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GAMES AND COMMUNITIES – PLAYERS, FANS, GAMERS
Sixth International Video Games Studies Conference (SVI 2027)
8-9 April 2027, University of Zadar, Croatia
Keynote Speaker: Tom Apperley
In January 2026, murals of faceless female silhouettes in yoga poses were scratched around the genital area in the Indian city of Gwalior. The figures depicted no identifiable women; they were attacked anyway. In 2024, sexually explicit AI-generated deepfakes of Taylor Swift circulated widely online, demonstrating a very different but related form of image violation. Across a scratched public wall and a fabricated digital image, the same question emerges: what happens when an image of a woman becomes the surface upon which sexualisation, humiliation or punishment is performed? This special issue asks where, if anywhere, a woman’s image can be assumed to be safe.
2027 SALA Annual Conference: Water as Matter, Matters of Water: South Asian Political, Historical, and Literary Flows
Venue: Online on Zoom
Dates: Mar. 13-14, 2027
Deadline for proposals: Dec. 10, 2026
We are inviting contributors to our project on World Philosophy and Humor. This work aims to explore the philosophical dimensions of humor, examining its nature, function, ethical implications, and cultural significance. We are now especially interested in adding contributors for book chapters on Islamic and ancient philsoophies.
Contributions could engage with any of the following themes:
1. The Nature of Humor: What is humor, and how can it be defined? Philosophical inquiries into the essence of humor, including its relationship to comedy, wit, irony, and satire.
FAULKNER'S VEGETAL FUTURES
William Faulkner Society-Sponsored Panel
University of Tennessee, Knoxville “Speculative Souths” Symposium (https://marktwainstudies.com/call-for-papers/cfp-speculative-souths-symp...)
Knoxville, TN
June 10-12, 2027
This seminar explores representations of female desire in music, literature and the visual arts. How have the complex poetics of female desire—the desire to have something, or escape something, or punish, or know—been represented over time? What strategies have been employed to subvert literary conventions defined predominantly by male perspectives on home, love, war, victory and loss? How have female characters navigated the interplay between things done overtly and thought covertly to reveal the inner web of desires, fears and conflicts that constitute a female poetics of love and longing?
submit propposals to: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/CFP
This seminar invites papers that explore the concepts of ekphrasis, the mise en abyme, and metaphorical mirrors in literature, music, and the visual arts. How are mirrors used by artists as deliberate tools to represent something else? How are metaphorical mirrors used to compare different types of reflections across mediums? How are mirrors used to suggest that the aesthetic “surface” is a distraction, and true clarity lies in understanding what the observer or listener wants to see or hear? Papers focused on one medium or interdisciplinaryapproaches from the Ancient, Medieval, Modern, and Postmodern periods are welcome.
Thresholds: Liminality, Performance, and Cultural Reconfiguration
Cultural Studies Association (CSA) 2027 Annual Conference
June 3-5, 2027
Fully Online
Deadline for Submissions: Friday, November 20, 2026
Call for Book Chapters: The Handbook of Witchcraft and Sorcery
Volume Editors:
Assoc. Prof. Cenk Tan (Pamukkale University, Türkiye)
Assoc. Prof. Milena Škobo (Sinergija University, Serbia)
Assoc. Prof. Nazan Yıldız Çiçekçi (Karadeniz Technical University, Türkiye)
Assoc. Prof. Oya Bayıltmış Öğütcü (Adıyaman University, Türkiye)
Submission Deadline for Abstracts: February 1, 2027
Volcanic Materiality in Literature and Art of the Anthropocene
Editor: Dewey W. Hall
Call for Contributions
International Conference, 16-18 August, 2027, Vaxjö, Sweden
Nostalgia has become one of the defining cultural affects of the twenty-first century. It permeates politics, popular culture, social media, environmental discourse, memory practices, heritage industries, and everyday life. While nostalgia is often discussed as a feeling directed towards a lost past, it is always encountered through acts of mediation. Memories, desires, identities, and imagined pasts are shaped, transformed, communicated, circulated, and shared through media technologies, aesthetic forms, communicative practices, and intermedial relations.
The Big Ten Trans Studies Initiative invites trans studies scholars and students affiliated with Big Ten institutions to submit proposals for a three-day forum on pedagogy and curriculum, to be held April 20-May 1 at Penn State University. This forum will be held in person.
Animal Studies Across Disciplines Symposium
April 7th-April 9th 2027
Arizona State University
Many scholars argue that we are now living in a new geological epoch—the Anthropocene—a name chosen to encapsulate an irreversibly transformed planet due to the rapid expansion of human populations, increasing exploitation of animals and natural resources, and pervasive pollution. The effects of the Anthropocene have been caused by only a small percentage of the world’s population, yet those living in the Global South disproportionately suffer the consequences. The Anthropocene, then, is just as much a social problem as it is an environmental issue.
CALL FOR CHAPTER PROPOSAL
The Ghost in the Machine Learns to Speak for the Dead:
AI, Rhetorical Resurrection, the Injustice of Synthetic Voice
An edited Collection, edited by Shiva Hari Mainaly, PhD, University of Memphis
Abstracts due December 15, 2026
The Dead are Speaking. Who Gave Them Their Words?
Call for Proposals - Acting Out: Theatre Training Outside the Theatre Classroom
Learning Stages is seeking contributions to a new anthology promoting the use of theatre training and educational strategies for application across post-secondary disciplines outside of the theatre classroom.
Haunted Landscapes 3
Conference: Falmouth University, June 30 to 2nd July 2027
In 2014 and 2023, Falmouth University hosted two of its most successful conferences: Haunted Landscapes. This conference is round three of that event, which will again be held in beautiful Cornwall on the Falmouth Campus, set in lush tropical gardens and only a few minutes’ walk away from its picturesque town and beaches.
Staging Myth: Performance, Adaptation, and Cultural Memory
Deadline for Abstract Submissions: 30th October 2026
“The true purpose of the theater is to create Myths, to express life in its immense, universal aspect.” (Artaud, 1958, p. 116)
This roundtable will engage with African American literary works (or other works of art) that create spaces for ancestors and other departed characters, frequently portraying such characters as active participants who shape the present of the living. We will consider in what ways such depictions offer and build communities for both the living and those whom they have lost. Special attention will be paid to how such works often serve as acts of historical preservation and memorialization outside official archives. All literary or artistic genres are welcome; interdisciplinary approaches welcome.
The Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University is thrilled to host the 12th annual Post45 Graduate Symposium on March 4-6, 2027.
The Post45 Graduate Symposium seeks graduate-level works-in-progress related to post-1945 media, arts, literature, textual or visual objects, digital platforms, politics, and culture. We welcome submissions that expand our conception of objects and meaning-making post-1945 or place them in comparative, transnational, or hemispheric frames. We especially welcome contributions that foreground the importance of race, gender, class, and sexuality to post-45 studies.
The Ernest Hemingway Society https://www.hemingwaysociety.org/ is sponsoringone panel andone roundtableat the 38th Annual Conference of the American Literature Association https://americanliteratureassociation.org/ to be held at The Westin Copley Place in Boston, MA, May 26-29, 2027.
Reminder: Teaching the Nineteenth Century in Today's University
NeMLA 2027 Annual Convention in Newport, RI, March 6-9, 2027
Abstracts due 9/30
In an environment of increasing digital distraction, courses exploring nineteenth-century literature and culture ask students to engage with some of literature’s lengthiest texts. How can we encourage meaningful engagement with nineteenth century “loose, baggy monsters” in today’s university? What resources can we call upon to better engage our students and support their learning in light of the rise of AI and the challenges of online distraction?
Sexualities Special Issue Call for Papers:
Transitions: Examining Changing Regimes of Sexuality in Post-Soviet Muslim Republics
Concept note
Participants are sought for a virtual roundtable at the Law and Society Association Global Meeting (Hong Kong) on June 26, 2027 examining how law is interpreted, translated, and given practical effect within universities—and how institutional actors may extend, reshape, or selectively invoke legal mandates in governing academic knowledge.
Working Title of Collection: Mukhar: Reading Gender across Page, Screen, and Society
Editor: Dr. Vasundhara Laspal (Head, Department of English, Government Degree College, Shitlakhet, Almora, Uttarakhand)
Publisher: L Ordine Nuovo Publication (CRRPS), Madurai, Tamil Nadu · www.nuovopublication.com · www.crrps.in
Call for Papers
Myth, Folklore, and Fairy Tales Area
Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)
48th Annual Conference, February 17-20, 2027
Marriott Albuquerque
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Submissions open: September 1, 2026
Proposal submission deadline: October 31, 2026
Call for Papers
Mystery / Detective Fiction Area
Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)
48th Annual Conference, February 17-20, 2027
Marriott Albuquerque
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Submissions open: September 1, 2026
Proposal submission deadline: October 31, 2026
¡AfroLatinxs Presente!, AfroLatinx Pasados
Special Issue of Pasados: Recovering History, Imagining Latinidad
Deadline for article submissions: January 5, 2027
What does it mean to teach a history that has been marginalised?
Questions surrounding the teaching of marginalised, contested, and difficult histories have become increasingly important across educational systems, universities, museums and other sites of historical education internationally. Yet discussions of inclusive and diverse curricula can sometimes obscure a more fundamental question: how, and at what point, does a history become marginalised in the first place?
When, in September 2026, a post declaring the actress Katrina Kaif "finished" following her return to public life after childbirth accumulated lakhs of views and comments, the disproportion between judgement and object became, itself, the more legible text. A comparable structure recurred that same year for the South Korean singer Jennie, whose performances at Mad Cool Festival and Lollapalooza Chicago drew, alongside widespread acclaim, a coordinated wave of "netizen" commentary deriding her "leaner frame" — two women, two national contexts, two entirely unrelated bodily "failures" (one insufficiently youthful, the other insufficiently substantial), and yet an identical infrastructure of mass, public, collectively affirmed judgement.