In her resolute commitment to telling stories about Black life without the white gaze, Toni Morrison articulated a model of community empowerment grounded in local knowledge, intra-communal collaboration, and the self-reflexive narration of Black worlds. While Morrison remains one of the most visible public advocates of this aesthetic and ethical orientation, practices of Black worldmaking across African and diasporic literatures have long exceeded mere response to anti-Blackness. Even under conditions structured by racial violence, coloniality, displacement, and social rupture, Black communities have continually generated modes of life, relation, memory, and imagination that assert the possibility of worlds otherwise.

Oceanography & the Blue Humanities: Literary Geographies of Islands and Water Bodies

December 09-12, 2026 

Concept Note:

The Winter's Tale: From Page to Stage

 IASEMS Tempera Seminar 2027

 University of Padova, Dipartimento di Studi Linguistici e Letterari

 7-9 June 2027

Location and Date: May 20-23, 2027 University of Houston 

In-person and Virtual: This panel will meet in-person

UMBRELLAS FOR FISH

An International Journal of Absurd & Existential Drama

We are now accepting submissions for our September 2026 Issue.

Submission Deadline: August 25, 2026Website: https://ufjournal.wixsite.com/umbrellas-for-fish/submissions

Email: ufjournal@aol.com

This roundtable discusses the convergence of literary expression and digital activism as means of empowering a community. The shift of passive representation to active agency in the 21st century can be common in the digital space where the local knowledge is stored and disseminated. We discuss how marginalized groups, namely Dalit writers and activists, have used digital humanities to evade authoritarian gatekeepers and develop transnational solidarities. This session welcomes people to talk about how online spaces can be seen as a form of regenerative space where the testimonios of Dalit can be heard, transforming the world into a supportive space of collective action and literary insurgency.

Digital Social Sciences (ISSN: 3078-4980 (Online), 3078-4972 (Print) is an international, peer-reviewed, open-access journal dedicated to advancing interdisciplinary research on the transformative impact of digital technologies on society. The journal provides a global platform for scholars, researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to examine the opportunities, challenges, and implications of digital transformation across the social sciences.

The Editorial Board invites original, unpublished, and high-quality manuscripts for Volume 3, Issue 2 (2026).

Themes of Interest

Public understanding of American cultures—peoples, neighborhoods, languages, foods, histories, arts, religions—has always been vulnerable to myth and misinformation, in particular from the far right. Collectively the humanities work to establish an ever-more accurate/inclusive lens on culture, but the (re)mainstreaming of far-right voices has dangerously distorted the diverse American story.

CFP: Handbook of the Cultural Legacy of 9/11. (under contract with Springer)

 Edited by:

 Marc A. Ouellette, Old Dominion University, (mouellet@odu.edu) and Peter Pericles Trifonas, University of Toronto

UVA Wise Medieval-Renaissance Conference XXXIX
Undergraduate Sessions
The University of Virginia’s College at Wise
September 17-19, 2026

Keynote Address:  
“Arthur's Great Death in Malory and its Afterlives”
Karen Cherewatuk, Saint Olaf College

CALL FOR PAPERS FRAME 40.1 “(Be)Longing”

Haryanvi Dalit theatre occupies a highly marginalised position within the broader landscape of Indian theatre. It may aptly be described as “the marginalised among the marginalised,” as it has remained largely excluded from both mainstream theatre studies and Dalit cultural historiography. Haryanvi Dalit Swang theatre was active long before the Dalit Panther Movement, but it received little attention due to its lack of publication and translation into English. This book seeks to recover, document, and critically examine the neglected legacy of Haryanvi Swang, with particular emphasis on its Dalit traditions and practitioners, thereby contributing to a more inclusive understanding of Indian theatrical heritage.

This panel invites theoretical and pedagogical explorations of experiential approaches to teaching environmental studies in higher education through the frameworks of new materialism, transcorporeality, affect theory, and embodied pedagogy. Aligning with NeMLA 2027’s theme, “Empowering Communities,” the panel examines how environmental learning can move beyond hierarchical and text-centered models toward collaborative, community-oriented, and experiential forms of knowledge production.

Rome and Capri, 21–28 June, 2027

F. Scott Fitzgerald visited Italy on two distinct occasions: first in the spring of 1921 during his and Zelda’s long-deferred honeymoon trip, and again from late 1924 to early 1925 during his unsuccessful attempt to economize. While the Fitzgeralds made brief stops in Venice, San Remo, Portofino, Savona, Pisa, Fiesole, Florence, and Naples, it was in the two host sites of this conference—Rome and Capri—that he spent the most time. It was here that he found inspiration for some of his most celebrated works, as well as several others that remain underexplored.

In the definition given by Podnieks, matrifocal literatures are written and narrated by mothers in the first-person or limited third-person voice, rendering maternal identity and experience from subjective perspectives. Such narratives (re)value the significance and meaning of maternal figures in cultural, social, and national arenas, and often contest or negotiate traditional ideologies of the “good” mother as self-sacrificing, nurturing, and sexless with her antithesis, the “bad” mother. In the last few years, we have seen the rise of matrifocal writings published to break taboos about previously silenced reproductive experiences, create a sense of community, support, and care, and, overall, empower people.

UVA Wise Medieval-Renaissance Conference XXXIX (9/17-19) deadline for submissions: June 26, 2026 full name / name of organization: University of Virginia-Wise Center for Medieval-Renaissance Studies contact email: kjt9t@uvawise.edu 

Today's ecological problems demand not only ecological awareness but also a fundamental rethinking of the human-nature relationship with the more-than-human world. Increased climatic change, species extinction, ecological degradation, and planetary instability. Challenge anthropocentric assumptions where humans are seen as separate from, superior to, or sole interpreters of nature.

Theme:                 Pentecostal Theology: A Discipline of the Future? Perspectives, Tensions, and Horizons

Date:                     October 30–31, 2026

Location:              Virtual (Zoom)

Time:                    09:00–17:30 EST

Languages:          Spanish and English

Host Institution:

In the Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan redefines the domestic space and the feminine laborassociated with it as a dynamic space where Chinese-American women reshape their identities, preserve their cultures, and share their stories of traumas. bell hooks’ assertion that “homeplace" was the one site where one could freely confront the issue of humanization” provides a productive framework for understanding how kitchens and acts of cooking become spaces of healing, survival, and female agency in women’s writing. By doing these, they try to assert a form of power, and agency that subverts the traditional notion of the domestic space(as an inferior space that is away from history), and the feminine labor associated with it.

Translating Emotions in Medieval Europe: Modes, Models, and Cultural Strategies

In recent decades, the upsurge of emotion studies within the field of Medieval Studies has contributed to reshaping its borders, revealing that medieval affectivity is a dynamic cultural construct that invites cross-cultural and comparative approaches. At the same time, translation in the Middle Ages was rarely a literal, word-for-word process; rather, it functioned as an act of cultural adaptation, political appropriation, and linguistic innovation.

NeMLA

58th Annual Convention, Newport, RI March 6-9 2027

CALL FOR PAPERS

Jokes in Dark Times: Humor, Crisis, and the Postdigital Public Sphere

Panel Chair: Ana León-Távora

Virtual session

The Graduate Journal of Food Studies invites submissions for a special issue exploring the theme Food as Joy.

Food is and will always be a source of pleasure, celebration, creativity, and connection. This issue seeks contributions that examine the intersections, tensions, and possibilities of food as a source of joy. We welcome interdisciplinary perspectives and encourage submissions that engage with food's social, cultural, political, environmental, and emotional dimensions.

International Conference

Université de Montréal

February 5-7, 2027

                                                                                         Call for Papers

                           Geo-Medical Syndemics: Earthquakes, Geotrauma, and Mental Health in the Planetary Imagination

Proposed panel for the Association for Asian Studies conference, AAS to be held in Boston in March 2027.