Hiding Behind Trees: Anthropomorphism in Children’s Literature and Culture

Guaranteed Session at MLA 2026 (Toronto, Jan. 8-11), sponsored by the Children's Literature Association

This panel seeks papers that consider the role of anthropomorphism in children’s literature and culture.

Humans have long believed we are distinct from other animals in our rationality, self-consciousness, and use of language. Why, then, do writers, artists, and even scientists so often use anthropomorphism to interpret the behaviors of animals, plants, and even nonliving things such as trains, teapots, and toys? What are the repercussions of this tendency to understand the world in terms of human social and cultural identities?

The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) is the most financially successful franchise in film history. Between 2008 and 2019 not only did it become a commercial behemoth, redefining the landscape of blockbuster cinema, but also a cultural phenomenon, delighting fans all around the globe. Yet post-Avengers: Endgame (2019) and the conclusion of “The Infinity Saga,” the MCU has struggled to maintain the same level of success and no longer resonates with audiences the way it once did. The MCU, and the wider superhero genre, has faced mounting criticism from fans, critics and even notable industry professionals on a wide range of issues.

This chapter will be part of an edited collection that aims at examining (the intersections between) the notions of monstrosity and evil in the literary and artistic depictions of non-human and hybrid (or post-human) intelligence in different cultural and historical contexts. It focuses on the representation of monsters and creatures that have cognitive abilities as well as on the demonizing and vilification of artificially or magically enhanced human intelligence. It also deals with the depiction of malignant non-human entities interfering with human thoughts and evil non-human cosmic intelligences interfering with human destinies.

Call for papers: “Failing Media”

Cinema and Media Studies Graduate Student Conference

University of Chicago, April 25–26, 2025

Keynote: Nicholas Baer (UC Berkeley)

2025 ICLA Congress-Seoul Call for Individual Proposals:

Dear Comparative Literature scholars/students,

Now the 2025 ICLA Congress (https://icla2025-seoul.kr/en) call for individual proposal submission is out.

For New Deadline and How to Submit Your Abstract, Click NOTICE 18:
https://icla2025-seoul.kr/en/notice/press-and-reviews/01JG9QCYG7XM2H36DE...

The English Editor of Modern Language Review (https://www.mhra.org.uk/series/MLR), the flagship journal of the Modern Humanities Research Association (https://www.mhra.org.uk), and one of the oldest in its field, invites original and compelling contributions from emerging and established scholars on any aspect or period of Anglophone literature. 

Contributions can take two forms:

American Literature Association
36th Annual Conference
May 21-24, 2025
Boston, MA

The Postwar Area Literature Group invites submissions on the following postwar and contemporary topics for the 2025 American Literature Association Conference, which will be held in Boston, MA from May 21-24, 2025 (information about the annual conference can be found at the ALA conference page website). The Postwar Literature Group has three guaranteed panels this year, two in postwar studies and one in contemporary studies. Please review our calls for papers below, and email Jacqueline.Foertsch@unt.edu with any questions.

Migrating Minds: Journal of Cultural Cosmopolitanism (ISSN 2993-1053) is a peer-reviewed, open-access scholarly journal devoted to interdisciplinary research on cultural cosmopolitanism from a comparative perspective. It provides a unique, international forum for innovative critical approaches to cosmopolitanism emerging from literatures, cultures, media, and the arts in dialogue with other areas of the humanities and social sciences, across temporal, spatial, and linguistic boundaries.

Submitted by: 

Survive and Thrive: A Journal for Medical Humanities and Narrative as Medicine 

PopCRN (the Popular Culture Network) will be holding a free virtual symposium exploring the 1950s in popular culture. Held online on Thursday 28th and Friday 29th of March 2025.

The 1950s was the decade where the world began to recover from the tragedy of the Second World War. This conference aims to explore both the popular culture of the 1950s, and how the 1950s have been depicted in the popular culture of other eras.

Sydney, Australia and Zoom 25-26 September 2025

PopCRN (the Popular Culture Network) will be holding a free conference in Sydney and online exploring representations of food in popular cultures in history and today, on 25 and 26 September 2025.

Delicious, Nutritious and Fictitious: Food in Popular Culture is asymposium that aims to interrogate the ways that food, recipes, cooking, eating and nutrition are evident in popular culture. This may be representations of food in television, film, literature, art, music, as text, narrative, discourse or any other scholarly form or genre.

We are currently seeking contributions from the humanities and social sciences for a scientific network that explores ephemerality in both its material forms and theoretical conceptualizations. This interdisciplinary network aims to bring into dialogue various questions about ephemerality, specifically examining how different fleeting forms of expression are implicated in the continual making and unmaking of proximities, both human and non-human, producing “a matter of temporary intensities and pacts amongst people” and other entities (Vélez-Serna, 14).

Boy Not There is a newly established fellowship, advocating for collaboration between scholars and lived-experience advocates regarding sexual violence against men and boys.

We aim to amplify voices that confront the challenges of male sexual violence, reckoning with social stigmas that often become barriers to disclosure. We work with survivors, researchers, educators and professional clinicians to create supportive frameworks for histories to be shared and eventually overcome.

CFP for ALA 2025 Panel

In the 2005 article, “A Narrative of the Interesting Origins and (Somewhat) Surprising Developments of African-American Print Culture,” Frances Smith Foster observed that “the definitions and assumptions with which one begins have a significant influence upon the story one finds” (735).