theory

University of Siedlce

Institute of Linguistics and Literary Studies

and

University of the Balearic Islands

Faculty of Philosophy and Art

would like to kindly invite all scholars from across the Humanities to take part in the

11th Annual Siedlce Forum for Contemporary Issues

in Language and Literature

Call for PapersLiterature-General Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA) 2026 SWPACA Summer Salon June 25-27, 2026Virtual Conferencehttps://swpaca.org/Submissions open on March 30, 2026Proposal submission deadline: April 27, 2026 Proposals for papers are now being accepted for the SWPACA Summer Salon. SWPACA offersnearly 70 subject areas in a variety of categories encompassing the following: Film, Television,Music, & Visual Media; Historic & Contemporary Cultures; Identities & Cultures; Language &Literature; Science Fiction & Fantasy; and Pedagogy & Popular Culture.

Edited by Giannis Stamatellos and Thorsten Botz-Bornstein

Pluribus (stylized as PLUR1BUS) is an American post-apocalyptic science fiction television series created by Vince Gilligan. It premiered on in November 2025, and a second season has been ordered. 

Humanity is infected by an extraterrestrial virus and has muted into a peaceful and happy “Hive Mind.” The Hive is the shared consciousness of the infected people. However, 12 people are immune and not affected by the virus and react in various ways to the new reality.

The short story has proven to be fertile ground for writers seeking to interrogate what the act of recording lives and the search for meaning entails, often through imagined renderings of the machineries of archive. In works such as Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Library of Babel,” Danilo Kis’s “The Encyclopedia of the Dead,” and Ivan Vladislavic’s “The Loss Library,” for example, writers engage with “the forces that govern preservation and erasure” in line with this year’s MMLA convention theme. 

This panel seeks papers that consider how these and other concerns find expression through the short story form.

The way our current globally interconnected and digitally enabled capitalist formation continuously reshapes itself to reinforce categories of class and overarching capitalist structures requires analyses that engage and critique these adaptive forces of capital. Responding to this need, this seminar seeks to examine the relationship of texts to a global capitalist economy by asking how class and capitalism function within and exert force upon texts and their contexts—in film, literature, art, video games, social media, and other extratextual spaces such as fan sites. In concert with this year’s theme, we also invite examinations of representations of the capitalist ruling class and the material and ideological effects of these representations.

estrema: interdisciplinary journal of humanities, a digital and open access journal from the Centre of Comparative Studies, at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Lisbon (CEComp-FLUL), has an open call for submissions for the 1st issue of its 5th volume, until June 9th 2026. The previous issue featured reflections around the theme of Speculative Fiction. In 2026, we are launching estrema’s first call for papers specifically oriented towards the potentialities of art and images in technical contemporaneity.

shooting

1. the action of filming or photographing a scene, film, etc.

The ongoing developments in artificial intelligence and machine learning automation announce an imminent technological revolution like nothing we have ever seen. Our relation to traditional labor markets, artistic creation, and modes of education has already been drastically disrupted and will potentially change even more. It seems that we are witnessing the dawn of a new age in which human intellectual and productive capacities are outsourced to machines and human connection is mediated by algorithms in digital spaces.

For the 2027 Modern Langauge Association Convention, the MLA Committee on Disability Issues in the Profession welcomes papers about:

• disability restricting ascent within social or academic hierarchies
• anti-hierarchical thinking in literature portraying disabled people
• representations of disabilities according to an imagined hierarchy

Please submit a 300-word abstract and CV to: Cassandra.falke@uit.no

Speaking of the agency of nature is now common practice. The biosphere is recognised as being life sustaining and its vitality essential to human existence. Following thinkers such as Felix Guattari, nature has also been recognised has having subjective qualities, inseparable from the meaning and values humans attribute to life and the visions we conjure of what constitutes a just and habitable future. The philosophical legacy of Immanuel Kant looms large over this aesthetic terrain, notably his work on the beautiful and the sublime, which still compels us to consider the complex relationship between humans and life-world systems.  

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 We are particularly interested in pieces by scholars that analyze or contextualize breaking news - be it political, cultural, or social events - that can be published quickly. 

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. 

By the time he passed away at the age of 90, British filmmaker Peter Watkins had cemented his legacy as one of the preeminent media scholars of the late-20th and early 21st centuries. Over the course of eight decades, Watkins’ oeuvre represented unrelenting interventions in an industry that was repeatedly acquiescing to the profit motive. Among the themes explored in the director’s work are war (The War Game) and revolution (La Commune). Within these films, his most common approach was the pseudo-documentary. This format helped Watkins combat what he viewed as the passivity that was the dominant mode of discourse in media.

"Digital Memory and the Translation of World Literature"

Conference organized by the American Comparative Literature Association
Official Seminar organized by The ICLA Translation Committee
To submit a proposal, please follow the link:
https://www.acla.org/seminar/fde38874-a710-4e69-b62e-f169ab7f722e

Venue: VIRTUAL 2027 Annual Meeting

15-16 May 2027, Virtual

In-Person Seminar at American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) in Houston, TX, May 20-23, 2027.

American Literature Association

May 26-29, 2027

Boston, MA

Roundtable on James Finley’s Abolition and the Rise of US Environmentalism

The Thoreau Society seeks papers for a roundtable on James Finley’s recently released Abolition and the Rise of US Environmentalism: The Literature and Politics of Free Soil (University of North Carolina Press, 2026). Papers may respond to or extend Finley’s book in part or in whole, and may include topics such as:

-Abolition and environmentalism

-The Free-Soil movement

-Settler colonization and abolition

-Racial capitalism 

-Abolition then and now