SAVE THE DATE

Alternative Endings:
A Symposium Celebrating the 30th Anniversary of Cheryl Dunye's The Watermelon Woman

October 17, 2026

Northwestern University--Downtown Campus
Chicago, Illinois

Join scholars, filmmakers, artists for a one-day symposium commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of Cheryl Dunye's groundbreaking film The Watermelon Woman.

The symposium will feature:

• A special panel showcasing previously unreleased alternative endings from the film, with commentary from invited scholars.

• A luncheon bringing together contributors to the film, panelists, and local Black women filmmakers.

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
Things Left Unsaid: A Flash Fiction Anthology

Silence. Regret. The conversation that never happened.

Submission Deadline: August 20, 2026
Acceptance Notifications: August 25, 2026
Submissions: specialanthologyfreshwordsmag@gmail.com
Website: https://sites.google.com/view/freshwordsmagazine/announcements

There are things we meant to say. Words swallowed before they could land. Letters never sent, calls never returned, confessions rehearsed in the dark and abandoned by morning.

In the wake of ecocriticism and environmental humanities, the blue humanities have emerged as a field of study that emphasizes the centrality of aquatic environments in understanding interactions between humans and nonhumans. This interdisciplinary field, which initially grew out of Anglophone literary criticism, proposes to shift our terra-centric perspective by adopting the seas and oceans as a new vantage point to rethink our understanding of both the planet and literature (Klein, 2002; Blum, 2008; Bailyn, 2005). Originally developed in the United States within the field of Oceanic studies (Blum 2010; Cohen 2010; Mentz 2009), the “Blue studies” have since expanded and become increasingly decentered and diversified.

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS — Mini Plays Review | September 2026 Issue 

Theme: Echoes of the Digital Age

This issue explores how human connection, conflict, identity, and memory are being rewritten in a hyper-connected yet deeply isolated world. We are looking for sharp, short scripts that capture the friction between our physical lives and our digital existence.

Subthemes for Submission:

• 1. Phantom Vibrations: The psychological weight, anxiety, or obsession of waiting for a notification that never comes.

Concept Note

Two-Day International Conference (likely to be ICSSR Sponsored) on  “Loss of Indigenous Knowledge in the Age of Digital Humanities: Preservation, Power, and the Politics of Representation” (Hybrid Mode)

Soapbox 8.0: call for papers

Ways of Structuring

peer reviewed; open to critical and artistic work. 

If structures are determinate and determining, as they have come to seem through the interventions of poststructuralist theory, then ‘ways of structuring’ names a contradiction.  The plurality of ‘ways’ sits in tension with the fixity of ‘structure,’ evoking the very qualities of contingency and flexibility that the concept seems to negate.  For this upcoming issue, we welcome academic and artistic contributions that explore this tension.

The Southeastern Renaissance Conference (SRC) invites submissions for presentation at our 83rd Annual Meeting, which will be hosted by the University of Tennessee Knoxville and its Marco Institute, to be held from Friday, October 23 to Saturday, October 24, 2026.
The organizers will consider papers on any topic related to the Early Modern / Renaissance period.

In keeping with the presidential theme of the 2026 MMLA Conference, “After the Archives,” to be held in Chicago from November 12-14, 2026, papers that incorporate and/or interrogate the archives are welcomed for this year’s panel on American Literature before 1870.

Futures and Frontiers of US American Culture(s) International Conference

30 September – 2 October 2026

John-F.-Kennedy-Institut für Nordamerikastudien, Freie Universität Berlin

Keynotes: Jenny Stümer (Universität Heidelberg) | Dan Hassler-Forest (Utrecht University)

Acceptance/rejection will be communicated shortly after the extended deadline has passed.

Throughout the history of political thought and cultural production, multitudes and mobs that stir up disturbance across the nation, whether revolutionary or reactionary, have frequently been portrayed by the images and metaphors of monstrosity. From the many-headed hydra which was adapted into a political discourse in the early modern age and later revisited by historians such as Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, to contemptuous terms toward the insurrectionists such as swarms or locusts described in Samuel Dolbee’s Locusts of Power, monstrosity and various of dehumanizing terms have long been employed as a signifier through which fears of insurrections are expressed.

Mediapolis – A Journal of Cities and Culture is an interdisciplinary open access online journal, drawing a connection between culture and the built environment – understood in the broadest sense. We publish research in different forms, from research articles to Q&A interviews and readings list, and across different academic fields, including but not limited to media studies, urban studies, geography, architecture and art history as well as digital humanities. 

Keynote speaker: Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (Central Michigan University)

May 20-21st 2027, University of Zadar (Zadar, Croatia)

CONFERENCE

2026 PAMLA Conference, taking place November 12–15 at the Hyatt Regency Seattle

SESSION/PANEL ABSTRACT

The British Women Writers Association (BWWA) seeks organizers for our
2028 conference and beyond, both in the United States and abroad. The
BWWA’s mission is to bring women from the margins to the center of
literary history by promoting scholarship on and the teaching of long
18th-and 19th-century British women writers in diverse global and
cultural contexts. In practice, the conference invites papers
addressing women’s writing as early as 1660 and as late as 1920,
inclusive of the work of transatlantic and Anglophone authors.

5th Annual UC Irvine Global Asias International Conference

February 18–19, 2027
UC Irvine

Keynote Speaker:
Paul Nadal, Princeton University

Early Career Publishing Workshop:
Tina Chen, Penn State

CFP: https://sites.uci.edu/globalasias/ga27/
Proposal Form: https://bit.ly/ga27cfp/

CALL FOR PAPERS

‘The pluralism of a postcolonial or decolonial philosophy of religion should be “on both ends” of the discipline; that is, both the phenomena and subjects considered and contemplated by the discipline should be diverse, but also the people, perspectives, and methods engaged in this project should come from diverse backgrounds—not only in terms of race, class, gender, geography, etc. but also in terms of ritual practice, training (both academic and otherwise), initiation or membership in tribes, societies, or “religious” traditions.’

—Oludamini Ogunnaike, “Expanding the Menu or Seats at the Table? Grotesque Pluralism in the (Post)Colonial Philosophy of Religion.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 89, no. 2 (2021): 734.

Fantasy has long explored lifeworlds and paradigms outside of societal norms. Orlando, Virginia Woolf’s gender-fluid protagonist, declares, ‘I'm sick to death of this particular self. I want another.’ World myths, legends, folk tales, and fairy tales are early promoters of gender-fluidity, populated by the likes of Inanna/Ishtar; Hermaphroditus, the offspring of Hermes and Aphrodite; androgynous Dionysus; Ardhanarishvara; Ometeotl; Guanyin; cross-dressing thunder and trickster gods; heartsick seafaring maidens disguised as sailors; and the mercurial ontologies of the Fae. In this issue we will explore how gender is portrayed and explored in Fantasy.

An interdisciplinary space for critical reflectionThe Social Contract in Dispute: Discourse, Legitimacy and Transformation  

Living in a context of intense political tensions and polarisations that threaten how society is organised and the fundamentals of democratic legitimacy, the 28th International Meeting of Research and Investigation (EIRI) is dedicated to reflecting on the social contract and its contemporary transformations.

Call for abstracts - Forward Thinking: New Voices for the Future

In an era marked by ecological breakdown, epistemic instability, and widening global precarity, the very notion of “the future” has become a site of intense conceptual struggle. We invite scholars carrying out visionary work across the humanities — philosophy, literary theory, political thought, cultural studies, and related fields — to articulate bold and innovative interventions on what it means to think futurity today. 

Agricultural and Rural Development in the Twentieth Century
Yearbook for the History of Global Development

Volume co-editors Leo Chu (University of New South Wales) and James Lin (University of Washington, Seattle)

The 123rd Annual Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA) Conference will take place this November in Seattle, Washington, from November 12-15.

Our panel will focus on American Literature from 1945 to the present. The category of “literature” includes imaginative works (fiction, poetry, drama) but also essays, memoirs, or creative nonfiction. This session investigates texts that are written by American-identifying authors, composed by writers in the US, or address American life.

University of Chicago | November 5–7, 2026 When we trace the genealogy of crisis, it can seem as if we’ve always been surrounded by catastrophe. Different factions of the ruling class tell us that we need to be prepared, but also that preparation may be fruitless. Crises shift and expand, strengthening their hold on us through their very instability. The state of emergency, after all, “is not the exception but the rule,” as Walter Benjamin theorized. It is not a single event but what Lauren Berlant called a norm “embedded” in the everyday.

[please note the updated conference date and timeline]

National Video Games: Cultures, Industries, Communities
international conference

4–6 December 2026
University of Warsaw, Poland

Just a quick update regarding the Society for Utopian Studies conference, November 12-14, 2026, in Portland, Oregon. Please see the following link for further information: https://utopian-studies.org/conference2026/.

 -The deadline has been extended to July 15, 2026. -We are thrilled to announce our two keynote speakers: