interdisciplinary

Dystopian literature is replete with examples of both individuals who resist and communities of resilience and resistance which model values and activities that stand in contrast to and in spite of the dystopian settings of the story. This panel seeks to bring together critical investigations of dystopian literature which attempt to bring to the fore lessons that can be learned to help us (re)imagine just communities amidst a world of political, economic and ecological decline and regression.

Mode of Presentation: Hybrid: The session will be held in-person but a few remote presentations may be included.

Medieval and Early Modern People and their Things

People perceive the world and their place in it through interacting with objects. Through these subject-object relationships, people experience the potential of materials, both naturally sourced and manmade, as physical resources that can be perceived. A number of concerns arise with the use of these materials amidst acts of meaning-making. How do people use subject-object relationships in negotiating their treatment of objects to define their world views? To innovate new ways of engaging with and replicating the world around them? And how does that process continue to influence how we create future realities for ourselves and others?

While Indigenous literary studies has grown substantially over the past several decades, comparative approaches that place Indigenous texts, traditions, and intellectual frameworks in conversation with one another remain relatively rare. Too often, Indigenous texts are incorporated into comparative, world, or global literary frameworks without meaningful engagement with Indigenous studies scholarship, or are read primarily through the organizing categories of nation, region, empire, or postcoloniality. This seminar seeks to create a space for comparative Indigenous literary inquiry that centers Indigenous texts, epistemologies, and methods on their own terms.

Call for Papers

Communal Life, Abolition, and Space

American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting

Houston, TX

May 20-23, 2027

“That is the exploration that awaits you. Not mapping stars and studying nebulae, but charting the unknown possibilities of existence.”
– Q to Jean-Luc Picard. From Star Trek – The Next Generation, “All Good Things” (Season 7, Episode 25)

This panel, Sounding Resistance: African American Voices and Affective Communities, examines how African American cultural production constructs forms of resistance through voice, affect, and relationality. Bringing together approaches from Black studies, feminist theory, and affect theory, the session investigates how literature and contemporary narrative media articulate alternative modes of community formation under conditions of racialized power structures. Rather than treating representation as a static reflection of social realities, the panel foregrounds the dynamic and embodied dimensions of Black expressive culture.

This seminar asks what it means to teach the “world” in fields such as world cinema, world literature, comparative literature, and global media studies. Courses organized around the world often promise breadth, diversity, and cross-cultural understanding, but they also face practical and conceptual problems. What counts as the world? How does the nation appear in “world” courses? How do syllabi balance coverage, depth, translation, historical context, aesthetics, and political urgency? How do institutional expectations and restrictions mold the student imagination of the “world”? How does the positionality of the instructor presuppose, structure, or influence the “world” classroom? 

In-Person Seminar at American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) in Houston, TX, May 20-23, 2027.

April 2-3, 2027
University of North Carolina at Greensboro

The UNCG Videogaming and Esports Studies (VES) program, with support from UNCG’s 
ARCADE (Applied Research in Computer Arts, Digitization, and Esports), invites proposals for
our third annual game studies conference!

This year’s theme explores navigation as a capacious term — how do we navigate or not 
navigate in a game (walking, running, jumping, climbing, warping, fast traveling, etc.), what 
choices do we have regarding navigation, and what affordances do games offer for navigation?

This seminar examines performance as a multilayered concept that is continually reshaped through travel and other mobilities. Performance, in this context, can be understood in its broadest sense as a dynamic practice through which identities, relationships, meanings, and experiences are negotiated and transformed. By bringing performance and mobilities into conversation as mutually illuminating frameworks, the seminar seeks to explore how their intersection creates new critical possibilities. 

***Please use this link to submit your proposal: https://www.acla.org/seminar/e8248863-9bba-4144-b079-9c355f34a4f7***

India's civilizational ethos is deeply rooted in its multilingual and multicultural fabric, where translation has enabled the circulation of ideas, texts, and knowledge across regions and traditions. Etymologically understood as "carrying across," translation in the 21st century extends beyond linguistic transfer to become a critical and interpretive practice.

Apologies for crossposting!

Call for New JCMS Editor(s)

Editor(s), JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies

The Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) seeks a new Editor or Co-Editors and a new institutional home for its scholarly publication, commensurate with the 5-year term of the Editor(s), for its scholarly publication, JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies.

Review the full Call for Editor(s) and apply by Friday, September 18, 2026: https://www.cmstudies.org/general/custom.asp?page=JCMSCallNewEditor

62nd International Conference on Medieval Studies, May 13-15, 2027

Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo

Organizers: Logan Spencer (Binghamton Univ.), Taryn DeLeon Mendiola (Boston

College)

Sponsor: Society for Queer Medieval Studies (SQMS)