general announcements

PCA Annual Conference, March 24-27, 2027: Boston, Massachusetts

The Collecting and Collectibles Area invites proposals exploring how “collecting” has become an embodiment of the economic, political, environmental, and digital precarities that shape contemporary popular culture. Collecting now operates as a dynamic source for epistemic production, constantly redefining how popular culture is constructed, construed, mediated, valorized, historicized, and even contested. 

TIDEL Scholarly Symposium Faith, Ethics, and Digital Transformation

Join TIDEL for a two-day convening exploring the ethical, theological, social, and institutional implications of technological change in an era of rapid innovation and profound social transformation.

Founded in 2022, TIDEL is a Union Theological Seminary–based initiative that brings together faith leaders, scholars, technologists, nonprofit practitioners, and public leaders to explore ethical, justice-centered, and collaborative approaches to technology, innovation, and digital engagement.

Thursday, October 1, 2026 Union Theological Seminary

1:45 PM -- 5:45 PM Boxed lunch available at 12:45 PM

$100 until September 1 $150 after

Setting the stage: a theatre and performance dissertation writing group 

Writing a dissertation can be lonely: we want to change that. Many of us first fell in love with theater because — through exploratory rehearsals, late-night tech runs, and joyful opening nights — we found camaraderie and connection, both of which can feel distant in graduate school. If theater is best practiced with others, how can our research and writing processes be shaped by the same commitment to community-building? 

Bulgaria-based (or Bulgarian-abroad) scholars of literature, reading and/or writing in English, are invited to a one-day conference in Blagoevgrad on October 10th 2026, to present projects-in-progress to an audience of interested peers from around the country. 

Hosted at the American University in Bulgaria, by the Department of Literature, Theatre, and Film, the conference will provide a hub for colleagues from across the nation to gather together, showcase and discuss each other’s work in progress, and chart the future of English-language literary study in Bulgaria. Papers will be combined into themed panels, with plenty of time in each panel dedicated for questions, discussion, and feedback.

European Comic Art invites proposals for a special issue on ‘Francophone Graphic Narratives/Bande dessinée: Authority and Resistance’. This issue will examine how francophone graphic narratives engage with, challenge, and reimagine authority in its many forms – political, cultural, institutional, and aesthetic – and how they forge practices of resistance and dissent.

Beyond the Ocean: Maritime Infrastructure and Hydro-Narratives of Indians under the Raj (Tentative Title)

Concept Note

The imperial ships of the British Raj bore millions of Indian migrants across waterways just the way Charon ferried souls across the river Styx to an irreversible fate. Nonetheless, the Indians transformed the vicious vessels into spaces of radical rebirth and enduring kinship.

Project Overview and Rationale

Dates of Conference: 4-8 November 2026

Format: Hybrid – Online (via Zoom) & In-Person (Thessaloniki, Greece)

Note: The onsite/in-person conference will take place exclusively on 6-7 November, 2026 and be streamed live on Zoom.

Organizer: KN: F.L.A.ME.S. by Konstantina Kliagkona (www.knflames.gr)

International, interdisciplinary conference titled:

The Hidden Faces of Violence II: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Abuse, Trauma, and Resistance

The editors are seeking 750-word abstracts of talks for a symposium at UCLA, February 5, 2027, on “The Great American Novel: A Twenty-First-Century Reckoning.” Early-career scholars as well as tenured faculty are encouraged to apply. Transportation and lodging costs will be provided. While there is a long and thriving history of debates about the GAN, we favor topics and approaches that highlight theoretical and critical concerns that reach beyond the discussion of any single text to consider broader theoretical, political, and aesthetic stakes.  Accepted speakers will be asked to revise and expand their presentations into articles to be considered for publication in a special issue of ALH.

“It is worse, much worse, than you think” states David Wallace-Wells at the opening of his The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (2019). “When do we start physically attacking the things that consume our planet and destroy them with our own hands?” asks Andreas Malm in How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2021). “I don’t think about hope much anymore. But I do think about imagination,” writes Terry Tempest Williams in an interview contained in A voice in the Wilderness: Conversations with Terry Tempest Williams (2006). In the spaces between these statements we encounter a range of reactions to our warming condition, from blunt pessimism, to righteous anger, to nuanced reframing.

Fostering Interpretive Communities in the Classroom and Research through Adaptation Studies (Roundtable) (Virtual) 

Co-organizers Michael A. Torregrossa and Carl B. Sell

Sponsored by Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture

Call for Papers - Please Submit Proposals by 30 September 2026

58th Annual Convention of Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)

Salve Regina University (Newport, RI)/Online.

Hybrid event: 6-9 March 2027

On June 8th of this year, FEMSPEC, an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal dedicated to challenging gender through speculative means in any genre, lost our founder and Editor-in-Chief Dr. Batya Weinbaum.  Dr. Weinbaum founded the journal in 1997 to fill a scholarly niche at the intersections of feminist theory and scholarship and literary scholarship in the realm of speculative fiction.  Since publishing the journal's first issue in 1999, Dr. Weinbaum has served as Editor-in-Chief and as the head of the volunteer collective that manages the journal.  The journal was the fruit of her creative effort, and it is thanks to her vision and leadership that the journal has published academic scholarship and creative writing for over 25 years.

Conference: 2-4 December 2026

Gdańsk (Poland) and online (via Zoom)

Dear Colleagues,

"Interface" calls for papers for a conference on the topic: “Creativity before and in the Age of AI: Literature, Languages and Cultures in Times of Instability”

Conference Date: November 27-29, 2026

Conference Place: National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan

Abstract Submission Deadline: September 26, 2026