cfp@english.upenn.edu

Calls for Papers in
English & American Literature

The English Department at the University of Pennsylvania hosts an electronic mailing list ( cfp@english.upenn.edu) and website (http://www.english.upenn.edu/CFP/) for calls for papers on English and American Literature and Culture. We encourage conference or panel organizers and volume editors to find the largest possible audience for their announcements by posting them on this list and web archive.

Announcements can include upcoming conferences, panels, essay collections, and special journal issues related to English and American literature, and can include calls for completed papers, abstracts, and proposals. The boundaries are flexible: all English-language literatures, cultural studies, literary theory, bibliography, humanities computing, and comparative literature (even when not concerned specifically with English or American literature) are within the pale. Conferences or panels devoted exclusively to literature not in English, to music or art, to history, etc., are excluded unless they are relevant to students of English and American literature, as are lecture series, regular meetings of small local societies, fellowship opportunities, etc. Essay competitions and prizes are excluded unless they will result directly in publication or presentation of a paper. Calls for creative writing are also excluded. Due to the volume of postings and the fact that each posting must be approved and edited by hand, the CFP list and web archive is only for calls for papers, not for general conference announcements.

Subscribing, Unsubscribing, and Changing Your Address

To subscribe to the list, address a message to

listserv@english.upenn.edu

Do not send subscription messages to cfp@english.upenn.edu. The subject line can be anything, but the body of the message should read

subscribe cfp

There should be nothing else: no name, no e-mail address. You should receive a confirmation message after a few minutes. If you have any questions, contact the editor at the address below.

To unsubscribe, address a message to

listserv@english.upenn.edu

(not cfp@english.upenn.edu!) with just

unsubscribe cfp
in the body of the message. (Don't include your name or address.)

To change your address on the CFP list, you should send an unsubscribe message from your current account, and then login to your new account and resubscribe from that one.

HTML-encoded text is sometimes hard to read and fouls up the automatic subscription system, so you should send your message as "plain text" (aka. ASCII text) in the body of the message. You might have to turn off the HTML-encoding option on your email in order to do this. Also, please make sure to turn off all forms of encryption and MIME-encoding before sending your message.

The Majordomo software on which the CFP list is run, I'm afraid, has no facility for digests and no "nomail" option. Also, we cannot send announcements only in a given field or fields of interest within English and American Literature. Those who find the volume of mail too high should rely on the Web archive; those who wish to stop receiving mail for a short while should simply unsubscribe and resubscribe later.

Web Archive of Announcements

Those interested in the calls for papers need not subscribe to the list directly. The announcements will be archived and available on the Web at

http://www.english.upenn.edu/CFP/

There they'll be grouped under rubrics (such as Renaissance, American, Theory, Gender Studies) to make browsing easier. Postings will remain in this archive until the conference has taken place. The website also includes a search engine and a monthly archive, which lists calls for papers chronologically as they are posted.

Enter your query below to begin searching.


Messages are sorted into their respective period- or topic-centered folders within about a week after their posting, but the "Archive by Month" is automatically updated with each new message.

Please check to see whether announcements have been posted already before sending additional copies.

Posting Announcements

All panel organizers and volume editors are encouraged to make their calls for papers or proposals by sending their announcements to

cfp@english.upenn.edu

After they are posted to the list, messages will automatically be archived on our website:

http://www.english.upenn.edu/CFP/

Please send postings as "plain text" (aka. ASCII text) in the body of the message rather than as an attachment. Please turn off MIME-encoding and HTML-encoding in your email programs, and please do not send attachments.

Calls can take any format in the body of the message. Please spell out any potentially confusing abbreviations (e.g. EGO = English Graduate Organization).

The subject line of your message should be as informative as possible (to enable browsers to find relevant announcements quickly), and should take the following form:

CFP: Topic of Conference (deadline; conference date)

Messages that don't conform to this standard may be rejected.

The subject line should briefly and clearly describe the topic of the conference. Some tips:

Some examples: 
    CFP: Teaching Beowulf in Translation (12/15/00; 3/23/01-3/24/01)
    CFP: (Post)Colonial Derrida (3/3/00; MLA '00)
    CFP: American Novel into Film (3/1/01; RMMLA, 10/11/01-10/13/01)
    CFP: Composition and Rhetoric (grad) (12/1/00; 2/23/01-2/24/01)
    CFP: Joseph Conrad (Poland) (1/15/01; 5/29/01-6/1/01)
    CFP: Romanticism & the Woman Reader (grad) (UK) (7/15/00; 9/6/00)
    CFP: Queer Theory and Disability Studies (8/1/00; journal issue)
    CFP: Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora (4/30/01; collection)
Note that with several thousand subscribers, some addresses on the list are no longer correct, as people change addresses without unsubscribing, or as hosts change names. The moderator tries to keep the list current, but you may receive error messages from some of these bad addresses when you send a call for papers. You can safely ignore them. If you want to know whether a call for papers successfully made it to the bulk of the subscribers, you can either check the archive on the Web or contact the moderator. Please be aware that due to the heavy volume of messages at certain times of the year, it can take up to a week for postings to be sent out to subscribers.

Updating Calls for Papers

If a call for papers must be updated -- to reflect a change in the location or date of the conference or the deadlines -- please replace the "CFP:" in the subject line with "UPDATE:" and be explicit about exactly what has changed in the body of the message. Please send only actual updates to the list: refrain from merely reiterating past calls for papers. Also, while I can post updates to the information in a call for papers, I cannot post general updates about the conference itself when the deadline for a call has already passed (e.g. registration info, finalized program, etc.)

Off-Topic Messages

The CFP list is meant strictly for announcements of calls for papers, not for discussion of conferences and certainly not for discussion of anything else, including social issues, chain letters, virus warnings, and so on. Please refrain from posting such messages to the list. Advertisements of commercial products or services not directly related to the purpose of the list are forbidden.

History

In 1995 the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania established the cfp@english.upenn.edu mailing list to facilitate the exchange of information on upcoming conferences and publication opportunities, and archives of the postings were later made available on the Web. Since that time, the CFP mailing list has grown to over 11,200 subscribers from more than 60 countries throughout the world.

The CFP list and web archive were founded by Jack Lynch and was followed as editor by Erika Lin. The next CFP editor was Jennifer Higginbotham.