twentieth century and beyond

Call for Papers

During our sixth annual online event, we will discuss 'making, remaking, and limitations' in festive, celebratory, and ritual cultures. Our questions are: How and why do people continue to make and remake culture? In what ways do they experience limitations when making and remaking culture, if any? What is the significance of the making and remaking of culture and whom is it for?

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The peer-reviewed, online and open access journal Studies in Testimony is currently accepting submissions on an on-going basis. The call for submissions is intentionally broad in nature, allowing for submissions that look at emerging areas of academic interest, in addition to those of continued and lasting relevance from a wide range of academic disciplines including, but certainly not limited to, literature, critical theory, history and psychoanalysis.

Subject areas could include, but are not limited to:

“Not to be made happy is to refuse the promise of this conversion. Not to cheer is to withdraw from the situation. Not being in the mood for happiness becomes a political action. And you know what: I am not in the mood.” – Sara Ahmed, “Too Much and Not in the Mood” 

“I laughed a little. I didn’t mean to, but unsure of what kind of face I should be making, I started laughing, in an odd way that betrayed the fact that I was used to living my life in a daze, without giving anything much thought.” Meiko Kawakami All the Lovers in the Night

We invite abstracts for a Special Session (non-guaranteed) at the MLA Convention to be held in Toronto, Canada, from January 8-11, 2026.

In our daily lives, we frequently encounter terms like "culture," "cultured," "high-cultured," "low-cultured," and "uncultured." We often hastily label individuals based on their appearance or social status; for instance, a shabbily dressed person or a homeless individual might be instantly deemed "uncultured." Certain activities, such as traditional children's games like using a gulti (slingshot) to collect mangoes, playing hopscotch, or spinning tops, are sometimes dismissively categorized as pastimes of the chotolok or lower classes.

Corporate Fictions

Across the novel, theater, film, and television, and across genres and modes, the corporation has served as a key setting for fictionalizations of modern life. This panel aims to create an intermedial, intergeneric, and historically comparative conversation between literary and literary-minded scholars interested in the corporation as a representational content and form. Paper foci could include:

Edited Collection: Haunted by Hydrocarbons: Petrogothic and Petrohorror in the Contemporary Imagination

Deadline for proposal submission: August 31, 2025

Editors: Madalynn L. Madigar (Cherokee Nation, University of Oregon), Jennifer Schell (University of Alaska, Fairbanks)

Contact Email: mmadigar@uoregon.edu, jschell5@alaska.edu

For this edited collection, we invite proposals for essays that focus on and engage with petrogothic and petrohorror, emerging fields that examine the textual artifacts of hydrocarbon cultures through the lens of gothic and horror studies.

XXVIII AISNA Biennial Conference

“Facing West: Thinking, Living, Outliving the American West”

(Bergamo, Italy, 11-13 September 2025) Deadline: February 28 2025

Panel 5

Coordinators: Tadeusz Pióro (University of Warsaw), t.t.pioro@uw.edu.pl Daniela Daniele (University of Udine), daniela.daniele@uniud.it

Avant-garde Poets of the San Francisco Bay Area. Their Lives, Works, and Film Portraits

CALL FOR PAPERS: James Baldwin Review

Modern Language Association

2026 MLA Convention

January 8-11, 2026

James Baldwin and the Reproduction of Racial Capitalism

Social domination, as exerted and felt through the categories of race, class, sex, and gender, finds itself expressed in and through James Baldwin’s work, often unevenly, subject to the peculiarities of his historical moments. Both Baldwin and his interpreters can be seen to elevate one vector of domination in racial capitalist modernity over the others, or forget one at the others’ expense, obscuring our vision of such domination and our capacities for struggling against it. 

CFP Contemporary Feminism and the Politics of Emotion

Proposed Panel Submission for NWSA 2025    Conference dates: Nov. 13th-16th, 2025

Submission Deadline: March 15th

This is a call for proposals to participate in a proposed panel at MLA in Toronto in January 2026.

Higher education had three socially pertinent effects in previous eras of capitalist development. It: offered graduates a pathway to upward mobility; conferred a “stake” in normative society such that graduates could “buy into” the dominant economic systems from which they stood to benefit; and was an incubator for mass social and political movements such as the 1960s student movement.

But much recent fiction evinces a change in attitudes to university – a weakening of the assumption that higher education is a pathway to social mobility for the individual and social justice/progress for the collective.

DEADLINE EXTENDED TO MARCH 15 2025

IAAS Annual Conference
Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin

24-26 April 2025

Conference Theme: “We the People”

CALL FOR PAPERS

“It is certain in Theory, that the only moral Foundation of Government is the Consent of the People. But to what an Extent Shall We carry this Principle?”—John Adams, 1776

 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF DELEUZE(NESS)

International symposium

18-19 September 2025

National Gallery of Art, Konstitucijos pr. 22, Vilnius

CALL FOR PAPERS

MLA 2026 (Guaranteed Session)

Toronto, January 8-11, 2026

Generous Modernisms