Other Conferences, Announcements, CFPs, and Job Listings

A service provided by the Western Literature Association.

Please send your announcements in electronic format to wal@cc.usu.edu.

CALL FOR PAPERS AND INVITATION TO PARTICIPATE

Mari Sandoz Heritage Society Annual Meeting and Conference
The Mari Sandoz High Plains Heritage Center
Chadron State College/Chadron, Nebraska
March 26–28, 2009

Mari Sandoz and Her Literary Contemporaries
(with exhibition of photographic works by Wright Morris)

Proposals for papers on Mari Sandoz's works are invited for presentation on Friday, March 27, 2009, at the Mari Sandoz Heritage Society annual meeting and conference. We are especially interested in papers dealing with Sandoz and her literary contemporaries from the High Plains, such as John Neihardt, Bess Streeter Aldrich, Weldon Kees, Angie Debo, Wright Morris, Willa Cather, and others. However, presentations focusing exclusively on the Sandoz works will be considered as well.

We also welcome submissions concerned with Wright Morris's literary works and/or photography since there will be a special exhibit of Moris's photographs at the Mari Sandoz Heritage Center.

The keynote speaker for the conference will be Dr. Joseph J. "Joe" Wydeven. Dr. Wydeven is an expert on Nebraska literature and Nebraska authors, particularly on the novelist and photographer Wright Morris, about whom he wrote a book titled Wright Morris Revisited, a biographical and critical study of Morris's career. Dr. Wydeven's work has also been featured in the Western American Literature, Centennial Review, MidAmerica, Midwest Quarterly, Women and Western Literature, Encyclopedia of the Great Plains, and The American West: An Interpretive Encyclopedia, Western Vision and American Values, The Kirkpatrick Signature Series Reader. He received the 2005 Mari Sandoz Award from the Nebraska Library Association, which recognizes significant, enduring contributions to the Nebraska book world.

Please e-mail inquiries or a short abstract for your proposed paper or presentation to Katherine Bahr, Department of English and Humanities, Chadron State College at kbahr@csc.edu.

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

Fourth Conference of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers
October 21–24, 2009
Sheraton Society Hill, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

We invite submissions of proposals for panels, roundtables, workshops, or individual papers. We welcome sessions on U.S. women authors and themes from the seventeenth through the twenty-first century; sessions and papers that compare U.S. women writers to writers of other nations are also welcome. The deadline for proposals is December 31, 2008.

All conference participants must be members of SSAWW. Each member’s name can appear in the program twice—once as a presenter and once in some other capacity (chair, commentator, roundtable participant, etc.).

Proposals for entire sessions should include: (1) a paragraph describing the session as a whole, (2) a one-page abstract of each paper, and (3) a one-page cv for each participant. The conference prefers four presenters per session, excluding the chair, although submissions for panels of three presenters will be considered.

Proposals for individual papers should include a one-page abstract and a one-page c.v.

Affiliated societies and organizations have one panel automatically included in the conference program. Affiliates’ contact persons should send panel titles with a list of participants, panel format, and presentation titles (if applicable).

Proposals should specify if audio/visual equipment is needed. However, due to the high cost, we ask that presenters request equipment only if it is essential.

All submissions should be sent electronically by the December 31, 2008 deadline to Carolyn Sorisio (csorisio@wcupa.edu). Please send proposals as Microsoft Word attachments. If that is not possible, then paste the information into an e-mail.

Click here for Call for Manuscripts for Great Plains Research (pdf)

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

EIGHTH BIENNIAL ASLE CONFERENCE
University of Victoria, British Columbia
June 3–6, 2009

"Island Time: The Fate of Place in a Wired, Warming World"

FEATURING PLENARY SESSIONS WITH
* Jeannette Armstrong, author of Slash and Whispering in Shadows
* H. Emerson Blake, executive director of The Orion Society and editor-in-chief of Orion
* Greg Garrard, author of Ecocriticism
* Karsten Heuer, author of Walking the Big Wild and Being Caribou
* Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands, author of The Good-Natured Feminist: Ecofeminism and the Quest for Democracy
* Ruth Ozeki, author of My Year of Meats and All Over Creation
* Richard Primack, author of Essentials of Conservation Biology and editor-in-chief of Biological Conservation
* Andrew Revkin, environment reporter for The New York Times
* Amy Seidl, author of Early Spring: An Ecologist and Her Children Wake to a Warming World
* Daniel Slager, publisher and CEO of Milkweed Editions
* Rita Wong, author of monkeypuzzle and forage
* Jan Zwicky, author of Songs for Relinquishing the Earth and Robinson's Crossing

AND PRE-CONFERENCE WORKSHOPS AND SEMINARS ON
* Animal Studies, with Linda Kalof, author of Looking at Animals in Human History, and Nicole Shukin, author of Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times
* Ecological Media, with Michael Ziser and Andrew Hageman
* Graduate Studies, with Michael Branch, editor of Reading the Roots: American Nature Writing before Walden
* Habitat Studies, with Laurie Ricou, author of Salal: Listening for the Northwest Understory
* Place-based Pedagogy, with Laird Christensen and Hal Crimmel, editors of Teaching about Place: Learning from the Land
* Science Studies, with Ursula Heise, author of Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global

The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) invites proposals for its Eighth Biennial Conference, to be held June 3–6, 2009, at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, on the theme of "Island Time: The Fate of Place in a Wired, Warming World." We seek proposals for papers, panels, roundtables, workshops, and other public presentations connecting language, nature, and culture. As always, we welcome interdisciplinary approaches; readings of environmentally inflected fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction; and proposals from outside the academic humanities, including submissions from artists, writers, practitioners, activists, and colleagues in the social and natural sciences.

This year's theme uses the conference's temporal and spatial location on Vancouver Island as a metaphor for the past and future of place generally. In particular, it reflects the fact that ASLE's first conference outside the U.S. is a fitting location to consider how the Internet and globalization now connect us all (linking our different identities, nations, and communities), as well as how the threat of climate change is affecting our interpretation of texts and cultures, not to mention the material world itself.

Building on the colloquial expression "you're now on island time," the theme suggests our interest in exploring intersecting questions of time and place, and of isolation and community, in a global era in which there are no longer any "islands" of nature outside of history and technology. Indeed, time appears to be running out as we seek ways to address ecological disasters that risk turning the planet as a whole into another "Easter Island." For this reason, we also urgently wish to consider the interconnected subjects of indigeneity, race, and social justice, in the Americas and globally, the engagement of which is crucial to achieving a sustainable society.

We are also interested in receiving proposals on the following related topics:
* island literature and life, including writing on metaphoric islands, such as protected areas, "sky islands," islands of urban and suburban nature, and environmental restorations
* place-based writing in any genre or field, including ecopoetics, ecotheater, environmental film, environmental history, landscape architecture, and cultural geography
* environmental literature as world literature, including comparative literature, cross-cultural approaches, borderlands writing, and travel writing
* literature from rooted modes of life, including forestry, fisheries, agriculture, viniculture, and apiculture
* ecocriticism, literary theory, and ecophilosophy, including post-structuralist approaches
* scientific research and writing, including the history of science
* ideas of the human, including meditations on animals and animality, the body, and disability studies
* narratives of "greening the campus," including initiatives related to recycling, transportation, and energy
* environmental rhetoric and ecocomposition
* ecopedagogy and the scholarship of teaching and learning
* undergraduate research and creative work
* the literature of environmental hope and joy

MAKE IT COUNT: ASLE RESPONDS TO THE CLIMATE CRISIS
At ASLE's last biennial conference at Wofford College in 2007, Bill McKibben said that if we were going to travel to a conference in a time of climate crisis, we should "make it count." We have taken this call to heart and made a number of changes to this year's conference in order to justify the costs of our collective resource use as best we can. In addition to creating as "green" a conference as possible in terms of our ecological footprint, we have attempted to create an intellectual and creative space where things can happen *that would not happen otherwise.* In particular, we have adapted the schedule to include more time for conversation, dialogue, and discussion in the hope that these exchanges will help to inspire creativity and innovation. These adaptions include new breakfast discussions, longer lunches, longer concurrent sessions, more time between sessions, informal discussions for attendees with special interests, a new presentation format, and several large concurrent discussion sessions for everyone at the end of the conference.

PRE-CONFERENCE WORKSHOPS AND SEMINARS ON JUNE 2
ASLE will once again offer a number of pre-conference workshops and seminars led by prominent environmental writers and critics. Each workshop and seminar will last for three hours on the afternoon of June 2 and will be limited to 15 participants. Advanced registration is required and will begin October 15 and close March 15 (or when full, whichever is earlier). Some pre-conference preparation will be required for seminars, including short position papers. Because titles of position papers will be listed in the conference program, we encourage (but will not require) seminar participants to consider attending the seminar in lieu of presenting at the conference itself (rather than doing both).

CONFERENCE SITE
The University of Victoria is located on traditional lands of the Coast Salish and Straits Salish peoples in Saanich, just outside Victoria, the capital city of Canada's westernmost province, British Columbia. The region offers tremendous outdoor opportunities, from walking among the big trees of Goldstream Park to kayaking in the Strait of Georgia to ethnobotanical walks around the university. Social attractions include all the amenities expected of a tourist destination (including the Royal BC Museum), the city's arts community, and restaurants committed to locally produced food and drink, as well as British Columbia's well-deserved reputation for environmental activism.

The university has a wired campus, including wireless service for conference registrants, and all classrooms we will use for concurrent sessions will be equipped for computer projection and Internet access. Conference housing will be provided in the university's dormitories (traditional single and double rooms, as well as four-bedroom townhouses), while we will also have a relationship with one or more hotels in the downtown core (approximately nine kilometers from campus). Victoria's airport, about 30 minutes from campus, serves many major carriers. The city is also accessible by ferry from Tsawwassen, BC (just south of Vancouver), or from Seattle, Port Angeles, and Anacortes, Washington; attendees can choose to fly into either Seattle or Vancouver and travel more deliberately to the Island.

FIELD SESSIONS AND POST-CONFERENCE FIELD TRIPS
As with past conferences, there will a number of half-day field excursions on Friday afternoon and several post-conference field trips. Among the shorter events will be a whale-watching jaunt, a cycling visit to some organic farms and orchards, a hike along East Sooke Park's Coast Trail, and time at the Quw'utsun' Cultural Centre. After the conference, the various trips will include visits to Botanical Beach, Pacific Rim National Park, the Gulf Islands (including the Heiwa Peace Park), and sites of importance for environmental activism and social justice. Volunteer opportunities are also being organized.

FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION AND SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
including presentation formats, submission guidelines, biographies of plenary speakers, graduate student travel awards, and book and graduate student paper awards, see http://asle.uvic.ca/

Questions about the program? E-mail Dan Philippon at danp@umn.edu
Questions about the conference site and field sessions? E-mail Richard Pickard at rpickard@uvic.ca

ALL PROPOSALS MUST BE SUBMITTED BY NOVEMBER 15, 2008

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTORS
ROUTLEDGE ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF ENGLISH STUDIES:
CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE SECTION

Routledge is proud to announce the launch of the Routledge Annotated Bibliography of English Studies (ABES), a unique reference tool for those working in the field of English Literary Studies.

Routledge ABES is a specialised online bibliography providing annotated entries on all of the most significant research in literary studies published each year. It contains scholarly annotations on all the best new criticism, from which users can find out about a publication, how it might be of use to them, and whether it would be relevant to their work. 

The database is organised around eight key sections: Medieval; Renaissance and Early Modern; Eighteenth Century; Romanticism; Nineteenth Century; Modernism; Postcolonial; Contemporary Literature.

Routledge is currently inviting applications to contribute to the Contemporary Literature section. In order to maintain the distinction between ABES's postcolonial and contemporary coverage, this section deals mainly with writing from The United Kingdom and Ireland, Canada and the USA—though the critical studies represented can originate from anywhere in the world. The section includes work on both established and up-and-coming authors, and covers all the major genres of contemporary writing including fiction, poetry, drama, non-fictional prose, travel writing, literary theory, and life writing.

As a contributor to Routledge ABES you would be called upon to create annotations to some of the best new research in literary studies, helping to provide an indispensable guide for the rest of the literary studies community. Your work would be fully acknowledged, with contributors able to provide a short biography and a link back to their own website or profile.

Each section is headed by a dedicated section editor, who edits and oversees the records in that section. If you are interested in becoming a contributor to Routledge ABES, then please contact the Contemporary Literature section editor:

The first issue contains an excerpt from David Guterson's new novel The Other and an interview with him, and pieces from WLA members Peter Donahue and Nicholas O'Connell, among other works of fiction and nonfiction.

For more information or to find out how to submit your own work: http://thewritersworkshopreview.net/issue.cgi

Click here for Call for Papers for a collection of essays on any aspect of the fiction of JAMES LEE BURKE(pdf)

Papers dealing with any aspect of American Studies are welcome. ASAT especially welcomes those papers that reflect the conference theme of the importance of place in American Studies.

$50 travel stipend for graduate student presenters

Papers, abstracts, or panel information due by September 1, 2008

Please submit hard copies to:
Mark Busby
Southwest Regional Humanities Center
Texas State University
601 University Drive
San Marcos, Texas 78666

Or electronic copies to mb13@txstate.edu

For more information see the ASAT website
http://orgs.tamu-commerce.edu/ASAof

NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE TEACHING POSITION
BLACK HILLS STATE UNIVERSITY, SPEARFISH, SD

Full-time, tenure-track faculty member with a specialization in oral and written Native American literature. 4/4 teaching load. PhD required.

For application information, check the South Dakota Board of Regents web site.

THE SOUTHWESTERN WRITERS COLLECTION
ACQUIRES CORMAC MCCARTHY PAPERS

The Southwestern Writers Collection (SWWC), a part of The Wittliff Collections at the Alkek Library, Texas State University-San Marcos, has acquired the papers of author Cormac McCarthy.

McCarthy’s body of work includes some of the finest novels of our times. In 1992, McCarthy won the National Book Award for the New York Times bestseller All the Pretty Horses, and in 2006 he was given the Pulitzer Prize for his most recent novel, The Road. The recipient of numerous other awards, including a Rockefeller Foundation Grant, Guggenheim Fellowship and MacArthur Fellowship (the so-called “genius” grant), Cormac McCarthy has been highly praised from the very start of his career.

James A. Michener said of McCarthy’s first novel, The Orchard Keeper, published by Random House in 1965, “His use of words is remarkable, for he lures from them a very special music…. But what is best, I think, is his acute observation and his ability to describe things in new ways. The specific gravity of his writing is high indeed….”

No Country for Old Men, on which the recent film by Joel and Ethan Coen is based, was touted by Sam Shepard as “a monster of a book." In December, the movie was named best film of 2007 by the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures.

THE ARCHIVES

The complete collection of McCarthy’s literary papers documents his entire writing career. At the core is correspondence, notes, hand-written and typed drafts, setting copies, and proofs of each of his eleven novels, from The Road (2006) back to The Orchard Keeper; also included is the draft of an earlier unfinished novel.

Additionally, the archive contains similar materials related to his work on the 1994 play, The Stonemason, as well as four screenplays, including “No Country for Old Men,” which McCarthy began as a screenplay in 1984 then adapted twenty years later as a novel.

In order to maintain the integrity of the Cormac McCarthy Papers, the Southwestern Writers Collection has contracted right of first refusal to purchase all future materials relating to work by the author, who is in the process of writing three new novels.

Typescripts of one play and two screenplays by McCarthy were previously donated by Bill Wittliff and McCarthy. These are photocopies of originals, signed by the author on the title page, and do not include annotations or edits. The play, The Stonemason, was published in 1994. The first screenplay, "Cities of the Plain" (1984), predates the publication of the novel by the same name by fourteen years. Both screenplays in this collection, "Cities of the Plain" (1984) and "Whales and Men" (n.d.) are unpublished.

Lead Archivist Katie Salzmann is currently creating the initial inventory for the Cormac McCarthy Papers and transferring materials into archival folders and boxes for permanent housing. She will then arrange and describe the McCarthy collection according to archival standards, in a manner most effective for research. The number of requests to access the collection is expected to be high once the processing is finished and the complete inventory (finding aid) of the contents is online, perhaps as early as this fall.

A room designated for the Cormac McCarthy Collection, will be located within the Southwestern Writers Collection on the Alkek Library’s seventh floor, and will be equipped for exhibits, study, and related activities.

Public events are being planned, and will be announced.

The Southwestern Writers Collection is online at www.swwc.txstate.edu.

ASLE GRAND CANYON RIVER TRIP WITH AUTHOR REBECCA SOLNIT
June 24–July 7, 2009

Join members of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE) and acclaimed environmental writer Rebecca Solnit for a wilderness rafting expedition on the Colorado River in Grand Canyon. Solnit is author of Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2002), A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005), Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities (2005), Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics (2008), and many other widely acclaimed works of nature writing, history, and commentary. She is a columnist for Orion and publishes regularly in Sierra and the Nation Institute’s Tomdispatch. Solnit was awarded the Lannan Literary Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. 

The full expedition will last fourteen days and cost $3570. Two alternatives schedules are available. You can join the 6-day upper half of the trip and then hike out from Phantom Ranch at river mile 89 ($1820). Or you can hike in at Phantom Ranch for the 9-day lower half ($2690). Prices are all-inclusive (excepting gratuities and alcoholic beverages). The trip starts and ends in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Trip organizer Lance Newman is a longtime ASLE member, professor of environmental literature, and Grand Canyon river guide. Outfitter Moki Mac River Expeditions (www.mokimac.com) has been running river trips in Grand Canyon for more than fifty years. For more information or to reserve your spot, e-mail lnewman@csusm.edu.

The Literature, Social Justice, and Environment (LSJE) initiative in the Department of English at Texas Tech University centers upon the most important developments in the study of the natural environment in literature. Students will revisit important texts in a new light—across political boundaries into bioregions—within environmental historical contexts. Students will have access to the Sowell Collection, which holds the papers of Barry Lopez, William Kittredge, Gretel Ehrlich, Annick Smith, Bill McKibben, Rick Bass, and others.

Click here for more information or contact sara.spurgeon@ttu.edu.

CFP-sort of:

If you have an idea for a WLA special session at the MLA Conference 2008 that YOU'd like to organize, please contact Prof. Hunt.

NOTE: WLA members, please support Alex Hunt by submitting papers to the above Call for Special Session as it is the first step toward applying for affiliate status with the MLA.

University of New Mexico Libraries and the University of Wyoming have partnered to launch a new regional resource: Rocky Mountain Online Archive. This extensive source of digitized information describes more than 2,000 archival and special collections from cultural institutions in Colorado, New Mexico, and Wyoming.

CDP@BCR, formerly the Collaborative Digitization Program, which in April merged into the Bibliographical Center for Research (BCR), is nationally recognized for its digitization expertise, including training and best practices guidelines. For the Rocky Mountain Online Archive project, the Collaborative Digitization Program, then hosted at the University of Denver, provided training for regional partners in digital imaging and metadata capture and acted as the resource for EAD creation and project management for all nine Colorado libraries.

The Rocky Mountain Online Archives specialized guides, called finding aids, give detailed descriptions of the unique primary source materials located at 20 different repositories from the three-state area. Students and scholars can begin their research any number of ways. In addition to browsing by state, users can easily begin exploring the Rocky Mountain Online Archive by subject area. Within minutes of accessing the site, users can find descriptions of collections related to architecture, frontier and pioneer life, land grant and water rights, wildlife conservation and more. Now that these materials are online, the regional research potential of these collections has truly been enhanced.

In addition to the descriptive finding aids created for this project, three institutions in New Mexico have created new digital collections. Those collections, along with many others from Colorado and Wyoming, can be accessed via the Collaborative Digitizations Program’s Heritage West (http://cdpheritage.org) and Digital Collections hosted by UNM Libraries (http://econtent.unm.edu).

Thanks to generous funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, University of New Mexico Center for Regional Studies, and the University of New Mexico Libraries, the Rocky Mountain Online Archive is now available to the public at http://rmoa.unm.edu/.

Call for Submissions of Articles

The editor of The International Fiction Review invites essays on contemporary fiction by international writers, new and established, including minority writers. Equally welcome are essays on literary and narrative theory, comparative studies of world fiction, and surveys of contemporary national literatures or writers. Contributors are invited to explore all narrative forms in any interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, and critical context.

Please send submissions to the editor via mail or e-mail.

ABOUT THE JOURNAL

The International Fiction Review, now in its thirty-first year, is a reviewed scholarly periodical devoted to international fiction. It publishes articles and book reviews. The journal has a world-wide circulation and a diverse readership which shares an interest in fictions of other cultures and language groups. The journal is available online to subscribers at www.lib.unb.ca/Texts/IFR

RECENT PUBLICATIONS
The Quest for Community in American Postmodern Fiction—The Politics and Poetics of Philippine Festival in Rosca’s State of War—International Fiction vs. Ethnic Autobiography—Oral Tradition and Modern Storytelling: Revisiting Chinua Achebe’s Short Stories—African Interests: White Liberalism and Resistance in Margaret Laurence—Early Precursors to the Egyptian Novel—Writing as Tea Ceremony: Kawabata’s Geido Aesthetics

For any further inquiries please contact the editor:

Christoph Lorey, Editor
University of New Brunswick
Department of Culture and Language Studies
Fredericton, N.B. Canada E3B 5A3

Phone: (506) 453 4636; fax: (506) 447-3166; e-mail: ifr@unb.ca