• Pleasure, joy, jouissance, delight, splendour, enchantment, empathy, and kindness
• Love, passion, and amour fou
• Middlebrow pleasure
• Living the queer life, and queer(ing) happiness
• Eudaimonia, mindfulness, and wellbeing
• Eudaimonic reading, and the eudaimonic turn in cultural and literary studies
• The hermeneutics of suspicion, paranoid and reparative reading, and their aftermath
• Ethical criticism, the ethics of hope, and hopelessness
• The body as site of happiness, joy, pleasure, etc.
• Affect, the theories and/or histories of positive emotions
• Celebration, and celebration as protest
• Burlesque, clowning, circus, carnivals, and the carnivalesque
• Kitsch, camp, and drag
• Sex and play, sex lives, fun
• Vitality, verve, vigour, and liveliness
• Biological life, bios, zoe, survival, sur-vivre [living-on], affirmation
• The utopian tendencies of gender studies and queer theory
• The (queer) future, queer futurity, and happy endings

Gender studies and queer theory are located across and between disciplines, and so we welcome submissions from across (and outside of, against and up against) the full cross-/inter/-trans-disciplinary spectrum, and from inside and outside of conventional academia.

Do not be limited. Be brave. Play with form, style, and genre. Invent, demolish, reimagine.

The deadline for submissions is 29 May 2017.

Written submissions, whether critical or creative, should be between 3,000 and 6,000 words in length, and should adhere strictly to the 16th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style.

All submissions—critical, creative, and those falling in between; no matter the format or medium—will be subject to a process of double-blind peer review.

For more information, please contact our guest editor, Dr Juliane Roemhild: J.Roemhild@latrobe.edu.au

2017 MASC-SLL Call for Papers

Mid-Atlantic Student Colloquium on Speech, Language and Learning

• Computational models of human language processing
• Computational phonology and morphology
• Discourse and pragmatics
• Evaluation
• Information retrieval and question answering
• Knowledge base population and machine reading
• Language acquisition
• Language disorders
• Language generation and summarization
• Language resources and annotation
• Lexical semantics and ontologies
• Machine learning
• Machine translation and multilingual processing
• NLP for the Web and social media
• Semantics
• Sentiment analysis and opinion mining
• Speaker variability
• Speech recognition and synthesis
• Syntax and parsing
• Text and document classification
• Text mining and information extraction

Important Dates

• Submission deadline (abstracts): March 31
• Decisions announced: April 10
• Registration opens: April 10
• Program schedule released: April 15
• Registration closes: May 1
• Colloquium: May 6

For more information
If you have questions or need more information, you can send email to the 2017 MASC-SLL organizers at organizers@mascsll.org.

UPDATE as of 3/13/17: 

Due to the anticipated inclement weather approaching the Baltimore area tonight, the Petrovich Lecture scheduled for this Wednesday, 3/15, is postponed. The rescheduled date and time will be announced in the near future. Thank you for your understanding & support with the event!