Call for Papers

Biography, Autobiography, Memoir, and Personal Narrative

Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)

2026 SWPACA Summer Salon

June 25-27, 2026

Virtual Conference

https://swpaca.org/

Submissions open on March 30, 2026

Proposal submission deadline: April 27, 2026

Time, Memory and Forgetting in the Western

Two-Day Symposium | 10–11 September 2026 | University of Essex, UK

Deadline for submissions: 30th April 2026

To submit: 250 word outlines for all submission types via email to richard.parker@uc.cl

“There will come a time when you believe everything is finished; that will be the beginning.”— Louis L’Amour, Lonely on the Mountain.

ROUNDTABLE: Writing Communities in and Beyond the Classroom (PAMLA, Seattle, Nov 12-15, 2026)

Deadline for Proposals: May 15

This roundtable revisits writing as a fundamentally social, collaborative, and democratic act at a time when many writers and students experience it as isolated, pressured, and increasingly mediated by technology. Beyond offering emotional and peer support, writing communities in classrooms, online and social spaces, and professional and informal networks shape how writers see themselves, understand their audience, engage in metacognitive practices, and take creative and intellectual risks.

Call for Papers Ecofeminist Drama: Theatre, Performance, and Ecological Futures

Edited by Douglas A. Vakoch and Işıl Şahin Gülter
Under review with the University of Illinois Press

Global Cinema Symposium

Organized by the Harry W. Bass Jr. School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology

 
Nov. 13-14, 2026

In-person at the University of Texas at Dallas

Keynote Speakers:

Professor Katarzyna Marciniak, Occidental College

Professor Meta Mazaj, University of Pennsylvania

Call for Papers

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.

The everlasting debates surrounding the relationship between literature and film as distinct mediums of artistic expression have long fascinated both philosophy and critical theory. While proponents of cinema argue that cinema is superior to other forms of artistic expression, especially literature, in the sense that it has a unique ability to engage emotions, convey abstract concepts in tangible settings, and challenge, what Gilles Deleuze might call, human “sensory-motor” perception through cinematic techniques, others might disagree by saying that cinema is inferior to literature due to its passive nature and over-reliance on immediate sensory experience rather than intellectual abstraction, which is one of the major characteristics of literature.

Deadline Extension: We are happy to announce that we continue to accept submissions until April 10, 2026. You may find further information on our website: www.thescatteredpelican.ca

this is for an in-personal panel for the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA) conference (in-person only), which is taking place in Seattle, WA November 12-15, 2025. 

Abstract

To be published in the world of contemporary creative writing likely means passing through one exclusive gate or another—even writers once able to make it through are losing access. What are these publishing gates, and who are their keepers? What are they trying to keep in—and out? Perhaps more productively, how might those of us who are passionate about creating a progressive, inclusive, and radical body of literature break down—or go around—or ignore those gates of exclusivity and begin to build new, ungated communities?

Description

Prosperity Fashion 
INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE 
9-12 February 2027
Università degli Studi di Firenze
Florence, Italy

Dowload the call for papers here https://riviste.fupress.net/index.php/fh/prosperity-fashion-2027 

The theme of beyond archives is an interesting one for a discipline that relies heavily on existing sometimes still only physical collections. This panel invites papers that explore any aspect of the archive in Old and Middle English literature.

International conference co-organized

with the French School of Athens

From imagination to remains, from remains to imagination: literary representations of ancient Greece in its materiality (14th-19th centuries)

February 25-26, 2027 at the French School of Athens

This special session invites papers on zombies and the undead as figures through which literature, film, television, games, and popular culture imagine power, hierarchy, and social conflict. In keeping with PAMLA 2026’s theme, “Our Ruling Classes: Culture, Power, Conflict,” this panel explores how zombie narratives dramatize the fragility of social order, the failures of ruling elites, and the tensions between collective survival and unequal power.

The volume Women's Autobiographies and Memoirs 1920-2025: Precarity, Resistance and Selfhood attempts to look into the dialectics of identity and writing - the compulsion to respond to the other inhabiting the self, which provokes in her something peculiar and singular - a text of one's own. The self-authenticated narratives are often haunted by many an unsubduable voice that breaks open the self-centred finitude of living and dying.

Call for Papers

ATHE Theory & Criticism Graduate Student Essay Contest 

The ATHE Theory & Criticism Focus Group seeks papers for its annual Graduate Student Essay Contest. The contest presents an exciting opportunity for an emergent theatre and performance studies scholar. It introduces the winning writer to the ATHE conference and provides them with a venue in which to showcase their work. 

The contest prizes are intended to support the development of the student’s academic work, ease financial challenges related to conference attendance, and connect the student with appropriate scholarly resources for the paper’s development and impact. 

Translational Research and Teaching: Bridging Knowledge, Practice, and Community October 29-November 1, 2026 Panama City, Florida 

Hosted in partnership by Florida State University, Florida A&M University, and the University of Mississippi 

The Association for Interdisciplinary Studies (AIS) is pleased to invite proposals for our 48th annual conference. AIS 2026 focuses on the theme of Translational Research and Teaching, exploring interdisciplinary work that bridges the gap between researchers, educators, practitioners, and community partners.

Call for Chapter Proposals: Tana French and Ireland Deadline for abstract submissions:May 1, 2026 Deadline for paper submissions:November 1, 2026 contact email:escheible@bridgew.edu Popular genre fiction offers an influential platform for the critique of Irish cultural containment and the victimization of women. Despite commercial dominance, genre fiction holds a complicated position in the literary marketplace, which carries over to scholarly appraisals.

The Call for Papers of the academic journal The Grove. Working Papers on English Studies for its following volume is open until May 31, 2026. Volume 33 will be published in December 2026.

The Grove is a peer-reviewed, indexed periodical. Published annually and distributed both nationally and internationally, The Grove is sponsored by the research group HUM-271 of the Regional Andalusian Government, published by the University of Jaén (Spain).

The primary scope of The Grove is literatures in English, critical theory, English language and linguistics, translation, English as a foreign language and cultural studies.

Queer Heroes and Queer Villains

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

“Literary texts are not, of course, merely passive conduits. They actively shape what the technologies mean and what the scientific theories signify in cultural contexts […] culture circulates through science no less than science circulates through culture.” (Hayles How We Became Posthuman 21) We can expand this view beyond science and technology. All aspects of human cultures circulate in artistic productions, most notably in prose fiction, and in return, fiction has the potential to influence cultures and to inspire innovations.

Call for Papers

Digital & Analog Cultures

Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)

2026 SWPACA Summer Salon

June 25-27, 2026

Virtual Conference

https://swpaca.org/

Submissions open on March 30, 2026

Proposal submission deadline: April 27, 2026

This roundtable, inspired by the 2026 PAMLA conference theme “Our Ruling Classes: Culture, Power, Conflict,” invites short (5-minute) presentations on possible approaches and challenges to teaching figures who have been rejected by cancel culture for their harmfully dated representations of marginalized figures and communities or their creators’ mistreatment of other people or toxic attitudes: writers like Mark Twain, Vladimir Nabokov, and J.K. Rowling; filmmakers from Alfred Hitchcock to Woody Allen; and performers like Kevin Spacey and Louis C.K. Possible approaches might include: