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FAQ changelog |
The 98th annual SAMLA Conference is taking place Thursday, November, 5, through Saturday, November, 7, 2026, at the Wyndham Atlanta Buckhead Hotel & Conference Center in Atlanta, GA. For more information, see https://southatlanticmla.org/.
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.
Cuteness is a twenty-first-century sensation—from the global expansion of Sanrio fandom to the rise of social capital around Labubu and Jellycat, from K-Pop stars (real or animated) to cute animals like the quokka and Fennec fox. This issue explores a “cuteness turn” found in many public realms around the world. The adoration of attractive or cheerful objects associated with childishness and youthfulness is part of the human experience. However, this issue does not examine cuteness as a transcultural aesthetic or psychological condition, but we focus on its larger political implications. Throughout history and around the world, this “universal” sentiment has often been manipulated for commercial and ideological purposes.
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
About the Book
Indian Cultural Heritage: Perspectives is an edited volume that invites interdisciplinary scholarship on the diverse and dynamic dimensions of India's cultural heritage. The volume welcomes original contributions exploring tangible and intangible heritage, indigenous knowledge systems, languages, literature, folklore, performing arts, architecture, material culture, cultural memory, museums, heritage conservation, digital heritage, and contemporary issues of identity, sustainability, and cultural preservation. By bringing together diverse academic perspectives, the volume seeks to advance critical understanding of India's rich cultural traditions and their continuing significance in a rapidly changing world.
Nineteenth-century British literature frequently interrogates the boundaries of community dynamics, examining not only what the individual contributes to a collective and what it means to belong, but how communal engagement fundamentally reshapes the individual.
Consistent with the NeMLA 2027 theme, "Empowering Communities," this panel explores a vital dual imperative within the nineteenth-century British novel: the structural tension between individuals whose actions serve to empower their communities, and communities that conversely function to shield and empower otherwise fragile individuals.
6/26/26 - 8/31/26: Subs are OPEN for our big 10th Issue: A Day In The Life.
… um, like The Beatles’ song?
YES!
We’re interested in the ways in which art like this exists in the world — with such wildly different fragments and contrasting energies not just coming together but overflowing with a vivid, mad, inventive creativity! (We do like this song.)
So, do we want poems and artworks about this song, or pieces about The Beatles? NO!
When Henry James described the Victorian multi-plot novel as “large loose baggy monsters,” he didn’t have twentieth and twenty-first century horror in mind, but the echoing effects of the Gothic on writers like Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Charles Reade, and others. These writers drew on the multiplied plots and perspectives of the Gothic to represent how social worlds were constructed and constrained.
Location and Date: May 20-23, 2027 University of Houston
In-person and Virtual: This panel will meet in-person
Intimately Disconnected
4-5 December 2026 (Friday and Saturday)
The University of Sydney
Public understanding of American cultures—peoples, neighborhoods, languages, foods, histories, arts, religions—has always been vulnerable to myth and misinformation, in particular from the far right. Collectively the humanities work to establish an ever-more accurate/inclusive lens on culture, but the (re)mainstreaming of far-right voices has dangerously distorted the diverse American story.
Call for Chapters
CFP: Handbook of the Cultural Legacy of 9/11. (under contract with Springer)
Edited by:
Marc A. Ouellette, Old Dominion University, (mouellet@odu.edu) and Peter Pericles Trifonas, University of Toronto
Comics and Graphic Narratives
PAMLA 2026, Seattle, November 12-15
https://www.pamla.org/pamla2026/
Extended deadline: 30 June 2026
Between Screens: Video Games, Film, Television and Transmedia Exchange
Edited by Dr Michael Samuel and Dr Richard Cole
Adaptation is a dialogic process, a creative exchange across content production and context rather than an attempt at fidelity. Recent trends in adaptation studies reflect this complexity. Videogames exist within a vast ecosystem of transmedia storytelling and experiences, yet scholarship on adaptation and video games remains limited.
Call for Papers
Genre and Genre Fiction in the Twenty-First Century
University of Basel
May 14-15, 2027
In this modern moment, there have been a myriad of proposals exploring the contours of “speculative fiction”—be that social, environmental, &c. This session seeks to deconstruct the ways in which the speculative shapes the contours of the “real” or realized. Though sensationalization can be found in works of fiction, the threads of one’s reality—intersectional as it may be—provides a rich narrative that encourages further exploration and the fears provided in what we would safely relegate to fiction. However, there remains a “seeping out” of those fears that can eerily be represented in the real world.
NeMLA
58th Annual Convention, Newport, RI March 6-9 2027
CALL FOR PAPERS
Jokes in Dark Times: Humor, Crisis, and the Postdigital Public Sphere
Panel Chair: Ana León-Távora
Virtual session
Hosting Identity: Boundaries, Bodies, and Belonging in Popular Culture
Who—or what—do we let in?
This panel invites papers that examine how identity in popular culture is shaped through the logics of hospitality: encounters structured by thresholds, boundaries, and negotiations of belonging. From the body to the home to the platform, popular media repeatedly stages identity as something that must be received, managed, or refused.
This panel explores how multimodal science fiction and fantasy pedagogies invites student engagement, retention, and career readiness across disciplines. Building on research demonstrating that storytelling supports the retention and transfer of knowledge, the panel argues that speculative and multimodal teaching practices create immersive learning environments that connect imagination to real-world application.
As Jacques Derrida asks in Of Hospitality, “Must we ask the foreigner to understand us, to speak our language, in all the senses of this term, in all its possible extensions, before being able… to welcome him into our country?” (15). Derrida’s question is rooted in the conception of the foreigner as the cultural, and important to this panel, the spatial other. Coming up on America’s 250th anniversary, this question is particularly fruitful when considering the environment of the United States; historically (i.e. Indigenous land theft and mistreatment, slavery, capitalist implementation) and contemporarily (i.e.
Call for Chapters
Horror has long been described as a genre about the unknown — the thing lurking just beyond the edges of civilization. But as Stephen Graham Jones (Blackfeet Nation) has written, horror uniquely allows "two timelines — the past and the present, the legacy of colonialism and the world of the story — to simultaneously exist. Not just exist, but intersect."[1] It is this capacity for temporal and cultural intersection that has made horror and the Gothic not merely accessible to Indigenous writers, but essential.
This accepted panel for NeMLA 2027 (March 6-9, 2027. Newport, RI) seeks to investigate works of American drama that engage deeply with other (possibly more canonical) American plays. Engagement is defined broadly and might include subtle evidence of influence, extended allusions, plays within plays, or outright sequels, prequels, and revisions of earlier works. Also welcome are examinations of how American plays appear in pop culture texts like TV shows.
From its founding ideals framing rights as tied to individuals to many of the ‘myths that made America,’ such as the self-made man, ideas of individualism are deeply entrenched in the culture of the United States. Yet at the same time, the US has also always understood itself as a particular community: as a city upon a hill, a melting pot, a more perfect union. As such, the United States has been established on a seeming paradox, forming ‘out of many, one.’ More recently, this previous consensus has become increasingly brittle, with fragmentation, polarization, hyper-individualism, and loneliness on the rise—as some would argue: again.
CFP NEPCA Monsters & the Montrous Area 2026 - UPDATED DEADLINE
The Monsters & the Monstrous Area of the Northeast Popular Culture Association (a.k.a. NEPCA) seeks proposals for inclusion in NEPCA’s 2026 annual conference.
The event will run as a virtual conference from Thursday, October 15th, through Saturday, October 17th. Virtual sessions will take place via Zoom throughout the day on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Registration will open up in mid-July. The registration fee is expected to be around 50 USD.
The Cultural Translation and Mobility: Processes, Spaces, Objects Working Group invites proposals for a panel titled “Planetary thinking at the intersections of cultural translation and mobility“ as part of the Canadian Association of Cultural Studies Biennial Conference (hybrid), November 5-7, 2026, hosted by the Cultural Studies Department, Trent University, Canada.
Theme: Hip Hop and Rap Conference
Tentative date: November 19-22
Location: Houston, TX
Award for best presentation
Scholarship for top scholars
Global and Intersectional Framings of Disability in Comics & Graphic Narratives
Edited by Crystal Yin Lie (California State University, Long Beach) and Kai Qing Tan (Ghent University; Aachen University)
Er(r)go. Theory – Literature – Culture
Next Issue – 55 (2/2027) – game/play/idleness
submission deadline: 15 September 2026
Green Day has often been treated as a problem in the “longview” of punk: too popular, too melodic, too commercial, too successful. Green Day and the Politics of Pop-Punk starts from the opposite assumption. Green Day matters precisely because the band’s career makes it impossible to separate punk from the mass-cultural conditions it has so often claimed to resist.