american

Conventional cinematic views of New York City are often characterized by aerials, panoramas, and long shots of the archetypal Manhattan skyline, montage of crowded sidewalks, and quick shots of the yellow cabs in congested traffic. Scholars have regularly linked such city views to their historical urban contexts: studies of city symphonies emphasize the concomitance of capitalist modernity, scholars of film noir associate the genre with Cold War anxieties magnified by urban disorientation, while studies of Blaxploitation link the films to the immediate precedents of urban crisis in the 1960s and 1970s.

At its most ambitious, the New Hollywood was a movement intended to cut film free of its evil twin, commerce, enabling it to fly high through the thin air of art. The filmmakers of the '70s hoped to overthrow the studio system, or at least render it irrelevant, by democratizing filmmaking, putting it into the hands of anyone with talent and determination.

As Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson argue, “autobiographical storytelling is a performative act through which narrators construct rather than simply describe selves.” In recent times, “life writing” has become a familiar term in literary and cultural studies, encompassing a range of written texts, including autobiographies, biographies, letters, memoirs, slave narratives, prison narratives, captivity narratives, travel narratives, confessionals, conversion narratives and even in recent times, personal diaries. However, rather than remain transparent records of lived experience, life writings actively shape identities, produce historical knowledge, preserve cultural memory, and intervene in social and political worlds.

The 18th Annual Louisiana Studies Conference will be held September 12, 2026, at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana. The conference committee is now accepting presentation proposals for the upcoming conference. Presentation proposals on any aspect of the 2026 conference theme “Remembering Louisiana,” as well as creative texts by, about, and/or for Louisiana and Louisianans, are sought for this year’s conference.

CFP for NeMLA 2027 Conference

Virtual Only Panel

Oral Community Knowledge as Antidote for Empire in Anglophone Literature

With the arrival of the New Woman at the end of the nineteenth century also came the modernist novel. The beginning of the twentieth century constitutes a period when women struggled with social expectations but decided to leave their own drawing rooms and discover the world; to be power brokers, instead of passive observers; and to gradually move from their interiority to making history. By comparing novels of women writers, both in the US and abroad, this panel attempts to find, in their similarities and differences, the real issues that women faced at the turn of the century, in novels that transitioned from realism and naturalism to modernism.

In keeping with the theme of Empowering Communities, this panel looks at the ways in which scholarship can make visible the previously obscured agency of women and other historically marginalized groups. Invisible labor is a concept frequently applied to the domestic sphere to describe the work women do to maintain households. In the literary world, too, women have shaped the canon in ways that have been overlooked.

Call for Papers: Alizés 47 (2027)

Special issue edited by Talal Hochard (University of Reunion Island) and Zuzana Fonioková (Masaryk University)

Discursive Resistance in Contemporary Anglophone Literature and Public Discourse

Abstract submission deadline (400 words) and short biographical notes (150 words): September 1, 2026

Notification of acceptance: October 1, 2026

Full draft papers submission: February 15, 2027

Final papers submission: June 30, 2027

I'm seeking participants for an APPA panel on "Poets' Novels" at the upcoming ALA symposium "The American Novel: Forms, Genres, Traditions," to be held at the Drury Plaza Hotel in Santa Fe, NM, 5-7 November 2026.

Proposals on novels or experimental prose forms by writers who primarily identify or are recognized as poets will be welcome for this session. Our definition of "novel" can be as broad as your claims for it will support. 

For best consideration, please send a precis of no more than 500 words to mrh@unm.edu by Sunday, 19 July  

Panel on Bill Lawrence for SCMS 2027 Since Spin City, the shows of Bill Lawrence have navigated the complexities of workplaces, friendships, grief and family. This panel intends to explore the Bill Lawrence universe from a diverse range of angles, with the overarching aim of seeing the series as part of a collective body of work. Papers are welcomed on Scrubs, Scrubs: The Revival, Rooster, Ted Lasso, Shrinking, Spin City, Cougar Town and Ground Floor.  Abstracts of no more than 250 words should be sent, with a 100 word bio to c.wilkins@bham.ac.uk by 20th July. 

Past and present, the Pacific Northwest has functioned in literature as a dynamic space defined by transition, ecological precarity, and socio-political friction. This panel explores writers of fiction, poetry, memoir, and non-fiction whose work investigates the unique sense of place, history, and culture defining the region. We welcome papers that engage with the tensions between industry and preservation, indigenous sovereignty, labor movements, and the mythologies of the western wilderness.

The 98th annual SAMLA Conference is taking place Thursday, November, 5, through Saturday, November, 7, 2026, at the Wyndham Atlanta Buckhead Hotel & Conference Center in Atlanta, GA.  For more information, see https://southatlanticmla.org/.

This panel explores how Latin American and Latine writers, filmmakers, and artists engage environmental elements as dynamic forces shaping human experience, identity, and social life. Grounded in the environmental humanities, the panel examines how cultural production renders visible the entanglements between ecological conditions and forms of movement, including migration, displacement, circulation, and transformation across human and more-than-human worlds.

"What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career."

— T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”