Books and special issues of journals – Deadlines January to March 2021

Eco-Georgic: From Antiquity to the Anthropocene
Ecozon@ 12.2 Autumn 2021
Deadline for full articles: 15 January 2021

Guest Editors: Sue Edney (University of Bristol), Philipp Erchinger (University of Duesseldorf) and Pippa Marland (University of Leeds)

Georgic, a genre or mode of writing about agricultural labour and rural life, is typically concerned with ways of being at work in an environment that tends to overtake or resist all human efforts to master it. As David Fairer has argued, georgic nature is always, to some degree, out of tune with our human endeavours to live in agreement with it (2011). It therefore constantly challenges us to adapt to its changing conditions. In Virgil’s Georgics, for example, human activities of cultivation and construction are repeatedly threatened to be overrun or swept away by the life of the more-than-human world–the world of pests, storms and droughts–in and through which they have to proceed. Georgic work, in short, takes place in a “world in process whose rewards are hard won” (Fairer 2015: 111). Hence the genre’s interest in all products of human skill and invention by means of which the earth, not necessarily a comfortable place, can be made to yield its fruits (Beck 2004). Yet, while georgic, from today’s perspective, is often quickly dismissed as being deeply implicated in outdated anthropocentric and nationalist ideologies of cultural improvement, industrialisation, exploitation and colonisation, it also addresses a number of questions about the relations between human and nonhuman spheres that, in our contemporary historical moment, seem urgent and fresh.

Thus, this issue of Ecozon@, taking its cue from Fairer’s concept of “Eco-Georgic” (2011), proceeds from the assumption that the georgic mode, with its interest in the messy involvement of human and nonhuman action, resonates with current debates in ecocriticism and the environmental humanities. Like much recent work in this field (Abram 1996, Alaimo 2010, Bennett 2010, Moore 2015), georgic literature often presents human culture as a way of working through, rather than being opposed to, nature. The daily work of sustaining, understanding, refining, and transforming human existence, it suggests, is inextricably caught up in, rather than separate from, the evolution of non-human matter and life. Last but not least, the georgic tradition affords a consideration of the changing functions of literature. For georgic has always reflected the use of the pen through the work of the plough, creating analogies between the making of poetry and the cultivation of the land. As a result, it poses questions about the relationship between the arts of writing and farming and, more generally, between literary and non-literary ways of working with the material world.

We invite articles that explore the ecology of georgic literature in all its theoretical and historical implications and shades. Conceptually, we encourage contributors to think of georgic in three ways: as a specific generic tradition that has its roots in Hesiod and Virgil, reaching its heyday in seventeenth and eighteenth-century verse; as a more fluid way of writing that, as “a rhizomatic underpresence” (Goodman 2004: 1), has remained influential throughout the history of literature, informing not only poems, but also fictional prose, essays and travel reports; and, finally, as a mode that is gaining new relevance and vitality as contemporary writers increasingly find themselves “writing to” the multifaceted crisis of the Anthropocene.

Submissions could address, but are not limited to, one of the following topics:

• Re-readings of the georgic tradition in the light of ecological and ecocritical concerns
• Issues, such as human-animal relations or the weather, that are relevant to the georgic tradition
• Farming and literature
• Anthropological and ecological aspects of literary labour or work
• Cultural histories of soil
• Georgic’s relation to pastoral and other genres
• Rewilding, wilding, land sharing
• Georgic ontology and epistemology
• Queer and feminist Eco-Georgic
• Georgic and contemporary ecocritical theory
• Anthropocene Georgic

Please direct any queries to the editors Sue Edney (sue.edney@bristol.ac.uk), Philipp Erchinger (Philipp.Erchinger@uni-duesseldorf.de), and Pippa Marland (P.J.Marland@leeds.ac.uk).

Manuscripts of 6000-8000 words may be submitted via the journal platform as early as December 2020 and no later than January 15, 2021. Authors must comply with the guidelines indicated on the platform. Title, abstracts, and keywords must be provided in the language of the article, English, and Spanish. MLA style should be used for citations. Permission must be obtained by the author for any images used, and the images should be included in the text. Manuscripts will be accepted in English, German, and French. Though it is not an essential requirement, we highly encourage potential authors to make prior contact with the editors by submitting a preliminary abstract (approximately 500 words).

References:

Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World, Vintage Books, 1996.
Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self, Indiana UP, 2010.
Beck, Rudolph. ‘From Industrial Georgic to Industrial Sublime: English Poetry and the Early Stages of the Industrial Revolution’, The British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 27.1, (2004):  17-36.
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Duke UP, 2010.
Fairer, David. ‘“Where fuming trees refresh the thirsty air”: The World of Eco-Georgic’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 40 (2011): 201-18.
Fairer, David. “The Pastoral-Georgic Tradition”, in: William Wordsworth in Context, ed. Andrew Bennett, Cambridge UP, 2015, 111-118.
Goodman, Kevis. Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism, Cambridge UP, 2004.
Moore, Jason W. Capitalism in the Web of Life, Verso, 2015.

(posted 22 February 2020)

IDEAS: Journal of English Literary Studies
Issue 1,  deadline 15 January 2021

(posted 16 November 2020)

Transformations: Representations of Nature and Economy in Modern Anglo-American Culture
A special issue of VTU Review: Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences
Submission deadline: 18 January 2021

Guest Editor: Dr. Jelena Šesnić, University of Zagreb, Croatia

Website of VTU Review: http://journals.uni-vt.bg/vtureview/eng/

This special issue is to address the question of the massive and long-ranging transformations overtaking the Anglo-American world in the course of the long nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Proposed topics should ideally converge on the intersection of nature and economy (work, technology) as represented in literature, film, television, and the digital media.

We invite contributions that would probe the historical and current concerns arising at the cusp of historical and social changes that define our late modernity. We especially encourage topics that tease out the longitudinal tension, in Anglo-American culture, between nature, technology, progress, and social change. A comparative approach to the topic(s) is very welcome.

Possible topics may include, but are not restricted to:

• North-American, transatlantic, and transnational imaginaries of nature;
• nature (landscape) and the idea of national identity;
• postcolonial interventions (“provincializing” Europe and the west);
• natural stasis vs. the dynamics of progress and development (“the technological sublime”);
• the ideology of progress and its detractors (e.g. romantics and transcendentalists);
• the idea of uneven development and its fictions (“The First World”/ “The Third World”);
• literature of (social) reform;
• representations of work across time;
• society and the individual in the era of the fourth industrial revolution;
• technology and nature from an eco-critical perspective.

For editorial style and submission details please consult the journal’s website: http://journals.uni-vt.bg/vtureview/eng/

All queries should be addressed to Jelena Šesnić,  jsesnic@ffzg.hr,

and Ludmilla Kostova, l.kostova@ts.uni-vt.bg 

(posted 12 October 2021)

Aging and Ageism
A book to be published by the University of Debrecen Press
Deadline for proposals: 15 January 2021

In spring 2020 the Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS), an international scholarly journal archived on JSTOR and available around the world on ProQuest published a themed block of essays, Negotiating Aging and Ageism in English-speaking Literatures, Theatre and Performance Arts. Currently HJEAS is planning to restart its series of HJEAS Books that were so successful in the early 2000s under the rubric, HJEAS Books—New Series with an initial offering of three titles. The third in this new series will be edited by Professor Emerita Mária Kurdi, University of Pécs, Hungary under the title Negotiating Age: Aging and Ageism in Contemporary English-speaking Literatures and Theatre and all three are scheduled to be published by the University of Debrecen Press in either late 2021 or—perhaps, more likely—in early 2022.

To contribute an essay to this collection, please send a 200-400 word proposal accompanied by a current CV to the volume editor on or before 15 January, 2021. Applicants will be notified of their accepted proposals on or before 15 February and completed papers will be due 15 July, 2021.

Send all proposals and any queries to:
Mária Kurdi
professor emerita
University of Pécs, Hungary

E-mail: mkurdi@dravanet.hu ; kurdi.maria@pte.hu

(posted 3 December 2020)

Pandemics in European Literature (20^th – 21^st ce.): Theory and Practice
A special issue of Journal Interlitterara
Deadline for proposals: 31 January 2021

Guest Editors:

• Nikoleta Zampaki, PhD Candidate of Modern Greek Philology, Department of Philology, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece; e-mail: nikzamp@phil.uoa.gr, nikoletazampaki@hotmail.com
• Peggy Karpouzou, Assistant Professor of Theory of Literature, Department of Philology, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece; e-mail: pkarpouzou@phil.uoa.gr

Paper proposals are invited for a special issue on the topic of Pandemics in European Literature (20th – 21st ce.): Theory and Practice and they might explore the topic of pandemics in the European Literature. Over time disease outbreaks have ravaged humanity, sometimes changing the course of history. From Homer’s Iliad which starts with a plague that strikes the Greek army at Troy there are numerous examples of contagion fables (plagues, epidemics, infectious diseases, etc.) into the European canon, among the most outstanding are certainly The Decameron, written by Renaissance humanist Giovanni Boccaccio in the late 1340s and early 1350s, Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), Mary Shelley’s, The Last Man (1826), Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague (1912) and Albert Camus, La Peste (1947). We will highlight the notion of pandemics, thought as a very large epidemic, through variable European literary texts, the impact on the people and their culture as well as the psychological dimensions that caused to humanity.

Papers might address questions like the following:

• Which are the representations of pandemics in the Εuropean Literary tradition (20^th-21^st) and genres like science fiction, apocalyptic fiction, climate fiction, traveling writing? How can pandemics be represented through the different local literary traditions?
• How did European Literature and Culture contribute to quarantine time? How did authors continue to write through the time of pandemics?
• How can society and individuals live through the sense of isolation and loss of community? How is their identity shaped and which is the social impact of pandemics? Which is the role of biopolitics and necropolitics in this direction?
• How about the impact of Ethics into Pandemics and vice versa?
• How can self-quarantine create an opportunity for increased engagement with environmental humanities and animal studies?
• May we investigate any nexus between pandemics and feminism or eco- feminism?
• Which is the relationship of pandemics and post humanities? Should we consider different representations of meta-bodies into today’s literary texts?
• Could be found any scientific discourses of pandemics into European Literature?
• May we contribute any ideas arising from our research to the current pandemic literature and what concerns may be pushed to the background now that pandemics dominate the headlines, but are still relevant and happening at the same time?
• How could pandemics construct or establish variable narrations today? May we consider a new pandemic theory as a new sub-form at the era of Anthropocene?

Through this call we focus on a variety of pandemic dimensions in the European Literature and we aim to provide broader scientific and cultural context for it. To cover the global scope of the topic, we seek contributions from around the world. Interested authors should send an abstract of no more than 300 words, a brief bio (c. 200 words) and 3-5 key words at both Guest Editors’ emails by the 31st of January 2021. Authors will be informed about whether their proposals have been accepted after the deadline. The call targets an academic and professional audience and all papers should follow the journal’s guidelines of submissions and policy. Please follow the guidelines for the submission [https://ojs.utlib.ee/index.php/IL/about/submissions] and the articles’ word count should be approximately 6.000 words. Please do not hesitate to contact us with any queries you might have.

(posted 22 June 2020)

Cross-pollination: Literature, Journalism, Literary Journalism
Cadernos de Literatura Comparada, nr 44 (June 2021)
Deadline for proposals: 31 January 2021

Guest editors: Jorge Bastos da Silva (University of Porto) and Isabel Soares (University of Lisbon)

Intersections between literature and journalism are manifold. Common ground both depends and bears on a set of shared technologies, ranging from verbal language itself to the material resources of manuscript, print and digital communication. Over the centuries, many writers of literature have been professional journalists and learned from the trade – and vice-versa. Periodical publications regularly report on literary activity, even when that is not their main focus, and a number specialize in following literary writing old and new by means of critical reviews, interviews, etc. Simultaneously, literary journalism, understood as a distinctive genre of long narrative non-fiction, or journalism written with a literary flair, has established its ground and produced a canon of acknowledged writers and won a Nobel.

This issue of Cadernos de Literatura Comparada addresses the connections between literature and journalism from an international, plurivocal perspective. We welcome articles that cover any of the topics relevant to the general theme of the issue, including (but not limited to) the following:

• literature, journalism and the professionalization of writing
• literature, journalism and the ethics of writing
• the relationship between fiction and non-fiction
• the genres of literature and the genres of journalism
• (literary) writers and/in the press
• writing techniques in literature and journalism
• verbal and visual: writing, illustrating, photographing, mapping, graphing
• historical approaches to literature and journalism
• the (literary) writer and the journalist as intellectuals
• forms of writing, social diagnosis and social change

The journal will also have its usual “Varia” section.
Proposals of book reviews may also be sent to the editors of this issue.
E-mail: cadernospreviewjune@gmail.com
Submission preparation checklist: https://ilc-cadernos.com/index.php/cadernos/about/submissions
Deadline for the submission of contributions: 31 January 2021

(posted 10 August 2020)

Internet trolling and online participation in the context of the science, technology and engineering of educational systems
A speical issue of ESOCEL 2021
Deadline for manuscripts: 31 January 2021

Special Issue Editors
Dr. Jonathan Bishop Website
Guest Editor
Congress of Researchers and Organisations for Cybercommunity, E-Learning and Socialnomics. Swansea SA1 9NN, UK.
Interests: e-moderation; cyberhate; gamification; e-politics

Dr. Jason Barratt
Guest Editor
Congress of Researchers and Organisations for Cybercommunity, E-Learning and Socialnomics. Swansea SA1 9NN, UK.
Interests: E-Dating, Usability/Accessibility research

Special Issue Information

This Special Issue is seeking papers on Internet trolling and online participation in the context of the science, technology and engineering of educational systems.

It will draw together ways of providing online learning, including through e-tivities, serious games, gamification, managed learning environments, MOOCs, and virtual worlds. It will also look at ways of managing online learning, including e-moderation, dealing with wellbeing issues like digital addiction and cyberbullying as well as the digital divide and accessibility.

Topics covered and welcome for submission include the following:

• Participation inequality; lurking, the free-rider problem;
• Online harassment; flame trolling, cyberbullying, cyberstalking;
• Transgressive humour, ‘trolling for the lulz’, viral humour, R.I.P trolling;
• Online Community moderation, perspectives on ‘don’t feed the troll’, blocking users (i.e., ‘ban-hammering’);
• Online learning issues: retention, motivation;
• Participation initiatives: Classroom 2.0, eParticipation;

Manuscript Submission Information

This Special Issue of Education Sciences on Online Communities and E-Learning is seeking papers on Internet trolling and online participation in the context of the science, technology and engineering of educational systems.

It will draw together ways of providing online learning, including through e-tivities, serious games, gamification, managed learning environments, MOOCs, and virtual worlds. It will also look at ways of managing online learning, including e-moderation, dealing with wellbeing issues like digital addiction and cyberbullying as well as the digital divide and accessibility.

Topics covered and welcome for submission include the following:

• Participation inequality; lurking, the free-rider problem;
• Online harassment; flame trolling, cyberbullying, cyberstalking;
• Transgressive humour, ‘trolling for the lulz’, viral humour, R.I.P trolling;
• Online Community moderation, perspectives on ‘don’t feed the troll’, blocking users (i.e., ‘ban-hammering’);
• Online learning issues: retention, motivation;
• Participation initiatives: Classroom 2.0, eParticipation;

For more information on the submission process visit the website above./athttps://www.mdpi.com/journal/education/special_issues/online_communities_e_learning

Guest Editors are:

* Jonathan Bishop (jonathan.bishop@crocels.ac.uk)

* Jason Barratt (jason.barratt@crocels.ac.uk)

(posted 26 August 2020)

Central and Eastern European Immigration to Canada
Call fo essays for Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS)
Deadline for poposals: 31 January 2021

The international journal, Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS) solicits papers on “Central and Eastern European Immigration to Canada” for a special issue to be published in 2022.

The special issue will address a broad range of topics related to Central and Eastern European immigration to Canada; therefore, we are looking for essays that examine the topic from a wide range of perspectives, including, but not limited to, migration studies, history, literature, cultural studies, film studies, travel writing studies, etc. There is no chronological limitation in terms of the time of migration and the term Central and Eastern Europe is used in the broadest possible sense, also including the Balkans and Russia.

The special issue aims to gather essays that explore Central and Eastern European immigration to Canada from a variety of perspectives, with possible topics and questions including (but certainly not limited to):

• Social and economic factors driving CEE immigration to Canada
• Push and pull factors influencing different migration waves
• Canadian immigration policy and Central and Eastern Europe
• Immigration propaganda
• Emigration routes and policies
• Refugees and immigration to Canada
• Perception of CEE immigrants in Canada
• CEE immigrants and the Last Best West
• Role of the United States and immigration restriction on Canadian immigration
• Inter-American perspectives
• Literary and filmic representations of migration
• Travel writing and migration
• Stereotypes of CEE immigrants in Canada
• CEE communities in Canada

Proposals of about 400-500 words and a brief CV should be sent to the editor before January 31, 2021. Contributors will be notified of the decision regarding their proposal until February 12, 2021. Complete essays of 7-10,000 words are due by June 30, 2021.

Send proposals and/or queries to Dr. Balázs Venkovits, venkovits.balazs@arts.unideb.hu

About HJEAS

The Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS) is devoted to literary, historical, film and cultural studies of the English-speaking world. It is an international scholarly journal with an international audience and the oldest continuously published Central European scholarly journal in its field available at major research centers and libraries throughout the world, published twice a year by the Institute of English and American Studies, University of Debrecen, Hungary. All HJEAS issues are available on JSTOR, the largest, most available website for humanities journals, accessible electronically on ProQuest and EBSCO, and is indexed and abstracted by PMLA.

Website and further information: https://ojs.lib.unideb.hu/hjeas

Author guidelines and submissions policy: https://ojs.lib.unideb.hu/hjeas/about/submissions

(posted 3 December 2020)

London’s East End: A Short Encyclopedia
A reference book
Entries due by 15 March 2021 (new extended deadline)

Owing to a variety of reasons, a number of entries in London’s East End: A Short Encyclopedia (under contract, McFarland) that were initially assigned have now become available. We are looking for writers in a number of different disciplines to contribute entries on people, film and literature, architecture, periodicals, major events, television, music, and art associated with the East End. Entries range from 50-2000 words with most following on the lower end of the spectrum. A description of the encyclopedia appears below. Established scholars, early career researchers, and advanced graduate students—those who, in a US context, have passed their qualifying exams—are welcome. Entries will be due 15 March 2021 (new extended deadline). For a list of available entries and a style guide, please contact the volume’s editor Prof. Kevin A. Morrison or managing editor Manon Burz-Labrande at EastEndEncyclopedia@gmail.com

From the transient street art of Banksy and Pablo Delgado to the exhibitions of Doreen Fletcher and Gilbert and George; from the novels of Charles Dickens and Monica Ali to televisual series produced by the BBC and ITV; and from early eighteenth-century churches designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor to twenty-first century skyscrapers conceived by Norman Foster, the East End is an iconic area of London.

In the span of four hundred years, the region to the east of the Tower of London, and north of the River Thames, has undergone a series of transformations. In the sixteenth century, it was arable land with a few dispersed villages. By the nineteenth century, it was one of Europe’s worst urban slums and an object of investigation for literary writers, social scientists, philanthropists, Salvationists, and journalists with a bent for the sensational. Today, owing to gentrification, the area includes neighborhoods of great affluence—chic restaurants, exclusive retail shops, and expensive real estate—within boroughs of extraordinarily straitened circumstances, where life expectancy is considerably lower than the City of London. As it has evolved, the East End has served as the birthplace of radical political and social movements and as the principal site for a variety of diasporic communities: French Huguenots, fleeing religious persecution; Jews, escaping the pogroms in Eastern Europe and Russia; and Bengali Muslims, driven from their homeland by conflict and famine.

Although the East End has attracted significant scholarly interest from a wide array of disciplines, there is no comprehensive guide to its social and cultural history. Through alphabetically organized, short but incisive and insightful cross-referenced entries, London’s East End: A Short Encyclopedia will serve as a foundational reference work with sections on the area’s art, architecture, politics, significant personages and places, literature, music, and film. The volume is under contract with McFarland, a leading independent publisher of academic books.

(posted 13 January 2021, updated 22 February 2021)

Strangers and Trespassers in Contemporary Women’s Crime Fiction (2000-2020)
A special issue of Papers on Language and Literature (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville)
Deadline for submissions: 15 Februay 2021

Guest editors: Carla Rodríguez González and Esther Álvarez López (Universidad de Oviedo)

Crime fiction is a “strange” genre situated at the paradoxical coordinates of best-selling success and academic marginality, whose multifarious manifestations trespass genre and gender boundaries. In spite of the highly masculinized associations of the mystery genre, the work of influential female writers has always been part of this tradition, starting with the pioneering contributions of Agatha Christie, Patricia Wentworth, Dorothy Sayers and Ruth Rendell. These writers and the many who have successfully followed in their literary footsteps have proved that the investigation of crime is also a suitable job for a woman. Trespassing symbolic spaces, and navigating and contending the phallocentrism of investigative work is inherent in this writing, which often requires a form of strangeness on the part of its protagonists. Contemporary authors often place their characters in this unstable position from which they challenge gender roles, while subverting notions about women’s independence and intellectual prowess. This appropriation of strangeness as a strategic analytical device can be traced in the works of, among others, Megan Abbott, Gillian Flynn, Tana French, Elizabeth Hand, Paula Hawkins, Val McDermid, Denise Mina and Gloria White, in novels that could be classified according to countless labels ranging from domestic noir to cozy, hard-boiled or forensic, to mention but a few.

The stranger is an enduring literary figure that has been associated with binary relationships: “inside/outside, known/unknown, fear/safety, familiar/unfamiliar” (Jackson et al 2017: 9). Strangers are not only coupled with detachment, unbelonging and disturbing, but also with freedom and objectivity, as Georg Simmel’s influential essay contends: they are “bound by no commitments which could prejudice [their] perception, understanding and evaluation of the given” (1950: 402). This ambivalent interstitial figure rather than reinforcing social, cultural and physical boundaries problematizes them as permeable and unstable. More recent conceptualizations have focused on the affective value of the stranger in relation to the collective processes involved in the delimitation and construction of acceptability and conviviality. Sara Ahmed argues that emotions create boundaries between people, determining who belongs and who does not through “affective judgements” (2004: 211). Trespassing these boundaries involves encountering otherness, reevaluating the self and the affective scaffolding that sustains all social relations.

Strangeness and trespassing are particularly ingrained in women’s crime fiction, as the investigation carried out usually implies unveiling the construction of social emotions, appealing to collective responsibility for the lack of support provided to the victims and reclaiming spaces of representation from an awareness of gender imbalance. As such, this special issue will explore different portrayals of strangeness and trespassing of social boundaries in the fiction produced by women crime writers in the twenty-first century. The main focus will be the examination of alternative approaches to detection from a gender perspective that identifies new rationalities in the crime fiction genre. As such, possible topics to address include, but are not restricted to:

• Trespassing boundaries, creating new spaces
• Strange encounters, amateur sleuths and private eyes
• The figure of the stranger and the trespasser in domestic noir
• Contesting gender in the hard-boiled tradition
• Legal and medical strangers
• Psychological suspense, thrillers and the stranger within
• Trans/nationalism and cosmopolitanism
• Ethics and aesthetics of contemporary women’s crime fiction
• Movement, displacement and negotiations of the city
• Affect and embodiment of urban spaces
• The politics of space: gender, class, ethnicity
• Institutional violence and transversal allegiances
• In/visibility, otherness and uncanny spaces
• Alternative itineraries and urban rhythms
• Trespassing genres: crime, speculative, fantastic, historical fiction.

References:
Ahmed, Sara 2000. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. London: Routledge.
—— 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotions. London: Routledge.
Bauman, Zygmunt 1995. “Making and Unmaking of Strangers.” Thesis Eleven 43: 1-16.
Dean, Jodi 1996. Solidarity of Strangers. Feminism after Identity Politics. Los Angeles: U. of California P.
Jackson, Lucy, Catherine Harris and Gill Valentine 2017. “Rethinking Concepts of the Strange and the Stranger.” Social and Cultural Geography 18.1: 1-15.
Kristeva, Julia 1991. Strangers to Ourselves. New York. Columbia UP.
Marotta, Vince 2010. “The Cosmopolitan Stranger.” Questioning Cosmopolitanism. Eds. S. van Hooft and W. Vandekerckhove. Springer.
—— 2017. Theories of the Stranger: Debates on Cosmopolitanism, Identity and Cross-Cultural Encounters. New York: Routledge.
Simmel, Georg 1950. “The Stranger.” The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Ed. and trans. Kurt H. Wilff. Glencoe, Il: The Free Press. 402-408.

Notes for contributors:
Contributors should follow the current edition of the MLA Handbook, and manuscripts should be free of all identifying information.
Submissions (7,000-8,000 words) must not be under consideration elsewhere.

They should be sent by 15 February 2021 to rodriguezcarla@uniovi.es and eal@uniovi.es, specifying “Submission: Special Issue Strangers Crime Fiction” in the subject line”.  Attach the essay in the form of a PDF file. Include an abstract of no more than 150 words in the body of the e-mail. Also include a postal mailing address and a phone number.

Please direct any queries to the guest editors: Carla Rodríguez González (rodriguezcarla@uniovi.es) and Esther Alvarez (eal@uniovi.es).

(posted 6 August 2020)

Fear, Anxiety and Crisis in Europe: A Multidisciplinary Approach
A collection of essays
Deadline for submissions: 15 Februart 2021

Early scholarly analyses of anxiety are inextricably intertwined with times of crisis. Sigmund Freud’s lecture XXV on anxiety is a seminal example. Delivered at the University of Vienna during the First World War as part of his introductory lectures on psychoanalysis (1915-1917, published in 1916-1917), in this piece Freud focused on a psychoanalytic study of the individual affective state of anxiety, which he defined as an emotional reaction to the perception of a potential threat or injury. Freud also distinguished between Angst (anxiety) and Furcht (fear) in that whereas the former focuses on the affective reaction, the latter focuses on the object that is the cause of this emotion. While the First World War is not explicitly mentioned in this lecture, Freud’s historical context and private life, with his two sons serving in the Habsburg army, shaped his work, not only as reflected by his disillusionment with human nature that pervades his Thoughts for the Times on War and Death (1915), but also, it has been argued, in “broadening his understanding of human nature beyond sexual drive” (Górny 2016). Freud’s study of fear and anxiety articulated at a time of crisis globally and, particularly, in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century is especially suitable when attempting to understand the dominant concern with such affective states and their interrelated individual and social dimensions in a contemporary global context. In this sense, since the turn of the twenty-first century, nearly a century after Freud’s lecture on anxiety, media, political and academic discourses have been characterised by the pervasive presence of “crisis.” Sociological analyses of the current epoch of late modernity often emphasise the intensification of speed and volume of spatially and temporally related factors as underlying causes of fear and anxiety. Hartmurt Rosa (2005), for example, has observed how what he terms “social acceleration” experienced at the structural and subjective levels, in which technological-technical acceleration plays a crucial role, helps to account for numerous socio-psychological pathologies, including anxiety, phobias and alienation. The subjective and generational perception of time running faster than in preceding epochs, and the consequent experience of anxiety or living in a time of crisis are certainly not new. However, what is ostensibly new in what Zygmunt Bauman (2000) has seminally termed “liquid modernity” is the manner in which technological development has enabled an increase in the speed, frequency and magnitude of transnational mobility of information, goods and people. Against a potentially positivist perception of these “new mobilities” (Sheller & Urry 2006), there is also the sense that current crises are often generated by the cumulative effect of the transnational spread and glocal experience of what sociologist Ulrich Beck (2004) identified as “global threats” and which, particularly since the turn of the twenty-first century with 9/11 marking a turning point, include global terrorism, financial crises, climate change – and to this list one cannot but feel compelled to include pandemics, such as the current Covid19 pandemic. Numerous scholarly analyses of these crises, unfolding in what has been referred to as our “age of anger” (Mishra 2017) or “age of anxiety” (Wachs & Schaff 2020), focus on the affective responses of societies when they perceive themselves to be under threat by an external entity, be it contamination, refugees or an unknown virus. Many of these studies are often conducted from within the borders of separate disciplines. Such is the case of anthropologist Arjun Appadurai’s insightful essay to map “the geography of anger” in the current context of globalisation, by considering the underlying reasons of the “fear of small numbers”, of minority communities, experienced by the majority communities in nation-states (2006). In other instances, such as in the work of Zygmunt Bauman, Martha C. Nussbaum and Sara Ahmed, analyses of contemporary crises and affective responses invite the crossing of disciplinary boundaries so as to better apprehend why, after the hope that modernity would erase the darkness of earlier centuries, there is an overriding sense that “ours is, again, a time of fears” (Bauman 2006: 2). Such a complex question requires a complex, multilayered and multiperspectival response. That is why this collection invites submissions on examinations of contemporary crises and their affective responses produced either within the specialisation of specific disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences or with an explicit interdisciplinary perspective.

Submissions are welcome on any of the following themes, though not excluding other topics:

• Manifestations and conceptualisations of “othering” in times of crisis
• Border anxieties
• Social, spatial and psychological boundaries
• Fixity and fluidity in spatial and temporal boundaries
• Processes of inclusion and exclusion
• Political crisis and fear
• Refugee crisis as “crisis of solidarity”
• The racialisation of migrants in times of fear
• Objects of emotions and objects of feeling
• Distant suffering and mediation of crisis
• Discourses on crisis, trauma and anxiety
• Time, space and anxiety
• Technological-technical acceleration and socio-psychological pathologies
• Media representations of crisis

Submissions in English, including an abstract (max. 500 words, including five keywords), a short biographical note (max. 150 words) and a statement that this work has not been published and is not currently under review elsewhere, should be sent by 15 February 2021 to the editors, Carmen Zamorano Llena (cza@du.se), Jonas Stier (jonas.stier@mdh.se) and Billy Gray (bgr@du.se). Notification of the editorial decision will be sent to the authors by 15 March 2021 and complete essays in English (max. 7,500 words, including works cited) should be submitted by 15 September 2021. The collection of essays will be published by an international academic publishing house with peer-review system.

Works Cited

Appadurai, Arjun. 2006. Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger. Durham: Duke University Press.
Bauman, Zygmunt. 2006. Liquid Fear. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Bauman, Zygmunt. 2000. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Beck, Ulrich. 2006 (2004). The Cosmopolitan Vision. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Freud, Sigmund. 1991. “Lecture XXV: Anxiety.” Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. 440-461. London: Penguin Books.
Górny, Maciej. 2016. “Freud, Sigmund.” International Encyclopedia of the First World War. August 29. https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/freud_sigmund.
Mishra, Pankaj. 2017. Age of Anger: A History of the Present. London: Penguin.
Rosa, Hartmurt. 2013 (2005). Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity. Trans. and introd. by Jonathan Trejo-Mathys. New York: Columbia University Press.
Sheller, Mimi and John Urry. 2006. “The New Mobilities Paradigm.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 38 (2): 207-226. https://doi.org/10.1068/a37268.
Wachs, Anthony M. and Jon D. Schaff, eds. 2020. Age of Anxiety: Meaning, Identity, and Politics in 21^st-Century Film and Literature. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

(posted 9 November 2020)

Muslim Writing, Writing Muslimness in Europe: Transcultural Literary Approaches
A collection of essays
Deadline for submissions: 15 February 2021

Almost twenty years ago the so-called “Muslim question” took centre stage in media and political discourses as a direct consequence of not only the 9/11 attacks in the United States but also of the Western military and political responses to these events and the subsequent spread of what has been defined as global terrorism. George W. Bush’s declaration of “war against evil” in 2001 and Tony Blair’s defence of “our values and our way of life” against violent Islamist extremism following the London bombings on July 7, 2005 signalled what has been referred to as a “paradigm shift” in international relations which is predominantly driven by anti-Muslim prejudice. The Islamophobia that has pervaded different aspects of the public sphere in the West since 9/11 is arguably more accentuated in the European context, where the numerically significant presence of Muslims in the EU is often regarded as “pos[ing] a serious cultural and political threat” (Parekh 2008: 5). In terms of culture within the European context over the last two decades, there is also a substantial body of literature that has engaged with the Western anxieties projected onto the Muslim ‘other’, and in particular, the Muslim migrant ‘other’. Literary criticism of Muslim writing and writing about Muslims by Muslim or non-Muslim writers in Europe has often highlighted the need to offer a more nuanced articulation of Muslim identity. Critical studies produced over the last two decades have predominantly focused on contemporary literature, and the novel in particular, as well as on the study of Muslim writing and writing about Muslims and Islam produced within a specific linguistic and national framework. The proposed collection of essays aims at expanding and adding complexity to existing analyses of contemporary Muslim writing and writing about Muslims and Islam in the European context by incorporating both a historical and a comparative perspective. As Maleiha Malik has persuasively argued, “it is impossible to analyse Muslims in the West today without a better understanding of how they were treated in the past” (2009: 207). Also, within the field of literary criticism, a response that engages critically with a transnational, Western-centred, anti-Muslim prejudice fostered by the “global threat” of Islamist terrorism calls for a complex, multiperspectival analysis. In this sense the collection will focus on “comparing the literatures” of Europe (Damrosch 2020: 1) through different contributions that either focus on literary text(s) produced within a specific national literary tradition or that have a comparatist orientation. This will be combined with a transcultural theoretical stance that emphasises how cultures, societies and identities are “less internally homogeneous, less coherent or self-contained and less territorially fixed than it was assumed” in the national(ist) paradigm (Dagnino 2012: 1).

Proposals of contributions on literary texts of all epochs that engage with articulations and definitions of Muslim writing and writing about Muslim identity in Europe are welcome on any of the following themes, though not excluding other topics:

• Muslims as the “new” Europeans
• Aesthetics and the “anthropological frame”
• Intertextuality, Muslim influences and rewriting literatures in Europe
• The gaze of the Muslim ‘other’
• The postsecular turn in Europe and in Muslim writing
• “Authenticity” in Muslim narratives
• Empathy and aesthetics
• Affects and effects of fear and hate
• Representational violence
• Translingualism and identity
• European anxiety and the Muslim question
• Muslim masculinities
• Muslim women and feminism(s)
• Body, politics and Islam
• Muslim identity/ies and crisis
• Diversity and difference in Muslim culture(s)
• Muslim identity/ies, space and place
• Tradition vs. modernity in first- and second-generation Muslim migrants
• Sufism and transculturality
• Cultural anamorphosis of Muslims and Islam
• The liminal space or barzakh in literature
• The market of Muslim writing in Europe
• Colonial past and present in contemporary Muslim writing

Submissions in English, including an abstract (max. 500 words, including five keywords), a short biographical note (max. 150 words) and a statement that this work has not been published and is not currently under review elsewhere, should be sent by 15 February 2021 to the editors Carmen Zamorano Llena (cza@du.se), Mattias Aronsson (mar@du.se), Billy Gray (bgr@du.se), Carolina León Vegas (clv@du.se) and Carles Magrinyà Badiella (cmb@du.se). Notification of the editorial decision will be sent to the authors by 15 March 2021 and complete essays in English (max. 7,500 words, including works cited) should be submitted by 15 September 2021. The collection of essays will be published by an international academic publishing house with peer-review system.

Works Cited

• Dagnino, Arianna. “Transculturalism and Transcultural Literature in the 21^st Century.” Transcultural Studies vol. 8, 2012, pp. 1-14.
• Damrosch, David. Comparing the Literature: Literary Studies in a Global Age. Princeton UP, 2020.
• Malik, Maleiha. “Anti-Muslim Prejudice in the West, Past and Present: An Introduction.” Patterns of Prejudice vol. 43, no. 3-4, 2009, pp. 207-212.
• Parekh, Bhikhu. European Liberalism and ‘the Muslim Question’. Leiden: Amsterdam University Press, 2008.

(posted 1 December 2020)

Kinship in the Fiction of N.K. Jemisin: Relations of Power and Resistance
An edited volume
Deadline for proposals: 1 March 2021

Dr Jenny Bonnevier, Örebro University, Sweden and Associate Professor Berit Åström, Umeå University, Sweden invite original essays for a contributed volume on kinship in the fiction of N.K. Jemisin. Lexington Books have expressed a provisional interest in publishing the volume.

N.K. Jemisin’s unprecedented win of three consecutive Hugo awards, one for each part of her Broken Earth trilogy, has brought her to the center of the field of the fantastic and earned her the attention of readers, fans and critics. Critical attention, however, is still just beginning to do justice to the richness of Jemisin’s textual universes. It has mainly focused on her work in the context of Afrofuturism, the Anthropocene, and as concerning issues of race, disability, and gender, recognizing Jemisin’s important contribution to re-imagining the future as a place characterized by diversity. While acknowledging the importance of these concerns to Jemisin’s fiction, this anthology takes as its starting point the conviction that not only are there other central concerns that merit exploration, but that our understanding of the role of Jemisin’s fiction in Afrofuturism and its struggle with the hope of a future (and a hopeful one at that) is made richer, more complex and more rewarding if we recognize and pay critical attention to the role of kinship relations in her work. Mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, brothers, sisters, grandparents – the relationships these terms evoke form complex nurturing as well as destructive webs of meaning in Jemisin’s textual worlds. Webs of kinship, families, sometimes function as centers of resistance and sometimes as means of oppression. At times, they are both simultaneously.

The editors intend the anthology to be part of a tradition of critical kinship studies, which understands kinship as a contingent and situated phenomenon, and to draw on the traditions of feminist, lgbtqia and afrofuturist scholarship in studies of the fantastic. We thus invite contributions that engage with kinship relations in the fiction of N.K. Jemisin in ways that are in line with this aim. In particular, contributions should pay special attention to questions of power and resistance and the ways in which family relations construct and/or are constructed through and within such fields of tension or conflict. Contributions that put Jemisin’s work in larger literary, cultural, or theoretical contexts are welcome, including readings of her text in conversation with other texts or traditions.

The chapters should be c. 7 000 words, including endnotes and bibliography.

Abstracts of between 250 and 350 words and a short CV or brief biographical note should be sent to jenny.bonnevier@oru.se and berit.astrom@umu.se by March 1, 2021. Notification of acceptance will be given no later than March 15, 2021.

Final manuscripts should be submitted by November 1, 2021.

(posted 15 December 2020)

Asian American Studies
A special issue of Journal of American Studies of Turkey (JAST)
Deadline for full papers: 31 March 2021

• Asian American narratives, literature and theory
• Asian American theater, drama, film and performance studies
• Asian Americans and intersectionality
• Asian American women, feminism, and solidarity
• Masculinity studies, critical race theory, and Asian American Studies
• APIDA cultural studies; food studies
• Is there an Asian American “canon”?
• The politics of Asian American Studies in American academia
• Teaching Asian American Studies within, and/or outside of, the US
• How do US-centric viewpoints exclude other types/definitions of Asian America?
• Globalization, citizenship, (im)migration, and mobility
• Hybridity, diaspora, and (forced) displacement
• The global pandemic and Asian American communities
• Collaboration/community among Asian Americans and with other racialized/minoritized groups
• Asian Americans, the internet and social media outlets (Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/Tik Tok)
• APIDA organizing techniques (consciousness raising, collectives, manifestos, grassroots activism)
• Asian American activism and global issues such as AIDS, sexual slavery, sex work/tourism, war/peace, violence, domestic abuse, natural disasters, sweatshop labor, economic exploitation, food production/distribution, consumerism, disability, art and popular culture, the beauty industry, the media, sports, critiques of capitalism, political oppression, human rights, BLM, LGBTQ+ rights, NGOs, reproductive rights, healthcare provision, education/literacy, and the environment

(posted 28 Octobe 2020)