american

In the light of girl-centric third-wave feminism and critical regionalism, contemporary American and Canadian literary and cultural texts present innovative girlhoods enabling expansive and emancipatory processes. Please submit an abstract (250 words) and a short bionote.

Deadline for submissions: Friday, March 20, 2026

Mercedes Albert-Llacer, Universitat Jaume I (mllacer@uji.es)

https://mla.confex.com/mla/2027/webprogrampreliminary/Paper33899.html

Hi all,

See the below CFP for a panel on Pacific early American literature for next year’s MLA. Please circulate to anyone you think might be interested!

This issue of Ampersand: An American Studies Journal invites submissions that take up the concept of the “American assemblage”. 

Two conferences, one in Halle (Saale) and the other in Atlanta (Georgia), aim to bring together researchers interested in the Francke Foundations in Halle, the English missionary societies, and the founding of the colony of Georgia. While the conference in Halle will focus on a systematic comparison between these institutions, the conference in Atlanta will address the social consequences. The main question is what types of social order the Protestant reform movements in Prussia, England, and Georgia promoted.

 Renewing Faith, Improving Society. A Comparison of Protestant Reform Movements in Prussia, England, and Georgia (first half of the 18th century)

This panel examines how literature circulates beyond fixed ethnic identity by bringing together the work of John Fante and Charles Bukowski as a case study in Italian American literary afterlives. While Fante is firmly situated within Italian American literary studies and Bukowski is more often framed within postwar American counterculture, this panel argues that reading them relationally reveals how Italian American literary aesthetics travel, mutate, and endure beyond explicitly ethnic frameworks.

Richard Linklater’s Slacker (1991) is a cult classic with a crucial role in the history of American cinema. The movie is unusual in many ways. It does not have a traditional narrative; it follows 100 characters around the UT Austin area in a way that seems completely random. There is no protagonist, no story, no thread to the individual events, yet somehow it is a completely coherent and engaging movie that sparks as many reflections as the number of scenes it has.

We are looking for chapter proposals in the form of abstracts. Topics already included are work, capitalism, Buddhism, film as a dream, narrative, episodic views of life, and absurdity. Possible topics for new chapters include:

Hello! Seeking 1-2 additional papers to join a trans studies panel at the 2026 American Studies Association Conference. Abstract for the proposed panel is below; please contact Anna James (AJames@franklincollege.edu) if interested. Thanks!

Panel Title: Minoritarian Gestures, Improvised Lives: Everyday Performance of Trans Resistance

MLA 2027: The Melville Society CFP: Melville and Hawthorne Revisited

Call for Abstracts!Elvis and Philosophy: Essays Concerning the King

Edited by Joshua Heter and Richard Greene

Abstracts are sought for a collection of essays on any philosophical topic related to Elvis Aaron Presley to be published with Wallace & Jacobs Press. We hope to receive a number of submissions concerning his music and movies as well as his persona, life, relationships, cultural impact, legacy, mythos, etc.

This special section of Whatever: A Transdisciplinary Journal of Queer Theories and Studies will function as a critical retrospective on Robert Eggers’s 2015 film The Witch. While much has been written on the film in relation to feminist theory, this special section seeks to excavate the queer possibilities of Eggers’s now iconic film. Taking a broad view of queer theory, we imagine queerness as that which challenges binaries and hierarchies. In this way, The Witch might be understood as queer in terms of the challenges it poses to heteronormative, patriarchal structures, as well as through its dismantling of the boundaries between self and other, human and animal, nature and culture.

This MLA special sessions panel invites papers on literary and cultural approaches to Los Angeles infrastructure, aimed at interrogating the political aesthetic of social, natural, and built environments. Please send a 250 word abstract and short bio. 

2027 MLA Convention: January 7-10 in Los Angeles (accepted presenters must be MLA members by April 1)

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.

Memory, Myth, and Meaning: Cather in Dialogue with America 250

Willa Cather Spring Conference | Thursday, June 4 - Saturday, June 6, 2026 

This year marks the centennial of My Mortal Enemy, one of Cather’s least affirmative works and one not produced in the Cather Scholarly Edition (translation: much important work remains to be done!)  We invite papers on new approaches to My Mortal Enemy, including but not limited to the following considerations of style, form, provenance, and themes:

This session will be devoted to academic novels and academic administration. Panelists will consider what these novels (as well as television and films centered in academia) have to say about how higher education institutions are run, and what we might learn about how—and how not—to run them. Equally interested in literary studies (genre, form, representation) and Critical University Studies (history, politics, current events).