Paper & Folk play call: Pagan Federation Wessex Conference Glastonbury Town Hall Saturday 18th April 2009 http://pfwessex.org/conferences.html Annual Conference & Workshops Pagan Federation Wessex hosts a very successful Annual Conference at the Town Hall in Glastonbury. The next conference is on Saturday 18th April 2009, see Conference 2009 for details and email houseoftheoldways@talktalk.net  or write to Adrian & Ann Bryn Evans, House of the Old Ways, 76 Balch Road, Wells, Somerset for tickets.This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it This year we are hosting a Workshop for the first time. It will be with Gordon 'The Toad' MacLellan on Saturday 24th January 2009. Tickets are available from Adrian at the addresses above. Please go to the Document Downloads section to download and print flyers for the workshop to distribute to your friends! The Jal Folk Theatre Company specialises in presenting folk tales and ancient travelling theatre. Artistic director, Patrick Jasper Lee, author of We Borrow the Earth, Beyond A Near Water, and Gypsy Goddess (CD), has a wealth of knowledge and experience to pass on regarding the Romani Gypsy culture and the lost art of travelling theatre. He will be presenting a talk entitled 'The Lost Art of Ritual Stagecraft,' together with a masked performance entitled, 'The Awakening', which typically presents the ritual elements of waking the soul, a theme much used in earlier times by Gypsy travelling players. Ancient masked theatre is something that he will be both illustrating via the performance and explaining within the talk as a means of helping us understand how rich the cultural past has been in ritual performance and how important it is to revive it today.

  Call for Papers: CFP: Rap Music and Hip Hop Culture 2009 Southwest/Texas Popular Culture/American Culture Association
Southwest/Texas Popular & American Culture Association 30th Annual Conference  February 24-29, 2009  Albuquerque, New Mexico Hyatt Regency Albuquerque http://albuquerque.hyatt.com/property/index.jhtml
The 2009 SW/TX PCA/ACA Conference will be held in Albuquerque, New Mexico at the Hyatt Regency downtown. Join us this year, as a returning or first-time participant, as we celebrate a new future on Route 66 at this regional popular culture conference. Further details regarding the conference (listing of all areas, hotel, registration, tours, etc.) can be found at http://www.h-net.org/~swpca/. Proposals for both Panels and Individual Papers are now being accepted for the Rap Music and Hip Hop Culture Area. We had excellent representation in this Area for 2008, and we are looking to expand in both quantity and complexity for 2009. This year, we are particularly interested in proposals that address the following: - Intersections of Hip Hop and Pedagogy - Rap Music, Hip Hop Culture, and Space/Place - Theoretical approaches to Hip Hop (i.e., Language Theory/Postmodernism/Social Theory) - Rap, Hip Hop, and Academic Disciplinarity - Rhetorical Approaches to Rap Music and Hip Hop Culture - Rap, Hip Hop, and Film/Documentary - Hip Hop Subjectivities/Agency - Anthropological/Sociological approaches to Hip Hop Culture - Economics and Hip Hop Culture - Discussions of international Hip Hop - Intersections of Hip Hop and Religion/Theology - Latino Hip Hop - Women and Hip Hop  As always, papers and panels that consider the myriad ways that Rap Music and Hip Hop culture impact and feed upon Popular and American culture are encouraged. This Area should be construed broadly, and we seek papers that aren’t afraid to take risks. Proposals from Graduate Students are particularly welcome, with award opportunities for the best graduate papers.  Please send abstracts of 250 words with relevant audio/visual requests by December 1, 2008, to Robert Tinajero at the email below. Panel proposals should include one abstract of 200 words describing the panel, accompanied by the underlying abstracts of 250 words of the individual papers that comprise the panel. Robert Tinajero Area Chair, Rap Music and Hip Hop Culture hiphopcfp@hotmail.com

Mystic Seaport's 30th Annual Sea Music Festival Symposium's Call for Papers Mystic Seaport, Mystic, Connecticut June 12 & 13, 2009 Mystic Seaport's 30th Annual Symposium "MUSIC OF THE SEA" Sponsored by Mystic Seaport Museum, The United States Coast Guard Academy, and the University of Connecticut at Avery Point. We are seeking proposals for papers in History, Folklore, Literature, Ethnomusicology, or other appropriate disciplines that address any aspect of music or verse of the sea or inland waters from the Age of Sail through the present day. The two-day symposium is part of a three-day event whose focus celebrates the lives and work of sailors through musical performance.The Friday, June 12, session will be held at the United States Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut, and the Saturday session, June 13, at Mystic Seaport, Mystic, Connecticut.Topics of interest have included: shipboard work songs, songs of maritime or other occupational trades, seafaring cultures and cultural change, ethnicity and ethnic influences, cultural exchanges, ballad and broadside traditions, technology, regional interests, and popular culture. SUBMISSION DEADLINE is March 13, 2008. Audiovisually illustrated presentations are welcome. Papers selected must be submitted in final form by May 8th. Graduate students are encouraged to submit a proposal. Dr. Glenn S. Gordinier
Attn: Symposium  Munson Institute  Mystic Seaport  75 Greenmanville Ave.
Mystic, CT 06355-0990 glenn.gordinier@mysticseaport.org

Call for Papers  On the Possibility of Worlds: An Interdisciplinary Conference at Princeton University, March 6-7, 2009  The goal of this conference is to bring together graduate students and faculty across the humanities and social sciences to discuss a topic being studied in a variety of disciplines: the creation of worlds—real or imaginary, human or divine, possible or impossible. By considering the genesis of the worlds we live in and the worlds we create, we hope to initiate a conversation about the borders of these worlds, the spaces in which different approaches meet and interact. Possible worlds theory has become influential in various areas of contemporary philosophy, including metaphysics and philosophy of language, and has interesting applications in the field of literary studies. What is ontological status of fictional worlds created by literary texts, and what is the relationship between these imaginary worlds and the actual one? The idea of possible worlds, furthermore, provides a framework for thinking about topics ranging from the discourse of colonization, utopianism, the changes wrought by technological and scientific advancements, and the consequences of immigration and globalization. Modal questions about contingency are raised in debates about counterfactual history, while in the study of religion, origin myths, theodicies, and questions of predestination all rely on a concept of world creation.
The conference will include panels on the topic in literature, philosophy, religion, and history. Each panel will have a respondent drawn from the Princeton faculty: Professor D. Vance Smith in literature; Professor Gideon Rosen in philosophy; and Henry Luce III Professor at Princeton Theological Seminary, Gordon Graham, in religion. Thomas Pavel, Gordon J. Laing Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, will deliver a keynote address.
Possible topics may include:
Theodicies (Ockham, Leibniz) Future Contingents Predestination Creation and origin myths Prophecy Reincarnation Church reform Utopian movements
Please submit abstracts of 500 words or less to PossibilityofWorlds@gmail.com by December 15th, with a cover sheet including a brief bio, departmental affiliation, name, email, and the title of your proposed talk. All participants will be notified on or before January 15th.  For questions, please write to Julianne Werlin, jwerlin@princeton.edu.  Andrew Huddleston Department of Philosophy
Suzanne Podhurst Department of History  Julianne Werlin Department of English
Dora Zhang Department of Comparative Literature

Call for papers: 2009 Annual Meeting and Conference of the Gypsy Lore Society  Conference Begins On: 08/27/2009 Sponsoring Institution: University of Helsinki Conference Will Be Held at: Helsinki, XX
Call for papers to the  2009 Annual Meeting and Conference of the Gypsy Lore Society  On behalf of the Gypsy Lore Society, several Helsinki-based organizations will host the 2009 Annual Meeting and Conference of the Gypsy Lore Society. The conference will be held on August 27-29, 2009, on the downtown premises of the University of Helsinki (UH). The conference starts at 1 p.m. on Thursday, August 27, 2009. Papers (20 minutes + 10 minutes discussion) on any aspect of Gypsy Studies are welcome but substantive scholarly papers will be given priority.
SUBMISSION  Abstracts should be submitted no later than March 31, 2009. Notification of acceptance will be announced by April 30, 2009. Send your abstract of maximally 250 words in plain text format (no tables or charts) in the body (not as an attachment) of an email message to the Programme Chair Kimmo Granqvist at Kimmo.Granqvist@kotus.fi.
SECOND ANNOUNCEMENT AND REGISTRATION The second announcement will be sent out no later than April 30, 2009. Please indicate your interest in obtaining this announcement by sending an email message to the conference email address. Conference registration starts on June 1, 2009.
FINAL PROGRAM AND ABSTRACTS OF ACCEPTED PAPERS
Downloadable from the conference home page by April 30, 2009.
CONFERENCE EMAIL AND WEBSITE  salla.makela@helsinki.fi www.ling.helsinki.fi/ykiel/GLS_2009
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE Fred Karlsson, Department of general linguistics, U Helsinki, Chair Risto Blomster, Finnish Literature Society Kimmo Granqvist, Research Institute for the Languages of Finland, Programme Chair  Airi Markkanen Panu Pulma, Department of history, UH
Minna Ruckenstein, Department of sociology / social and cultural anthropology, UH & Finnish Anthropological Society Anna Maria Viljanen, Department of sociology / social and cultural anthropology, UH & Finnish Anthropological Society  Salla Mäkelä, Department of sociology / social and cultural anthropology, UH, Secretary

The Department of English and Philosophy at Arkansas State University (Jonesboro campus) announces its fifteenth annual Delta Blues Symposium, http://www.clt.astate.edu/blues/ to be held 2-4 April 2009. The theme for Delta Blues Symposium XV is the celebration of Delta culture the past 100 years. The ways in which those in the public as well as in academia have highlighted cultural influences shaping the Lower Mississippi River Delta embrace a wide range of expressive forms. Underscoring such an multidisciplinary approach, the symposium committee encourages proposals from scholars and students of the humanities and social sciences-especially anthropology, art history, economics, folklore studies, geography, history, literature, musicology, political science, and sociology. As well, we seek contributions from scholars and students of the physical and natural sciences. In keeping with past symposia, we also welcome proposals for papers and panels that deal with any and all aspects of the seven-state Mississippi River Delta region or with the blues, perhaps the region's most famous export. We particularly invite presentations on artists who have appeared at previous symposia (fiction writers such as Lewis Nordan, Ellen Douglas, Scott Ely, Tom Piazza, and Beverly Lowry; poets like Natasha Trethewey, Yusef Komunyakaa, Jo McDougall, and Michael Harper; visual artists, including James Fraher, David Rae Morris, and Maude Schuyler Clay; and such musicians as Alvin Youngblood Hart, Kenny Neal, Little Milton, Billy Lee Riley, and James "Super Chikan" Johnson. Program proposals may be for individual presentations or for panels. These should be sent as 100-word abstracts. We also urge participation by creative writers and other artists. Please send samples of previous work for our consideration. The submission deadline is December 15, 2008. The registration fee of $25.00, which covers Symposium expenses and brings a one-year subscription to Arkansas Review, will be collected after proposals have been accepted. Note that this fee is waived for currently enrolled students. Proposals may be sent via post, e-mail, or fax to the following address:
Delta Symposium Committee
Department of English and Philosophy
PO Box 1890
Arkansas State University
State University, AR 72467
delta@astate.edu
Phone: 870-972-3043
Fax: 870-972-3045