-tropical warmth of the South invited justif…[Read more]

Please send abstracts of 200-300 words to ylee@wellesley.edu before March 16, 2022.

1. Narratives Beyond Binaries: Does narrative still rely on binary structures in a world that has moved beyond them (male/female; past/present; public/private)? The binary and nonbinary as modes of thinking; post-poststructuralism; holding theory accountable to…

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The Sounds of Humor

The Drama and Performance Forum and the Sound Studies Forum of the Modern Language Association (MLA) announce a co-sponsored session entitled “The Sounds of Humor” to be held at the MLA Convention in San Francisco, CA from January 5-8, 2023. What does humor sound like? Sounds tend to play an important role in performances inte…[Read more]

The Drama and Performance Forum solicits paper proposals for two guaranteed sessions at MLA 2023 in San Francisco:

Humor and Humorlessness before 1900  From the medieval period to the nineteenth century the concept of humor shifted from an aspect of human physiology, to the eccentric qualities of individuals or comic characters, to a mode of…[Read more]

How are various new media forms (e.g. apps, memes, gaming avatars, Webcast rites) creating performative representations of religion?  200-word proposals by March 15.  Manisha Basu, U of Illinois, Urbana (mbasu@illinois.edu ) Adrienne Brown, U of Chicago (adrienneb@uchicago.edu ).

More information: How have visual digital forms supplemented r…[Read more]

How do cleric-sleuths or other religious detective figures (e.g., Cadfael, Granchester, Father Brown, etc.)  navigate/challenge religion alongside police or state-sponsored will-to-knowledge? 200-word proposal to mbasu@illinois.edu by March 10.

More information: From G.K. Chesterton’s ‘Father Brown’ to Ellis Peters’ Brother Cadfael, from Harry…[Read more]

Memorialization, “entering the canon,” and the influence of politics, race, class, or gender. Who decides on the people, texts, places, dates, etc. selected to be commemorated, studied, and/or enshrined? Theorists such as Lonergan, Bourdieu, Girard, and Agamben have explored “sacralization” as a process of making holy or sacred that can inv…[Read more]

What does psychoanalysis do for theory, criticism, and scholarship in US literatures today? Conversely, how do US literatures intervene on psychoanalysis?

The MLA’s Transdisciplinary Connections Forum on Psychology, Psychoanalysis, and Literature has noted extraordinary scholarly interest in these questions recently. We therefore invite a…[Read more]

Please consider nominating outstanding authors, scholars, educators, leaders, playwrights, artists, and editors for the  Association for Theatre in Higher Education’s prestigious awards.

Please visit ATHE’s website for submission information and other details (under the “awards” drop-down tab).

The deadline for nominations is February 1.

We a…[Read more]

The University of Georgia Department of Theatre and Film Studies and the Institute for African American Studies seek an assistant professor whose scholarly research focuses on African American theatre and performance. Additional areas of specialization might include African American film, performance methods based in Afrocentric…[Read more]

MLA has a new process for selecting new members to forum executive committees. Now forum executive committees appoint one new member annually to their committees. If you’d like to make a nomination (or self-nominate) please email me. Thank you, Sophia