twentieth century and beyond

"Towards Theories of Character and Quirk in Eudora Welty's Fiction":

Panel at American Literature Association Annual Conference May 26-29, 2027 in Boston

Myth in Literature and MusicUniversity of Angers, France, 30 June – 3 July 2027

The Interdisciplinary Center for Research on Heritage in Arts and Languages (CIRPaLL) at the University of Angers is proud to host the 15th Conference of the International Association for Word and Music Studies (WMA) on Myth in Literature and Music from 30 June to 3 July 2027 at the Maison de la Recherche Germaine Tillionin Angers, France.

Marking thirty years since the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, often remembered in South Korea as the “IMF crisis,” this panel reflects on contested forms of Korean and Korean/American belonging in its aftermath. The IMF crisis was not only a national economic crisis that profoundly reshaped South Korea’s economy and social formations; it also precipitated movements of Korean people beyond their homes, producing family separation and forced movement. Nearly thirty years later, Korean diasporic cultural forms increasingly reckon with the crisis and its repercussions, with Min Jin Lee’s forthcoming novel American Hagwon (2026) also taking up this historical context.

Call for Abstracts 

K-Pop and Philosophy 

Edited by Catherine M. Robb, Natasha Haddal, and Gah-Kai Leung

The Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series 

In Asian context, the Cold War has not ended but became an ongoing structural condition that determines the social, political, and economic dimensions of everyday lives. The unresolved nature of the war has also left traces on a personal level, expressing through one's body, psyche, and their intimate relations. The Korean War (1950-present) as a proxy war between the two global superpowers, for example, has been continuing as manifested on multiple levels, and it keeps bringing back the traumatic past into the present while challenging the authoritarian interpretation of the war as "The Forgotten War". This session will discuss Cold War narratives that are written from the vantage point of those who have been living through the imperialist war violence.

Second newsletter by end of September, and conference panel plans soon, from a new scholarly society - SSUPFUS- for studying unconventional US fiction from the era usually called "postmodern" 

- sign up here - https://docs.google.com/forms/d/13ZGTYU1vgzj-WMtrtKIYkpE8I1FmYY_kZH0Sldnxbfo - and see below for more details...

The relation between a theory and its so-called “object” always poses the danger of reducing an art form (in this case film) to a mere instance testifying to the validity of the theory. In this way, the theory provides the “genus” of which a given film will be a mere “species”. The application of psychoanalytic ideas or Marxist concepts to film would therefore run the risk of depriving the specificity and singularity of the object in favour of the hegemony of the theory. Here, theory would truly live up to its theological vocation (the “theo” in theory refers to God) standing transcendentally above its “object” upon which it would cast its daunting shadow.

March 6-9, 2027
Newport, RI
Convention Site: Salve Regina University

On the occasion of the  135th  birth anniversary of Pearl  S. Buck, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1938), this international symposium seeks to revisit her life and  writings   from   the   perspective   of  exchanges   and   mutual   learning   among civilizations. Hailed as “the most influential Westerner to write about China since the 13th  century’s Marco Polo”, Pearl  S. Buck not only introduced Chinese literature and culture to global readers through her literary writings, but also participated actively in transnational   cultural   dialogue,   humanitarian   engagement,   and   the   shaping   of international understandings of China.

Call For Papers: 2027 ALA Symposium

“Music and the American Literary Imagination” 

January 28 – January 30, 2027

Hyatt Centric Downtown Nashville

210 Molloy Street

Nashville, TN   37201 

Bulgaria-based (or Bulgarian-abroad) scholars of literature, reading and/or writing in English, are invited to a one-day conference in Blagoevgrad on October 10th 2026, to present projects-in-progress to an audience of interested peers from around the country. 

Hosted at the American University in Bulgaria, by the Department of Literature, Theatre, and Film, the conference will provide a hub for colleagues from across the nation to gather together, showcase and discuss each other’s work in progress, and chart the future of English-language literary study in Bulgaria. Papers will be combined into themed panels, with plenty of time in each panel dedicated for questions, discussion, and feedback.

The Lives and Legacies of Medieval Comics: A Commemoration of Ninety Years of Hal Foster's Prince Valiant (Hybrid)

62nd International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University (Kalamazoo, MI), Thursday, 13 May, through Saturday, 15 May, 2026

Co-sponsored by Medieval Comics Project, Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture

Co-organized by Michael A. Torregrossa, Bristol Community College, and Carl B Sell, University of Pittsburgh

Rationale 

Editors: Dana Lee Baker and Matthew Mendez Garcia
Publisher: Edward Elger Publishing
Submission deadline for abstracts: 1 January 2027

We invite proposals for entries in an edited academic handbook on the politics of neurodiversity. This volume will bring together interdisciplinary perspectives on neurodiversity as a political, cultural, institutional, legal, and epistemic phenomenon.

Over the last two decades, we have seen a surge of scholarship at the intersection of Food Studies and New Materialist theory. Thinkers like Elspeth Probyn (2000; 2016), Jane Bennett (2010), Annemarie Mol (2021; 2024), and Kyla Wazana Tompkins (2024) explore the diverse ways in which edible matter acts on our bodies, wills, and dispositions, in multilayered entanglements that involve water, minerals, fungi, bacteria, plants, as well as human and nonhuman animals. These material-discursive networks urge us to rethink not only our notions of agency but also our ways of being, knowing, and relating.