professional topics

We are excited to share with you all on behalf of the Conference Planning Committee for the University of Connecticut First-Year Writing Program that we are holding our 21st Annual Conference on the Teaching of Writing on Thursday, April 23, and Friday, April 24, 2026, on our campus in Storrs, CT. Our theme for the upcoming conference is: “Wicked Reading for Wicked Problems." As those who have collaborated with us in the past, we are once again inviting you to help us explore ways of approaching these 'wicked problems', such as those that evade consensus, offer multiple solutions, or may even resist resolution at all.

This session will be devoted to academic novels and academic administration. Panelists will consider what these novels (as well as television and films centered in academia) have to say about how higher education institutions are run, and what we might learn about how—and how not—to run them. Equally interested in literary studies (genre, form, representation) and Critical University Studies (history, politics, current events).

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.