In the collective global imaginary, humans seemingly write the world in isolation. We dictate the climate, biodiversity, and natural resources but we also control the ways in which the world is perceived through literature. This roundtable considers how literature is a co-constitutive process written through connectivity across time and space, landscapes, species, environments, and voices by humans and more-than-humans.

DEADLINE: April 5, 2026

In light of the recent resurgence in scholarly work on the writings of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, we are proposing an MLA volume on “Approaches to Teaching the Works of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman.” Freeman’s oeuvre is extensive, and her work intersects with queer studies, disability studies, animal studies, food studies, Gothic studies, ecocriticism, labor history, and more. The MLA will decide whether to commission a book based on the quality and quantity of survey responses, so if you are a scholar who engages Freeman in the classroom, we would appreciate it if you would complete the survey. If you are interested in contributing to this volume, we also invite you to submit a proposal.

Call for Papers (CFP) for ISBN Edited Volume
Edited Volume Title: Body Politics in Literature

About the Volume

The body in literature is never neutral; it is a site where power is exercised, identities are shaped, and social meanings are constantly negotiated. Rather than viewing the body as a purely biological entity, literary texts reveal it as something produced through cultural norms, political structures, and ideological forces. This edited volume, Body Politics in Literature, aims to investigate how writers across different periods and traditions represent the body as a space of control, conflict, and transformation.

Trans embodiments have been lived and conceptualized in multiple ways throughout the long and complex history of Southeast Europe. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, state institutions – through legal and medical frameworks grounded in early sexology – largely criminalized and pathologized transness. These classifications often entailed invasive and frequently involuntary legal and medical interventions, and were accompanied by profound social marginalization. At the same time, the reception and dissemination of sexological and juridical knowledge across Southeast Europe remained uneven, shaped by the divergent historical trajectories of the region’s post-imperial formations.

William Faulkner and Louise Erdrich

A Conference Sponsored by the Center for Faulkner Studies

Southeast Missouri State University

Cape Girardeau, Missouri

October 22-24, 2026

**DEADLINE EXTENDED to 13 April 2026**

Call for Papers: 

Listening to Possible Worlds 

Sound and Music in Speculative Literature and Culture 

22-23 October 2026, Leiden University, the Netherlands (in-person) 

Confirmed keynote speakers are Anna Snaith (King’s College London) and Chris Tonelli (University of Groningen) 

Narratives of Resistance and African Literature: Articulating Dissent, Disobedience and Pluriversal Futures

Special issue of English Academy Review (Taylor and Francis)

Link: https://think.taylorandfrancis.com/special_issues/narratives-of-resistan...

Special Issue Editor(s)

Goutam Karmakar, University of Hyderabad, India
goutamkarmakar@uohyd.ac.in

Archival Abundance and Silences in Islamic Studies: A Graduate Conference 

Call for Proposals

October 2nd – 3rd 2026

Princeton University

Keynote Speaker: Nancy Khalek, Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Associate Professor of History at Brown University 

The year 2026 marks the centenary of Michel Foucault’s birth, a milestone that invites a profound reassessment of a thinker whose "grey, meticulous" genealogies have fundamentally altered the landscape of the humanities. For the students of literature, Foucault remains an indispensable figure, not merely as a philosopher of the prison or the clinic, but as the premier architect of the "space of language." His move to dissociate the text from the sovereign "Author", famously articulated in his 1969 essay What is an Author?, transformed the literary work from a vessel of personal genius into a site of discursive struggle.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o stands as one of the most formidable literary and intellectual voices of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Novelist, playwright, theorist, memoirist, and advocate of linguistic decolonisation, Ngũgĩ’s work continues to shape debates on coloniality, nationalism, language politics, global capitalism, and epistemic justice.

Call For Papers

The 3rd International Conference on Global Plant Humanities

Botanical Life in Art, Science, and Imagination

Conference Dates:     8–10 May 2026 (Fri–Sun)

Mode:                         Hybrid (Physical & Virtual)

Host:                           Department of English, North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong, Meghalaya, India

Submission Guidelines 

• The deadline for submissions is March 20th, 2026. Please submit a 300-word abstract with a short 50-word bio to our conference email address: otherothering@gmail.com

• We are only accepting submissions written in the English language 

• Each participant is allocated 15 minutes for their presentation

• Successful applicants will receive an invitation to the conference by 2nd April, 2026

Concept of other and othering 

The LSL Language Change Forum invites proposals for the following panels at the 2027 MLA Annual Conference in Los Angeles:

Empowering Language Change

This guaranteed panel invites papers examining how linguistic changes enable—and emerge from—emancipatory practices across spoken, written, digital, pedagogical, and/or related contexts.

Listening to Language Change: Evidence of Emancipation

This guaranteed panel invites papers examining how emancipatory movements become visible through linguistic changes—historically, contemporarily, or in imagined futures—across disciplines.

Please consider submitting an abstract to present in my conference panel. The conference is open to graduate students (MA and PhD-track), educators, practicing artists, and museum professionals. Details below:

Call for Abstracts – SECAC Panel

Immersive Threads: Narrative, Participation, and the Making of Experiential Worlds

How do narrative and participation become interwoven within immersive environments? How do we, as participants, become threads within experiential artworks, installations, museums, performances, digital platforms, or urban spaces?

Call for Papers: International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics

Special Issue: ‘Entertainment Video Games Within Wider Culture’

View the full call here>>

https://www.intellectbooks.com/international-journal-of-media-cultural-politics#call-for-papers

Context

The Polish Academy of Sciences Scientific Centre in Paris and the Institute of Linguistics of the University of Silesia in Katowice cordially invite you to the academic conference entitled:

IN COLLABORATION ON COOPERATION: RESEARCH IN LINGUISTICS WITHIN FRENCH-POLISH TEAMS

9–10 July 2026
Scientific Centre of the Polish Academy of Sciences
74 Rue Lauriston, 75116 Paris, France

We invite submissions for a special session at the 2026 PAMLA meeting (Seattle, WA; November 12-15, 2026) on “Biblical and Middle Eastern Literatures.” All papers will be allotted about 20 minutes. Papers must be presented in person.

Genre has traditionally been seen as a framework or series of frameworks for organizing texts (and other artworks) so they may be analyzed with some degree of precision, yet the meaning of the term has always been unstable. Disagreements arise around specific classifications, and the term has often been redefined or simply deployed, without explanation, in different ways. The novel, for instance, has been subject to numerous and diverging definitions, from (to name only a few) Gyorgy Lukacs to Mikhail Bakhtin to Ralph Rader to Priya Joshi.  Such classifications, no matter how numerous, are familiar.

The Dance and Movement Analysis Section of the American Folklore Society is looking for papers, panels, workshops, and lec/dems for the 138th AFS Annual Meeting, to be held at the Renaissance Asheville Downtown Hotel in Asheville, North Carolina from October 27–31, 2026. Deadline is April 6, 2026 for emailing us with ideas and questions, at dance.section@afsnet.org.

I am writing to invite you to consider submitting a chapter proposal for consideration to be included in The American Research Handbook on Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, an edited scholarly volume that examines the evolving role of diversity, equity, and inclusion within American democracy and educational institutions.  

I have been invited to serve as the section editor for The White Rural Experience. This section seeks rigorous, thoughtful, and evidence-based analyses that examine how rural white communities engage with, experience, interpret, or resist DEI discourse and policy across educational, civic, cultural, and economic contexts.

11–12 June 2026

Hosted by the Manchester Game Centre, in collaboration with the Poetry Research Group and the Manchester Poetry Library.

Call for Papers -- The Sixteenth Century Society: A Society for Early Modern Studies

Chicago, IL, October 29-31, 2026

Please consider submitting a short (250 word) proposal for this guaranteed panel sponsored by the Robert Graves Society.

In “Narrating the Past,” British historian Alun Munslow defines “history as a ‘literature of fact’” (23), “an aesthetic undertaking” (17), and a “storied form of knowledge” (17). Continuing the conversations related to “Times and Places,” to be held at the 17th International Robert Graves Conference in Palma, Mallorca, Spain (July 2026), this panel deliberates Graves’s and his literary associates’ historical, geographic, and historiographic legacies.