african-american

The American Literature II: Literature after 1870 Permanent Section of the Midwest Modern Language Association (MMLA) is seeking proposals for this year’s in-person convention in Chicago, Illinois. This year’s theme for the conference is “After the Archive”; accordingly, the Permanent Section encourages presentations that focus on the notion of the archive. Some questions to be considered in context of American literature after 1870 are:

Session Abstract: The genre of African American poetry has a long legacy of both preserving tradition and evolving to suit current times and places. This session invites discussion of the defining features that have been maintained over time as well as patterns of bold experimentation. Rather than seeing tradition and innovation as opposing aesthetic directions, this session hopes to examine ways they have co-existed in this genre and been mutually fruitful. 

Archives are not neutral: they tell stories about who counts, whose experiences are remembered, and whose are erased. For centuries, racial hierarchies have shaped the preservation of knowledge, leaving silences where Black, Indigenous, and other marginalized voices should be. The Antiracism Permanent Section of the MMLA invites submissions that move beyond critique, asking how we can reimagine, rebuild, and transform the archive to reflect justice, equity, and shared humanity.We are especially interested in work that explores:

Call for - Literary Musings Online - 2584-1459 - July 2026

Academic Journal

Research Academy

Meditations on The Black Garden

Special Issue of African American Review, 2027

Guest-edited by Brandy Underwood (California State University, Northridge); Mia Alafaireet (The University of Texas at Austin); Samantha Pinto (The University of Texas at Austin)

Abstracts due to AARBlackgardensSI@gmail.com by May 1, 2026.

Call for Abstracts:

Children’s accounts of violence occupy a paradoxical space in public discourse: they are framed as both essential, unquestionable evidence, and, sometimes at the same time, as unreliable and prone to outside influence. Both framings rely on cultural constructions of the child’s “innocence.” This panel invites papers examining narratives of violence told by children, with a particular interest in experiences of institutional or state violence. How do these narratives complicate familiar tropes of children as voiceless victims in need of saving, or of certain topics as exclusively “adult” or “childish”?  How do child narrators themselves exploit, resist, and play with or into these tropes?

This is a guaranteed panel for the MLA's Teaching of Literature Forum.  This roundtable discusses experiences and pedagogical approaches to teaching literature under authoritarianism and state violence widely conceived. Panelists discuss whitewashing and erasing literary histories, global efforts at repressing liberatory literacy, heightened classroom surveillance, teaching anti-fascist literature, and more.

Deadline for submissions: Friday, March 27, 2026

Please send 250-500-word abstracts and CVs to Danica Savonick (danicasavonick@gmail.com ) and Brandi Locke (blocke@udel.edu). 

This sessions welcomes 300-word abstracts that actively engage the ways that Black-girl centered literature (novel, poetry, media, etc.) reimagines modes of resistance, resilience, and world-making through historical and modern definitions of freedom and emancipation.

What does it mean to do Black queer/trans studies now? Amidst intensifying state violence both in and outside of the academy, this graduate conference is an invitation to explore the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and power through a global lens. The conference will be a space for inter- and cross-disciplinary dialogue amongst scholars of Black queer and trans life and politics, capaciously defined. 

The Louisiana Creole Research Association (LA Creole, http://www.lacreole.org) invites submissions for its 2026 journal, La Créole, on subjects relevant to its mission of advancing family research, providing education, and celebrating Creole history and culture. There is evidence that both French and Spanish colonial Louisiana identified all its people (white, black, and mixed), both free and enslaved, who were born in the new world of old world stock, as Créole.  That included the offspring of Europeans (predominantly French and Spanish), Africans, and a mixture of both that could also include Native Americans.  Therefore, the descendants of all these people

One response to the official archives’ violent erasure(s) of multiethnic subjects (and the associated literatures) in the US has been scholarly investment in digital archiving. Still, the digital archives (and/or the metadata culled from them) can–and often do–reify whiteness as normative and the marginalization of other Americans. MELUS invites papers that consider how digital archiving (re)shapes and/or supports lay communities that inform the literature of the marginalized. We are particularly interested in papers that address how practices of liberatory archiving resist objectification of multiethnic subjects and/or authors. Submit titled proposals (250 words), a brief CV, and AV needs.

CALL FOR PAPERS 

Literatures of the Global South: Space, Place, Environment 

University of Toronto 

2nd-4th June 2027 

Keynote Speakers: Amitav Ghosh and Ato Quayson (Stanford University) 

The Centre for Comparative Literature invites submissions for a scholarly conference and edited collection that will explore the material and imaginative alignments across literary cultures of the Global South. 

The American Humor Studies Association (AHSA) invites submissions for a proposed panel for the American Literature Association (ALA) 2027 symposium “Music and the American Literary Imagination,” to be held January 28-30, 2027, in Nashville, TN.

38th Annual Conference of the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Society

May 7-8, 2027

Gainesville, Florida

The Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Society, an organization of 200+ members worldwide, invites paper proposals on topics related to Rawlings’ life and works. Papers should be 20-30 minutes.

Topics related to rawlings may include: