theory

In keeping with the presidential theme of the 2026 MMLA Conference, “After the Archives,” to be held in Chicago from November 12-14, 2026, papers that incorporate and/or interrogate the archives are welcomed for this year’s panel on American Literature before 1870.

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.

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

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.

Though getting it together may signal a practice of spontaneous collectivity, “get it together” is also a gendered command—one which affiliates a performance of femininity with certain aesthetic expectations and demands the unbounded work of love, care, and social reproduction. How do we understand the aesthetics of femininity in a moment where feminism has been defanged of its oppositionality, when it functions as an alibi for the tide of fascism in the form of TERFs and girlbosses? Everyday injunctions toward norms of femininity appear in the form of “Get Ready With Me” videos, Planned Parenthood’s decision to offer Botox, ceaseless trend cycles, and the normalization of weight loss medication, with Serena Williams as its icon.

Abstract

“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” claims Percy Bysshe Shelley at the end of his well-known essay A Defence of Poetry, based on the idea that poetry is connatural with the origin of the human. Poetry is one of the most prestigious genres in the literary tradition, if not the most. Whether we go back to its public and ritual function in shamanic chants or in Homeric epic, or we think of its circulation in multimedia formats on digital consumption platforms on the internet, poetry has existed both as an artistic mode of verbal language and as a literary genre that encapsulates the virtues of literature.

JFA Presents: The Ruthven Literary Bulletin – FOCUSED ISSUE CALL FOR PAPERS

Issue Editor: Elizabeth Schechter

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.

Extended deadline for Re-thinking Trauma: Cinema, Performance, and Mediation International Conference

Ekphrasis Center for Transdisciplinary, Liberal Arts and Creative Technologies Research Department of Theatre and Film, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania September 2–4, 2026

DEADLINE EXTENDED: May 1st, 2026

The Poetics of Liminality: The Poet and the State

Consciousness, War, Exile, and the In-Between

Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association (RMMLA) 2026
Conference Dates: October 8–10, 2026
Location: Marriott Courtyard, Ogden, Utah

Contact: stacy.stingle@gmail.com

The Charles Olson Society will sponsor panels at the Re-Viewing Black Mountain College Conference, to take place in Asheville, North Carolina, October 2-4. 2026 marks the Centenary of poet Robert Creeley’s birth, and the Charles Olson Society will welcome abstracts pertaining to any aspect of Creeley’s life and work. Creeley was a central poet in the development of Black Mountain Poetry, and along with his life-long friend and companion in verse, Charles Olson, Creeley greatly influenced the development of American poetics after World War II. As he said, “I write to realize the world as one has come to live in it, thus to give testament. I write to move in words, a human delight. I write when no other act is possible.”

Call for Papers

ATHE Theory & Criticism Graduate Student Essay Contest 

The ATHE Theory & Criticism Focus Group seeks papers for its annual Graduate Student Essay Contest. The contest presents an exciting opportunity for an emergent theatre and performance studies scholar. It introduces the winning writer to the ATHE conference and provides them with a venue in which to showcase their work. 

The contest prizes are intended to support the development of the student’s academic work, ease financial challenges related to conference attendance, and connect the student with appropriate scholarly resources for the paper’s development and impact.