translation studies

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.

Abstract

This session invites papers exploring the role of affect and emotion in contemporary world literature. Recent developments in affect theory—particularly the work of Sara Ahmed and Lauren Berlant—have emphasized how emotions circulate across individuals, communities, and cultural contexts. Literary texts offer a powerful site for examining how affect shapes narratives of identity, belonging, and social transformation within global and transnational frameworks.

54th Annual Conference on South Asia, October 28-31, 2026

English Language Notes (ELN) Call for Papers 

“Global Queer and Trans Class Relations” 
 

A special Issue of English Language Notes (ELN), Vol. 65, No. 2 (October 2027) 

Edited by Matt Brim and Emmanuel David 

Submissions due September 1, 2026 

CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS 

35th International Conference Virginia Woolf 

Open Forum “Virginia Woolf: Sound and Rhythm in Translation”, Istambul, Jun 24-Jun 28, 2026

Update: We are currently working to transform this forum into a hybrid format. When submitting your proposal, please indicate whether you would prefer to participate in person or online.

The LSL Language Change Forum invites proposals for the following panels at the 2027 MLA Annual Conference in Los Angeles:

Empowering Language Change

This guaranteed panel invites papers examining how linguistic changes enable—and emerge from—emancipatory practices across spoken, written, digital, pedagogical, and/or related contexts.

Listening to Language Change: Evidence of Emancipation

This guaranteed panel invites papers examining how emancipatory movements become visible through linguistic changes—historically, contemporarily, or in imagined futures—across disciplines.

In recent years, critiques of human exceptionalism and extractivism have prompted scholars to reconsider the role of translation as a communicative practice capable of engaging with nonhuman voices. Dominant strands of Western thought, from Descartes to Heidegger, have long reinforced the perceived superiority of humans over other forms of life and expression. Challenging this hierarchy requires not only rethinking human–nonhuman relations but also reconsidering how communication itself is understood within translation studies.

In a world increasingly marked by geopolitical strife, cultural polarization, and digital fragmentation, literature continues to stand as one of humanity’s most profound instruments for fostering peace, empathy, and human solidarity. From ancient oral traditions to contemporary narratives, literary expression has served as a repository of shared human experience—preserving collective memory, resisting violence, and envisioning alternative futures grounded in compassion and coexistence. The pursuit and preservation of peace have remained among the fundamental purposes and aesthetic aspirations of literature since antiquity.

BABEL AFIAL journal. Dept of English, French and German, University of Vigo, Spain. Call for Papers for No. 35, Special Issue: “BABEL/S IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: LINGUISTIC AND LITERARY NEGOTIATIONS, CULTURAL (MIS)ENCOUNTERS AND TEXTUAL VARIATIONS IN THE ANGLOPHONE WORLD”. Deadline:  31 March 2026. Contact info: babelafial@uvigo.gal. Journal info (both English & Spanish versions) at: https://revistas.uvigo.es/index.php/AFIAL/announcement/view/38

On Sean Bonney: Poetic Radicalism at the Turn of the Third Millennium

A two-day international conference to take place at

Université Paris Cité

10th and 11th of December, 2026

Organising committee:

Bastien Goursaud (Université de Picardie – Jules Verne)

Andrew Hodgson (Université Paris Cité)

Abigail Lang (Université Paris Cité)

Elise Legal (Université Paris 8)

Sean Mark (Université Catholique de Lille)

If literature has long played a central role in defining what it means to be human, posthumanist thought urges us to reconsider that definition in the face of unprecedented technological, ecological, and cultural transformations. Rather than announcing the ‘end’ of the human, posthumanism interrogates the category itself, foregrounding humanity’s entanglements with other species, material environments, and technological systems. In doing so, it challenges human exceptionalism and exposes the historical contingency and political implications of the ‘human’ as a normative construct.

Title: Witness, Voice, and Agency: Chinese Poetry as Emancipatory Narrative

This panel explores how Chinese poetry, from classical to contemporary, functions as emancipatory narrative across historical periods, aesthetic forms, and sociopolitical contexts.

We welcome papers that examine how poets articulate conditions of constraint while imagining, inhabiting, or enacting liberatory possibilities. Possible topics include, but are not limited to: 

Migrating Minds: Journal of Cultural Cosmopolitanism (ISSN 2993-1053) is a peer-reviewed, open-access scholarly journal devoted to interdisciplinary research on cultural cosmopolitanism from a comparative perspective. It provides a unique, international forum for innovative critical approaches to cosmopolitanism emerging from literatures, cultures, media, and the arts in dialogue with other areas of the humanities and social sciences, across temporal, spatial, and linguistic boundaries.

CFP - MLA 2027, "Translation as an Emancipatory Practice in Italian Literary and Cultural History”

Roundtable Sponsor: Forum on 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-Century Italian