CFP: Sexing the Book, McGill Graduate Conference on Language and Literature 2009, (1/16/09; 3/27-29/09)

The English Graduate Students Association of McGill University is pleased to announce its 15th annual Graduate Conference on Language and Literature. This year’s conference is entitled “Sexing the Book: Bodies, Texts, Practices.” The conference will be held in Montreal, Canada on March 27-29th, 2009.

From Chaucer to Butler and beyond, writers, critics, and theorists have been writing about sex in conventional as well as controversial ways. Within literary studies, a recent focus on sexual practices and sex work has reemphasized the material nature of sexual acts, providing detailed and fascinating examinations of sexuality’s particular socio-historical forms. In literary and extra-literary contexts alike, scholarship on sexuality continues to provide a forum for questioning broader cultural practices, the nature of human inwardness, and various kinds of social relationships.

At this year’s conference, we hope to bring together a variety of perspectives on human sexuality, including literary, sociological, anthropological, and historical views of sex. We warmly invite both literary and non-literary papers that address aspects of human sexuality from a range of disciplines, critical perspectives, periods, and genres. Possible topics might include:

Literary representations of sex work
Textual representations of sexual practices
Pornography as/and/vs. literature
Sex and technology
Sex and the spirit: sex and sin, religious ecstasy, libido
Sex and gender
Sexual spaces: brothels and bawdy houses, sex and/in the home, sex clubs
Sociology of sex: infidelity, monogamy, polygamy, polyandry, incest and other taboos
Censorship and criminalization
Sex and health/disease
Critical theory on sex: feminist criticism, queer and gender studies, power and discourse
Sexual metaphors of literary creativity

Our keynote speaker for the conference will be Professor William Fisher of Lehman College, CUNY. His award-winning book is entitled Materializing Gender in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (Cambridge UP, 2006), and he is presently working on a new book on sexual practices in the Renaissance.

Please send paper proposals (300 words) to Emily at emily.essert_at_mail.mcgill.ca or to Sara at saracoodin_at_hotmail.com by Friday, January 16th, 2009. If you are interested in applying to one of the specific panels listed on UPenn CFP list, please contact the panel coordinators directly at the address provided. Applicants with successful proposals will be notified by email in Early February.

CFP: Navigating the Body: Spaces, Mapping, and Embodiment (1/23/09; 3/20-22/09)

Navigating the Body: Spaces, Mapping, and Embodiment University of Virginia Department of English
Graduate-Student Conference

219 Bryan Hall, P.O. Box 400121
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4121

March 20-22, 2009

The Graduate English Student Association at the University of Virginia is hosting a Spring conference on “Spaces, Mapping, and Embodiment.” This conference is intended to cross several periods and disciplines within the humanities, and to engage with recently opened critical conversations on such issues as: theories and forms of cultural, literary and literary-historical mapping; history and historiography; sexuality and gender; the designation and re-designation of national, political, and cultural spaces; and embodied and performative modes of history and memory.

Professor Valerie Traub will be delivering the keynote lecture. Prof. Traub is a Professor of English Studies and Chair of the Women’s Studies Department at the University of Michigan. Her recent work has focused on
the history of sexuality and on sexuality in the early modern period. Her upcoming book is entitled Mapping Embodiment in the Early Modern West: A Prehistory of Normality.

Potential panel topics include, but are not limited to:

- Literature and Historiography
- Gender, Sexuality, and Location
- Hemispheric and Global Studies
- Borderlands
- Body Politics
- Commodity Culture and Texts as Material Objects
- Wastelands
- Space and Abjection
- Bodily Excess
- Memory, Mapping, and History
- Race and Space
- Medicine, Technology, and Literature

Please send a 250-word abstract and a copy of your CV to Patrick Abatiell and Sabrina Rissing at uvaconference_at_gmail.com. Submission deadline is January 23, 2009.

CFP: Ecofeminist collection, Early Modern Studies (1/15/09)

Nearly thirty years ago, Carolyn Merchant proposed new ways to look at the various mechanisms that “sanctioned the domination of both nature and women” (Death of Nature xxi). Today, scholars have made great strides in locating these mechanisms in various periods and places important to American, British, and World literatures, but scholars of early modern literature have yet to consider them at length. Ecocritical studies of Shakespeare, Milton, and others have challenged the way early modern scholars understand the relationship between human beings and the natural world in the period, but these studies still tend to focus on humans in a universal (or universally male) sense. Alternatively, when women are the focus of ecocritical studies in the period, they tend to be discussed in symbolic terms, often as tropes for or related to Nature herself.

We are proposing an ecofeminist collection of essays that look specifically at the material rather than symbolic relationship between women and the natural world in the period, with essays that focus on
women’s writing (or the representation of women in writing) and everyday tasks that position them sometimes in alignment and sometimes at odds with the natural world they used and lived in.

Please send abstract submissions of 300 words or fewer on topics related to materialist study of women and the natural world between 1500 and 1800 that may include readings of texts (male- or female-authored) or more broadly theorized approaches to this issue.

Please submit abstracts or direct inquiries by email (preferred) by January 15, 2009 to Jennifer Munroe at jamunroe_at_uncc.edu or Rebecca Laroche at rlaroche_at_uccs.edu; or, you may send abstracts or inquiries by post to:

Professor Jennifer Munroe
English Department
UNC Charlotte
9201 University City Blvd
Charlotte, NC 28223

CFP: Private Parts: Early Modern Bodies, Spaces and Texts (1/15/09; 4/3/09)

The Early Modern Interdisciplinary Group of the City University of New York Graduate Center
invites abstract submissions for its annual conference:

Private Parts: Early Modern Bodies, Spaces and Texts
Friday, April 3, 2009

In 1860, Jacob Burckhardt asserted that the English Renaissance witnessed the emergence of the individual. This new “private man” operated in two distinctly different spheres—maintaining a public face while experiencing a sense of privacy not compatible with medieval sanctions. Though Burckhardt’s arguments have met opposition and criticism, the dialectic of public and private realms has remained a force in early modern scholarship, with recent work addressing issues of privacy from material culture, feminist, queer and textual perspectives. This conference aims to interrogate this dialectic as it manifests in early modern literature, art, architecture, culture, music, science and philosophy. How do our notions of privacy impact our study of Renaissance life? Did privacy mean the same thing for men as for women? How did the emergence of private rooms shape notions of personal privacy or intimacy? In what ways did the
rise of private reading change the dissemination and reception of texts?

Topics for papers or panels might include, but are not limited to:

• private chambers
• diaries and letters
• domesticity
• apocrypha, palimpsests and deleted scenes
• the study, the studiolo and the reading room
• body image, body parts
• private art and book collections
• silent reading
• the hidden and unseen
• the forbidden and taboo
• medical studies of the body
• self-fashioning vs. the private self
• covert organizations
• the private person
• hermetic life
• private or underground worship
• spying and violating privacy
• quarantines, hospitals, and asylums
• private chapels and prayer spaces
• privilege and privacy
• life-writing
• manuscript circulation
• backstage/off-stage action
• clandestine relationships
• clothing the body

Please send abstracts of 250 words to EMIGconference_at_gmail.com by January 15, 2009.