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CRITICAL MYSTERY STUDIES
An Interdisciplinary Symposium
Call for Papers
In-Person + Online
The University of New Mexico
November 16-17, 2026
Co-Organizers: Matthew David Goodwin, Sarah Hernandez, Nahir Otaño-Gracia
Seminar at the Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA)
University of Houston, Houston, Texas
20–23 May 2027 — in person
Marginalised women in South Asia are read for what was done to them, far less often for what they made. This seminar asks what comparative literature can do about that.
Since the publication of Derrida's Specters of Marx (1993) and the resulting growth of Spectrality studies in the past twenty years, much attention has been devoted to literary works that portray a spectral entity that reconfigures the more traditional gothic vision of the ghost, especially in Western Literature. However, in recent years, literary works and scholars alike have responded to this Western bias by envisioning Hauntology as a method for recuperating the stories of marginalized groups. In this view, spectrality can also be employed as a metaphor for social invisibility, a model first expanded by Esther Peeren and Maria Blanco.
War does not end; it migrates even after the guns fall silent, crawling into bodies, landscapes, archives, and the grammar of storytelling itself. This seminar inquires into how societies of South Asia and the Middle East, so often positioned as sites of conflicts rather than as theorists of their aftermath, have produced their own vocabularies for narrating what survives war. Michael Rothberg (2009) argues that memories of distinct historical violence do not compete for scarce recognition but can be mutually constitutive.
Concept Note for Call for Papers LAW, LITERATURE, LANGUAGE, AND CULTURE: EPISTEMOLOGIES OF JUSTICE
Background
LAST CALL! EXTENDED DEADLINE! This panel examines how writers challenge dominant structures of authority in/through narratives of sexual violence. Legal and cultural frameworks often dictate how sexual violence is recognized, narrated, and believed, shaping whose stories are legible and whose are dismissed. This session explores how survivors and writers resist these constraints through alternative narrative strategies, fragmentation, silence, poetic form, visual storytelling and more. It attends to how narrative operates as a site of power, shaping not only representation but the conditions under which sexual violence is acknowledged, legitimized, or denied.
Jordan Peele transformed the horror genre with his film Us, specifically with the creation of “The Tethered,” subterranean clones that are forced to mimic the lives of the people who live on the surface like stringless puppets. Whether intentional or not, Peele not only created a unique horror concept but a metaphor that can explain the everyday terrors experienced by many.
Jordan Peele’s Us is a critically acclaimed horror original about government-manufactured clones that are forced to mimic the lives of the people who live on the surface like stringless puppets. While Peele focuses more on a physical tethering, there is a psychological tethering that can be gleamed from this piece, specifically as it relates to the idea of double consciousness. In his work “The Striving of the Negro People,” W.E.B. Du Bois describes this idea as “this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt or pity.
Call for Papers
Claflin University Conference on Languages and Cultural Studies (In-person on the campus of Claflin University) *
October 21-22, 2026
THEME: CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE TEACHING IN HIGHER EDUCATION AND SECONDARY SCHOOLS
*(Participants not residing in the United States and those unable to travel may request a virtual option)Scholarly and creative writing panel proposals, roundtable proposals, and paper abstracts on all aspects of reading, writing, and teaching modern languages are invited including papers and panels on
Beyond the Ocean: Maritime Infrastructure and Hydro-Narratives of Indians under the Raj (Tentative Title)
Concept Note
The imperial ships of the British Raj bore millions of Indian migrants across waterways just the way Charon ferried souls across the river Styx to an irreversible fate. Nonetheless, the Indians transformed the vicious vessels into spaces of radical rebirth and enduring kinship.
CFP: “Bookstore Communities”
Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) annual convention
Newport, RI
March 6-9, 2027
In keeping with the NeMLA 2027 theme of “Empowering Communities,” the purpose of this panel is to explore the role of bookstores in imagined, fictional spaces. What does a bookstore signify? What’s the symbolic difference between a bookstore and a library? How do fictional bookstores create and foster community? What magic, literal or figurative, is inherent in a shop that sells physical, printed texts? What do these commercial spaces represent as far as identity, belonging, or culture?
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.
A Volume
Editors
Dr Swastick Sen Chowdhury
Assistant Professor & Head in the Department of Economics, Bhatter College, Dantan (Autonomous)
Dr Supratik Guha
Assistant Professor, Department of Economics at Shahid Matangini Hazra Government General Degree College for Women
To be published under the book series
About the Volume
Inspired by the emptiness of the National Mall celebration of America’s 250th, we invite 300 word abstracts that consider enclosure and vacancy in Americana and its related aesthetic categories, like the Western and Southern Gothic.
Presenters might engage with a variety of fields, especially black, feminist, and indigenous studies, and take up media across time periods, including contemporary art by Bisa Butler and Jeffrey Gibson, Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter, Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, Aleshea Harris’ Is God Is, and many more.
https://mla.confex.com/mla/2027/webprogrampreliminary/Paper36527.html
The advancement of artificial intelligence has transformed humanities research and education, deepening computation’s influence on scholarly practice and everyday life. From the early era of “humanities computing” in the 1970s to the rise of “computational humanities” over the past decade, this trajectory highlights the enduring—and expanding—role of computation in shaping inquiry across the humanities. These intersections are especially visible in interdisciplinary work. As T. S. Eliot observes, “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” The same spirit can illuminate how methods and tools migrate across fields.
CFP: 3rd International Interdisciplinary Conference of the Department of English, University of Zululand and the Department of English and Literary Studies, Federal University Wukari, Nigeria
28-30 September 2026
Ongoye, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
Re-imagining Language, Writing, and Literature in English in a Fast-Changing World
Dystopian fiction is having a moment. Classic dystopian fiction like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1986) have renewed relevance since the election of Donald Trump in the U.S., while more recent novels like Ali Smith’s Gliff (2024), Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song (the Man Booker winner in 2023), and John Lanchester’s The Wall (2019) describe worlds sliding into totalitarianism post-Brexit. This panel seeks to raise questions about how contemporary Anglophone speculative fiction addresses the current cultural moment and issues like artificial intelligence, immigration and the internet’s dissolution of privacy. Formally, how do 21st century dystopian novels connect science fiction with realism? With magical realism?
Call for Book Chapters
Expected Publisher: De Gruyter Brill (Scopus Index)
Recovering Marginalised Theatre, Folk Epics and Songs beyond Literary Canons
Kashyap Deepak
Mahatma Gandhi Central University
Call for Papers
Literary Friends and Rivals: Hospitality and Literary Networks in Spain and Latin America
98th South Atlantic Modern Language Association (SAMLA) Convention
Thursday, November 5 - Saturday, November 7, 2026
Atlanta, Georgia
American Comparative Literature Association 2027 Annual Meeting
University of Houston
May 20-23
The Poverty of Literature
Organizer:
Gabriel Quigley, University of Victoria (gabrielquigley@uvic.ca)
Haryanvi Dalit theatre occupies a highly marginalised position within the broader landscape of Indian theatre. It may aptly be described as “the marginalised among the marginalised,” as it has remained largely excluded from both mainstream theatre studies and Dalit cultural historiography. Haryanvi Dalit Swang theatre was active long before the Dalit Panther Movement, but it received little attention due to its lack of publication and translation into English. This book seeks to recover, document, and critically examine the neglected legacy of Haryanvi Swang, with particular emphasis on its Dalit traditions and practitioners, thereby contributing to a more inclusive understanding of Indian theatrical heritage.
Conference: 2-4 December 2026
Gdańsk (Poland) and online (via Zoom)
Conference online: 27-28 August 2026 (online)
CFP:
The twenty-first century is continuously defined by geopolitical shifts, armed conflict, environmental precarity, and evolving border regimes, within which migration operates as a critical locus of global transformation. This physical transgression of geopolitical boundaries inevitably instigates a profound restructuring of individual and collective subjectivities. Literature functions as a dynamic repository for these complex trajectories, articulating the psychological, political, and cultural exigencies of displacement and resettlement.
The Postcolonial Literature and Culture session invites submissions that explore postcolonial literature, art, film, or culture. We specifically welcome papers aligned with the conference theme, “Our Ruling Classes: Culture, Power, Conflict,” although the session is open to any projects engaging with postcolonial texts.
The Postcolonial Literature and Culture session invites submissions that explore postcolonial literature, art, film, or culture. We specifically welcome papers aligned with the conference theme, “Our Ruling Classes: Culture, Power, Conflict,” although the session is open to any projects engaging with postcolonial texts.
Potential areas of focus include, but are not limited to:
Concept Note:
Storytelling, from the metamorphic narratives of the Indian epics such as the Mahabharata and the Ramayana and Ovid’s ancient transmutations to the evolving interfaces of the present, has been an act of survival through transformation. Metamorphosis is the underlying imperative of the twenty-first century; it is not just a biological inevitability but a relentless ontological pulse beating beneath the surface of our global narratives. We inhabit a world amid a grand moulting, where the traditional mediums of storytelling, like the printed page, the physical body, and the ancestral soil, are being reshaped under the pressures of a planetary crisis.
Public Humanities is an international open-access, cross-disciplinary, peer-reviewed journal at the intersection of humanities scholarship and public life.
The journal invites submissions for the upcoming issue, Musical Commemorations and Contestations in Postcolonial Contexts, which will be guest edited by Bart Paul Vanspauwen, Ana-María Alarcón-Jiménez, and Livia Jiménez Sedano.
Deadline for submissions: 1 February 2027
Description
Panel: Ecocriticism (standing session) co-sponsored by ASLE
PROPOSAL SUBMISSION DEADLINE: Sat July 25, 2026
Submission link: https://pamla.ballastacademic.com/Home/S/20212.
Conference: Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA)
Conference Theme: "Our Ruling Classes: Culture, Power, Conflict”
Location and Date: Seattle, Washington (USA), Nov 12-15
How do postcolonial literatures imagine hospitality in a world shaped by colonial histories, forced migration, displacement, and contested belonging? This panel invites papers that examine the ethics and politics of hospitality through postcolonial, diasporic, and transnational literary and cultural texts. Moving beyond hospitality as a simple act of welcome, the panel seeks to explore its tensions, contradictions, and possibilities: Who is welcomed, excluded, or rendered perpetually a stranger? How do migration, exile, memory, language, and cultural difference reshape notions of home, community, and kinship?
The Text, an International Peer Reviewed Online Journal of Language, Literature and Critical Theory (ISSN: 2581-9526)invites original, unpublished research papers for January 2027 issue.
Indexed in:
1. Google Scholar
2. ERIH PLUS (European Reference Index for the Humanities and Social Sciences)
3. IAMCR (International Association for Media and Communication Research)
4. Citefactor (Directory Indexing of International Research Journals)
5. DRJI (The Directory of Research Journal Indexing)