Undergraduate students who are interested in submitting their writing for publication or for presenting at a conference can find information here on Calls for Submissions that have been sent to the Department of English. Questions regarding calls for submissions should be addressed to the publication or to Bryn Thompson at bthompson@brynmawr.edu.
Columbia Journal of Literary Criticism
The Columbia Journal of Literary Criticism is seeking pitches and essays for its 2021 issue, to be published in the spring.
Submission Guidelines
Email your submission or any questions to submittocjlc@gmail.com by Jan. 15, 2021. Writers should either be current undergraduates or recent graduates submitting undergraduate work. Please include your name, university, and year of graduation. If we’re interested in how your pitch addresses our theme, we will contact you to set a deadline and work with you throughout the writing process.
Call for Submissions
Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, the word intimacy has quickly taken on new meanings. While the pandemic has limited certain kinds of intimacy, requiring sacrifices for the sake of public health, many are responding to its restrictions by forging creative ways of being and of being together. Online birthdays, weddings, and funerals as well as concerts, exhibitions, and plays are just a few examples.
There are many ways to think about and the concept itself is subject to continued reimagination. It resonates in any discipline or discourse that engages with ideas of community and practices of belonging. Recent scholarship on topics such as digital intimacies, queer intimacies, intimacies of translation, and intimacies under racial capitalism reflect the current state of the metamorphosis of the concept. For example, Gayatri Spivak, in The Politics of Translation, describes translation as “the most intimate act of reading.” Furthermore, books such as Christina Sharpe’s Monstrous Intimacies and Lisa Lowe’s The Intimacies of Four Continents posit a capacious approach to literary criticism as reading through the intimacies of people, the intimacies of empire, slavery, and capital.
Much will be written about how the COVID-19 pandemic remade experiences of intimacy and closeness. It is perhaps premature to attempt to draw conclusions about the current moment. Yet literary criticism is a kind of bellwether; the critic inevitably reflects upon the moment in which they write. Criticism helps us understand how new ways of being are integrated into (and supersede) the old.
This year, CJLC calls on undergraduates to examine how the various meanings and experiences of intimacy are changing today. We intend the 2021 issue to be a partial catalogue of the trajectories of intimacy, tracing its permutations throughout history.
The following is an incomplete list of possible approaches to the theme of intimacy:
To think about the history of the Columbia Journal of Literary Criticism is to look ‘behind’ it at the university and its intimacies with the community of Harlem.
- How is literary criticism intimate with the academy and its forms of exploitation?
- How is the growing genre of autofiction reckoning with intimacy?
- How does prison literature imagine new modes of intimacy and engagement?
- Do we overestimate the worth of self-reflection in autobiographical writing? How can we push this emotional intimacy even further?
- Can we begin to excavate digitally-specific forms of intimacy? How does the digital arena provide a new vocabulary or sense to our notions of intimacy?
- How has the rise of confessional poetry redefined reactions to intimacy?
- Following Spivak’s work on translation, how does intimacy figure in public/private language, codeswitching, multilingualism, and translation?
Humanities Education and Research Association (HERA) Call for Papers
4-6 March 2021 | 1st Virtual Conference | "Cultural Divides: Bridging Gaps and Making Connections"
The Humanities encompasses a vast story comprised of many stories. From the classics through the present day, from ancient times to the contemporary, the humanities as a discipline speaks through time, as a voice for many cultures, addressing many peoples. HERA invites research, papers, panels, and presentations embracing inclusivity in all aspects of the human conditions––including, but not limited to, race, class, gender, sexuality, age, veteran status, ability, power, ecology, sustainability. We encourage a wide and extensive representation of disciplines and interdisciplinary projects. Every field in the humanities, liberal and creative arts, and social sciences is appropriate. Our goal is to foster the sharing and expressing of the humanities as an urgently important human enterprise––helping to clarify the crucial immediacy of the humanities and why they should be encouraged, supported, and sustained.
Submissions are encouraged from educators at all levels as well as all those with an interest in the arts and humanities. Proposals for papers, panels, or workshops (150-200 words) must be submitted through the conference submission portal on HERA’s website.
HERA's Undergraduate Humanities Prize
A prize of $500 will be awarded to the best undergraduate conference paper that addresses race, ethnicity, gender, or sexuality. Creative presentations, readings, and exhibitions are also welcomed. Undergraduate students applying for the prize, must indicate this on their submission abstract.
HERA Undergraduate Research Prize
A prize of $1,000 will be awarded to the best undergraduate conference paper (or divided among a panel of papers), sponsored by an attending professor (with a $500 prize awarded to the professor). See HERA’s website for more details. Creative presentations, readings, and exhibitions are also welcomed.
- Undergraduate students may apply for only one of the two undergraduate prizes.
- Questions may be directed to the conference organizer, Marcia Green (mgreen@sfsu.edu)
- Presentation time for individual papers is limited to 15-20 minutes.
Deadline for submission: no later than Jan. 25, 2021.