bibliography and history of the book

In the summer of 2026, Elizabeth and Ines Soto were sentenced to fifty years in prison for their participation in the anti-ICE protests at Prairieland, including a charge of “providing material support to terrorists.” In the trial that led to these exorbitant sentences, the Sotos’ production and distribution of zines, including literature on protest strategy, anti-ICE arguments, gay and trans issues, and plant propagation, were used as evidence in their conviction. Their printing press (a home office printer) was confiscated by the FBI. At the same time, Daniel Sanchez Estrada, who was not present at the protest, was sentenced to thirty years for “concealing documents,” including zines labeled as “political literature.”

Host Institution: Sapienza University of Rome (Scientific Director: Prof. Federico Batini)

Conference Dates: December 2–3, 2026 (Rome) & December 4, 2026 (Perugia, Italy)

Official Website: www.sharedreadingaloud.com

Resurgens Theatre Company, along with the Georgia State University Department of English, is pleased to announce our fourth biennial conference on early modern verse drama by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, “Shakespeare’s Apocrypha Now.” We’re calling for papers that examine some aspect of Shakespeare’s non-canonical plays, i.e., those dramatic works that have been or are currently attributed to Shakespeare (as a whole or in part) that have yet to receive widespread scholarly and/or theatrical recognition. We particularly welcome topics on canonicity, collaboration, and performance-oriented concerns regarding Renaissance drama and/or early modern print culture.

This roundtable considers the role of “unfinished” texts—in the broadest possible sense—in early modern English literature and life writing. 

This panel considers the often overlooked presence of flora and fauna in early modern print, whether they appear as marginalia, within printers’ ornaments, or as materially integral to books. Animals and plants always carry symbolic value—a single image sometimes carrying diametrically opposed values—and participate in a broader network of signification through emblems, printers’ ornaments, marginalia, and engraven images. Do those values come into tension with each other via the margin, the marginal, and the marginalized? In what ways do peripheral plants and animals comment on questions of identity, like gender, race, or disability?

We invite you to submit an abstract and bio by June 17, 2026, to participate in a Modern Language Association (MLA) 2027 seminar, "Queer Literary Studies NOW." Seminar participants will precirculate 1500-word papers on the theme, and we will discuss the papers and the larger theme during the seminar on the first day of the MLA 2027 conference. MLA 2027 will take place in Los Angeles, California, January 7-10, 2027. Participants must be MLA members and register for the conference.

Reception, including reading, listening and viewing, occurs at the tail-end of a complex process of production and reproduction that can create a significant distance between the authors who begin the process and the individual recipients who enact multiple, unique endings in their idiosyncratic experience. With an acknowledgement of the digital reproduction that enables this online conference to occur, we invite papers that address the impact of reproduction at any stage of this process. We especially welcome papers that address the impact of reproduction on the textual, material and cultural meaning of the work, text or image that is reproduced on, amongst others:

This year is the 550th anniversary of William Caxton’s establishment of the first printing press in England in 1476. We invite papers for a two-day conference on Caxton’s career, texts, and contexts. Abstracts of up to 300 words to be sent to shaw.worth@all-souls.ox.ac.uk and jacob.ridley@ell.ox.ac.uk by 10 June 2026.

Call for Papers

University of Delaware’s 8th CMCS Conference in Material Culture

April 2-3, 2027

What’s the Matter with Description?

Form, Practice, and Material Culture

Keynote Speaker

Susan Stewart

(Princeton University)

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:

MMLA 2026 Convention Theme: "After the Archive"  (https://mmla.memberclicks.net/call-for-papers)Meeting Dates: 12-14 November 2026Meeting Location: voco Chicago Downtown (350 W Wolf Point Plaza)

Presentation Length: 15 Minutes (7-8 Double-Spaced Pages)
Submission Materials: 250-Word Abstract and CV
Submission Deadline: April 25, 2026

The inaugural Edinburgh Bibliographical Seminar and Workshop (EBSW) seeks proposals on the theme of ‘Catalogues and Registers as Evidence in the History of Mathematics, Science, and Technology’. The event will occur at the University of Edinburgh from 20 July to 24 July, 2026, the week after the joint meeting of the History of Science Society and the European Society for the History of Science.

Call for Papers: MLA 2027 - Los Angeles

The William Morris Society in the United States is soliciting proposals for two panels at next year's MLA (January 7-10, 2027 in Los Angeles). You are warmly invited to submit proposals for either session. Please submit your proposals to the email addresses listed with each CFP. Submissions must be received by March 22.

William Morris, Labor & the Nineteenth Century

Perpetrators of genocide destroy people as well as their cultural legacies, including formal archives, libraries, privately held records, and culturally significant texts and other print objects. Colonial occupation both historically and currently consolidates power through destroying records of occupied peoples to deny their past, present, and future. Resistance, in turn, may take the form of preserving such records through smuggling, hiding, converting, memorizing, digitizing, translating, and reconstituting. Inspired by the Phoenix Library in Gaza, the MLA Forum on Book History, Print Cultures, Lexicography seeks papers on preserving books, print materials, and other textual records (broadly understood) in contexts of genocide.