UPCOMING CONFERENCES
WEST
Literary Geographies – Space, Place, and Environments
Biola University
La Mirada, CA
April 7-9, 2022
“All theology is rooted in geography.”
—Eugene H. Peterson, Under the Unpredictable Plant: an Exploration in Vocational Holiness
Eugene Peterson’s statement highlights how our spiritual lives are rooted in the material reality of our daily lives. Keeping in mind how Christ transforms not only individual hearts but also entire neighborhoods—and remaining attentive to how literature documents and shapes that transformation—we invite papers that address textual representations of space/place, environment, ecological endangerment, displacement, and rootedness. How do these ideas shape individual and communal identities? How do embodied experiences of being in particular places affect our orientation toward the world and understanding of human flourishing? What does it mean to cultivate a meaningful relationship to place? How does the discourse around immigration and citizenship help us think about the effects of displacement and emplacement? How do literary texts illuminate what our response should be toward the environmental crisis? And what does it mean to think of place and environment not merely as backdrops to our lives but as agents and interlocutors?
Potential topics / methods might include:
- Neighbors and neighborhoods (shared, communal or different identities)
- Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies
- Ecological footprints and the relationship between nature and culture
- Literary representations of disaster—fires, floods, earthquakes, drought
- Reflections on how Christian scholars occupy particular space(s) in the academy or elsewhere
- Literary representations of embodiment/embodied identities
E-mail your one-paragraph abstracts for an individual presentation or a one-paragraph abstract for a group panel by December 20, 2021 to Chris Davidson at christopher.davidson@biola.edu. Undergraduate students must submit their entire paper for consideration; eligible undergraduate papers will be entered into the national CCL Undergraduate Writing Contest for a cash prize and publication on the CCL website. Graduate students are encouraged to apply for the CCL Travel Grant. For more details on these undergraduate and graduate opportunities, visit https://www.christianityandliterature.com/Awards-and-Grants.
REGIONAL CONFERENCES
Regional conferences afford members an opportunity to learn from one another and to build networks of support for their scholarly and professional endeavors. They also offer graduate students an opportunity to gain valuable experience presenting at conferences.
For the themes of past and recent regional conferences, please click on the regions below:
UPCOMING CONFERENCES
MIDWEST
Gathering: Christianity, Race, and Justice
Keynote: Willie James Jennings (Yale University)
Midwest Regional Meeting of the Conference on Christianity and Literature
June 23-24, 2021
Online Conference
Willie James Jennings, author of The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race, has recently released After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging, which seeks to reframe higher education by "turning attention to the original trajectory of a God who has ended hostility and has drawn all of creation into a reconciliation . . . one that aims to re-create us, reforming us as those who enact gathering and who gesture communion with our very existence." What parts do literature, writing, and teaching play in such a vision? How do justice, race, and faith intersect in literature? In our creative work? In our teaching? This conference gathers under the conditions of a global pandemic that prevent physical proximity. It no less, however, allows us to reflect in scholarly and creative ways on the concept of gathering, given the realities of injustice that have been prominent on the global, political, social, and religious stage in the past year. This conference will involve traditional panels; roundtables; peer-review panels with pre-circulated papers, shorter presentations and substantive feedback; creative readings; and student panels. Scholars at all stages of their inquiry into matters of Christianity, race, and justice in literature, writing, and teaching are welcome.
Possible topics include the following:
pedagogy and race in Christian higher education
the Christian imagination of race in literature
raced bodies and the body of Christ in literature
mestizaje theology and literary form
anti-racism, faith, and literature
writing and literature pedagogy and contemporary realities of injustice
the cross and the lynching tree
prophetic textual traditions of race and faith
repudiations of Christianity in literary accounts of race
critique and post-critique of literature, race, and faith
race, place, and faith
the ethics of minority/majority as categories for literature
political rhetoric of race and faith
faith and protest literature
minjung theology and literature
literature and repair/reparations
whiteness and Christianity in literature
majority world theological readings of literature
(con)textualized theology of race
indigenous literatures' imaginations of faith
modernity and the theological formulation of race
the Christian literary marketplace and diverse books
literature of law and order, policing, justice
As always, the Midwest CCL is open to other proposals concerning the relationship of Christianity and literature, including panel proposals. Undergraduate students must submit their entire paper for consideration; eligible undergraduate papers will be entered into the national CCL Undergraduate Writing Contest for a cash prize and publication on the CCL website.
Send abstracts (200-400 words) via email to cclconference@wheaton.edu by May 15, 2021. Panel proposals welcome. Abstracts should indicate a preference for either traditional panels or peer-review (pre-circulated papers) panels.