international conferences

Calling all children's literature scholars! The Children's Literature panel at the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association conference is accepting papers until June 30th or when the panel is filled. PAMLA will meet November 20th-23rd in San Francisco. To submit a paper visit the online PAMLA portal and create an account: https://pamla.ballastacademic.com/

Bulletin on 10 June 2025: Final Week to Send Abstracts! Second Keynote Speaker Confirmed.

The Department of Communication at Saint Louis University’s Madrid, Spain campus announces an upcoming international, interdisciplinary conference that examines change from a wide panorama of angles.

The conference will take place across Thursday and Friday, 2-3 October 2025 on the SLU-Madrid Campus, close to central Madrid (seven metro stops from Puerta del Sol).

We invite abstracts of 250 words, plus up to six key words, by 15 June 2025. Decisions to invite candidates will happen shortly after the due date to assure adequate time for participants to make travel plans as needed.

Thinking of the Children: Book Bans, Censorship and Literature for Young People An online conference hosted by the University of Münster
11-12 February 2026

In January 2025, just four days into the new Trump administration, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights announced that they had ended the so-called “Book Ban Hoax” by dismissing 11 pending civil rights complaints related to book bans in public schools and eliminating the position of Book Ban Coordinator – a position created by the Biden administration to address intellectual freedom violations in schools and federally-funded institutions.

Ekphrasis, the verbal representation of visual representation, is one of art’s oldest preoccupations. Over the past decade, we have seen a rise in both ekphrastic poetry and visual art that responds to poetry. Concurrently, there has been a new wave of interest in the efficacy and function of ekphrasis, that focuses on its role as a type of creative practice and a way of thinking through aesthetic judgement. Despite all this activity, no formal consideration of the field of ekphrasis itself has emerged. As such, we are holding a cross-disciplinary symposium on contemporary ekphrasis called ‘Ek’.

4th Annual Conference

February 19–20, 2026
UC Irvine

Keynote Speaker:
Junyoung Verónica Kim, New York University

Early Career Publishing Workshop:
Tina Chen, The Penn State University

https://sites.uci.edu/globalasias/ga26/

EXTENDED DEADLINE: 8 June, 2025

Call for Papers

International and Interdisciplinary Conference "Games & Game Studies Beyond Postmodernism"

4-5 September, 2025

Call for Papers

Child's Play in Popular Culture: History, representations and consumption

PopCRN – The Popular Culture Network invites scholars to explore the diverse representations of childhood in popular culture at a virtual symposium to be held online on 30 April – 1 May 2026.

From dolls and board games to digital playgrounds and interactive media, the concept of play has been a defining aspect of childhood across cultures and historical periods. Popular culture has both shaped and been shaped by children’s play, reflecting broader societal values, anxieties, and technological advancements.

Call for Papers

“Living in a Material World”: The 1980s in Popular Culture

PopCRN (the Popular Culture Network) will be holding a free virtual symposium exploring the 1980s in popular culture to be held 26-27 November 2026.

The 1980s was the decade of excess, technological innovation, and political upheaval. This conference aims to explore both the popular culture of the 1980s and how the 1980s have been depicted in the popular culture of other eras.

The 1st International Symposium on Archipelagic Studies ‘The Island and the Archipelagic Dimension’, to be held at the University of Madeira from the 23rd to 24th of October 2025, aims to reflect on issues of insularity and archipelagos in the conception of today's world, marked by environmental crises, new trends in human development and reinterpretations of place and its dynamics.

CONGIST’26Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Crisis 

Date:  13-15 May 2026

Venue: Istanbul University, Faculty of Letters, Istanbul, Turkey

https://congist.istanbul.edu.tr/en/content/congist-2026/call-for-papers

Kingston School of Art, Kingston University, September 11th and 12th September, 2025

Historical Fictions Research Conference, Erlangen (Germany),

19th-20th February 2026

Call for Papers

Deadline: 1st September 2025

Submission Form

Main theme: “Listening to Each Other’s Voices”

Sapphic Echoes: Representations of Female Desire in Litererature and the Visual Arts

This panel asks questions and invites responses that explore representations of female love and desire in literature and the visual arts. How have the complex poetics of female love and 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?