Saturday, May 24, 2008

ANNOUNCEMENT: CFP Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies

Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies

Special Issue: Blindness and Literature

Special Guest Editor: Georgina Kleege

Blindness seems to hold a particular fascination for writers from all cultures, functioning in a variety of ways in different texts. Blindness can indicate divine retribution for some sort of transgression, or can serve as a personal tragedy to be overcome. Blind figures can highlight the virtue and compassion of sighted characters, or act as seers and teachers commenting upon and guiding sighted protagonists.

This special issue of JLCDS will explore literary representations of blindness and vision impairment.

Topics may include:

  • blind seers and prophets
  • Homer's blindness
  • Milton's blindness
  • Joyce's blindness
  • Borges's blindness
  • blindness and visuality
  • blindness and aurality
  • blindness and gender
  • memoirs of lost sight
  • memoirs of restored sight

Proposals should be e-mailed to the guest editor Georgina Kleege gkleege@berkeley.edu and the editor David Bolt bolt@talktalk.net before October 1 2008.

Invited authors will then have at least 3 months to submit the final typescripts.

Book reviews that relate to the issue should be e-mailed to the Book Reviews Editor Clare Barker c.f.barker02@leeds.ac.uk before January 15 2009.

NB In 2009 Journal of Literary Disability will be moving to Liverpool University Press, 3 issues per annum, print as well as online formats, and the new title Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies. The journal will no longer be free, so LUP subscription will be necessary.

Further information is available at: http://www.liverpool-unipress.co.uk/html/publication.asp?idProduct=3856

Saturday, May 3, 2008

ANNOUNCEMENT: Journal of interest

Scholars who work on intersections among constructions of disability, monstrosity, and religion may be interested in the venue below.

Rebecca Raphael http://www.golemjournal.org/

GOLEM: Journal of Religion and Monsters is a new, peer-reviewed, indexed, online journal that seeks to provide a space for thinking critically about monsters in the context of religion as culture. GOLEM wishes to act as a catalyst for new approaches to the subject, with topics as varied as ontology, class, gender, race, ethnicity, nationalism, cosmology, disability, ecology, family, natality, post-humanism, science and technology. We welcome scholarly submissions using a variety of methodologies and focusing on religion and monsters from antiquity to the present day. GOLEM maintains a commitment to advanced academic research as well as to the work of promising students, whose scholarship is featured in a special GREMLIN section in each issue.

EDITORIAL BOARD: Rubina Ramji (Cape Breton University ­ Senior Editor) Frances Flannery-Dailey (James Madison University ­ GOLEM Founding Editor) Timothy Beal (Case Western Reserve University); Beverly Bow (Cleveland State University); Rebecca Raphael (Texas State University); Paul B. Thomas (Rockhurst University); Rachel Wagner (Ithaca College);

CONTENTS OF VOLUME TWO, SPRING 2007

§ Gavin Van Horn and Lucas Johnston, Evolutionary Controversy and a Side of Pasta: The Flying Spaghetti Monster and the Subversive Function of Religious Parody

§ Paul B. Thomas, Smiting Goliath: Giants as Monsters in the Ancient Near East

§ Douglas E. Cowan, Do I Look Like Someone Who Cares What God Thinks?" Rethinking the Relationship between Religion and Cinema Horror

§ Nathan Shinn, Boundaries Between Wild and Civilized Humans in Near Eastern and Biblical Mythology

Friday, May 2, 2008

ANNOUNCEMENT: Current Journal Articles on Disability History

About once a month, and appearing as an an occasional feature of H-Disability, Penny L. Richards, a PhD Research Scholar at the UCLA Center for the Study of Women and Co-editor of H-Education and H-Disability, compiles and posts a listing of recently published historical articles about disability (somewhat broadly defined). These articles are usually found on the "current periodicals" shelves at a university library, from the most recent two calendar years (right now, 2007-2008). Some of them are culled from online Table of Contents sites maintained by journal publishers. Additional sources include book chapters in new collections, cites for new books, and cites for review articles, new books, and new dissertations.


She welcomes contributions offlist that are compiled into subsequent postings . Her usual caveats for contributions are:

"1) your definitions of history and disability may exclude some of these articles, and include others;

2) listing here does not necessarily constitute a recommendation of the articles involved; and

3) only English-language tables of contents or abstracts are usually culled (but works in other languages are welcome from contributors)."

ARTICLES:

Beaumanoir, A. "Institutional Care for Patients with Epilepsy: Historical Aspects from the Late 18th Century until Today," _Epilepsies_ 20(1)(2008): 45-50.

Gonsalves, J. "Reading Idiocy: Wordsworth's 'The Idiot Boy,'" _Wordworth Circle_ 38(3)(2007): 121-129.

Hocking, Clare. "The Way We Were: Romantic Assumptions of Pioneering Occupational Therapists in the United Kingdom," _British Journal of Occupational Therapy_ 71(4)(April 2008): 146-154.

McCabe, Helen. "Two Decades of Serving Children with Autism in the People's Republic of China: Achievements and Challenges of a State- run Mental Health Center," _Disability & Society_ 23(3)(2008): 271-282.

Oliphant, J. "'Touching the Light': The Invention of Literacy for the Blind, _Paedagogica Historica_ 44(1-2)(2008): 67-82.

Stone, Christopher, and Bencie Woll. "Dumb O Jemmy and Others: Deaf People, Interpreters, and the London Courts in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries," _Sign Language Studies_ 8(3)(2008): 226-240.

Todman, Don. "Warts and the Kings of Parthia: An Ancient Representation of Hereditary Neurofibromatosis Depicted in Coins," _Journal of the History of the Neurosciences_ 17(2)(2008): 141-146.

REVIEWS:

Thomas Docherty reviewed Allan Ingram and Michelle Faubert, _Cultural Constructions of Madness in Eighteenth-Century Writing: Representing the Insane_ (Palgrave MacMillan 2005), in _Modern Language Review_ 103 (1)(January 2008): 193.

DISSERTATIONS:

Verstraete, Pieter (Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, KULeuven, Belgium, 2008): "Disability History: A Foucauldian Perspective"

BOOKS:

Oliphant, J. _The Early Education of the Blind in Britain c. 1790-1900: Institutional Experience in England and Scotland_ (Edwin Mellen Press 2007).

Raemdonck, L. & Scheiris, I. _Ongehoord verleden. Dove frontvorming in Belgiƫ aan het begin van de 20ste eeuw_ (Gent: Fevlado-Diversus 2007) [Deaf advocacy in Belgium at the end beginning of the twentieth century].

Contributions received this month from: Pieter Verstraete


Compiled by Penny L. Richards

PhD Research Scholar, UCLA Center for the Study of Women

Co-editor, H-Education and H-Disability

turley2@earthlink.net