The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association invites submissions for a Fall 2025 issue on the theme of “Health in/of the Humanities.”

“We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.” So reads an inscription on the tomb of the fictional author Kilgore Trout in Kurt Vonnegut’s 1973 novel Breakfast of Champions. While darkly serio-comic, the novel’s exploration of how “ideas or the lack of them can cause disease” raises genuine questions about the relationship between the humanities and health that inform the theme of the fall 2025 issue of the peer-reviewed Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association.

The song lyric occupies little space in academia, where it is less studied, less appreciated, and perceived as less-than other kinds of writing. Despite music’s ubiquitous cultural presence, the song lyric—as creative work—suffers from what renown songwriter Jimmy Webb calls a “status problem”: songwriters do not enjoy the same standing as writers of other kinds of traditionally studied literature. The most common way that song lyrics have earned scholarly attention is by conflating the form with the poem. Goldstein’s (1969) The Poetry of Rock is one of the first books to attend to lyrics as poetry.

In 2025 alone, public arts and humanities organizations have faced constant and systemic threats to their funding, their missions, and their ongoing goals to provide communities with access to the arts. The Trump administration's demolition of funding to the National Endowment for the Humanities immediately harmed the ongoing projects of organizations across the country, while imperiling most of the state humanities councils across the country. More recently, the rescindment of National Endowment for the Arts grants affected the publishing missions of nonprofit, independent publishers like Graywolf and Milkweed, while also shredding the community outreach efforts of public arts, literary arts, and literacy programs across the nation.

This edited volume seeks to collect scholarship on the treatment of political themes and world-building in the Star Wars franchise since Disney acquired Lucasfilm in 2012. Scholars have thoroughly explored political topics in George Lucas’s works, but have paid less attention to how Star Wars projects under Disney have continued, changed, or challenged the franchise’s approach to politics. To advance the scholarship on this subject, we welcome proposals from a variety of disciplines and perspectives, including literary criticism, cultural history, political science, film studies, and fandom studies. 

Possible / Suggested Topics:

Dear friends, colleagues, and students, 

We are excited to announce the Call for Papers for the third issue of the NEW BENJAMIN STUDIES yearbook, centred around the theme “Walter Benjamin in Times of Crisis”.

The editorial collective of NBS is pleased to welcome Anna Migliorini (Florence) and Ana María Miranda Mora (Utrecht) as guest editors for the issue. 

Latinx Visions 2.0

ONE PLANET—MANY WORLDS

CALL FOR PAPERS

ONLINE CONFERENCE

November 3-7, 2025

Co-Organizers: Matthew David Goodwin, Cathryn Merla-Watson, Taryne Jade Taylor

State of the Nation Film and TV in Britain: Representations of the Social, Political, and Cultural Landscape.

How might we illustrate, explore, and begin to define the ‘state of the nation’ film and television text? This edited collection, in collaboration with Intellect, invites consideration of these questions. We are particularly keen for considerations of contemporary nominees such as Adolescence (2025) and Mr Bates vs The Post Office (2024).

The editors invite abstracts for a forthcoming edited volume entitled Disney: A Companion, which will offer a comprehensive critical exploration of The Walt Disney Company’s cultural, historical, aesthetic, political, and industrial significance. The Companion is intended for the Peter Lang Genre Fiction and Film Companion series (https://www.peterlang.com/series/gffc), and aims to bring together a wide range of interdisciplinary perspectives that interrogate Disney’s enduring legacy and its evolving role in global media and culture.

A great number of Gothic fiction productions explicitly address themes such as gender roles and reproduction from diverse perspectives, which at times hold opposing viewpoints on certain aspects of these topics. The ability to gestate is often considered one of the key indicators of sexual difference. However, the subject of gestation and child-upbringing is not usually addressed in Gothic fiction, aside from iconic examples such as Rosemary’s Baby (1968). As Russ (2007: 25) has stated, these processes are often not described in many texts. Frequently, the women in these stories are either young and childless or middle-aged, with their children already grown and secure (ibid.).

The affordances of speculative fiction to provide not only specific examples, but also schemas, for alternate ways of knowing and being are well known. Suvin identified the novum as the central feature of science fiction, a feature which made it possible to consider humanity not generally nor as "fixed and supernaturally determined", but rather in terms of "which [human]? in what kind of world?: and why such a [human] in such a kind of world? (10).

CFP: Proposals Requested for Modernism in British & World Literature: A (Re)consideration (updated)

Deadline for submissions:

October 1, 2025

Note on Updated Proposal:

This CFP is now live on the Journal of Postcolonial Writing website.

Blue Humanities and the Indian Ocean: South Asian Literary and Cultural Representations

We are pleased to announce the launch of Commentarium: Journal of Humanities Studies, published by the University of Madeira's Faculty of Arts and Humanities. This interdisciplinary journal focuses on the Humanities and invites contributions that bridge various academic disciplines. It will be published annually, exclusively online, and will be freely accessible through the Open Journal System platform.

The journal welcomes submissions from both domestic and international scholars and researchers in Portuguese, English, Spanish, French, and Italian, with contributions accepted on a rolling basis. Book reviews may be submitted only in Portuguese or English.

Registration and submission are now open.

Harper Eternal: New Inquiries on Frances E.W. Harper 

We invite submissions for a paper panel themed “Non-Western Aesthetics: Rhetoric, Resistance, and Representation” – an exploration of aesthetics from diverse cultural perspectives, non-Western rhetorical traditions, and globalized literary theory. Our aim is to examine non-Western, non-hegemonic discourses from non-White nations that incorporate indigenous critical approaches and local theories within artistic and literary practices. We are particularly interested in South and Southeast Asian literary and cultural studies.

Broad areas of exploration may include, but are certainly not limited to, the following literary and cultural theoretical perspectives:

“There is a project that I’ve had in the back of my mind for several years. Not a solo project, but one that D and I envisioned as collective and that we thought to call “The Dictionary of Untranslatable Blackness.” Our imagined Dictionary was inspired by a read one: the dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, by Barbara Cassin [….]

Academic Conference - Call for Submissions - Deadline Sept. 5, 2025

Entering the Zoraverse: People, Places, and Spaces
37th Annual Zora Neale Hurston Festival™ of the Arts and Humanities (ZORA!™ Festival)
Historic Eatonville, Florida
January 29-30, 2026

Abstract

Anne Tyler has won the Pulitzer Prize (Breathing Lessons, 1988), the Kafka Prize (Morgan’s Passing, 1980), the National Book Critics Award (The Accidental Tourist, 1985), and been shortlisted for the Booker Prize (A Spool of Blue Thread) and while the subject of scholarship and dissertations, analysis of her work has been infrequent since the 1990s. This panel welcomes papers on any of her twenty-five novels that discuss Tyler's contribution as a modernist or postmodernist observer of the American family.

This collection uncovers how medieval literature challenges dominant narratives of pregnancy through depictions of marginalized reproductive experiences. In the Middle Ages as today, pregnancy was both a private, embodied experience and a public metaphor shaped by law, morality, and politics. In a moment when U.S. courts cite medieval legal treatises to restrict reproductive rights, reexamining medieval narratives of pregnancy has never been more urgent. The chapters in this book explore marginalized reproductive experiences—such as caesarean section, nursing, generational trauma, and trans pregnancy—revealing how medieval texts offer alternative ways of thinking about gender politics, reproductive agency, and embodiment.

You Are What You (Don't) Read: Vegetarian and Vegan Characters in Literature

Poetry Off the Page: International Advances in Poetry Performance Research is an open access peer-reviewed digital collection featuring new work in poetry performance research from around the globe. It attends to diverse aspects, geographies, and constituents of contemporary poetry performance cultures and the flows between them, and showcases a range of approaches to spoken poetry.

EXTENDED DEADLINE: September 15, 2025

November 6-7, 2025

Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, as part of the FORTHEM Alliance, invites scholars, researchers, and practitioners to submit proposals for the upcoming Cultural Heritage Lab International Conference, dedicated to exploring cultural heritage within, across, and beyond the European Union’s borders. This year’s theme investigates the dynamics of intercultural, interethnic, and social interactions—especially in regions where boundaries (geographical, political, linguistic, or symbolic) are fluid and contested.

The CEMORY project team at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków (Centre for Comparative Studies of Civilisations) invites Participants to join the "Forgotten Voices. Holocaust Memories Through the Perspective of Minorities" International Conference. The "Forgotten voices. Holocaust Memories Through the Perspective of Minorities" International Conference is organised under the auspices of the “Central European Memory of the Holocaust in a Multicultural and Multidimensional Perspective” [CEMORY] project funded by the Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values Programme (CERV). "Forgotten Voices" Conference, vol.

Lolly Willowes at 100: Sylvia Townsend Warner, Religion, and the Supernatural

IAS Common Ground, University College London, 29-30 May 2026

‘She, Laura Willowes, in England, in the year 1922, had entered into a compact with the Devil. The compact was made, and affirmed, and sealed with the round red seal of her blood’.