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Wilde West Coast
The Oscar Wilde Society invites abstracts for a special session at the 2027 MLA (Modern Language Association) Convention in Los Angeles, January 7–10 2027.
In athletics, athletes are often described as ‘throwing down the gauntlet’ when they record a particularly impressive jump, race, throw, indicating a raise in the competition stakes, a nod to their fellow competitors that they are the champion to beat. In the 2001 movie A Knight’s Tale, jousting enthusiasts are depicted like modern day sports fans, with Ulrich’s friends even singing a football chant in the pub.
The song lyric occupies little space in academia, where it is less studied, less appreciated, and perceived as less-than other kinds of writing. Despite music’s ubiquitous cultural presence, the song lyric—as creative work—suffers from what renown songwriter Jimmy Webb calls a “status problem”: songwriters do not enjoy the same standing as writers of other kinds of traditionally studied literature. The most common way that song lyrics have earned scholarly attention is by conflating the form with the poem. Goldstein’s (1969) The Poetry of Rock is one of the first books to attend to lyrics as poetry.
Call for Papers
International Conference on Ecocriticism and Environmental Studies10-11 October 2026 – London/Onlineorganised byLondon Centre for Interdisciplinary Research
International Conference on Myths, Archetypes and Symbols:“Models and Alternatives” 26-27 September 2026 – London/Online
organised by
London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research
International Conference on Poetry Studies:“Poetry Between Creation and Interpretation”19-20 September 2026 – London / Onlineorganised by London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research
“Beyond Labels”: International Conferenceon Disability, Different Ability and Neurodiversity12-13 September 2026Birkbeck, University of London / Online
organised by
London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research
Disability, different ability and neurodiversity are concepts that traverse boundaries, challenging disciplines to rethink foundational assumptions about identity, culture and power. This interdisciplinary conference seeks to bring together scholars from different fields to critically examine the shifting narratives, representations and lived experiences surrounding ability and difference.
Fifth Annual Beverly Lyon Clark Children’s Literature Symposium
Trees: In Relation
Saturday, 11 April 2026 at Wheaton College (Norton, MA)
In the early stages of understanding the scope of the most horrifying criminal empire in American history, we are grappling with academia’s role in it. Several faculty members and institutions have been implicated. A few were genuinely innocent and ignored Epstein’s invitations, and some were willingly complicit in crimes against humanity.
Epstein’s co-conspirators have fundamentally compromised the student-teacher relationship and the student-university relationship.
Postcolonial Interventions invites scholarly articles for an OPEN ISSUE to be published in June 2026. As the journal enters its eleventh year, we are hoping to continue critical exploration of emerging voices and recent literary creations while remaining mindful of the various threats associated with older imperial aggressions, re-appearing across the globe, fissures within nation states, multiple forms of exclusionary violence and widening inequality and precarity. The next issue of Postcolonial Interventions seeks to explore such issues and more based on postcolonial experiences across the world.
Submission Guidelines:
LORETO COLLEGE, KOLKATA
Call for Book Chapters
Theme: Marginalized Identities: Dimensions, Perspectives and Problems
The Research and Development Cell of Loreto College is pleased to announce a call for chapter contributions for an upcoming book publication. The theme of the proposed volume is:
‘Marginalized Identities: Dimensions, Perspectives and Problems’
This publication aims to present interdisciplinary insights into the lived realities, challenges, and representations of marginalized identities across various contexts.
Seeking 250-word proposals that engage with Filipino/a/x placemaking in literature, ecology, media, the arts, and the built environment. Particularly interested in proposals that bring together some combination of urban humanities, Global Asias, and archipelagic thinking.
Questions in Black sound and sonic geographies
American Association of Geography
Panel Presentation
What are the spatial contours of black sound? What are some iterations, notes, scripts, or possibilities within the emerging field of black sonic ecologies and black sonic geographies? How can one detect or follow a “black sense of place” (McKittrick 2011)? What is being listened to and what is being heard? What have you been taught or teaching yourself to hear?
What do you consider noise? Who and what hears black sound as a nuisance? What does noise, nuisance generate?
The Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies publishes interdisciplinary and cross-cultural articles and interviews on literature, history, politics, and art whose focus, settings, or subjects involve colonialism and its aftermath, with an emphasis on the former British Empire.
“We are here to begin to achieve the American Revolution.”
– James Baldwin, Foley Square, 1963
Did Baldwin mean it? Do we, who take him down from the shelf, mean it? What would it mean to pick up the idea again, with or against Baldwin? Is it too late, for America, for revolution, for both? Or is the time now finally ripe?
For the American Studies Association convention in Chicago in 2026, James Baldwin Review invites proposals for a roundtable that takes this starting point as an occasion to leap into the unknown.
Please send abstracts of 250 words to jbr@wustl.edu by February 20, 2026.
James Baldwin ends his “Open Letter to My Sister, Angela Y. Davis” about her imprisonment, the health of the country, and the responsibility of intellectuals, with the assertion that:
If we know, and do nothing, we are worse than the murderers hired in our name. If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own—which it is—and render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.
How might scholarship today render such corridors impassable? What is our responsibility, and what are we willing to risk?
In “Thoughts on Late Style,” Edward Said describes how an artist’s late works
cannot be reconciled or resolved, since their irresolution and fragmentariness are constitutive, neither ornamental nor symbolic of something else. The late works are about ‘lost totality’, and it is in this sense that they are catastrophic.
The late works of James Baldwin have often been dismissed as evidence of decadence, of their maker’s exhaustion after too many years of activism, as a crude failure to synthesize his fiction and nonfiction, the novels too political, the essays too aesthetic. Yet this supposedly weak synthesis rhymes with Said’s meditations on the irresolution typical of an artist’s late works.
The Gaskell Journal invites applications for the position of co-Editor.
The Gaskell Journal is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal published annually, dedicated to disseminating the most authoritative, dynamic and agenda-setting research in Gaskell Studies. It is owned by the Gaskell Society and is distributed to its members, as well as being indexed in various academic databases (for more details, see The Gaskell Journal – The annual Journal of the Gaskell Society). In a typical issue, the journal publishes 3-4 original articles, 3-4 book reviews, and reports from the Society’s branches across the UK and the world.
Edited Volume
Call for Contributions
Apologies for crossposting.
Call for Papers: Journal of Contemporary Painting Special Issue & Symposium
Special Issue: ‘Conversations between Painting, Fashion and Textiles’
One-day symposium: ‘Painted Garments’
Friday 22 May 2026
The Hub, Camberwell College of Arts, Bonar Road, London SE15 5FB
Keynote: Delaine Le Bas
View the full call here>>
https://www.intellectbooks.com/journal-of-contemporary-painting#call-for-papers
Deadlines
Penn State’s Center for American Literary Studies presents
Heat and the Humanities: Reframing Human Relationships to Heat and Wildfire
Friday, February 27, 2026, Noon—1:00 p.m. EST via Zoom
Register here
https://psu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_tzjjrtt9RYWmESys5PkJaw
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email
The Cambridge Handbook of Postcolonial Law and Literature is a collection of essays analyzing the relationship between English Common Law and Anglophone literature in the colonial and postcolonial world. The collection is largely complete, but can accommodate a few more essays. The editors particularly welcome submissions on Disability Studies, Ecological Studies, and/or essays that focus on the Caribbean.
Jason Lives – essays on the Friday the 13th franchise
In 1980, inspired by the success of John Carpenter’s Halloween two years prior, Sean S. Cunningham wanted to create a horror film that would serve as a ‘roller coaster ride’ – that film, Friday the 13th, would launch one of the key horror franchises of the 20th century, comprising twelve films, a TV series, a selection of books, games and merchandise, and the establishment of hockey mask-wearing killer Jason Voorhees as a cultural phenomenon.
This year’s ICSAH meeting approaches the Art of Mediation as a framework for understanding cross-cultural interaction in history. Throughout time, individuals, institutions, communities, and cultural forms—ranging from language and performance to visual and material culture—have acted as mediators between societies. In negotiating religious difference, political conflict, economic rivalry, and artistic exchange, they shaped the shared spaces where civilisations met, interacted, and coexisted.
Call for Articles: Cultural Materialism, Fascism and the Far Right
A Special Issue of Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism
CFP for Special Issue in IMAGO MUNDI: The International Journal for the History of Cartography
“Maps and the Imagination”
In light of the ongoing “cartographic turn” in literary studies and recent critical attempts to
“remap” the field of cartographic history, we are seeking contributions for a special issue that
examines the relationship between maps (from historical prints to digital creations) and the
imagination (from the impact of maps on literary and visual arts to earthworks and new media).
Following the growing interest in cartographic imaginaries, documented, for example, in studies
Call for Papers: Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds
Special Issue: ‘Video Games & Horror’
Abstract deadline: 1 April 2026
Full article draft deadline: 28 July 2026
View the full call here>>
https://www.intellectbooks.com/journal-of-gaming-virtual-worlds#call-for-papers
The Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds is excited to announce a call of content for an upcoming Special Issue focused on horror in video games.
The Cultural Studies Cell
Department of English and Cultural Studies, Central Campus
In collaboration with
Department of Media Studies, Central Campus
CHRIST (Deemed to be University), Bangalore
Organizes
An International Conference (Hybrid)on
Urban/Media Infrastructures
March 5-7, 2026
The USC Korean Studies Institute invites applications for its annual Pacific Graduate Conference for Korean Studies at USC (PaCKS). This conference aims to foster a multidisciplinary community of local and regional graduate students whose research projects significantly engage Korean society and culture across the periods. It offers a platform for emerging scholars to present their work-in-progress, receive feedback from faculty and peers, and participate in interdisciplinary discussions within a supportive environment.
Call for Expressions of Interest: Book Reviews Editor for The London Journal
The London Journal is seeking expressions of interest for the role of Joint Book Reviews Editor.
This role will cover the period from roughly 1800 to the present, joining Kirstin Barnard, who covers the medieval and early modern periods. The Book Reviews Editors are full members of the Editorial Board.
Call for Papers
Journal of West Indian Literature Special Issue on Caribbean Health Humanities
November 2027
Special issue editors: Jarrel De Matas and April Shemak
Call for Papers: SCMS Horror Studies SIG Graduate Student Essay Prize
The SCMS Horror Studies Scholarly Interest Group is delighted to announce that submissions are now open for our annual Graduate Student Essay Prize.
The winning essay will be published in an upcoming issue of the open-access journal Monstrum and the author will receive:
Papers on Joseph Conrad and reading, including close reading, book culture, intertextuality, Conrad’s own reading, Conrad’s global readers, and the challenges of reading Conrad in the age of artificial intelligence. This is one of several planned panels for the Joseph Conrad Society of America Allied Organization at the Modern Language Association Convention in January 2027. Email 300 word proposals and a 100-word biography to Jana Giles, giles@ulm.edu. Deadline: March 15, 2026.
For further information and to see the call posted on the MLA website, see: https://mla.confex.com/mla/2027/webprogrampreliminary/index.html.
Papers, delivered in English, on adaptations of works by Joseph Conrad, in any form and language, including film, television, games, opera, theatre, musical compositions, and graphic novels. This is the planned guaranteed session for the Joseph Conrad Society of America Allied Organization at the Modern Language Association Convention in January 2027. Email 300 word proposals and a 100-word biography to Jana Giles, giles@ulm.edu. Deadline: March 15, 2026.
For further information and to see the call posted on the MLA website, see: https://mla.confex.com/mla/2027/webprogrampreliminary/index.html.
POSTHUMANISM AND CONTEMPORARY ARTISTIC PRACTICES
INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM 7-8 May 2026
Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre
Gedimino Ave. 42, 01110 Vilnius, Lithuania
Concept Note
Call for Papers: Elizabeth von Arnim and Pomerania EXTENDED DEADLINE
Institute of Literature and New Media at the University of Szczecin, Poland invites you to take part in the international academic conference on the 160th anniversary of the birth and 85th anniversary of the death of the author Elizabeth von Arnim and Pomerania
6-7 June 2026
Confirmed plenary speakers:
Dr Jennifer Shepherd, The Open University Belfast, Northern Ireland
prof. Noreen O’Connor, King’s College, Pennsylvania, USA
This guaranteed online session of the TC Religion and Literature forum at the January 2027 MLA convention invites papers on literary production and culture that occurs at the intersections of Black Studies and spirituality. How have texts by Black writers imagined, challenged, and embraced traditional, new, and syncretic forms of spirituality?
Possible topics could include:
CFP: WHAT MIRACLE: NEW REVELATIONS ON THE PROSE POEM
October 15 and 16, 2026, in Rome, Italy
CALL FOR BOOK CHAPTERS - DEADLINE EXTENDED
The Final Frontier: Race, Ecology & Colonialism in Space Opera
Edited by Mikail Boz & Cenk Tan
Editors’ Introduction
The Activist Author: Contemporary Forms and Historical Precedents of Activist Literature
Dates and Location:
November 9th & 10th, 2026.
UCLouvain (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium).
Confirmed Keynote speakers:
Sara Dimick: Northwestern University; author of Unseasonable: Climate Change in Global Literatures.
Juan Meneses: UNC Charlotte; author of Resisting Dialogue: Modern Fiction and the Future of Dissent and editor of Postpolitics and the Aesthetic Imagination.
The next Conference on John Milton will be held at Brigham Young University in Provo, UT from 22–24 October 2026.
We invite proposals for 20-minute papers addressing any aspect of Milton's life or work, including papers that explore connections between Milton and other writers or artists of the time period (or beyond). Proposals for panels or sessions are also welcome.
Please send abstracts of 150–200 words along with a CV to jason_kerr@byu.edu by 31 January 2026. UPDATE: the submission deadline has been extended to 2 March 2026.
In a Conference Far, Far Away…Traversing Forms of the Folkloric (Graduate Student Conference)
New York University, Department of Comparative Literature: Friday, May 1, 2026
Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies
Brutalism in the Global Novel (https://journals.upress.ufl.edu/jgps/cfp)
Madhurima Nayak, Chandigarh University, India
“American Shorts 2026” will take place on October 29-31, 2026, at the School of Arts & Humanities of the University of Lisbon, Portugal.
American Shorts 2026 webpage: https://sites.google.com/view/americanshorts2026
Submission deadline: 10 June, 2026
Conference: 29-31 October, 2026
Location: Lisbon, Portugal
The Aquatic Presence-Absence in World Literatures
Critical Language and Literary Studies (CLLS) invites original, unpublished research articles for a themed issue to be published in Fall 2026. The theme is examining aquatic presences and absences in world literatures.
Updated CFP: We invite three additional contributors to join the volume, replacing previously shortlisted chapter authors who were unfortunately unable to continue with the project. This presents an excellent opportunity to participate in a substantial scholarly publication that already includes confirmed contributions from researchers based in India, Palestine, Indonesia, the Netherlands, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Call for Papers: Special Issue on Digital Marginalisation, AI Bias, and Cultural Representation in South Asia
UPDATE: DEADLINE EXTENDED UNTIL 07 February 2026
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UCI Comparative Literature Graduate Conference 2026
Keynote Speakers: Prof. Rizvana Bradley and Prof. Samiha Khalil
The infiltration of chaos into any home is not an abrupt occurrence. A fine dust settles on the cracks of wood, sheet folds, window seams, and curtain pleats, waiting for a wind to find its way into the home and liberate the components of scatteredness from their ambush.
Ghazaleh Alizadeh, The House of Edrisis
For those who dominate and oppress us benefit most when we have nothing to give our own, when they have so taken from us our dignity, our humanness that we have nothing left, no "homeplace" where we can recover ourselves.