Congratulations to Jennifer Shepperd, who studied History and English at the U of S and recently completed her Ph.D. in English at the U of Alberta. She now lives in Belfast and was even more recently awarded a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship, which she is taking up in affiliation with Hull University in England.

Jennifer is also the post-graduate (or, as we say in North America, graduate) associate editor for the Modern Humanities Research Association (MHRA) Working Papers in the Humanities, in which capacity she brings the following call for papers to your attention:

The MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities (http://www.mhra.org.uk/ojs/index.php/wph) is a new electronic publication forum intended to allow researchers to present initial findings or hypotheses such as might, at a more advanced stage, become eligible for publication in established scholarly journals. As such it will be of particular interest to postgraduate (i.e. graduate) researchers, though established scholars are also invited to submit papers. Submissions for the first issue of the Working Papers, to be published in October 2006, are invited on any topic, but the editorial panel aims to choose half of the papers from submissions that relate to the theme of Youth and Age. Authors might consider, among other things: the cultural construction and symbolization of youth and age (e.g. notions of young blood, coming of age, seniority); the role these terms play in constructions of gender, ethnicity, etc.; the symbolization of political or artistic succession in terms of youth and age (e.g. the old guard / young Turks); and the privileging, in cultural discourses about generational succession, of the male line over female-female and mixed-gender relations. Authors may also want to dismantle the opposition youth / age to consider more complex models of life stages. Papers may come from any field in the modern humanities, which includes the modern and medieval languages, literatures, and cultures of Europe (including English and the Slavonic languages, and the cultures of the European diaspora). History, library studies, education and pedagogical subjects, and the medical application of linguistics are excluded. THE SUBMISSION DEADLINE IS 1ST MAY 2006.