professional topics

This roundtable considers positive solutions in the face of disappearing positions and programs, and declining academic freedoms. Successful approaches to reversing this trend desired. We must work together to resist. ~200-word abstracts. ~100-word bios.

Deadline for submissions: Wednesday, March 11, 2026

E. Nicole Meyer, Augusta U (nimeyer@augusta.edu)

Throughout its consolidation as an academic discipline, museum studies have tended to gravitate around major national and international museums, their emblematic collections, and the management models they have established as standards. These institutions, mostly located in urban centers and supported by solid structures of funding, research, and public outreach, have shaped a “canon” that has influenced not only academic agendas but also collective imaginaries about what a museum is (and what it should be).

Date of Conference: 23-25 April, 2026

Deadline for Abstract Submission: 24 March 2026

Online, international, interdisciplinary conference titled:

(In-)Visible Wounds: Interdisciplinary Perspectiveson Discrimination and Violence

Call for Proposals
MLA 2027 (Los Angeles)
Special Session

We are proposing a special session for the 2027 MLA Convention in Los Angeles on "Edited Collections: Tips and Tricks to Successful Publishing." This special session will be a roundtable featuring six presenters with the following format: 

Fat has been ever-present in public imagination in various forms. Fat is perceived as a

public enemy and “demonized in medicine and public policy” (Blank 2020). It is “adored by chefs

and nutritional faddists, desired and abhorred when it comes to sex, and continually courted by a

multi-billion-dollar fitness and weight-loss industry” (Blank 2020). Yet, ‘Fat’ as an area of

academic research has remained remarkably underdeveloped in the Humanities and Social

Sciences domain. Only recently, it has emerged as a vibrant interdisciplinary field that interrogates

Call for Participants: Medieval Studies, Leadership, and Public Humanities Advocacy
MLA 2027 (Los Angeles)
Forum: French Medieval Language and Literature
Roundtable Session

Call for Chapters

Over the past 10–15 years, children, adolescents, and youth worldwide have lived through overlapping emergencies: the COVID-19 pandemic; intensified border regimes, migration control, and detention; racialized and colonial state violence; war and occupation; environmental disaster; and the erosion of social and educational safety nets. These crises shape not only early childhood, but also adolescent identity formation, schooling, embodiment, political consciousness, and future-making. 

Since September of 2025 the English Department at Carnegie Mellon University has housed a new publication called The Pittsburgh Review of Books (or PRoB), available at http://www.pghrev.com

Edited by author and Public Humanities Special Faculty Ed Simon, PRoB is a home for engaged, creative, and interdisciplinary cultural criticism and analysis across the humanities. The tone of the publication is similar to other para-academic publications intended for both specialists and a general audience. Currently we are particularly interested in analysis that intersects with breaking news that can be produced by scholars quickly.

The Margaret Fuller Society invites proposals for a panel at ALA 2026 about teaching in difficult times. As we head into the spring 2026 semester—the mid-point in an academic year when students and educators read U.S. literature amidst rising book bans, closing degree programs and DEI offices, and even the dismantling of the Department of Education—many of us are facing existential crises about how to do what matters to us most. How to support our students? How to sustain our disciplines? How to teach in ways that do justice to our subjects? The most basic day-to-day parts of our teaching lives have never felt more vulnerable—or more urgent.

INTERNATIONAL PSYCHOHISTORICAL ASSOCIATION’S 49th ANNUAL CONFERENCE

 MAY 29-31, 2026, VIRTUALLY ON ZOOM

THEME: Breaking Cycles of Violence: Psychohistorical Perspectives on Individual and Collective Healing

What Is This Conference About?

How do we break the cycles of violence — within ourselves, our families, and our societies — that perpetuate suffering across generations? What can psychohistory contribute to understanding and transforming these deep patterns? The 2026 IPhA Annual Conference invites scholars, clinicians, educators, and activists to explore these vital questions from both individual and collective perspectives.

Penn State’s Center for American Literary Studies presents

Urgent Lessons from Antifascist Works of American Literature and Culture

Friday, December 12, 2025, Noon—1:00 p.m. EST via Zoom

 Register here

https://psu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_QD77CICpR267kwXJgIB56g

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email

The 37th Society for Animation Studies Conference will take place in the city of Pittsburgh (USA) from June 15 to 18, 2026 (with optional excursions to follow on June 19-20). It will be hosted by the Pennsylvania Expanded Animation Alliance (PA XAA), a consortium of faculty from local universities (including Carnegie Mellon University, Point Park University, Robert Morris University, and the University of Pittsburgh) in concert with the Children’s Museum Pittsburgh. The event will also be hybrid, with additional details to follow. 

We are soliciting chapter proposals for an edited volume titled “Documentation of/as Violence.” In this volume, we seek to explore how documentation, or the lack thereof, can function in capacities that both enforce and protect against violence. We understand documents, and documentation, through two primary functions: surveillance and preservation. The collection of materials capturing violence enacted upon marginalized communities, as well as how the practice of documentation itself can be a violent action of surveillance experienced by marginalized communities complicate the function of representation in library and archival collections. 

Announcing

The 2026 First Book Institute

May 31-June 6, 2026

Hosted by the Center for American Literary Studies (CALS) at Pennsylvania State University

Co-Directors

Priscilla Wald, R. Florence Brinkley Distinguished Professor of English, Duke University, and Co-Editor of American Literature

Sean X. Goudie, Director of the Center for American Literary Studies and Past Winner of the MLA Prize for a First Book