african-american

29th Southern Writers/Southern Writing Graduate Student Conference 

University of Mississippi

August 8th—9th, 2026

Call for Submissions

Supernatural South(s): The Monstrous, The Fantastic, The Grotesque, The Speculative and So On…

The Southern Writers/Southern Writing Conference (SW/SW) is an interdisciplinary conference, welcoming graduate students, creative writers, activists, and community members with interest in the U.S. or Global South from all departments and fields of study. The 29th meeting of SW/SW will be held at the University of Mississippi from August 8th-August 9th, 2026. 

Announcing

The 2026 First Book Institute

May 31-June 6, 2026

Hosted by the Center for American Literary Studies (CALS) at Pennsylvania State University

Co-Directors

Priscilla Wald, R. Florence Brinkley Distinguished Professor of English, Duke University, and Co-Editor of American Literature

Sean X. Goudie, Director of the Center for American Literary Studies and Past Winner of the MLA Prize for a First Book

CFP | Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins Society (PEHS) session 

American Literature Association Annual Conference, Chicago, IL, May 20-23, 2026

Hopkins’s America, Then & Now

ALA 2026: Politics in American Fiction

ALA Annual Conference (May 20-23, Chicago, IL)

“Meaning emerges in the encounter — in the relations between bodies, images, and the world,” wrote Vivian Sobchack in her Carnal Thoughts (68); and it is precisely these shifting relations that shape contemporary — digital — American identity. In the digital environment, such relations do not stabilise; they reconfigure themselves, recalibrate, and adjust across platforms, archives, sensors, and interfaces.

The African American Literature and Culture Society invites abstracts (of no more than 250 words) for presentations at the annual conference of the American Literature Association (http://americanliteratureassociation.org/). We will also consider a limited number of panel proposals (of no more than 500 words).    

The Margaret Fuller Society invites proposals for a panel at ALA 2026 about teaching in difficult times. As we head into the spring 2026 semester—the mid-point in an academic year when students and educators read U.S. literature amidst rising book bans, closing degree programs and DEI offices, and even the dismantling of the Department of Education—many of us are facing existential crises about how to do what matters to us most. How to support our students? How to sustain our disciplines? How to teach in ways that do justice to our subjects? The most basic day-to-day parts of our teaching lives have never felt more vulnerable—or more urgent.

We invite faculty, advanced graduate students, and independent scholars to apply for a three-week National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on the New Deal era Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), taking place June 29–July 18, 2026. The institute will be conducted in a hybrid format, with the first and third weeks held virtually and the second week convening on site at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. for guided research in its extensive FWP collections. This interdisciplinary program offers participants the opportunity to deepen their understanding of the FWP and to develop hands-on experience using its rich documentation of American lives, communities, and cultures for teaching, research, and scholarship.

Across the African continent and its global diasporas, trauma reverberates through histories of slavery, colonialism, racial capitalism, gendered violence, war, migration, and displacement. However, African and Afrodiasporic writers and artists have not only transformed experiences of pain into sites of creativity, survival, and healing but also reflected in their works the use of African approaches to restoration. This edited volume seeks to explore the ways in which trauma is reconstituted, managed, borne, and cured in African and Afrodiasporic literature and cultural expressions.

Call for Papers | Society of Early Americanists
American Literature Association | 37th Annual Conference | May 20–23, 2026 | Chicago, IL

Placing Chicago in Early American Studies

Acknowledging our conference setting and anticipating the 2027 SEA Biennial, this panel invites papers and presentations that explore the literature, culture, and history of Chicago prior to its March 1837 incorporation. What is (or should be) Chicago’s place within the field of early American studies? Topics might include (but are not limited to):

Call for Papers | Society of Early Americanists
American Literature Association | 37th Annual Conference | May 20–23, 2026 | Chicago, IL

Errand into the Wilderness at 70

Upon the 70th anniversary of his Errand into the Wilderness, this panel invites papers and presentations that offer critical examinations and new interpretations of work by the intellectual historian (and Chicago native) Perry Miller. Topics might include (but are not limited to):

American Literature Association: 37th Annual Conference
May 20-23, 2026
Chicago, IL

It is with great pleasure that we announce the opening of applications for the 2026 Feminist Decolonial Politics Workshop.

The workshop will be held in a hybrid format, with both in-person and online participation options. We are especially excited to centre this year’s workshop on reading the work of Hortense Spillers, one of the most influential theorists of our time. Spillers is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor at Vanderbilt University, and her scholarship has been foundational to feminist, Black, and decolonial thought.

Participation in the workshop is by application only, and applicants must be accepted in order to attend.

Cornell EGSO Conference 2026: Effervescence

Deadline for Submissions: January 5th, 2026

Conference Date: March 20th, 2026

Call for Academic and Creative Proposals

“This impulse to violence had been in her for a long time, growing, feeding, until finally she had blown up in a thousand pieces... Yes, a one-way ticket, she thought. I've had one since the day I was born. The train was on the track.”

—Ann Petry, The Street