popular culture

About the Conference
In light of our deeply polarized times, the American Academy of Religion, Western Region (AAR/WR) invites scholars, practitioners, educators, and community leaders to submit proposals for its Annual Conference. This year's theme is Moving Beyond Boundaries and Silos Toward Interconnection. It reflects AAR/WR's foundational commitment to inter-religious, inter-disciplinary, and inter-generational dialogue.
 

The International Journal of Young Adult Literature is accepting proposals for a guest-edited special section for our 2027 issue (Volume 8). We particularly encourage researchers working beyond Anglo-American young adult literature and/or working outside of the UK and US to submit proposals.

Proposals should be sent to ijyal@roehampton.ac.uk by 31 July 2026. 

I seek proposals for brief scholarly essays (3500-5000 words) that provide an overview of a chosen aspect of motherhood in the American imagination for a volume under contract with a new Bloomsbury series called Exploring the American Imagination: Ideals, Values, and Myths in Popular Culture. 

These overview essays should cite a number of popular culture texts to provide an overview of the tensions and contradictions as well as the foundational beliefs inherent in various aspects of American motherhood. Essays should cover multiple genres (film, fiction, television, graphic novels, music) and a broad time period. These are overviews or research starters rather than narrow analyses.

GIANT MONSTERS ALL-OUT ATTACK: Kaiju Culture in the Twenty-first Century

Edited by Alex Adams, independent scholar

As more and more women's stereotypical images are distributed via digital networks, active counter-activism via digital networks is an urgent need in a post-truth media environment. In the age of audio-visual curation, the cultural narrative has been traditionally controlled by state and corporate power, while today, opaque automated content moderation, algorithmic sorting and filtering, and platform capitalism of transnational streaming networks dominate the scene.

2026 Imagining Creative Worlds Online Symposium, 11–12 November 2026

We invite proposals for 2026 Imagining Creative Worlds, an annual online symposium in the Common Ground Imagining Futures Series, taking place 11–12 November 2026.

The symposium brings together scholars, researchers, artists, designers, educators, publishers, museum professionals, media makers, and cultural practitioners working across creative fields and practices. We welcome proposals that explore how creative worlds are made, shared, interpreted, circulated, and transformed.

For 2026, The Arts in Society Research Network serves as the host Network, helping shape the symposium’s emphasis within the wider theme of Imagining Creative Worlds.

This panel proposes a revaluation of boundary-making between early modern and modern generic and affective registers in South Asia. While there is a consensus that genres of composition and cultural sensibilities did not change radically with the coming of print—“print did not so much produce new books as more old books” (Blackburn, 2002)—the precise sites of continuity/rupture differed widely based on the region and language in question.

58th NeMLA Convention
Newport, RI

Format: In Person Only

This panel builds off feminist science fiction studies’ investigation of the role of gender in speculative texts by expanding the field of inquiry to the role of nonbinary characters and even nonbinary worldbuilding in contemporary speculative fiction. It asks how both science fiction as a genre and feminist science fiction as a field have transformed with the emergence of new gender subjectivities. How do these fictions empower trans and nonbinary communities?  How must the methodological tools for studying SF change to meet this moment?

The phrase “Publish or perish” resonates for far too many faculty and staff in higher education. It’s all a matter of timing: finding the right topic, the right publication or publisher, and the right time. When it comes to the art of the edited collection, you can create an opportunity for yourself and other contributors to synthesize the collective’s ideas and expertise for the betterment of readers. This roundtable will provide a platform for contributors and editors to discuss how they synchronized diverse perspectives, managed the evolution of themes, and navigated the practicalities of peer review and publisher expectations.

Who owns mythological creatures? What do they do in modern literature? Based on the reemerging prevalence of mythological influences in popular culture – cf. Madeline Miller, Jennifer Saint, Rick Riordan, etc. – it can be read that monstrosity is having a cultural renaissance and reimagining. With new interpretations and uses of mythology, what happens when a lens of modern feminist or queer theory is applied to these stories?

Gothic Nature is a peer-reviewed, open access journal that engages with the Gothic conceptions of, and relationship to, the natural world. For the TV and film review section of its sixth issue, the journal seeks reviews for ecoGothic television series and films released in the last couple of years (2023–2026). Issue VI of the journal is unthemed, so there is no restriction on the types of film and TV we’d like reviews for. As a general guideline, we’d be interested to see reviews of the following (please note that this is not an exhaustive list, reviews of other relevant films and programmes are more than welcome):

Film:

Workshop: ‘The Cultural Imaginary of the Cambridge Spies’

18 September 2026

The National Archives, Kew, London, UK

As part of the AHRC project ‘The Afterlives of the Cambridge Spies’ (2026-8), we will be holding a one-day workshop exploring the extensive cultural impacts of the Cambridge Spies. This will be an in-person event hosted by The National Archives, in Kew, London, on the day of 18th September 2026.

NeMLA's 58th Annual Convention March 6-9, 2027 | Newport, RI 

The Teaching with Media and Technology session welcomes proposals on any topic related to the use of media and technology in any modern language, composition, or literature classroom. Papers that engage with this year’s conference theme, "Our Ruling Classes: Culture, Power, Conflict," are welcome but not required.  PAMLA's annual conference is being held in Seattle, WA, 12-15 November 2026. 

 For submissions and more information, please visit https://pamla.ballastacademic.com/Home/S/20030