1. art and entertainment
2. books and literature

CCCC 2016 Panel: Writing (Center) Strategies for Action
Heather Lang & Aimee Jones
[email protected]
Writing (Center) Strategies for Action
Popular, and powerful, narratives in the field of writing center studies position nondirective and
collaborative writing strategies, higher order concerns (over lower order concerns), and peer-to-peer
tutoring as key terms in the field. Though an accomplishment for writing center scholars and
administrators, this narrative with its preferred strategies has neglected the experiences of some writers.
This session is a call to action to examine the writing center’s narratives and strategies by bringing
underrepresented client populations to the fore:
Speaker One will explore the ways in which online training materials prepare consultants to work with
writers with disabilities. Though there is a growing body of work dedicated to exploring how disability and
disability studies can inform the work of composition (Brueggeman; Dolmage; Kirschbaum; Yergeau et al)
and the work writing centers do to work with and for writers with disabilities (Badcock; Hitt), there is little
systematic or sustained inquiry into the practices that shape these reflexive activities. Drawing on case
study methods, this project seeks to address this gap by examining tutoring practices and tutor-training
strategies that engage writers with disability to commend the good work already being done and cast a
critical gaze on areas that might require more development. Speaker One will also propose Universal
Design (Dolmage) as a new keyword for writing center pedagogy and heuristic that can be adopted by
writing center staff to anticipate a wide variety of writers’ needs and expectations.
Speaker Two will examine how international students’ sources of motivation and expectations for utilizing
the university writing center are aligning or misaligning with the writing center's tutoring strategies and
practices. Through a qualitative case study, speaker two will specifically explore how well collaborative,
non-directive tutoring approaches typically used for native English speaking students that place
importance on higher-order concerns (rhetorical awareness, organizational strategies, and argument
development) before bringing attention to lower-order concerns (grammar and mechanics) align with the
motivations and expectations of multilingual international students who utilize the university writing center.
Further, speaker two will observe how tutors modify or adapt their tutoring practices when confronting
these motivations and expectations, which may collide with traditional tutoring strategies and practices.
The two aforementioned populations represent consultations where key terms, such as higher order
concerns or peer-to-peer, might not hold the same weight as they do in more traditionally theorized
consultations. We are currently seeking one or two more participants for our CCCC 2016 panel proposal
who have similar research interests in underrepresented populations who utilize the writing center, which
could include but are not limited to graduate students, domestic minority cultural groups, and online
clients. If you are interested in collaborating, please email Heather Lang [email protected] or Aimee
Jones [email protected] by May 1, 2015. We look forward to hearing from you!
Creative Writing and Innovative Pedagogies Conference Call for Papers - deadline June 1st
Creative Writing and Innovative Pedagogies (CWIPs)
[email protected]
The exponential increase in Creative Writing degrees and programs at the undergraduate and graduate
level has been well-documented, and much thought and scholarship has been devoted to the impact the
Academy has on the writing community and subsequent creative output. However, there has been only a
limited amount of public conversation about and research into the pedagogical approaches that have
been or might be used in Creative Writing classrooms and programs. How are teachers of Creative
Writing tweaking, extending, revolutionizing, or replacing the traditional Workshop model in their
classrooms? What are or should be the academic and aesthetic goals of a Creative Writing class or
program, and how can these goals be achieved? For this conference we are seeking papers that discuss
theories that inform creative writing pedagogy, strategies and practical applications in the Creative Writing
classroom, development of curriculum at the program level, and pedagogical innovations beyond the
classroom.
Proposals are welcomed and encouraged from all teachers of Creative Writing, including graduate
students and those who teach outside of the Academy.
Teaching Fellowships: A limited number of teaching fellowships are available for this conference. The
conference registration fee ($40) is waived for fellows, who are invited to work one-on-one with an
undergraduate Creative Writing student at UCM in a half-hour conference on Friday afternoon.
To Submit: a one-page proposal for your paper, CV, and indicate in a cover letter (1) whether you are
proposing a panel, individual paper, or paper that fits in an existing panel topic, (2) which existing panel
topic you are proposing a paper in, and (3) if you wish to be considered for a Teaching Fellowship. Send
these materials to: [email protected].
The deadline for paper/panel proposals is June 1st, 2015.
Date: October 16-17, 2015
Keynote Speakers: Michael Kardos & Catherine Pierce, Directors,
Creative Writing Program, Mississippi State University
More info: http://www.ucmo.edu/pleiades/visiting_writers/CWIPSConference.html
Panels: Individuals registering for the CWIPs conference may submit a paper on any topic relating to the
teaching of creative writing, but his/her chances may be improved if s/he submits in the following panel
topics:
- The Flipped Workshop: Using Technology to Facilitate Learning Creative Writing
- The Hypoxic Workshop: A Writing-Intensive Approach
- The Music Education Model: Incorporating 1-on-1 Instruction into Creative Writing Curricula
- Creative Writing as Literature: Finding Moments of Success within Failed Student Stories/Poems
- Is Writing Therapeutic?: Navigating Student Catharsis in the Creative Writing Classroom
- Stories & Poems as Products: Achieving a Sense of Audience by Pursuing an Actual Audience
- Writing Abhors a Vacuum: Teaching “Special Topics” in Creative Writing
- Motivation and the Creative Writing Classroom: Incentives vs. The Self-Driven Writer
- Teaching Strange: The Impossible Art of Poetic Weirdness
Chaucer and Related Topics at PAMLA (Nov 6-8, 2015); Deadline May 15
Tara Williams
[email protected]
Proposals on "Chaucer and Related Topics" are invited; please submit at
http://www.pamla.org/2015/topic-areas by May 15, 2015.
The 2015 PAMLA Conference will meet November 6-8 in Portland, OR.
Dickens Day 2015: Dickens, Readers and Reading
Birkbeck, University of London, the University of Leicester and the Dickens Fellowship
[email protected]
Now in its 29th year, Dickens Day is an annual conference jointly run by Birkbeck, University of London,
the University of Leicester and the Dickens Fellowship. This year's event will be held on Saturday 10th
October at Senate House, London WC1.
Reading is a powerful thing in Dickens’s novels. David Copperfield says of his childhood that ‘reading was
my only and my constant comfort’. He goes on, ‘when I think of it the picture always rises in my mind, of a
summer evening, the boys at play in the churchyard, and I sitting on my bed, reading as if for life’. If the
lonely and unhappy David found reading life-saving, Oliver Twist experiences its deathly associations. He
is so disturbed by reading the Newgate Calendar that its pages seem to turn red with gore and he hears
its words sounding in his ears.
Contemporaries of Dickens were also keenly aware of the power of literature and they worried about
Dickens’s own influence over his vast numbers of readers, particularly the ‘impressionable’ ones –
women, younger readers and the lower classes. Despite such concerns, Dickens’s popularity remained
undimmed throughout his life and in his last years he reached a new audience with his public readings of
his own works. Reading Dickens had a profound effect on many other writers too and we will seek to
explore the echoes, referencing and rewriting of Dickens – both celebratory and critical – in later works.
Jointly run by Birkbeck, the University of Leicester, the Dickens Fellowship and the Institute of English
Studies, this one-day conference will explore Dickens’s reading, his readers and reading in his work. We
invite proposals for 20-minute papers on any aspect of the theme and warmly encourage Dickensians
and scholars of all backgrounds and career stages to apply.
Topics could include but are not limited to:
Reading and readers of Dickens’s work
Dickens’s relationship with his community of readers
Descriptions of readers and reading in Dickens’s novels
Dickens as a reader of Dickens: Dickens’s public readings
Dickens’s library and what he read
Dickens 2012: reading Dickens in the bicentenary
Dickens serial reading projects
Critics and critical reception of Dickens
Dickens’s support for charity schools and education
Illiteracy and non-readers in Dickens’s work
The Dickens Fellowship and Dickens reading groups
Please send proposals (maximum 500 words) to Bethan Carney, Holly Furneaux and Ben Winyard at
[email protected], [email protected] and [email protected]. The deadline for paper
proposals is 31st May 2015.
Classics and Early American Literature and Culture (Nov. 6-8, 2015) Portland, OR
PAMLA 2015
[email protected]
Classics and Early American Literature and Culture
Presiding Officer:
Adam Goldwyn, North Dakota State University
Matthew Duques, North Dakota State University
Abstract: The literary and political culture of the early U.S. republic drew heavily from Greek and Roman
models. This panel seeks to move beyond previous scholarship, which has focused on the influence of
the Classics in North American political discourse, to a wider array of literary and non-literary texts and
material cultures.
Panel Proposal: Scholars have long recognized that the reception of Classical Greek and Roman
literature and culture played a crucial role in early modern and modern American thought. Much of the
focus, though, has traditionally been placed on how allusions to, and adaptations of classical literature
shaped the framers, their framing documents, and all manner of civic praxis. Recently, this focus has
begun to shift from the more political reception of classical antiquity to its reception in wider American
social and cultural contexts. Historian Caroline Winterer has recently elaborated on how early U.S.
citizens and non-citizen residents conceived of the classical past, and literary critics are now turning to a
wider literary canon to understand how diverse writers engaged with these civilizations. With a similar
critical spirit in mind, this panel invites papers that recover new relationships between the classics and
cultural expressions from the Revolution to the Civil War. Possible topics might include the classics and
Revolutionary literature, African American, Native American, Caribbean, and South American literatures,
classics and sermons, journals, and periodicals, classics and illness, democratic theory, sexuality,
classical collectors and material culture (sculpture, paintings and architecture); classical pilgrimages and
travelogues, and other similar topics.
Please contact Adam Goldwyn (adam.goldwyn_at_ndsu.edu) for more information or submit through
PAMLA's onine portal.
- See more at: http://www.pamla.org/2015/topics/classics-and-early-american-literature-...
Shakespeare and Waste, May 23rd, 2015 (Abstracts May 1st)
Kingston Shakespeare Seminar in Theory (KiSSiT)
[email protected]
The Oxford English Dictionary lists three main senses for ‘waste’ in the English language:
1, Waste or desert land
2, Action or process of wasting
3, Waste matter, refuse
The conference invites abstracts for 20 minute papers which fit under these broad headings.
Papers might consider, but are not limited to, the following areas and questions:
*The early modern association between waste and idleness
*The link between waste (land) and wilderness
*Waste paper
*Economic concerns relating to Shakespeare
*Do waste products of the body suggest a leveling and/or intensification of social hierarchy?
*The relationship between human waste and abjection
*The concept of human waste associated with digestion, purging, emetics, and / or blood-letting
*The concept and processes of ‘catharsis’ in relation to waste
*Waste in King Lear
*What does the imagery of contamination by human waste (muddy fountains / cisterns, stains, filth)
suggest about the relationship between racial and ethnic groups?
*Human waste as the traditional Protestant symbol of money; conversely, money as the denial of feces
and its evocation of the human body as pure physicality
Organizers: Johann Gregory, Paul Hamilton, Anne Sophie Refskou, Timo Uotinen, Richard Wilson.
Please submit abstracts and brief CVs, or register as an auditor, by emailing the organizers at
[email protected] before 1 May, 2015 (auditors may register before 15 May)
Please indicate whether you would like to book a ticket for King Lear in your mail.
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Kingston Shakespeare Seminar in Theory
ANNOUNCING A NEW SERIES OF SHAKESPEARE EVENTS FOR POSTGRADUATE STUDENTS
AND EARLY CAREER SCHOLARS
Kingston Shakespeare Seminar (KiSS), part of the London Graduate School, announces the launch of
Kingston Shakespeare Seminar in Theory (KiSSiT): a series of seminars and conferences for
postgraduate students and early career scholars with an interest in Shakespeare, philosophy and theory.
The program will be committed to thinking through Shakespeare about urgent contemporary issues in
dialogue with the work of past and present philosophers – from Aristotle to Žižek.
It is intended that one-day KiSSiT conferences will be held three times a year at the Rose Theatre,
Kingston-upon-Thames, which was developed by the great director Sir Peter Hall to be a ‘teaching
theatre’, where actors and academics would work together. KiSSiT events will be free and open to all.
The inaugural KiSSIT conference will take place at the Rose Theatre on Saturday 23 May, 2015, on the
theme of SHAKESPEARE AND WASTE (see CFP below). Auditors are also encouraged to attend.
Confirmed speakers include Scott Wilson (Kingston University) and Peter Smith (Nottingham Trent
University).
Although there is no attendance fee, seating is limited, and registration is necessary: see email contact
below.
Reduced-price tickets will be available to all participants for the evening performance at the Rose Theatre
of Jonathan Miller’s acclaimed production of King Lear, starring Barrie Rutter
WAITING AS CULTURAL PRACTICE: An Interdisciplinary Conference, 20.-22. May 2016, University
Paderborn/Germany
Universität Paderborn & Kennesaw State University
csinger[at]mail.uni-paderborn, oberwald[at]kennesaw.edu
20. – 22. May 2016 at the University Paderborn, Germany
Waiting shapes the narratives of individuals and societies alike. Yet, waiting is more than just one
realization of the present. Far from being a mere form of intermittent white noise, waiting could be
conceptualized as the unravelling of and the reflection on a plurality of possible futures. Waiting
simultaneously foregrounds the often paradoxical agency/passivity of the waiting subject as explored, for
example, in the narrative of Penelope in Homer’s Odyssey.
As Harold Schweizer observes: “Waiting is as resistant to description and analysis as time or boredom.
Although central to the idea of narrative from Homer to Hollywood, waiting is a temporal region hardly
mapped and badly documented.” (Schweizer, Harold. On Waiting. Routledge: Abingdon, 2008. 1.) This
interdisciplinary conference explores and conceptualizes how “waiting” shapes the narratives of
individuals and societies alike and in what shapes and forms these narratives manifest themselves.
Firstly this conference focuses not only on the influence of “waiting” on individual and social narratives,
but also on how these are being narrated. The representation of waiting has produced some of the most
remarkable narratives, often connected to themes such as return, redemption or revenge. How is waiting
represented in different cultural artefacts? How can the simultaneity of possible futures be packaged as
superficially linear forms of mediation? What is the cognitive impact of real or fictional waiting? Do
“waiting narratives” show a propensity for the allegorical?
Secondly, how is waiting a relevant part of cultural rituals in contexts of intimacy and public spheres (e.g.
courting, mourning)? How is waiting related to the experience of mobility and immobility, e.g. in the case
of refugees, who are detained in camps for months? How does the continuous endurance of “chronic
waiting” (Jeffrey, Craig. Timepass: Youth, Class, and the Politics of Waiting in India. Stanford: Stanford
University Press: 2010) affect and shape whole societies?
Thirdly, this conference aims to discuss the spatiality of waiting. How do spaces such as waiting rooms or
bus stops shape the waiting subject’s thought processes? How are these spaces representative of the
power conditions that construct them? Is the resulting creation of “abstract futures” and the “forthcoming”
(Bourdieu) intentional and in what instances of "timepass" do they result?
Possible topics could include but are not restricted to:
- the formative/subversive impact of waiting on narratives of individuals and societies
- the spatio-temporality of waiting (prisons, camps, bureaucratic processing, architecture)
- political and religious aspects of anticipation and participation (utopias/dystopias)
- aesthetics, poetics, and narratology of waiting
- waiting as social practice; waiting in/as solitude
- gendered waiting; women in waiting; waiting and rituals
- psychological aspects (postponements, anger and patience, vulnerability/insecurity, opportunity to
collect oneself, risk of losing oneself)
- sociobiological manifestations (“expecting:” pregnancy; waiting to die or for medical test results)
- obliteration/proliferation of waiting through new media (instant messaging, etc.)
- patience/impatience: waiting as an active and/or passive state of mind
- the generative potentials of waiting
We invite speakers from various fields: literary and cultural studies; sociology; philosophy; theology;
psychoanalysis (or psychology in general); art history (including history of architecture); film studies;
political theory, etc. Travel stipends may be available. A publication is planned.
Please send a 300-500 word abstract to Olaf Berwald ([email protected]) and Christoph Singer
([email protected]) by July 20, 2015.
20. – 22. May 2016 at the University Paderborn, Germany