The Octavia E. Butler Literary Society invites prospective participants to submit proposals on any aspect of Butler’s life and work. This year, we especially encourage papers and panels that engage with her any of her work and/or her archives. We welcome both full panel proposals and individual papers.

Submit proposals to:
Kendra R. Parker
Email: oebliterarysociety@gmail.com

Proposal Deadlines:

• Preferred: December 15, 2024
• Final: January 13, 2025

Please include the following in your submission:

Call for Papers: Surveillance and Literature

Special Issue of Surveillance & Society

Edited by Steph Brown, University of Arizona

Submission deadline: January 1, 2025 for publication September 2025

This special issue asks: what does literature, and the study of literature, offer our shared understanding of surveillance? And what can literature tell us about surveillance and its entanglement with the arts?

Call for Papers: Special Issue, The Comparatist

Topic: Failure

General Editor: Zahi Zalloua (Whitman College)

The professional journey of children’s and young adult literature scholars, librarians, and educators often involves significant transitions. These transitions present unique opportunities and challenges, often requiring redefinition of identity, reevaluation of goals, and the navigation of new professional landscapes. For this year’s “Building a Career Panel,” the Membership Committee invites proposals for an interactive workshop panel that explores the diverse experiences of career transitions within the field of children’s and young adult literature.

Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur presents 
Anviksha: A Research Scholars’ Conference
8th and 9th February, 2025
Conference Theme: Identities

An Archaeology of the Gaze
Studying the evolutions of the Iconography of Violence and Brutality

Anyone familiar with the war iconography of ancient sovereigns—from the Assyrian palaces and temples of Ramses II to Trajan’s Column—would not be surprised by these powers' claims to legitimate violence. It was entirely endorsed by the sovereign, reducing the victims of the conquering arm to mere foils for the political power asserting itself through force. In stark contrast, the photographs that journalists share from contemporary conflicts are often characterized by a specific focus on the victims, whose suffering has become central to the interpretation of violence.

HERA

Call for Papers

        Humanities Education and Research Association

Annual Conference, 12-15 March 2025

University of Houston-Downtown

Houston, Texas

"Humanities 2.0: Traditions & Technology"

‘Body horror,’ a subgenre devoted to corporeal transgressions, is undergoing a rebirth with films like Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (2024)—a cautionary tale challenging the beauty industry and the gendered double standards of ageing. This emerging biopolitical discourse concerned with body dysmorphia, loss of control, abjection, susceptibility to illness and mutation is not limited to film. From classics like Frankenstein to Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the Grand Guignol ghastly extends its arms to the literary sphere with emerging works like Mona Awad’s Rouge or Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation.

Acta Ludologica is inviting manuscripts for its Special Issue: Games and Monetisation.

Guest editor: assoc. prof. PhDr. Jana Radošinská, PhD.

We are pleased to announce the in-person 2025 Theory & Criticism conference at Western University from April 25th-26th. This conference aims to look beyond visions of the future that are confined to the utopian-dystopian binary. To do so, it will feature theoretically rich work from decolonial, queer, trans, and crip-futurism(s) and their intersections. 

• The first panel, a roundtable on “Kate Chopin in the Classroom/ Teaching Through Technology,” seeks short (seven- to eight-minute) papers/remarks that address an aspect of or strategy for teaching Chopin’s life or work in the contemporary classroom. How do you teach Chopin in the post-covid classroom? What in-class activities and assignments incorporating technology, multimodality, infographics, podcasts, TikTok videos, AI, etc. are engaging your students as they study Chopin? Proposals should include a title, your name and affiliation, and a paragraph about your proposed remarks.

The World of Bob Dylan returns to Tulsa from July 24-27, 2025 and, in cooperation with the Bob Dylan Center, will celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of Dylan going electric at the Newport Folk Festival.  We now seek proposals for papers, panels, roundtables, and creative sessions that will run across the event’s four days.

Rethinking Race, Nation and Empire: Charles Dickens, Slavery, and the American Civil War considers how the writings of Charles Dickens are shaped by—and contribute to—Victorian discourses of race, nation, and empire in the middle of the nineteenth century. The “discursive roots of modern racism lie in British, European, and colonial writings,” writes Patrick Brantlinger. But often unacknowledged is the “extent to which racism informed virtually all aspects of Romantic and Victorian culture” (Taming Cannibals 6-7).

This conference aims to examine the question of figurative art at the beginning of the 21st century. Nowadays, figurative artistic models are challenged by increasingly sophisticated technologies that reshape our definition of “the real,” and more particularly, of reality. AI-generated images tend to normalize manipulated and distorted representations of the world we live in and can sometimes become indistinguishable from real images (“deepfakes”).