MLA to provide e-dossiers for job candidates

Here's some good news for future job-seekers: starting this fall, the MLA will partner with Interfolio, a leading e-dossier service, to offer dossier- and document-delivery services to all job seekers, as well as services for department's managing searches. Anyone who's every tried to manage the paperwork of a job search in the pre-Interfolio era, or had to pay Interfolio to manage a dossier, will appreciate this move by the MLA.

MLA Director Rosemary Feal's letter below the jump.

New Shakespeare Journal from Stratford-upon-Avon

New Journal: Shakespeare Institute Review - Call For Papers

The Shakespeare Institute Review is a new online academic journal, which is funded by the University of Birmingham College of Arts and Law. It is run by four research students at the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon, UK.

Students at this institution, and on other postgraduate Shakespeare programmes, are invited and encouraged to contribute short papers for publication. Each issue of the journal will be themed.

We thought it exhilaratingly inappropriate, and so irresistible, to signal the birth of this journal with an issue looking at death.

Students are encouraged to submit papers, between 1,500 and 2,500 words, on topics relating to death, mortality and religion in Shakespeare's plays, or elsewhere in the Early Modern period.

Possible topics might include, but are not restricted to:

• Critical examinations of the way that various of Shakespeare’s characters deal with death, or die. This could include close-reading, comparative analysis, and analysis from a specific theoretical position (Marxist, feminist, etc.).
• Historical studies of how mortality or religion was understood in the early Modern period, and of how Shakespeare makes use of (and plays off) those understandings in his plays.
• Considerations of the political, ethical, religious, spiritual and existential significances of mortality or religion in the Early Modern period, and for Shakespeare’s characters.
• Comparisons between how Shakespeare understands mortality, and how other creative artists and philosophers–-of Shakespeare’s time, or before, or after–-have understood it.
• More intensely personal and experientially engaged writing on how Shakespeare’s plays have helped you deal with death–-with your own mortality, or with the death of people that you know. How does Shakespeare make you look at death, and is this vision comforting or distressing? Does Shakespeare get to the truth of death, for you, or not?
• Reflections on metaphysical and spiritual truths that arise from Shakespeare’s plays.
• More provocative reflections on how the writing that is produced by the Modern academy–-writing that is critical, theoretical, historical—does not deal adequately with death in Shakespeare’s plays, and suggestions as to how this inadequacy can be rectified.

Suggestions of other topics will be warmly received.

Papers should be submitted to shakesreview@gmail.com, with a deadline of 20 May 2012.

All submissions will be reviewed by the editorial board, and those submissions that are selected will be published in our first online issue. Please contact the journal for further information.

The CUNY Annual Victorian Conference

It's tomorrow!  Here's the link.

Welcome
Mario DiGangi

Executive Officer
PhD Program in English
CUNY Graduate Center

Moderator
Nicholas Birns

The New School

Victorians Abroad

David Pike

American University, Washington, D.C.
“The World Street and the Victorian City”

William Cohen

University of Maryland, College Park
“Dickens’s French: Or, a Tale of Two Cities”

Discussion and Break

Dickensian Urbanity

Matthew Beaumont

University College London
“The Old Cupiosity Shape: Dickens and the Nocturnal City”

Julian Wolfreys

Loughborough University, Leicestershire UK
“Quiet: Towards a Phenomenology of Urban Perception in Dickens”

Lunch (on your own) 12:00 P.M.-2:00 P.M.

Afternoon Session
2:00 P.M.-6:00 P.M.

Moderator
Annmarie Drury

Queens College, CUNY

Urban Beauty, Urban Sublime

Michelle Allen-Emerson

U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis
Urban Growth: Gardening in the Late Victorian City

Nancy Rose Marshall

University of Wisconsin-Madison
“‘This Horrid Grandeur’: Imagining Fire in the Victorian World”

Discussion and Break

Cities of Delight

Deborah Nord

Princeton University
“Night and Day: Illusion and Carnivalesque at Vauxhall”

Keynote Address:

Judith Walkowitz

Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore
“The Victorians and Literary Geography”

Reception
6:00 P.M.

English Common Space, Room 4406