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  • Western Literature Association Fiftieth Annual ConferenceVisual Culture in the Urban West

The fiftieth annual conference of the Western Literature Association, hosted by David Fenimore and Susan Bernardin, will take place October 14–17, 2015, at Harrah’s Reno. We will be meeting thirty-five road miles from beautiful North Lake Tahoe, on the west-northwestern edge of the Great Basin, at the intersection of Washoe and Paiute homelands, where the transcontinental emigrant trail and railroad line meet the mighty Sierra Nevada. Riding the edge of old and new, of indigeneity and transience, Reno corrals Native, Hispanic, Basque, cowboy, and casino cultures even as it looks forward to the new high-tech economies and recreational lifestyles of the information age. It is an apt location for our fiftieth anniversary, an occasion to consider our histories, but more so the next fifty years of western American literary and cultural studies. In that spirit our planning committee has invited a diverse group of featured presenters, including Rebecca Solnit, Willy Vlautin, William Fox, Arigon Starr, Native filmmakers, and Basque writers and performers. [End Page 320]

In addition to proposals on any aspects of literature about the North American West, we especially encourage innovative proposals on the following:

  • • Visual culture, film, performance

  • • Environmental art, politics, justice, literatures

  • • Indigenous Wests, writers, filmmakers

  • • Twain and Tahoe

  • • Basque American writers, including Robert Laxalt

  • • Latino/a studies in western places

  • • Emigrant and mining narratives

  • • Tourism, mountaineering, river running

Submissions must include a 250-word abstract, name, affiliation, contact information, and A/V requests. Proposals for panels and roundtable discussions should include an abstract for each paper or presentation. Deadline: June 15, 2015.

For more information see http://www.westernlit.org/wla-conference-2015/.

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