cultural studies and historical approaches

Seminar at the Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA)
University of Houston, Houston, Texas
20–23 May 2027 — in person

Marginalised women in South Asia are read for what was done to them, far less often for what they made. This seminar asks what comparative literature can do about that.

Panel: Precarious and Obsolete Spaces in the Novel

We form strong attachments with the spaces we inhabit, which shape us as we shape them. Spaces house our memories, provide opportunities for encounters, and alter our individual and collective identities. But what happens when these locations deteriorate, become obsolete, or disappear entirely? This panel invites papers considering representations of neglected, abandoned, or otherwise ephemeral spaces in novels from any period or location. We welcome papers on places and spaces of any scale: buildings, towns and cities, landscapes, even nations and worlds.  

Conference Location: University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC

If American mass media is an ecosystem, we cast the press as predators, and the celebrity as their prey. We envision the reporters grouped in a posse, arranged for an ambush. Camera flashes crack as they capture their quarry. By now, these perceptions have become truisms that obscure our own role as consumers in a matrix of violence, spectatorship, and stardom. If we condemn the paparazzi for their alleged violence, we also continue to revise and revisit their heyday in the age of print media. This seminar seeks papers that explore how violent desire—of the spectator, the press, the star – shaped the profusion of tabloid and true crime print culture across the Americas.  

This panel will explore Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and related texts at MLA 2027 Convention in Los Angeles. Please send your 250 word abstract on relevant themes like homecoming and the oceanic by August 30, to Ennuri Jo (she/her) at ennurijo@upenn.edu. 

Christopher Nolan’s much-awaited film The Odyssey was released in IMAX on July 17, 2027.

Call for Papers (CFP)18th SAAS Conference: Negotiating Identity and Power: Resistance, Rebellion, and Resilience in U.S. Literature and CultureUniversidad de Oviedo, Spain | March 15–17, 2027Panel Title:Speculative Ontologies: The Posthuman, the Eerie, and Cultural Memory in US Media and NarrativesPanel Chairs:

Technological systems are routinely narrated through a rhetoric of the “high-tech”: futuristic, frictionless, dematerialized, and planetary in scale. Such rhetoric directs the attention of media technologies toward the newest platform, the most advanced infrastructure, the most spectacular feat of engineering. Yet every high-tech system is sustained by processes that are decidedly low-tech: extraction of raw materials, energy consumption at industrial scale, manual and low-wage labor, informal repair and maintenance, grassroots appropriation, and amateur practice operating at the margins of official technological narratives. The “high” is never self-sufficient; it is built on, and constantly obscures, the “low.”

20032. The Picaro and Picaresque Fiction "The Picaro and Picaresque Fiction" examines variations on theme of the picaro from its sixteenth-century Spanish origins to the present day. What does this recurring impish rapscallion have to offer readers in different political and historical contexts?

Abstract

Call for Papers

Claflin University Conference on Languages and Cultural Studies  (In-person on the campus of Claflin University) *

October 21-22, 2026

THEME: CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE TEACHING IN HIGHER EDUCATION AND SECONDARY SCHOOLS

*(Participants not residing in the United States and those unable to travel may request a virtual option)Scholarly and creative writing panel proposals, roundtable proposals, and paper abstracts on all aspects of reading, writing, and teaching modern languages are invited including papers and panels on

The "White World," as defined by Walter Rodney, determines who is white and who is black. To this, we add that the White World also dictates which women are enslaved and which may be free. It is difficult to envision the possibility of women’s liberation in the Global South without the complete dismantling of colonialism and Western imperialism. While women in many post-colonial patriarchal nations are exploited in myriad ways, it is a mistake to imagine that this exploitation—and the patriarchal mentality of the post-colonial world—is not profoundly shaped by Western influence. Many African and South American nations continue to funnel their resources to the West while their own populations suffer from hunger.

In the Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan redefines the domestic space and the feminine laborassociated with it as a dynamic space where Chinese-American women reshape their identities, preserve their cultures, and share their stories of traumas. bell hooks’ assertion that “homeplace" was the one site where one could freely confront the issue of humanization” provides a productive framework for understanding how kitchens and acts of cooking become spaces of healing, survival, and female agency in women’s writing. By doing these, they try to assert a form of power, and agency that subverts the traditional notion of the domestic space(as an inferior space that is away from history), and the feminine labor associated with it.

American Literature Association: “Music and the American Literary Imagination” Symposium

January 28-30, 2027 in Nashville, Tennessee

CFP: “Sounding the Subject in the Nineteenth Century” 

“To be or not to be”—Hamlet’s timeless question of existence—resonates with a gendered undertone that continues to echo through literature and culture. This panel asks a related question: what does it mean to be (or not to be) a man, and how do literary texts help illuminate that question across genres, periods, and geographies?

CFP: “Bookstore Communities”

Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) annual convention

Newport, RI

March 6-9, 2027

In keeping with the NeMLA 2027 theme of “Empowering Communities,” the purpose of this panel is to explore the role of bookstores in imagined, fictional spaces. What does a bookstore signify? What’s the symbolic difference between a bookstore and a library? How do fictional bookstores create and foster community? What magic, literal or figurative, is inherent in a shop that sells physical, printed texts? What do these commercial spaces represent as far as identity, belonging, or culture?