theory

PAMLA Seattle (2026) - November 12-15, all in-person conference 

2027 marks the centenary of US American poet and Pulitzer Prize-winner, Galway Kinnell (1927-2014). This session seeks to celebrate his life and legacy while pointing to future thematic and prosodic engagement in Kinnellian studies. Papers offering approaches to any aspect of Kinnell’s work are invited and most welcome.

This session aims to celebrate a century of Galway Kinnell. 2027 marks what would have been his 100th birthday and suggests a critical time for both introspection as well as re-evaluation of his life and literary accomplishments. Participants in the panel will also be invited to contribute to an edited compendium.

AbstractThis session welcomes contributions on the topic of literary, philosophical, or intellectual influences between any of the members of the Inklings, especially between J.R.R. Tolkien and Owen Barfield, and the robustness of those claims. Verlyn Flieger’s assertion in Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien's World, that the languages of Middle-earth developed just as Barfield says human languages do in real life, is perhaps the model of influence, and is well known, respected, and analyzed. But Flieger's argument remains almost entirely circumstantial.

“Rhetorical Theory” (Standing Session)
Seattle, WA, Nov. 20-23
Chair: Dr. Ryan Leack (USC)
Email: leack@usc.edu

Abstract

This panel will explore recent movements in rhetorical theory writ large, either in connection with or apart from composition theory and practice. Special attention will be given to proposals that engage with the conference's theme.

Description

CALL FOR PAPERS

Send your abstracts to: congress@iasa-world.org by 31st May, 2026.

War Literature Today: Ecology, Violence, and the Novel

A special issue of Humanities (ISSN 2076-0787). This special issue belongs to the section "Literature in the Humanities".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 28 February 2027 | Viewed by 69

Disability and Horror: A Companion

Call for Chapters

We invite chapter proposals for an edited collection titled Metafictional Horror Cinema: The Screen as Mirror, to be submitted to the UWP Horror Studies series. The volume explores how horror cinema reflects on its own formal strategies, lays bare its narrative and technological mechanisms, and confronts viewers with unsettling modes of self-awareness.

The volume will explore the role of metafiction within horror cinema, from postmodern genre revisions and reflexive found-footage films to avant-garde and hybrid works that fracture narrative logic, collapse diegetic boundaries, break the fourth wall, or explicitly implicate the viewer in acts of spectatorship and violence.

Seeking on papers about opacity in contemporary literature and art for a panel at ASAP (Association for the Study of Arts of the Present) 2026 Convention. Please send an abstract and a short bio to Sané Bhattarai (bhattsan@gvsu.edu) or Moya (Moyang) Li (moyang.li@csulb.edu) by April 24.

How does the novel resist? Both as an action (movement, predicate) and as a form (structure, construction) how does the novel as a genre engage in resistance? Of what, too, is the novel resistant? Studies of the novel have long emphasized the genre’s capacity to control and coerce, as in the work of D. A. Miller and Nancy Armstrong, to name a couple. This panel instead invites papers that approach the novel as a resistant structure and a form of resistance. What might it mean to read the novel not as an instrument of control, but as a site of formal, aesthetic, or material resistance?

Theme: Interconnections between Utopia and Dystopia in Times of Crisis

Venue: Embassy Suites Portland Downtown (Formerly the 1912 Multnomah Hotel)

Proposal Deadline:June 30, 2026

Conference Co-chairs email: susprogramchair@gmail.com

Conference website: https://utopian-studies.org/conference2026/

The 123rd Annual Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA) Conference will take place this November in Seattle, Washington, from November 12-15.

The 2026 general article submission window will be open until the beginning of June 2026. Book review queries and submissions remain open throughout the year. If you passed your accessibility screening and are already in process of working with us for a creative think piece or essay, please remain in touch with the editor with whom you have been working.If you are submitting to JFA Presents: The Ruthven Literary Bulletin, follow issue-specific guidelines here or at the bottom of this page. Submissions for the focused issue will be open until June 2026 and acceptances will go out by September 2026.

What happens when cosmopolitanism no longer promises the world but reveals its limits?

Cosmopolitanism has long been associated with mobility, openness, translation, and coexistence across difference. In Asian literary and cinematic contexts, it has often been linked to port cities, diasporic networks, colonial encounters, and transregional circulation. Yet this cosmopolitan promise has never been equally available to all.

Literary Inspirations

(A Peer reviewed Journal of Research in English Language and Literature)

ISSN:3108-3269 (Print)

Call for Papers - Volume 2 (2026)

Guidelines for Contributors:

We warmly invite original, unpublished and high-quality scholarly articles in any area of English Language and

Literature, book reviews and creative writings for publication in the second volume of our journal . All submissions