popular culture

This creative session invites scholars, writers, and hybrid practitioner-theorists to explore liminal dialogue as a form of literary creation in which unlikely, displaced, or structurally incompatible voices are brought into conversation. Drawing on the centrality of dialogue in literary and dramatic traditions, this panel reimagines conversational form as a site of constraint-based experimentation, where meaning emerges through the collision of discourses that would not ordinarily coexist. Rather than focusing on artificial intelligence as a technological subject, this session treats AI-assisted generation as a formal device for producing estranged adjacency between voices, genres, and epistemologies.

CFP – “BLACK ESSAYSM: FORMAL EXPERIMENTATIONS IN BLACK CREATIVE/CRITICAL PRACTICES”

liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies 12, no. 1, Spring 2028

Guest editor: Walton Muyumba

Submissions due: January 30, 2027

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?

CFP Reminder:

Special Session: Cultural Patrimony in Wartime: Destruction, Protection, and the Question of Ruling Classes

123rd Annual Conference, Seattle, Washington / Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA)

Submission process:
Please send a 300-word abstract and a short bio (100 words) to amazuet@stanford.edu.

Final extended submission deadline: July 15, 2026.

Call for Abstracts/Chapter Proposals

SCREEN STORYTELLERS: The Works of Jaco Van Dormael

Edited by Albert Lee

Panel on Bill Lawrence for SCMS 2027 Since Spin City, the shows of Bill Lawrence have navigated the complexities of workplaces, friendships, grief and family. This panel intends to explore the Bill Lawrence universe from a diverse range of angles, with the overarching aim of seeing the series as part of a collective body of work. Papers are welcomed on Scrubs, Scrubs: The Revival, Rooster, Ted Lasso, Shrinking, Spin City, Cougar Town and Ground Floor.  Abstracts of no more than 250 words should be sent, with a 100 word bio to c.wilkins@bham.ac.uk by 20th July. 

Mid-Atlantic Popular & American Culture Association (MAPACA) 2026 Annual Conference, November 5-7, 2026 in Baltimore, MD

Call for Chapters
Edited Volume: Rethinking M.R. James: Antiquarianism, Horror, and the Supernatural

Editor: Dr. Sakti Sekhar Dash, Fellow of Social Science Research Council

Introduction

As we meet in Newport, an island at the edge of the Atlantic, this panel invites papers about ocean-based horror media. Oceans, seas, and other waterways have been central to human culture throughout history, offering both opportunities to build communities across the waves and the threat of lonely, painful death through drowning or isolation through shipwrecks.

This CFP seeks submissions for a Just-in-Time session proposed for the 2027 MLA conference.  If accepted, this panel will analyze the recent slew of literary and genre fiction about "trad wives." Caro Claire Burke's Yesteryear, Saratoga Sch