World Literatures (non-European Languages):

• Representations of Alexandria in the Arabic Novel Due to its mythical past, cosmopolitan history, and literary significance, representations of Alexandria are far from coherent, chronological, or clear. This panel seeks papers that view the city as a space that hovers between past/present, local/global, center/periphery, private/public, etc. Papers may focus on the specific ways the city is imagined, invoked, and invented. They may also use different iterations of the city to draw larger conclusions on the development of the Arabic novel.
• The City in Contemporary Arab Women’s Writings This panel seeks papers that focus on the representations of the city in the literature of the Arab Uprising and in all contemporary Arab women's writings, both fictional and non-fictional: travel narratives, autobiographies, memoirs, testimonials, etc. Possible topics include but are not limited to: rebel cities, Utopian cities, cities at war, cities of exile, foreign cities, World capitals, literary capitals, sacred cities.
• Space and Place in World Literature This panel seeks to bring together papers that explore the issues of space and place in world literature. We are interested in work that investigates the multiple ways in which space and place are imagined, produced, and consumed, or disputed and dismantled in today’s world literature. Presenters are encouraged to explore the panel’s theme using a variety of methodological approaches, situating the work both within global and national contexts.

American:

• Cities Afloat What happens when cities and other concrete geographic spaces become uprooted and mobile? On sailing vessels and modern cruise liners alike, land-based social and political issues are transformed, and new hierarchical power systems can develop. We welcome proposals that consider how the boat functions as a type of floating city or community and possibilities this suggests for new ways of thinking about these spaces. Please send 250-word abstracts.
• Transnational Utopian Literature: Influences on the U.S. into the 21st Century America was viewed in the eighteenth and nineteenth century as a land of opportunity. Thinkers such as Edward Bellamy, Robert Owens, Charles Fourier and others utilized the vast American territory as an experimental testing ground for their proposed theories. What influences do the utopian theorists have on ecology, environmentalism, technology, and/or corporate hegemony in the twenty-first century as depicted in print or on stage?
• Urban Pests, Ecology, and Social Justice While we often think of city parks and urban gardens as sheltering the preferred forms of nature in urban settings, we often forget about or denigrate those aspects of nature we consider ‘pests’ (e.g. rats, pigeons, bugs, and weeds). This panel invites papers addressing cultural works from all periods of American history that allow us to identify the line between accepted and rejected forms of nature in urban landscapes across the United States and the various intended or unintended environmental and/or social consequences caused by this line.

 Anglophone:

• The (Ir)real City: The Changing Metropolis in the Twentieth Century For Raymond Williams, the disorienting ephemerality of the modern city is like the form of a film fragmented yet appearing to flow. This duality becomes characteristic of twentieth-century city narratives. The city becomes a space both real and irreal, existing simultaneously as a concrete place and as ephemera that allows for authorial intervention. This panel explores the evolution of the representation of the city in twentieth-century Anglophone fiction to discuss its subsequent impact on narrative. Submit 300-word abstracts.
• Urban Ecologies in Writing About India, 1800s to the Present  This panel focuses on the interplay between cities and their natural environments in writings about India. It seeks to address such questions as: What is the interplay between cities and the natural world, and what does this imply in regard to the writer(s) under discussion? Do Indian writers differ in significant ways from non-Indian writers in relation to this topic? If so, what are possible reasons for these differences? Do urban ecologies described in works about India speak to the gender concerns of their particular period?
• Urban Ecology and the Postcolonial Global Subject This panel considers the specific role of urban environments in imagining postcolonial subjects’ relationship to the world. How and why do cities function as the locus for a cosmopolitan identity, while villages remain the bearers of tradition? How have discourses of globalization and environmental justice changed considerations of postcolonial subjectivity and environments in our century? What literary innovations have helped represent the sedimented historical landscapes of colonialism, global capitalism, and histories of devastation? 

British:

• Amidst the Ruins of Monuments For centuries, the monument was central to our concept of the city. It was designed not merely to store communal memory but to make the city itself significant to its citizenry. With the rise of postmodern ‘post’-urbanity, however, the hermeneutics of the cityscape are no longer oriented toward monumental memories but toward patchwork histories stripped of context. This panel reconsiders the monument as a site of memory, examining the psychogeography of the city and the memorial’s changing status within the literature of the last century. 

• Onwards and Upwards: Moments of Friction in Victorian Teleological Thinking This panel engages with the repercussions of teleological imagery on Victorian thought. Civilization was widely imagined as a cumulative, unidirectional social development through time, which profoundly shaped the Victorian understanding of society and empire. For instance, common metaphorical similarities between descriptions of cultural primitivism and developmental immaturity grounded the rhetoric of both imperialism and social conservatism. This panel examines moments when this teleology is thrown into confusion, disagreement, and paradox.

Comparative Languages & Theory:

• Representations of Lost Cities  The goal of this creative session is to discuss, among translators, authors, and critics, the multiple aspects involved in representing urban-centric literary texts and to celebrate the results with a multilingual reading. How do we represent a city that no longer exists? An underground city? A secondary city? A city that has never been seen? An unidentified city? A secret city?
• Ruin, Rubble, and Remembrance: Explorations of/on the Traumatic The purpose of this panel is to invite a set of theoretical conversations about how architecture is both mobilized to monumentalize and commemorate, and is understood to represent trauma through the representation of its decay. Through a critical exegesis of texts that deal with issues concerning architecture, ruin, and their relationship to remembrance practices, it is hoped that this panel will underscore the ways by which historical memory always already appears to straddle the fine line between the remembrance and the forgetting of trauma.

• Urban Ecopoetics This session seeks to promote creative, cross-disciplinary engagement with cities and city poetry from the US and around the world by addressing a range of questions, including but not limited to: What is a city poem, and what purposes does it serve? Where are the poetic city’s margins, and what are its limits? Which urban relations are most crucial? What are the poetics of urban development and protest? Where/how does the queer city intersect the straight one? What are the possibilities of an affective poetics of the city?

Creative writing:

• CfP: Memory Palaces, Dream Houses, and Possessed Bodies How do places bind and anchor their inhabitants? In the spirit of Benjamin and Sebald, this includes: the live burial of dreams, haunting by memory palaces, and how places occupy us, changing our inner ecological systems, and re-wiring our desires. Papers that explore the uncanny connections between subjects and the built environment of modern urban spaces (domestic or industrial, commercial and ex-urban) from a literary, popular culture, ficto-critical, or filmic perspective are especially encouraged. 

Culture&Media Studies:

• Folklore and Material Culture of Canada This panel will investigate Material Culture in Canadian Folk Groups. How do we express who we are, where we come from, and what we believe in? One of the many ways we establish our social identities is through what we make, why we make it, and how we use it. This is a brief definition of Material Culture, and every social/folk group demonstrates it. The creations we come up with, both in terms of usefulness and aesthetics, reflect who we are. Topics may include but are not limited to foodways, folk art, tools, tapestries, and architecture.

French and Francophone:

• CfP: Writing the City of Light: Paris in Literature, Philosophy, and History This panel seeks papers that uncover or provide fresh examinations of any and all who have attempted to translate Parisian life onto the page. Possible topics include: Paris, Capital of Modernity; The Gothic City vs The Renaissance City; Zola and Haussmannization; Surrealist Explorations; Colonial Cities as Extensions of the Metropole; Le Corbusier and la ville radieuse; G. Perec and His Parisian Games; Literature from the Banlieue(s); Representations in Non-Francophone Literature.

Italian:

• Digital Humanities for Medieval Italy We welcome proposals dealing not only with Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio but also with chronicles, religious works, illumination, illustration and iconography, geography, architecture, music and so on. Of special interest are projects that deal with the development and application of recent technologies (including innovative uses for encoding, Data-Driven Documents, spatial mapping, GIS and GPS, text/data mining, corpus construction and so on) or new tools for dissemination, visualization and archiving.
• The Legacy of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966) This session examines how Michelangelo Antonioni explores and questions reality through art, photography, and cinema. We are interested in exploring how the issues raised in Blow Up (how we perceive and de/construct reality) anticipated not only the modes of representation but also the critical discourses of the post-sixties. What is the nature of Antonioni’s distinctive cinematic vision and its impact on subsequent cultural trends, from filmmaking to fashion, from visual art to architecture? 150-200 word abstracts in English and brief bios.
• New Perspectives on Italian Futurism (1909-1944) The aim of this seminar is to provide an overview of Italian Futurism and to serve as a forum to present and debate new interpretations of it. Interdisciplinary investigations are welcome on all the areas explored by the Futurist avant-garde, such as painting and sculpture, architecture, design, fashion, photography, advertising, literature, and theater.

Spanish/Portugese:

• The Body in the City: (Im)migrant Subjects in the Spanish Speaking World his panel explores representations of immigrant subjects in hispanophone literature, film, performance, and theater. Possible topics include: (im)migrant subjects as they relate to economic and political fluctuations; the (im)migrant subject as the representation of the city in ruins (past or present); the flâneur in the city; cultural manifestaciones and appropriation of the city by (im)migrants; the relationship of the (im)migrant body to the city historically; music, performances, and festivities of (im)migrants in the city.

• Latin American Cities: Places to Live, Spaces to Imagine This panel looks for proposals on cities in Latin America. What similarities and differences exist among Latin American cities? How do these shape Latin American identity/identities? How have urban spaces changed in Latin America? How are cities represented in media? The panel aims for an interdisciplinary perspective and welcomes presentations from different disciplines--film, literary studies, ecocriticism--to foster a critical dialogue on urban spaces in Latin America. Please submit 300 word abstracts in English or Spanish to Mayra Fortes. 

Women’s and Gender Studies:

• Women Poets Writing the City Urban spaces have often proven to be rich environments for poets, often providing them with both freedom and a community of like-minded artists. This panel will explore how women poets are influenced by and, in their representations, influence the city. Representations may be of the city and its inhabitants, or they may be in a style that mimics the urban space. Possible topics include author studies, studies of schools, or comparative works. Papers on any historical period or nationality are welcome.