interdisciplinary

In recent decades, the scientific search for extraterrestrial life has undergone a significant conceptual transformation. Earlier astrobiological research largely focused on identifying environments similar to those on Earth—particularly the presence of water and organic molecules—as indicators that life might exist elsewhere in the universe. Increasingly, however, scientists recognize that truly alien life may not resemble terrestrial biology at all. Rather than searching only for “life as we know it,” astrobiologists now explore the possibility that organisms could arise from unfamiliar biochemical systems, rely on alternative solvents, or take forms that challenge our current definitions of life.This shift has important cultural implications.

Gender and Fragmentation in the Fin de Siècle 

Nineteenth Century Gender Studies Special Issue – Summer 2027

Guest Edited by Emily Waller Singeisen and Ryan Carroll

In his book, Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species (2016), Neel Ahuja’s theory of “the body as a transitional theater of imperial warfare” explores how the control of human and nonhuman bodies proliferated the expansion of empire over the 19th century to the present. Despite the growing hegemony of biomedical control, there have always been and continue to be significant moments of resistance and agency in which marginalized (colonized/Indigenous) communities have challenged or reformulated/redefined the concepts of body, disease, and health.

Submit abstracts at: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22314

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

Food is simultaneously a cultural text and a political artifact — a site where identity, memory, power, and resistance converge. This panel invites world language educators and scholars to examine how food, as subject, medium, and metaphor, can transform the language classroom into a space of critical inquiry, developing not only linguistic proficiency but also intercultural communicative competence and critical citizenship.

The Marilynne Robinson Society will be hosting a panel at the annual American Literature Association Conference (May 26-29, 2027; Boston, MA).  The panel will focus on a wide variety of topics connected to Robinson’s essays and novels.

Please submit a 350-word proposal and short bio to haein.park@biola.edu by December 1, 2026.

Conference Dates: 23-24 October, 2026

Format: Online (via Zoom)

International, interdisciplinary conference titled:

Healing Narratives: Exploring Humanity in Medicine and Healthcare

In the realm of medicine and healthcare, narratives- whether spoken, written, visual, or performed- serve among others as powerful tools to humanize clinical experiences, challenge biomedical paradigms as well as foster empathy and understanding. These stories reveal the complex interplay between biological, psychological, social, cultural, and spiritual dimensions of health, illuminating the ways in which healing is intertwined with human dignity, identity, and societal values.

Black Performing Arts: Sound, Movement, Image, Text

Submission Deadline: October 31, 2026

The Black Performing Arts Area provides a scholarly forum to share research pertaining to Black performance across expressive forms.  Broadly defined, the area focuses on all forms of performing and visual arts, including all musical genres, theatrical performance and performance art, performance elements in visual art, and connections between different Black expressive forms.  In all these contexts we are interested in investigating where aesthetic technique and embodiment merge across Black diasporic expressivity.

Love and Its Reversals in Peninsular and Latin American Literature (Panel –  Virtual Only)

NeMLA 2027 — 58th Annual Convention
March 6–9, 2027 | Newport, Rhode Island
Virtual Only

Love has long occupied a central place in Peninsular and Latin American literature, but literary representations of love also expose its reversals, contradictions, and darker dimensions. This panel explores representations of love and its reversals—including desire, rejection, violence, hate, and eroticism—with particular attention to questions of gender, subjectivity, power, and social norms.

International, interdisciplinary conference titled:

Healing Narratives: Exploring Humanity in Medicine and Healthcare

In the realm of medicine and healthcare, narratives- whether spoken, written, visual, or performed- serve among others as powerful tools to humanize clinical experiences, challenge biomedical paradigms as well as foster empathy and understanding. These stories reveal the complex interplay between biological, psychological, social, cultural, and spiritual dimensions of health, illuminating the ways in which healing is intertwined with human dignity, identity, and societal values.

This seminar convenes Cuban, Mexican, and U.S. Gulf South scholars to theorize the Gulf of Mexico as a transnational zone of ecological entanglement, rather than a set of discrete national environments. Although the Gulf’s waters, storms, labor histories, and extractive infrastructures circulate across borders, scholarship often remains siloed within national or linguistic frames. This seminar asks how environmental humanities approaches might illuminate the Gulf as a shared, relational ecology shaped by movement, sedimentation, and uneven histories of extraction.

We may imagine the act of hospitality benign: to open a door, to welcome another across a threshold, or to make an offer to a guest. Rooted in such acts, however, is an ethics of how we engage with another, whether friend or stranger. Acts of hospitality contain their own contradictions, as to serve as host is to hold power, to set terms, to guard thresholds and entry points. For this year’s SAMLA conference, we invite papers, panels, and creative works that consider the many meanings and complications of hospitality—as practice, metaphor, ethics, affect, and structure.

Sappho’s Mirror: Images of Female Desire in Literature, Music & the Visual Arts 

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?

This is a virtual session.

ACLA 2027 Virtual Symposium: What We Are Going to Become?: Dysphoria Mundi, Weird , Excess

Contact Information

Elif Sendur, es1037@scarletmail. rutgers.edu

es1037@scarletmail.rutgers.edu

URL

https://www.acla.org/seminar/476406f6-1280-48ea-a968-33ae461c37d5

Announcement Type

Conference

Subject Fields

American Comparative Literature Association  IN-PERSON 2027 Annual Meeting (May 20-23, 2027), Houston, Texas

Organizers: Dr. Julia Chan (Lingnan University)

Fatma Betul Ciftci (Lingnan University)

One is not born a monster; the monster is produced. From Beowulf to Ruthven to Dracula to cyborgs, ‘monster’ is a cultural construction, a humanly-produced non-human. This seminar invites scholars to discuss the monster both as a literary figure and as the representation and construction of a cultural and political identity. Through this, it aims to explore the question of where, why, and how monsters are produced, and what these monsterized creatures "show" about the communities that "produce" them.