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.

The “Inter-American Mobility” conference will take place at the Inter-American Research Center of the University of Szeged, Hungary, on November 6–7, 2026. Inter-American mobilities encompass a wide range of movements, from geographical migration to the circulation of cultural productions and ideas, following both material and conceptual routes: People, objects, capital, cultural artifacts, and ideas are produced and (re)used by communities in changing contexts. The conference will explore how these diverse forms of mobility have shaped Inter-American relations from the era of exploration to the present day.

Between the Arts, the 36th annual international conference on Virginia Woolf, invites contributions across the fields of academic and artistic research that emphasize artistic expression, and draws on the inspiration of the Bloomsbury group, Woolf’s circle of artists, writers, critics, and public intellectuals.

As Jacques Derrida asks in Of Hospitality, “Must we ask the foreigner to understand us, to speak our language, in all the senses of this term, in all its possible extensions, before being able… to welcome him into our country?” (15). Derrida’s question is rooted in the conception of the foreigner as the cultural, and important to this panel, the spatial other. Coming up on America’s 250th anniversary, this question is particularly fruitful when considering the environment of the United States; historically (i.e. Indigenous land theft and mistreatment, slavery, capitalist implementation) and contemporarily (i.e.

Call for Papers & Proposals:
2026 Youth Symposium: Youth Agency and Activism in an Age of Precarity

The Intersection of Research, Civil Society, and Young People

The University of Tokyo Komaba Campus, Tokyo, Japan

September 7-8, 2026 (Hybrid)

Organized by
East Asia Young Scholars Association (EAYSA)

Concept Note

Queer Theory in the Age of Global Asias: An International Conference December 11-12, 2026 University of Hong Kong In the last two decades, queer theory has shifted from theoretical focuses on shame, performativity, and identification to questions of transnationalism, diaspora, queer liberalism, homonormativity, and homonationalism. Simultaneously, when US-based queer theorists (Eng, Ferguson, Gopinath, Munoz, etc.) devised new models such as queer of color critique and queer diaspora to name the alternative subjectivities and telos of modernity beyond queer liberalism, the AsiaPacifiQueer (APQ) network based in Australia collaborated with queer scholars in Asia to organize the First International Conference of Asian Queer Studies in Bangkok in July 2005.

Call for papers

Undisciplined Anthropologies II: Beyond Borders

American University of Rome, Italy

Department of Cultures and Societies, University of Palermo, Italy

International Conference

25th, 26th September 2026

The conference will take place in Rome

American University of Rome

The Aurelia Auditorium

Via Pietro Roselli, 4

Roma 00153

Deadline for abstracts: September 1st, 2026

“Unruly Realism: Conventions and Contestations in 19th-Century American Realist Fiction”

Workshop at the University of Erfurt – November 26 - 27, 2026

Co-organized by Ilka Saal (Erfurt) and Antonia Purk (Mannheim)

Resources for American Literary Study (Penn State UP), a peer-reviewed journal of archival and bibliographical scholarship in American literature, invites submissions for our upcoming 2027 issues. Covering all periods and genres of American literature, RALS welcomes both traditional and digital approaches to archival and bibliographical analysis. We also welcome proposals for our "Prospects" series in which scholars forecast future developments (and identify scholarly gaps) in the study of major authors.

Instructions for submissions may be found @ http://www.psupress.org/Journals/jnls_rals.html. 

Centre for Science, Technology, and Society Studies at the Czech Academy of Sciences invites prospective participants to submit abstracts for presentation at the international research symposium Novelty and Inequalities in Science, to be held in Prague, Czechia, on October 8-9, 2026.

Novelty and Inequalities in Science

International Research Symposium on Recognizing and Rewarding Novelty in Science

October 8-9, 2026 Prague, Czechia

Submit abstract of 150-300 words or find more information here:

https://stss.flu.cas.cz/novelty2026

Call for Abstracts

The ancient Greek concept of parrhesia, or “fearless speech,” examined by Michel Foucault in a series of later lectures, has generated a steady stream of scholarship from a variety of perspectives: philosophical, political, social, even personal. Considering instances of parrhesia in literary texts can help us understand the underlying tensions between oppression and resistance, especially for those figures whose parrhesia takes the form of refusal.

From its founding ideals framing rights as tied to individuals to many of the ‘myths that made America,’ such as the self-made man, ideas of individualism are deeply entrenched in the culture of the United States. Yet at the same time, the US has also always understood itself as a particular community: as a city upon a hill, a melting pot, a more perfect union. As such, the United States has been established on a seeming paradox, forming ‘out of many, one.’ More recently, this previous consensus has become increasingly brittle, with fragmentation, polarization, hyper-individualism, and loneliness on the rise—as some would argue: again.

Tentative Title- Cross Imagination and Literary Production: African Writers and Indian Characters, Indo- African Writers and African Characters

Globalectics is the interrelationship of all things, the mutual containment of the local and the global.”
— Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing (2012)

CFP NEPCA Monsters & the Montrous Area 2026 - UPDATED DEADLINE

The Monsters & the Monstrous Area of the Northeast Popular Culture Association (a.k.a. NEPCA) seeks proposals for inclusion in NEPCA’s 2026 annual conference.

The event will run as a virtual conference from Thursday, October 15th, through Saturday, October 17th. Virtual sessions will take place via Zoom throughout the day on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Registration will open up in mid-July. The registration fee is expected to be around 50 USD.

The Politics of Literary Form
Graduate Student Conference at Johns Hopkins University
Date: November 13–15, 2026
Location: Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD
Keynote Speaker: Oliver Simons, Columbia University