ecocriticism and environmental studies

Plant Lives: Sacred Interdependencies in the Arts of the Americas

A planting event and conference hosted by the Yale Institute of Sacred Music

April 11, 2026

In 1831, the preacher Nat Turner testified that hieroglyphics had appeared to him on leaves and corn stalks in a field. These hieroglyphics, he said, relayed divine messages that inspired him to lead a rebellion of enslaved Virginians. The starting point for this one-day conference is the many capacities of plants to transmit divine insights across time. This event at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music will explore the ways in which plants perform, evoke, and embody sacred relations throughout the Americas.

 “I, I wear a plastic suit / Plastic is my food / Perhaps, I’m plastic too,” sang the iconic Yugoslav New Wave band Idoli in their 1981 song “Plastika” (“Plastics”). These lyrics captured a 1980s moment in which Yugoslav production, import, and consumption of plastics reached their peak. Yet the groundwork for it had been laid in the preceding decades, since plastics production had begun shortly after the Second World War and rapidly permeated all aspects of everyday life (see Filipović 2023). Importantly, Yugoslavia’s trajectory differed from that of the Eastern Bloc.

The UI English Graduate Association is excited to announce our 2026 conference theme “(k)no(w) books, (k)no(w) people: Multidisciplinary Studies of Narrative, Media, and the Anthropocene.” At the forefront of our conference is the power of narratives. Humans are storytellers by nature, and for thousands of years we have used stories to remember our pasts and envision our futures. We have used them to entertain and inspire us, to empower us in the face of oppression, and to understand the world around us. And, as the Anthropocene makes strikingly clear, human stories have shaped the world, to an irreversible degree.

Current Research in Speculative Fiction 2026

16th Annual Conference

Systems and Entanglement

July 16th-17th 2026

University of Liverpool and Online

Nobody lives everywhere; everybody lives somewhere. Nothing is connected to everything; everything is connected to something.

(Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene)

Crossings: A Journal of English Studies is an annual double-blind peer-reviewed journal of scholarly articles and book reviews. The articles involve, but are not limited to, issues related to language, literature, culture, and pedagogy. It is a discursive platform to critically examine human behavior and communication, and their larger role in society as well as in knowledge production.

CROSSINGS: A JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES (ISSN 2071-1107; E-ISSN 2958-3179) is inviting scholarly articles for its Volume 17 to be published in 2026. 

Submission Deadline: March 31, 2026

Chapter Proposal Abstract: Part I – Medieval Seeds

CFP — Edited Volume
Watery Worlds: Decolonial Ecologies and the Mediterranean

This edited volume explores water as a decolonial, ecological, and affective force across Mediterranean geographies, including but not limited to contemporary Turkey. Rather than treating water as background or metaphor, the volume considers it a central analytic force shaping experiences of colonialism, displacement, border-making, memory, and belonging.

Society for the Study of Southern Literature Conference 2026

“Building Spaces of Freedom,” March 28th-31st at Fisk University, Nashville, TN

Panel: Building Emerging Spaces of Freedom

The Emerging Scholars Organization (ESO) invites papers that center emerging perspectives on SSSL’s conference theme, Building Spaces of Freedom. This panel foregrounds the ongoing labor of emerging scholars who navigate long histories of exclusion, gatekeeping, and uneven access while also reshaping southern studies through new interventions, methods, and archival practices.