film and television

The 2026 Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association will be held in person at the Palais des congrès de Montréal, February 26 - March 1, 2026.

In moments of rupture—whether personal, political, or planetary—narratives frequently stage ethical crises that challenge and destabilize established frameworks of responsibility, relationality, and judgment. How do literature and film illuminate the fragile, often invisible networks of moral obligation that bind us to one another, particularly when these ties are strained by trauma, contingency, or crisis?

Virtual interventions have become permanently embedded in our spaces, and play a major role not only in how a space is constituted but also in how our bodies exist in, encounter, and co-constitute space. Physical space and virtual networks are inextricably intertwined today, such that a space is never purely physical.

Chair: Sanjukta Banerjee, York University

AATSEEL 2026: New Orleans, LA - February 19-22 (Sheraton New Orleans)

When taking stock of the figures that dominated late Soviet popular culture, one would be remiss not to mention Cheburashka, Vinni-Pukh, and the Bremen Town Musicians alongside the likes of Alla Pugacheva and Viktor Tsoi. Animation represented a massive undertaking in the Soviet Union, with state funded animation studios found across republics. Both viewers and scholars alike have been drawn to Soviet animation’s diversity in style and ability to address what scholars such as Larissa Tumanov have termed a “dual audience” of children and adults, often concealing more subversive messages behind an innocent storyline. 

Call for Papers

Asian Popular Culture / Asian American Experiences

Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)

47th Annual Conference, February 25-28, 2026

Marriott Albuquerque

Albuquerque, New Mexico

https://www.southwestpca.org

Submissions open: September 1, 2025

Proposal submission deadline: October 31, 2025

Proposals for papers and panels are now being accepted for the 47th annual SWPACA

This is a call for papers for a hybrid session at the Northeast Modern Language Association Conference in Pittsburgh, PA which will take place March 5-8, 2026. Please see this link for the CFP and to submit through the NeMLA site: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21963 .

The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin invites applications for its 2026–2027 research fellowship program. Up to 50 fellowships will be awarded to support projects that require substantial on-site use of the Center’s internationally renowned collections in all areas of the humanities, including literature, photography, film, art, the performing arts, music, and cultural history.

*Fresh Words* is now accepting submissions for its **Special One-Minute Horror Plays Anthology**, titled ***SHHH! BREATHE SLOW!* (Volume 4)**. We invite playwrights worldwide to submit original, spine-chilling short works that deliver maximum impact in just 60 seconds.

Website:  https://sites.google.com/view/freshwordsmagazine/announcements?authuser=0

This roundtable will explore the theme of mad echoes within contemporary (re)generations of literature and her/their/history. The term (re)generation calls forth processes of renewing or restoring something that has been lost or damaged. Damage and loss have been ways of speaking about the lasting and ongoing violences against marginalized bodies that have been labeled as Mad, pathologized, or institutionalized, but the limits of these concepts have been contested, perhaps most notably in Eve Tuck’s “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities,” which interrogates the (un)helpfulness of damage-focused research to the pursuit of justice and wellbeing for members of marginalized communities.

The Mystery & Detective Fiction Area of the Popular Culture Association invites proposals for the 56th annual conference in Atlanta, Georgia, April 8-11, 2026, to be held at the Atlanta Marriott Marquis.

We seek proposals from researchers, academics, graduate students, and independent scholars for scholarly discussions on all aspects and periods of mystery and detective fiction. Interdisciplinary approaches are strongly encouraged.

We ask that proposals extend existing scholarship in new directions and avoid plot summary or review. Proposals should have a clear and focused argument that can be developed adequately in a 15-minute presentation.

Some possible topics for the 2026 conference:

This seminar investigates how repression, repetition, and unresolved rhythms shape emotional experience across Anglophone literature, heritage film, and contemporary media. It emphasizes stalled movements of feeling, looping tensions, and residues that resist closure. Such affective patterns disrupt inherited memories and unsettle formations of Englishness and other post-imperial identities. At the center of this seminar lies a guiding question: how do patterns of emotion simultaneously sustain and fracture collective identity?

After an enriching conference in 2025, Heavy Childhoods 2026 will run under the title “Curating Future Nostalgia inHeavy Times”

Journal of Chinese Cinemas Special Issue CFP: Before, Besides, and Beyond the Taiwanese New Cinema

This is an updated CFP for an edited collection representing contemporary “conservative cultural criticism” of books, film, TV, and other media. We are taking a broad view of what conservatism entails, but common influences cited by contributors include Russell Kirk, C. S. Lewis, Paul Elmore More, and Roger Scruton. I have 12 chapters so far on the following topics / authors: