popular culture

Deep Cut Magazine, an independent literary magazine, is seeking academic articles on horror for its inaugural issue, to be published December 2026. Academic work will be published alongside original fiction and reprints (by invitation) in an open-access electronic magazine.

While the focus must be on some element of horror as a genre, the scope of the call is purposefully broad: research may focus on literature, film, popular culture, gender studies, history, and more. Interdisciplinary approaches are strongly encouraged.

New Perspectives on Creature Features (additional chapters)

Edited by

Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns (Universidad de Buenos Aires)

2026: 09-15-26: CFP Holy Grail, Batman? Expanding Knowledge of the Grail Legends in Popular Culture (Online) (9/15/2026; ICMS Kalamazoo/Online 5/13-15/2027)

Holy Grail, Batman? Expanding Knowledge of the Grail Legends in Popular Culture (Online)

62nd International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University (Kalamazoo, MI), Thursday, 13 May, through Saturday, 15 May, 2026

Co-sponsored by Alliance for the Promotion of Research on the Matter of Britain, Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture

The rise of the superhero is one of the most significant cultural developments of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Since the debut of Superman in Action Comics #1 (April 18, 1938), superheroes have evolved from colorful comic-book figures into powerful global symbols that shape conversations about politics, morality, identity, technology, gender, race, mythology, trauma, and resistance. What began with the imaginative vision of Jerry Siegel (writer) and Joe Shuster (artist) has expanded into a worldwide phenomenon spanning comics, film, television, literature, gaming, digital media, and academic discourse.

Now We Are Six at One Hundred: Affect, Atmosphere, and Ordinary Feeling in A. A. Milne's Hundred Acre Wood

Edited Collection for the Children's Literature Association Series: Centennial Studies

Call for Abstracts

In 2027, A. A. Milne's Now We Are Six reaches its centenary. This is the second collection of children's verse and the third book in the Pooh sequence, following When We Were Very Young (1924) and Winnie-the-Pooh (1926). It contains 35 poems, all illustrated by Ernest H. Shepard. Unlike the prose Pooh books, it is a collection of self-contained poems. The poems move between several interconnected worlds:

Nonfiction film and media have played a crucial role in advocating for animal welfare, rights and liberation. Although short videos and a number of documentaries were produced and distributed with activist purposes during the 1980s, it is during the so-called “documentary renaissance” of the early twenty-first century, together with the communicative advances of digital media, that nonfiction moving images emerged as a medium capable of reaching more mainstream audiences, becoming  a central cultural tool for instigating transformative change in humans’ speciesist practices and attitudes toward nonhuman animals.

Fostering Interpretive Communities in the Classroom and Research through Adaptation Studies (Roundtable) (Virtual) 

Co-organizers Michael A. Torregrossa and Carl B. Sell

Sponsored by Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture

Call for Papers - Please Submit Proposals by 30 September 2026

58th Annual Convention of Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)

Salve Regina University (Newport, RI)/Online.

Hybrid event: 6-9 March 2027

                                                           Call for Chapters

            The Routledge Handbook of Hip Hop and Sport, Culture, and Activism

                       Date Extended till August 30, 2026

Faster than society gathers wisdom: Video games and/as speculative Fiction

(McFarland, Studies in Gaming Series)

 Editor:

 Marc A. Ouellette, Old Dominion University (mouellet@odu.edu)

Concept Note:

Storytelling, from the metamorphic narratives of the Indian epics such as the Mahabharata and the Ramayana and Ovid’s ancient transmutations to the evolving interfaces of the present, has been an act of survival through transformation. Metamorphosis is the underlying imperative of the twenty-first century; it is not just a biological inevitability but a relentless ontological pulse beating beneath the surface of our global narratives. We inhabit a world amid a grand moulting, where the traditional mediums of storytelling, like the printed page, the physical body, and the ancestral soil, are being reshaped under the pressures of a planetary crisis.

A quarter century has elapsed since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, both the successful ones targeting the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the unsuccessful one targeting the Capitol.

This panel session seeks to explore the cultural fascination surrounding "The Backrooms," an internet 'creepypasta' about an abandoned office building with endless corridors that became a popular YouTube series and most recently, a blockbuster horror film. What are the Backrooms? Do they represent an artificial or alien intelligence attempting to simulate reality? Are they a glitch in the imperfect fabric of an unstable universe? Are they a metaphor for the subconscious, techno-paranoia, wasteland necrocapitalism, corporate control, or the internet itself? Or is this all just a retelling of the Greek myth of the Labyrinth for a Gen Z audience?

Special Issue: ‘Cowboy Carter: Reimagining the American West through Fashion, Music and Performance’

Guest editors:

Elizabeth Kealy-Morris, Manchester Fashion Institute, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK

Sonya Abrego, Fordham University, USA

Robb Hernández, Fordham University, USA