cultural studies and historical approaches

2026 Dress and Body Association Conference

CALL FOR PAPERS

The Dress and Body Association invites submissions for the organization’s seventh annual conference, which will be held on November 7-8, 2026. Consistent with our long-term goals for inclusivity and sustainability, all activities will be 100% online.

Join our Google Group to learn about opportunities and converse with members of the DBA year-round! Email to request membership: dress.body.assoc@gmail.com.

Opening the Archives of Dress and the Body

Panel topic: "Consuming Serialized Fiction in the US, from 1800 to today.”

Venue: American Literature Association Symposium, Santa Fe, NM; Nov. 5-7, 2026

Note: as indicated here, ALA does not require presenters to be paying members of the organization

Call for Papers

Imagining the Global Past:
Antiquities, Early Modernities, and the Humanities Today

Research Symposium, May 17–18, 2027

University of Washington Division of the Humanities

Keynote Speakers: Russ Leo (Princeton, English Literature) and Andrew Hui (National University of Singapore, Comparative Literature and Sinology)

Organizer: Rhema Hokama (University of Washington, English Literature and Religious Studies)

Due to the rhetorical challenges of sharing the unmentionable, infertility is often underdiscussed in both Early Modern society and today. It has discomforted and continues to discomfort theologians, medical practitioners, politicians, scholars, and everyday people trying to build identities through societies deeply founded on the structure of the family. The very concept of family is built around parents and children–what happens when a couple is childless, what happens when the children aren’t materially seen, only known to the parents that lost them before birth? It has historically forced thinkers to grapple with their understanding of life and death, grace and agency, reality and the supernatural.

Call for Papers – Volume 37, Issue 1 & 2 (2027)

Dear Colleagues,

Litera: Journal of Language, Literature and Culture Studies – Dil, Edebiyat ve Kültür Araştırmaları Dergisi, the official publication of the Department of Western Languages and Literatures at Istanbul University, invites submissions for its 2027 issues (Volume 37, Issues 1 & 2).

Call for Papers: Short Fiction in Theory & Practice

Special Issue: ‘Writing Across Languages: Anglophone Short Stories by Multilingual Authors’

Guest edited by Elsa Court (University of Oxford), Nina Ellis (The American University in Cairo), and Sonya Moor (Manchester Metropolitan University).

View the full call here>>

https://www.intellectbooks.com/short-fiction-in-theory-practice#call-for-papers

Where and how does African American culture begin?

Every story has a beginning, yet every beginning is a choice: a conscious decision about where, when, and how to start. Beginnings are contextual constructions as are endings.

Mid-Atlantic Popular & American Culture Association (MAPACA) 2026 Annual Conference, November 5-7, 2026 in Baltimore, MD

Congreso Estética(s) del Horror: Filosofía, Cine y Literatura.

Invitación a envío de propuestas. Congreso presencial

 (English version below)

En los últimos años, el terror ha experimentado una renovada visibilidad cultural. El éxito del cine reciente, la consolidación de una auténtica edad de oro de las series televisivas y la aparición de nuevas voces literarias, impulsadas también por el trabajo de editoriales especializadas, evidencian que el horror ocupa hoy un lugar central en el imaginario colectivo y mantiene una extraordinaria capacidad para dialogar con las preocupaciones estéticas, sociales y políticas de cada época.

On January 19, 2022, Sheila Heti published the first of ten weekly installments of “A Diary in Alphabetical Order” in The New York Times. Each installment included an author’s note explaining that Heti had “loaded all 500,000 words of [her] journals into Excel to order the sentences alphabetically,” hoping to “see the self in a new way.” Over time, the project “grew into something more novelistic,” and the note concludes that “the self’s report on itself is surely a great fiction.” Heti is hardly the first author to challenge or destabilize autobiographical conventions.

As we meet in Newport, an island at the edge of the Atlantic, this panel invites papers about ocean-based horror media. Oceans, seas, and other waterways have been central to human culture throughout history, offering both opportunities to build communities across the waves and the threat of lonely, painful death through drowning or isolation through shipwrecks.

This is a CFP seeking panelists for the 2027 Annual Conference of the Association for Asian Studies. We invite papers that examine racialization and ethnicization across Sinophone and Asian contexts in which local projects of improvement and rule are entangled with colonial and imperial systems and epistemologies, both Western and non-Western, external and internal, often sustained by local elites and intermediaries. We understand these contexts in broad terms, including transnational, diasporic, and colonial aspects. Processes of racialization and ethnicization, as well as resistance to and negotiation of such processes, could involve, but are not limited to, discussions of care, gender, and sexuality.

How is everyone doing?

At a routine meeting of the Editorial Board of this journal in March 2026, this innocuous question erupted into disquiet, tension, unease. Speaking from vastly different parts of the world, there was an unmistakable sense of a planet slipping beyond available comprehension and unplugging us from work and life routines. As wars in the Middle East expand and fires spread from apartment blocks reduced to rubble to bombed oil refineries and shipping corridors, profound geopolitical, personal, even psychic rifts leave us grasping for the language and feel of the moment, the falling apart of things, the zeitgeist of an endangered now.

This special issue will explore current attacks on scholarship and scholars, and the multiple ways in which law, broadly conceived, is understood and deployed in these attacks with implications for who is allowed to shape and engage in the public sphere.