Full Title: 45th Conference of the Portuguese Association of Anglo-American Studies (APEAA) - Speaking Out: Identity, Resistance and Silencing
Short Title: APEAA2025

Date: 28-Apr-2025 - 30-Apr-2025
Location: Braga - University of Minho, Portugal
Contact Person: Isabel Ermida
Meeting Email: [email protected]
Web Site: https://sites.google.com/view/apeaa25

Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics; Discourse Analysis; Ling & Literature; Pragmatics
Subject Language(s): English (eng)

Call Deadline: 31-Jan-2025

Meeting Description:

The Department of English and North American Studies of the University of Minho at Braga, Portugal, is proud to host the 45th Conference of the Portuguese Association of Anglo-American Studies (APEAA), which will be held on 28-29-30 April, 2025.

The APEAA conference -- a traditional annual meeting, with a long history dating back to 1980 -- is open to non-members of the Association as well, both from Portugal and abroad. It wishes to provide a lively forum for academic debate and intellectual dialogue on a national and an international level.

The general theme of this year's conference is "Speaking Out: Identity, Resistance and Silencing", a description of which can be found on the Call for Papers together with suggestions of possible topics to address. Participants wishing to contribute with papers on other issues regarding English Literature, Language, or Culture, are also welcome.

Call for Papers:

Literature has portrayed countless struggles against domination and control, reproducing at length the voices and woes of many generations of nonconformists. However, it has also been the target of domination and control. The banning and public burning of books stained history not only at the time of the Inquisition or during fascist and communist regimes, but also very recently. In 2019, the American Library Association reported a petition for removal of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) from public library shelves, on the grounds of profanity, vulgarity and sexual overtones in the text. Twentieth-century examples of attempts at silencing uncomfortable writers are legion, from the banning of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) to the Salman Rushdie affair in the late eighties. Indeed, literature has long suffered a tug-of-war between artistic and intellectual freedom on the one hand, and intolerance, bigotry and censorship on the other. Cultural history is also laden with movements and periods of resistance and rebellion, from pop culture to various alternative forms of communication (e.g. online) and underground views and practices of art, all paired with the usual mainstream reactionary backlash. And even the use of language has been subjected to prescriptivism, the fetters of the ever-elusive “norms”, the frowning upon new words and new usages, upon youths’ linguistic creativity, non-standard English, and the unstoppable evolution of the way speakers speak.

In light of this, the 45th Annual Conference of the Portuguese Association of Anglo-American Studies (APEAA) invites 250-word abstracts in English, by APEAA members and non-members, for 20-minute oral presentations, followed by 10-minute discussions, OR for poster displays, addressing issues related to literary, cultural, and linguistic identity, resistance, and silencing. Proposals of panels, roundtables and book presentations are also welcome. The conference will include the 2nd APEAA Doctoral Symposium.

We warmly encourage papers from any of the three scientific areas of the Association: English Literature, Culture, and Linguistics. Within these, we welcome contributions from a large range of fields and theoretical frameworks: Discourse analysis, Pragmatics, Sociolinguistics, Literary theory, Literatures in English, Gender Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Translation Studies, and Cultural Studies (including Media, Film, Performance, Visual and Music Studies), among others.

A collection of selected papers is expected to be published, hopefully as a special issue of an international journal.

Please send your 250-word abstracts, together with a bio-note, to [email protected], with the “Subject” reading “Abstract submission”, no later than 31 January 2025.

We look forward to receiving your proposals! If you have any queries, please feel free to contact us at [email protected].