A couple of interesting CFPs

GENDER, SEXUALITY, AND URBAN SPACES

A graduate student conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

March 11th – 13th, 2011

CALL FOR PAPERS

Urban spaces both produce and are produced by gender. The Graduate Consortium in Women’s Studies conference, Gender, Sexuality and Urban Spaces, seeks to explore the reciprocity of these complex relationships. We are interested in how life (or living) in urban spaces mark as well as produce gendered and sexed bodies and how gender, class and race relations, performances and sexualities, in turn, make their marks on the urban spaces. By urban spaces, we mean the lived practices and representations through which a variety of spaces are constituted within and beyond the scope of the city. We invite submissions that examine the construction of gender and sexuality (in conjunction with race, class, & mobility) and urban spaces across a range of historical, cultural, national, fictional, and conceptual contexts.

Interesting CFP: Interiority in Early Cultures

CALL FOR PAPERS: “INTERIORITY IN EARLY CULTURES”

The Group for the Study of Early Cultures at the University of California, Irvine invites submissions for its Third Annual Graduate Student Conference:

INTERIORITY IN EARLY CULTURES
Friday & Saturday, January 21-22, 2011
Keynote Address by Paul Strohm (Anna Garbedian Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University)

Our contemporary understanding of interiority is tied to a sense of domestic life, personal psychology, and the separation of public and private spheres, all which suggest a model of human existence and interaction that hinges on the delineation of what is ‘inside.’ This conference revitalizes notions of the interior in premodern contexts, ranging from the ancient era, through the medieval and early modern periods, and into the eighteenth century. We define “interiority” loosely as any terrain, such as conscience, mind, psyche, soul, or spirit, that positions itself within a subject. Given this openness, we invite papers across a variety of disciplines that investigate interiority in any of its manifestations­ literary, historical, visual, dramatic, legal, spiritual, or philosophical ­in early cultures. Fundamentally, we seek to question and mobilize the borders between the interior and exterior as vital spaces of containment and definition.