“Unruly Realism: Conventions and Contestations in 19th-Century American Realist Fiction”

Workshop at the University of Erfurt – November 26 - 27, 2026

Co-organized by Ilka Saal (Erfurt) and Antonia Purk (Mannheim)

This accepted panel for NeMLA 2027 (March 6-9, 2027. Newport, RI) seeks to investigate works of American drama that engage deeply with other (possibly more canonical) American plays. Engagement is defined broadly and might include subtle evidence of influence, extended allusions, plays within plays, or outright sequels, prequels, and revisions of earlier works. Also welcome are examinations of how American plays appear in pop culture texts like TV shows.

When we think of the Central Valley, that strange opaque space between Los Angeles and San Francisco, we often think of heat, smog, and sometimes fruits and vegetables. What we don’t think about, however, is the immense literary scene of writers from the Central Valley and/or writing about the Central Valley. From Manuel Muñoz, to Gary Soto, to Juan Felipe Herrera, to Lee Herrick, to Marisol Baca, to David Dominguez, to many others, the Central Valley literary community is capacious and deserves attention. As such, this panel session invites papers that discuss the literary community of the Central Valley.

This panel at the SAMLA 97 conference (Nov. 5-7, 2026) examines hospitality as a critical framework within postcolonial studies, attending to the ways literary and cultural texts negotiate welcome, refusal, obligation, and exposure in the aftermath of empire. Within empire studies, hospitality emerges as a fraught ethical and aesthetic relation shaped by colonial histories, uneven mobility, and asymmetrical power. We consider how such texts register these dynamics across postcolonial contexts. Readings across genres and media—including novels, graphic novels, life writing, film, poetry, and theory—deploy hospitality as a vital lens for understanding postcolonial subjectivity, relationality, and the ongoing legacies of colonial governance.

MLA 2027 - Just-in-Time Session Proposal

Conference Date: January 7 to 10, 2027. 
Location: (Los Angeles, CA)
Submission Deadline: (August 17th, 2026)

TITLE: Many Stories, One History: Re-examining the Diverse Coalition of the American Revolution

CFP NEPCA Monsters & the Montrous Area 2026 - UPDATED DEADLINE

The Monsters & the Monstrous Area of the Northeast Popular Culture Association (a.k.a. NEPCA) seeks proposals for inclusion in NEPCA’s 2026 annual conference.

The event will run as a virtual conference from Thursday, October 15th, through Saturday, October 17th. Virtual sessions will take place via Zoom throughout the day on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Registration will open up in mid-July. The registration fee is expected to be around 50 USD.

The Politics of Literary Form (deadline extended to August 22, 2026)
Graduate Student Conference at Johns Hopkins University
Date: November 13–15, 2026
Location: Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD
Keynote Speaker: Oliver Simons, Columbia University

Call for Papers / Presentations

Montparnasse and its Legacies

November 13-14, 2026

Columbia Global Paris Center | Reid Hall

Paris, France

Theme: Hip Hop and Rap Conference 

Tentative date: November 19-22

Location: Houston, TX

Award for best presentation 

Scholarship for top scholars 

• Judged by artists, PhD’s, Workshop, and Peer Review. 

A small number of additional abstracts (on disability in German Literature) are currently being sought for an edited volume to be published by Metzler Publishing House (an imprint of Springer Nature). The volume adopts a comparative approach and examines representations of disability and/or addiction in German-language and Japanese literature. Interested scholars are invited to send a brief abstract or topic proposal as soon as possible to habib.tekin@hotmail.com and hayashih@kansai-u.ac.jp by 2.7.2026.

Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature invites article submissions on the topic of “planetary precarity” for its Winter 2027 issue. This special issue will consider how precarity is produced on both local and global scales. As we confront our own possible extinction-level threats caused by climate disaster and, supposedly, a future dominated by artificial superintelligence, we seek to investigate how the Victorians reconceived their own precarity in the face of extractive capitalism and ecological crisis.

CFP: Smell Studies Journal

General Editors: Will Tullett, University of York and Manon Raffard, University of Manchester.

Editorial board: Andrew Kettler, Chanelle Dupuis, Jayanthan Sriram, Ally Louks, Hsuan Hsu, Sandra Barré.

Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions invites submissions for a special guest-edited issue on the subject of disclosure. Since the beginning of the modern UFO phenomenon in 1947, popular discourse on the subject has always included an intense speculative interest in the secret knowledge of the state, including and perhaps especially the military and intelligence agencies, who are widely suspected of harboring hidden knowledge about UFOs, their occupants, and nothing less than humanity’s ultimate place in the cosmos.

CALL FOR PAPERS

International Research in Children’s Literature

Special Issue: Global Perspectives in Queer Children’s and Young Adult Literature

Guest Editor: Cheeno Marlo Sayuno, PhD

Global and Intersectional Framings of Disability in Comics & Graphic Narratives
Edited by Crystal Yin Lie (California State University, Long Beach) and Kai Qing Tan (Ghent University; Aachen University)

CFP: German Romantic Humor across the Disciplines (9/30/2026; NeMLA; Sat March 6 - Tuesday March 9, 2027)

To be held at the 2027 Northeastern Modern Language Association (NeMLA) convention in Newport, Rhode Island.

This panel seeks to bring together scholars of literature, philosophy, history, art history, theology, musicology and/or related humanistic disciplines to discuss how humor shaped, and was shaped by, German Romanticism.

Abstract:This roundtable explores contemporary directions in life writing, biography, and memoir, with a particular interest in how we narrate the self amidst evolving issues of identity, culture, and power. We welcome both traditional scholarly essays and creative nonfiction/memoir submissions accompanied by a brief meta-analysis. Potential topics include, but are not limited to, autoethnography, digital self-representation, intersectional approaches to life writing, and the emerging impacts of technological shifts—such as generative AI—on authorship and equity.

Green Day has often been treated as a problem in the “longview” of punk: too popular, too melodic, too commercial, too successful. Green Day and the Politics of Pop-Punk starts from the opposite assumption. Green Day matters precisely because the band’s career makes it impossible to separate punk from the mass-cultural conditions it has so often claimed to resist.

[FR]

Appel à communications -- Congrès AFEC 2027

Le Canada face aux logiques de l’économie extractive : perspectives esthétiques, politiques, juridiques, historiques, économiques et environnementales

Université de Strasbourg, 23-25 juin 2027.

"Eastern Thought in the Americas"
RIAS Vol. 21, Fall-Winter (1/2028)

This issue of RIAS invites contributions on the theme of “Making Trouble: Subversions and Reclamations in American Imaginaries.” Engaging ongoing debates in global American Studies on power, representation, dissent, and cultural transformation, the issue seeks contributions that examine how American cultural, political, and social imaginaries are challenged, reworked, and reclaimed across diverse historical and geographical contexts. It invites interdisciplinary perspectives from the global field of American Studies and welcomes submissions from scholars worldwide.

GERMAN

Die Germanistikabteilung der Philologischen Fakultät an der Lucian-Blaga-Universität Hermannstadt führt ihre Tagungsreihe mit dem Schwerpunkt Deutsche Literatur, Sprache und Kultur im südosteuropäischen Raum fort. 

Edited by Juliana Luna Freire (Universidade Federal da Paraíba UFPB), Rong Huang (Peking University), Lucy Blaney-Liable (University of Stuttgart) 

Confirmed publisher Editora UFPB (Brazil)

Following Guan and Scott (2025), there is a need to rethink pedagogical practices in language teaching and their real impact on health students and their future work in the medical field. 

We propose, as discussed by Ferguson (2025), a deeper discussion on the contexts of English for Medical Purposes (EMP), as well as the prevalent use of English in this field. 

Queer as Method:

Transdisciplinary Approaches to Art, Research and Resistance

an online transdisciplinary conference

September 11-12, 2026

Online, Via Zoom

Conference Webpage: https://labrc.co.uk/2026/06/15/queer-as-method/

Proposal deadline: August 15, 2026

"Making Trouble: Subversions and Reclamations in American Imaginaries"
RIAS Vol. 21, Fall-Winter (2/2028)

This issue of RIAS invites contributions on the theme of “Making Trouble: Subversions and Reclamations in American Imaginaries.” Engaging ongoing debates in global American Studies on power, representation, dissent, and cultural transformation, the issue seeks contributions that examine how American cultural, political, and social imaginaries are challenged, reworked, and reclaimed across diverse historical and geographical contexts. It invites interdisciplinary perspectives from the global field of American Studies and welcomes submissions from scholars worldwide.