FEMSPEC, an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal dedicated to challenging gender through speculative means in any genre, seeks volunteers to fill the following roles:

PRODUCTION EDITOR

Duties include:

Collating and formatting content for each new issue of the journal.  Liaising with the journal's editor and other volunteer collective members to make changes to the issue's content and layout until the end of each issue's production period.

This online panel seeks proposals that examine how humor, irony, and formal games use linguistic misbehavior to create new emotional landscapes, construct gendered subjectivities, and challenge traditional hierarchies across global literatures.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Puns, irony, or broken syntax and a gendered “I”
• Mis-translation and playfulness in translation
• Mixing languages and subjectivity
• Post-colonial parody
• Joy as defiance
• Humor in crisis
• Games based on works of literature

Please send a 250-word abstract and a brief bio to Dr. Haihong Yang (hyang@udel.edu) by March 15th. 

The 2026 International Postgraduate Comparative Literature Conference (IPCLC 2026), hosted by the Master of Arts in Literary and Cultural Studies (MALCS) at The University of Hong Kong (HKU), brings together postgraduate students and emerging scholars from Hong Kong and beyond for a day of cross-cultural conversation. Taking place in person at HKU on May 26, 2026, the conference offers a supportive forum for sharing work in progress, building scholarly networks, and testing new comparative methods across literary, cultural, and media studies. Featuring themed panels, a keynote lecture, and Best Paper Award(s), IPCLC 2026 invites participants to consider how comparison can sharpen our understanding of urgent questions in the humanities.

Call for Papers

Philip K. Dick at 100: Fiction, Philosophy, and Cultural Afterlives

Edited Volume (Centenary Collection)

Editors:
Assoc.Prof.Dr. Ercan Gürova
Ankara University, Turkey

Prof. dr Mladen Jakovljević
University of Priština in Kosovska Mitrovica, Serbia

“Under consideration for publication by a reputable international academic publisher.”

CALL FOR PAPERS

Edited Volume

Island Studies in South Asia: Gender, Culture and Islandness

We're excited to announce that the DIY Methods Conference is back for another year! Pitches are due by April 20th, 2026. Please don't hesitate to email us (annepasek@trentu.ca and trentwintermeier@utexas.edu) if you have any questions.

Call for Paper

The Politics of Ableism: Gender, Sexuality, and Disability in Literature and Media

Edited by Habib Tekin & Nizara Hazarika

Call for Papers

In the Introduction to In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination, Margaret Atwood makes a clear distinction between science fiction and speculative fiction: the former concerns events that could not happen; the latter draws on developments that could happen or that have already occurred in some historical form. The distinction was publicly contested, including in an exchange with Ursula K. Le Guin, and Atwood insists her terminology was descriptive rather than hierarchical. She places The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) within the speculative category on the grounds that nothing in the novel exceeds documented historical precedent (Atwood 5–6). This conference takes Atwood at her word.

Title: Witness, Voice, and Agency: Chinese Poetry as Emancipatory Narrative

This panel explores how Chinese poetry, from classical to contemporary, functions as emancipatory narrative across historical periods, aesthetic forms, and sociopolitical contexts.

We welcome papers that examine how poets articulate conditions of constraint while imagining, inhabiting, or enacting liberatory possibilities. Possible topics include, but are not limited to: 

Textual Bodies: Incarnation, Corporeality, and Affective Materialities through Literature
6th Meeting of Young Researchers of the SELGyC

Faculty of Philology — Complutense University of Madrid
September 16–17, 2026

«Write yourself: your body must be heard»
Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa

«The text you write must prove to me that it desires me»
Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text

The D H Lawrence Society of North America and the Joseph Conrad Society of America are seeking panel papers on the themes of exile and emancipation in the works of both Lawrence and Conrad.  Proposals specialized on either author will be considered for inclusion, but we are especially interested in papers that address both of these important writers in a comparative or interdisciplinary manner.  In either case, early for Conrad and later for Lawrence, the author left his home country in the interests of a less constrained existence elsewhere, thereby raising the possibilities of exilic nostalgia and regret.  At the same time, both equally sought spaces of freedom and movement in expatriat

This panel will foreground how Muslim minorities acculturate cooperative networks of solidarity, acceptance, creativity and affect beyond rigid notions of nation, region and sovereignties. In this context we will look at ruptures which persist due to the rigid and restrictive processes of neocolonial and neoliberal regimes and how it continues to shape the lived and material realities of South Asian Muslims across national and diasporic contexts. In particular we will discuss the historical contexts and enduring consequences of the rigid and restrictive processes of colonisation, partition, migration, trade, caste, legalities, and majoritarianism as it intersects with the inter-nation and cross-border movements of Muslims within and beyond South Asia.

Title: Algorithm or Ally? AI, Global English, and the Future of Language Learning
Sponsoring Entity: MLA LSL Global English Forum
Convention: MLA 2027 (Los Angeles, Jan 7–10)

Description: The future of Global English is now inextricably linked to the rise of Artificial Intelligence. This session investigates a fundamental tension: Is AI democratizing language access, or is it a new, automated iteration of "Linguistic Imperialism"?

Present-day cultural and political shifts are producing seismic impacts upon Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies programs and curricula across geopolitical contexts. This session explores new currents, approaches and strategies for teaching WGS in the classroom. (In-Person Session)

Deadline: Sunday, March 15, 2026

Send proposals of 200-words with a shot bio to Ryan Calabretta-Sajder (rcalabretta@gmail.com) and Victoria Muñoz (vmunoz@adelphi.edu)

The nature of free speech has been a flashpoint in the past decade of contemporary Anglo-American and Western politics. Depending on who you ask, free speech is imperiled by politically correct language and the silencing of right-leaning voices among the elite, or by political administrations, corporations, and other institutions that remove books from libraries and syllabi from classrooms. As these principles collide, the dialectic between freedom of expression and institutional censorship reaches a crucible—a volatile tension that distills our understanding of these core principles.  

Butoh Symposium, Kingston University London, 17-18 September, 2026

We will be holding a Butoh Symposium over two days and two evenings, 17-18 September 2026, at the Main Auditorium of Kingston University’s award-winning Town House Building, in south-west London. The Symposium is organised by researchers attached to the School of Art’s Visual Cultures Research Centre at Kingston University’s School of Art faculty. This symposium follows on from our recent successful symposia of 2024-25 on the work of Antonin Artaud and on ‘experimental archives’.

Call for Submissions

Yeshe: A Journal of Tibetan Literature, Arts and Humanities is an international open-access and peer-reviewed annual e-journal, which provides an outstanding platform for Tibetan writers, translators and all research scholars in the area of Tibet Studies to publish their works. 

Yeshe is currently open to submissions of academic articles, reviews, and interviews related to Tibet, as well as poetry, performance, prose, art, and fiction written in English or translated into English) for its sixth annual issue to be published in October 2026. Please check our submission page for the guidelines.

Seeking 250-word proposals examining feeding and nourishment as maternal practices that shape care, embodiment, and power, through literary, cultural, and medical humanities approaches in contemporary Hispanic and Lusophone contexts. Deadline: March 2

Seeking submissions exploring the formal contours of ecopoetics across time, cultural traditions, and media environments.

250-word abstract, brief bio and CV by March 20, 2026. 

Nikki Skillman, Indiana University-Bloomington

nskillma@iu.edu

Department of Applied Linguistics, Department of Pedagogy and Department of English and American Studies of the University of Gdańsk, Poland, in cooperation with ELLMEnet (Early Language Learning and Multilingual Education Network), are proud to welcome researchers from all over the world to contribute to our 4th International Conference on Early Language Learning and Multilingual Education in Early Childhood.

This roundtable considers positive solutions in the face of disappearing positions and programs, and declining academic freedoms. Successful approaches to reversing this trend desired. We must work together to resist. ~200-word abstracts. ~100-word bios.

Deadline for submissions: Wednesday, March 11, 2026

E. Nicole Meyer, Augusta U (nimeyer@augusta.edu)

Call for Papers: SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900

SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, published quarterly by Johns Hopkins University Press for Rice University, invites submissions of original scholarly essays for upcoming issues. We seek work that offers fresh, rigorous contributions to the study of British literature across four historical fields:

• English Renaissance Literature

• Tudor and Stuart Drama

• Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature

• Nineteenth-Century Literature

The Milton Society of America invites proposals for 15-minute papers for one or more sessions at the 2027 MLA Convention in Los Angeles. Papers on any aspect of Milton’s works, historical milieu, sources, and reception and comparative approaches are welcome. Send 150-word abstracts and 50-word biographical statements to Marissa Greenberg, MSA Secretary, at MiltonSocietySec@gmail.com  by Monday, 16 March 2026.