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Category: Call for Papers

CFP: Indigenous Texts and Young People (deadline: 31 March 2017)

Benjamin Lefebvre

Roundtable for Association of Research in Cultures of Young People annual conference, 30 May 2017

Organizer: Benjamin Lefebvre (Ryerson)

Galvanized by the theme of Congress 2017, “The Next 150 on Indigenous Lands,” this roundtable seeks to take stock of Indigenous texts for and/or about young people in the twenty-first century. Whether depicting past injustices such as the residential school system, continued hardships under neocolonial policies, or the possibilities for Indigenous identities in contemporary culture, these texts as a collective are produced within a complex system of shifting priorities. Concerns about accuracy and authenticity are sometimes in competition with the priorities of publishing as a business, especially when it comes to books published by mainstream/settler presses and intended largely for non-Indigenous readers: a manuscript is accepted if it is deemed to have the potential to sell sufficiently for the publisher to make a profit, and a book needs to sell sufficiently to stay in print. And while the publication of Indigenous-created texts for young people has been steady since the 1970s, the reports of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada have granted such texts more visibility in the mainstream media and have promoted these texts as opportunities to share and celebrate Indigenous histories, identities, and knowledges.

I welcome proposals for ten-minute presentations on any aspect of Indigenous texts for and/or about young people across the age spectrum, from alphabet books and picture-book texts to book-length fiction and graphic novels and also including texts for adults about young people. Topics could include but are certainly not limited to the following:

  • The politics and economics of publication (texts published by Indigenous presses and texts published by settler presses)
  • Alternative forms of publishing in the Web 2.0 era, including multilingual and multimedia texts
  • The politics of historical fiction (granting voice to survivors of the residential school system while potentially introducing settler readers to this historical event)
  • Texts and target markets (Indigenous readers and/or settler readers)
  • Questions of witness, empathy, and appropriation (such as Gord Downie and Jeff Lemire’s graphic novel Secret Path)
  • Revising or dismantling Western histories, literary conventions, and understandings of land, family, community, and knowledge
  • Indigeneity and activism
  • Media coverage of Indigenous texts for young people
  • Stories of Indigenous young people aimed at adult readers, including memoirs of Indigenous childhoods

Please submit a proposal of 250 words, along with a bio note of 50 words and a statement about any A/V needs, to Benjamin Lefebvre (benjamin.lefebvre@ryerson.ca) by 31 March 2017.

CFP: Crossover Texts (conference panel; deadline 1 November 2015)

Benjamin Lefebvre

The Fall 2015 newsletter of the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE) includes my member-organized panel on Crossover Texts, which I proposed for the 2016 conference that will take place on 28–31 May 2016, during the annual Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences held at the University of Calgary. Proposals and inquiries are warmly welcomed! The deadline for submissions is 1 November 2015.

Crossover Texts
Organizer: Benjamin Lefebvre (Ryerson University)

The term “crossover fiction” refers usually to texts that cross the boundary between children’s literature and adult literature, in terms of target readership and genre. While there are countless examples of texts that were published for one group but embraced by readers of all ages, the term can also be applied to texts that require some form of textual transformation and texts that fit imperfectly within textual categories.

For this panel, I invite proposals for papers that consider crossover texts of any kind and by authors of any cultural group, including the following:

  • Adaptations or reworkings across media (including oral storytelling, commodities, and tourism) or within one medium;
  • Adaptations across genres and readerships, such as YA novels made into films for a general audience;
  • Transmedia storytelling and questions of authorship, ownership, and branding;
  • New and/or transnational editions, including attempts to revise problematic older texts and to redesign books from one genre to fit within another;
  • Versions across authors’ careers, including shifts from periodical to book publication and authors’ revisitations of their own work;
  • Movements from “high” (literary) genres to “low” genres (fantasy, romance, detective) and formats (comics and graphic novels);
  • Texts by minoritized authors that cross over from niche publishing to mainstream success;
  • Rewrites across cultures, national boundaries, and age-based readership categories, including revisionist texts, mash-ups, and parodies.

Please send the following to the panel organizer at benjamin.lefebvre@ryerson.ca by 1 November 2015: a file containing a 300- to 500-word paper proposal, with no identifying marks of any kind; a file containing a 100-word abstract and a 50-word biographical statement; the 2016 Proposal Information Sheet available on the ACCUTE website. You must be an ACCUTE member in good standing to apply for a member-organized session.

CFP: L.M. Montgomery and War (26–29 June 2014)

Benjamin Lefebvre

The call for proposals for L.M. Montgomery and War, the eleventh biennial conference hosted by the L.M. Montgomery Institute and held at the University of Prince Edward Island on 26–29 June 2014, has a new deadline of 15 August 2013! Please visit the new conference Facebook page for all the latest updates!

“And you will tell your children of the Idea we fought and died for—teach them it must be lived for as well as died for, else the price paid for it will have been given for nought.” — Rilla of Ingleside (1921)

“I am thankful now, Jem, that Walter did not come back … and if he had seen the futility of the sacrifice they made then mirrored in this ghastly holocaust …” — The Blythes Are Quoted (2009)

The year 2014 marks the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the First World War, a global conflict that would prove life-changing for L.M. Montgomery and millions of her contemporaries. For the eleventh biennial conference hosted by the L.M. Montgomery Institute at the University of Prince Edward Island, we invite proposals for papers that consider war in relation to L.M. Montgomery’s fiction, poetry, life writing, photographs, and scrapbooks, and the range of adaptations and spinoffs in the areas of film, television, theatre, tourism, and online communities.

Montgomery’s 1921 novel Rilla of Ingleside is one of the only contemporary accounts of Canadian women’s experience on the homefront during the First World War, but the War is evoked and implied in direct and indirect ways in many of the novels, short stories, and poems that precede and follow it. The Blythes Are Quoted, Montgomery’s final published work, bridges the years between the First World War and the Second World War, complicating Montgomery’s perspectives and thoughts about war and conflict. Montgomery’s work has met with a variety of responses world-wide during times of war and rebellion, from post-WWII Japan to today’s Middle Eastern countries. Different kinds of wars and rebellions also permeate her fiction and life writing—class conflicts, family disputes, gender and language wars—sometimes humorous, sometimes tragic. This conference seeks to take stock of the complex ways in which war in all its forms has influenced Montgomery’s works and their reception, both in Canada and around the world.

Possible topics include: the Great War anticipated, revisited, remembered, and re-imagined; the politics of gendered witnessing; Montgomery’s reception in times of war and conflict; chivalry, patriarchy, conflict, and romance in poetry and fiction; war as an agent of change; internal and external rebellion in relation to war; the psychology of war in battle and on the homefront.

Proposals should clearly articulate the proposed paper’s argument and demonstrate familiarity with current scholarship in the field (please see http://lmmresearch.org/bibliography for an updated bibliography). For more information, please contact the conference co-chairs, Dr. Benjamin Lefebvre (ben@roomofbensown.net) and Dr. Andrea McKenzie (acmcken@gmail.com). Submit a proposal of 200–250 words, a biographical statement of 70 words, and a list of A/V requirements by 15 August 2013 by using our online form at the L.M. Montgomery Institute website at http://www.lmmontgomery.ca/. Proposals for workshops, exhibits, films, and performances are also welcomed. Since all proposals are vetted blind, they should include no identifying information.

CFP: LauraPalooza 2012: What Would Laura Do?

Benjamin Lefebvre

[The call for papers for this exciting conference was posted recently on the website of Beyond Little House, an amazing resource for Ingalls-Wilder-Lane studies.]

The National Laura Ingalls Wilder Legacy and Research Association Conference

Sponsored by the Laura Ingalls Wilder Legacy and Research Association and the Department of Mass Media at Minnesota State University, Mankato

We invite submissions of paper, panel, and workshop proposals for review and possible acceptance for presentation at the second LauraPalooza conference, to be held on the campus of MSU, Mankato, July 12-14, 2012.

The theme of this year’s conference reflects the continuing interest in the lives and stories of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, particularly as related to American culture, history, values, and ideological practice. Participants may consider asking themselves, “What Would Laura Do?”

Topics may include:

  • The broad influence the stories have had on American popular culture in the last 75 years
  • The history of the books and their cultural, educational, political, and social influences
  • The renewed interest in women’s handwork as cultural artifacts of women’s history
  • The preservation of American folk music ways
  • The preservation of American food ways
  • The strategic and political influence of farming and farming culture in American history
  • The long-term ramifications of the 1862 Homestead Act on Western culture
  • The ever-widening circle of Lane’s politically Libertarian belief structures
  • Historical racism and its lasting effects
  • New discoveries in individual research that add to the Lane and Wilder legacies
  • Any other way you might interpret the legacies of Wilder and Lane.

Submit your proposal in the form of a 700- to 1,000-word abstract, outlining your idea and research, by midnight on December 15, 2011. All proposals should include a 200-word bio as would be appropriate for the conference program. Panel proposals should include bios for all panelists and his/her topic of discussion. Workshop proposals should include an outline of the workshop curriculum and materials needed.

We are also accepting proposals for presentations or programs for Camp Laura, an activity-based conference for elementary school children, running concurrently with Laurapalooza 2012. Please follow the same submission guidelines outlined above, but denote “Camp Laura” at the top of your abstract.

Be sure to include all contact information. Abstracts should be sent via email to amy.lauters@mnsu.edu, conference chair. Acceptance notifications will be sent out via email on the birthdate of Laura Ingalls Wilder: February 7. Those with accepted proposals will be expected to register for and attend the LauraPalooza 2012 conference. (Registration begins in February.)

[Find a PDF of the Call for Proposals here.]

CFP: Nature vs. Nurture: Cultural Inheritance in Canadian Literature

Benjamin Lefebvre

The following is a call for papers for a member-organized panel to be held at the ACCUTE Congress at Concordia University (Montreal) in May 2010.

I invite proposals for papers that focus on questions of cultural inheritance in Canadian texts, particularly as they come up against the binary nature/nurture. To what extent are cultural traditions (including ancestry, ritual, festival, language, religion, food, clothing, etc.) expressed or experienced as either “natural” components of the body or as acts and behaviours nurtured by cultural citizens? In the process of inheriting culture, are nature and nurture complementary or contradictory processes? How dotexts published in or about Canada negotiate this binary, and what visions of the nation do these tensions produce?

Proposals about texts from all regions, communities, and periods are welcome, as are all critical/theoretical approaches and methods. Possible topics include: the performance of cultural inheritance; racialized, gendered, classed, regionalized, and politicized bodies, families, and communities; trans-, hybridized, queer, questioning, two-spirited and/vs. heteronormative identities and inheritances; adulthood and/vs. childhood; the production, reproduction, and counterproduction of cultural memory.

Following the instructions on the ACCUTE website (under Conference), send your 700 word proposal (or 8-10 page double-spaced paper), a 100 word abstract, a 50 word biographical statement, and the submitter information form, to ben@roomofbensown.net by November 15th.

Note: You must be a current ACCUTE member to submit to this session.

Five-Day Extension for LMMI Conference

Benjamin Lefebvre

Due to an unexpected technological difficulty, Jean Mitchell and I would like to offer a five-day extension to everyone interested in submitting a proposal to the L.M. Montgomery and the Matter of Nature conference, to be hosted by the L.M. Montgomery Institute and held at the University of Prince Edward Island. Please send your abstracts and full contact information in the body of an e-mail to lmmi@upei.ca by Monday, 21 September at the very latest.

The call for papers can be found here.

CFP: L.M. Montgomery and the Matter of Nature (updated)

Benjamin Lefebvre

L.M. Montgomery and the Matter of Nature
9th International Conference
University of Prince Edward Island
23-27 June 2010

At the ninth biennial conference hosted by the L.M. Montgomery Institute (University of Prince Edward Island), we invite you to consider L.M. Montgomery and the matter of nature. In recent years, the matter of nature has been the subject of much contested debate and theoretical innovation across disciplines. While multiple romanticisms have informed L.M. Montgomery’s passionate views of the natural world, her complex descriptions show her writing both of and for nature. This complexity extends as well to the depiction of cultural and gendered mores (domesticity, friendship, faith, community, biological determinism) as both natural and cultural. In all its forms, nature situates binary relationships that are often represented as hierarchical and oppositional: nature and culture; child and adult; animal and human; female and male; emotion and reason; body and mind; traditional and modern; raw and cooked; wild and domestic; rural and urban.

We invite the submission of abstracts that consider these issues in relation to Montgomery’s fiction, poetry, life writing, photographs, and scrapbooks, as well as the range of adapted texts in the areas of film, television, theatre, tourism, and online communities. Possible questions include:

  • What are the effects of the representations and images of nature that are crafted and circulated in Montgomery’s work?
  • How do Montgomery’s narrations of nature shape children and adults within and across cultures?
  • How do particular constructions of nature work in fiction, across such differences as gender, race, culture, and class?
  • What are the cultural and historical contingencies surrounding nature in Montgomery’s work?
  • What does it mean to consider Montgomery as a “green” writer (Doody) or as a proto-ecofeminist (Holmes)?
  • What do Montgomery’s provocative readings of nature offer us at a time of environmental crises and ecological preoccupations?
  • How does the notion of “nature” impact some of the most central preoccupations in Montgomery’s fiction, poetry, and life writing (the nature of war, of mental illness, of cultural inheritance, of conflict, of same-sex friendships and of heterosexual marriage, of cultural memory, of national ideologies)?

Abstracts should clearly articulate the paper’s argument and demonstrate familiarity with current scholarship in the field (please see http://lmmresearch.org/bibliography for an updated bibliography). For more information, please contact the conference co-chairs directly: Dr. Benjamin Lefebvre (ben@roomofbensown.net) and Dr. Jean Mitchell (mjmitchell@upei.ca). All proposals will be vetted blind and should therefore contain no identifying information.

Please submit one-page abstracts and short biographical sketches by 15 September 2009 to the L.M. Montgomery Institute’s OCS page (http://ocs.vre.upei.ca/index.php/lmmi/2010).

If you’ve already submitted an abstract for the 2010 Conference, please verify that it has been received by e-mailing the director at lmmi@upei.ca. All those who were registered through the 2008 OCS page have been made authors and should go to http://ocs.vre.upei.ca/index.php/lmmi/2010/presenter/submit/1 to submit their abstract. If you were registered but have forgotten your password, please use the Reset Password link located here: http://ocs.vre.upei.ca/index.php/lmmi/2010/login/lostPassword. If this is your first time using OCS for the L.M. Montgomery Conference, then please register yourself as an author here: http://ocs.vre.upei.ca/index.php/lmmi/2010/user/account?source=&requiresPresenter (make sure to select the “Create account as Author: Able to submit items to the conference” option at the bottom of the registration form).

The 2010 Conference planning is well underway so please be on the lookout for future emails with details concerning accommodations and other events. And as always, if you have any problems, do not hesitate to contact us at lmmi@upei.ca.

L.M. Montgomery and the Matter of Nature (2010)

Benjamin Lefebvre

Call for Papers

Please note the extended deadline is now September 15, 2009.

L. M. Montgomery and the Matter of Nature
9th International Conference
University of Prince Edward Island
June 23-27, 2010

In 2010 we invite you to consider L.M. Montgomery and the matter of nature. While multiple romanticisms have informed L.M. Montgomery’s passionate views of nature her descriptions were complex as she wrote both of and for nature. What are the effects of the representations and images of nature that are crafted and circulated in the fiction of Montgomery, and in that of other writers of literature (especially for children and youth)? How do her narrations of nature shape children and adults within and across cultures? How do particular constructions of nature work in fiction, across such differences as gender, race, culture and class? What are the cultural and historical contingencies surrounding nature in Montgomery’s work? In recent years, the matter of “nature” itself has been the subject of much-contested debate and theoretical innovation across disciplines. Nature situates binary relationships that are often represented as hierarchical and oppositional. These include nature and culture; child and adult; animal and human; male and female; reason and emotion; mind and body; modern and traditional; raw and cooked; domestic and wild; urban and rural?among others. How might any of these formulations be examined and challenged (or not) in the context of Montgomery’s work? What does it mean to consider Montgomery as a “green” writer (Doody) or as a proto-ecofeminist (Holmes)? What do Montgomery’s provocative readings of nature offer us at a time of environmental crises and ecological preoccupations?

Please send one-page abstracts and short biographical sketches by September 15, 2009 to:
L.M. Montgomery Institute
University of Prince Edward Island
550 University Avenue, Charlottetown, PE C1A 4P3 Canada
E-mail: lmminst@upei.ca

CFP: Anne of Green Gables: New Directions

Benjamin Lefebvre

Edited by Irene Gammel and Benjamin Lefebvre

Toronto: University of Toronto Press

Call for Papers

Since its first publication in 1908, L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables has been a remarkable success with a worldwide following of readers and an energetic scholarly engagement over the past two decades. As the novel enters the second centennial of its publication, the University of Toronto Press is interested in publishing a collection of scholarly essays dedicated to the topic Anne of Green Gables: New Directions. The editors are interested in papers related to any aspect of L.M. Montgomery’s Anne, including its inspirations, its sequels, and its cultural impact. Innovative approaches including interdisciplinary perspectives that make us see Anne and the world of Avonlea in new ways are particularly encouraged. Papers should engage with relevant scholarship, and should be written in lively and accessible prose. Illustrations and formerly unpublished material are particularly welcomed. Twenty-five-page papers including all endnotes and bibliography should be accompanied by a bio-sketch and abstract. All essays are subject to blind peer review.

Please submit your paper electronically to the editors:

Dr. Irene Gammel
Department of English
Ryerson University
E: gammel@ryerson.ca

Dr. Benjamin Lefebvre
Department of English and Film Studies
University of Alberta
E: ben@roomofbensown.net

Irene Gammel is the author of Looking for Anne: How L.M. Montgomery Dreamed Up a Literary Classic (Key Porter and St. Martin’s Press, 2008), and most recently the editor of The Intimate Life of L.M. Montgomery (University of Toronto Press, 2005), and Making Avonlea (University of Toronto Press, 2002).

Benjamin Lefebvre is director of the L.M. Montgomery Research Group and editor of “Reassessments of L.M. Montgomery” (2004), a double issue of Canadian Children’s Literature / Littérature canadienne pour la jeunesse.

Deadline: August 15, 2008. Early submissions are encouraged.