Medieval and Early Modern People and their Things

People perceive the world and their place in it through interacting with objects. Through these subject-object relationships, people experience the potential of materials, both naturally sourced and manmade, as physical resources that can be perceived. A number of concerns arise with the use of these materials amidst acts of meaning-making. How do people use subject-object relationships in negotiating their treatment of objects to define their world views? To innovate new ways of engaging with and replicating the world around them? And how does that process continue to influence how we create future realities for ourselves and others?

While Indigenous literary studies has grown substantially over the past several decades, comparative approaches that place Indigenous texts, traditions, and intellectual frameworks in conversation with one another remain relatively rare. Too often, Indigenous texts are incorporated into comparative, world, or global literary frameworks without meaningful engagement with Indigenous studies scholarship, or are read primarily through the organizing categories of nation, region, empire, or postcoloniality. This seminar seeks to create a space for comparative Indigenous literary inquiry that centers Indigenous texts, epistemologies, and methods on their own terms.

How do we study reading practices of the modernist era? After the development of what Richard Altick (1957) famously called the “democracy of print” in the nineteenth century, and the move toward mass literacy in the Anglophone world, how did  the act of reading and readership get transformed? Virginia Woolf’s 1926 essay, “How Should One Read a Book?” called reading the “most arduous and exhausting of occupations” and made the case for a discerning reader who would give the writer the “benefit of every doubt.” While the modernist era championed close reading with the evolution of New Criticism and I.A.

“That is the exploration that awaits you. Not mapping stars and studying nebulae, but charting the unknown possibilities of existence.”
– Q to Jean-Luc Picard. From Star Trek – The Next Generation, “All Good Things” (Season 7, Episode 25)

AACS 2027: Archipelagic Sovereignties

In June 2027, we invite you to join us on Gadigal Country at the University of Sydney for the Australian Association for Caribbean Studies (AACS) conference, organised by the Discipline of English and Writing and the United States Studies Centre (USSC), and held from the 10th to the 12th of June, 2027. AACS conferences are interdisciplinary, and papers on all topics relating to the Caribbean are considered, including from the natural sciences.

For 2027, we invite presenters to explore archipelagic sovereignties.

This seminar opens up discussions on past and ongoing debates around indigeneity and indigenous lives. In America, the aboriginals assumed the title “First Nations” to distinguish their identity from that of the non-indigenous people. Historically, the European colonizers have classified the tribes for the sake of academic interest, colonial justification and administrative purposes. The British in India developed criminal ethnography archives and aspired to have systematic anthropometric methods to identify so-called ‘criminal tribes’.

This seminar asks what it means to teach the “world” in fields such as world cinema, world literature, comparative literature, and global media studies. Courses organized around the world often promise breadth, diversity, and cross-cultural understanding, but they also face practical and conceptual problems. What counts as the world? How does the nation appear in “world” courses? How do syllabi balance coverage, depth, translation, historical context, aesthetics, and political urgency? How do institutional expectations and restrictions mold the student imagination of the “world”? How does the positionality of the instructor presuppose, structure, or influence the “world” classroom? 

In-Person Seminar at American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) in Houston, TX, May 20-23, 2027.

Call for Contributors: Paid Research & Analysis Writing (Remote, Freelance)

The Pivot Academic — an independent research and analysis platform based in Hong Kong — invites undergraduate and postgraduate students, recent graduates, and independent scholars to join our global contributor network.

WHO WE ARE

The Pivot Academic is a decentralized intellectual hub founded by a team of European scholars. We publish rigorous, evidence-based analysis on the forces reshaping our world, and we connect independent researchers with a global audience. No institutional affiliation or prior publication record is required — what matters is the rigor of your argument, the originality of your perspective, and the integrity of your evidence.

This is a call for papers by

Call for Proposals: Special Issue on Pauline E. Hopkins for New England Quarterly

The special issue of our open access, Q2 journal explores how contemporary literary, artistic and cultural practices engage with, interrogate, and imagine decolonial ecologies. While decolonial ecology is best understood as a constellation of different ideas, schools, and disciplines, Malcom Ferdinand’s insistence on the politicization of ecology offers a useful point of departure. In his book, Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World (2019; English trans. 2022), Ferdinand identifies a “double fracture” in modernity:the colonial fracture, which produces hierarchies among people, and the environmental fracture, which separates humans from nature, treating the latter as an object of exploitation.

JAMS@MAGS

Co(n)texts: Journal of Language, Literature and CultureVolume 1, Issue 1: Reimagining the Humanities: New Directions in Language, Literature and Culture

Submission Deadline: 31 October 2026

The inaugural issue of Co(n)texts: Journal of Language, Literature and Culture, a peer-reviewed, open-access journal of the Department of English, Central University of Punjab, Bathinda, seeks to explore emerging directions in humanities scholarship. We invite original and unpublished research that rethinks established paradigms, engages with contemporary theoretical debates, and offers innovative perspectives on language, literature, culture, and their intersections.

American Literature Association

May 26-29, 2027

Boston, MA

Roundtable on James Finley’s Abolition and the Rise of US Environmentalism

The Thoreau Society seeks papers for a roundtable on James Finley’s recently released Abolition and the Rise of US Environmentalism: The Literature and Politics of Free Soil (University of North Carolina Press, 2026). Papers may respond to or extend Finley’s book in part or in whole, and may include topics such as:

-Abolition and environmentalism

-The Free-Soil movement

-Settler colonization and abolition

-Racial capitalism 

-Abolition then and now

Journal of Medieval Worlds Call for Submissions

Environmental racism predates its own name. The term entered public discourse in 1982, but the conditions behind it, namely exposure to hazard and unequal claim to safety, go back to slavery itself. Historian Carl Zimring traces this to a basic split in American thought: white meant clean, Black meant dirty. That split decided who did the dirtiest, most dangerous work, and who lived closest to pollution, for generations. In 1968, Memphis sanitation workers went on strike over exactly that: unsafe, degrading labour shaped by the same racial split. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis while there in support of the very strike. That split still operates today.

Call for papers

Stories of Collective Authorship in Architecture

Read Full Website:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/special-issue/335748/stories-of-collective...

Rethinking Cultural Mediation in Global Media

NeMLA 2027 – Panel

How does culture change as it travels across languages, media, technologies, and national borders? What roles do translators, audiences, institutions, platforms, and emerging technologies play in shaping how cultural meanings are represented, circulated, and received?

American, British and Canadian Studies

Special Issue
After the Human, Before the Machine: Rethinking Creativity, Reading and Interpretation in Contemporary Anglophone Culture
December 2026

Deadline extension: 5 October 2026

Guest Editors
Dr. Merritt Moseley, University of North Carolina, Asheville (moseley@unca.edu)
Dr. Alexandra Mitrea, Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu  (alexandra.mitrea@ulbsibiu.ro)

Biennial Conference of the Southeastern American Studies Association (SASA) 
March 18-20, 2027. Montgomery, Alabama 

This session explores how women's bodies function as contested archives of trauma, sites of testimony that dominant social, legal and political structures have often silenced or delegitimised. Drawing on feminist trauma theory, postcolonial critique and affect studies, it examines bodily memory as a form of somatic knowledge that exceeds conventional language and probes the tension between trauma's structural unspeakability and the ethical urgency of testimony and witnessing.

In March 1827, Freedom’s Journal, the first Black newspaper in the United States, famously declared, “We wish to plead our own cause. Too long have others spoken for us.” Across the two centuries that followed, Black newspapers, magazines, and periodicals have served as crucial sites through which Black women articulated political demands, crafted literary identities, challenged racial and gender hierarchies, cultivated communities, and imagined new social futures.

Popular Culture Association: British Popular Culture 

Call for Papers

The British Popular Culture area of the Popular Culture/American Culture Association (PCA/ACA) is now accepting submissions for the 2027 national conference to be held Mar 24-27, 2027, in Boston, MA at the Boston Marriott Copley Plaza.

Academics at all stages in their careers, as well as independent scholars, are encouraged to apply. We particularly encourage submissions by graduate students.