CFP: Lexicon for Animacy

This session explores how postcolonial and diasporic literatures grapple with memory, trauma, and cultural haunting. Rather than thinking of identity as fixed or linear, selfhood is complex and palimpsestic due to colonial violence, migration, and historical erasure. This session invites papers that analyze how characters or narratives navigate misremembering, inherited trauma, or overwritten histories to reclaim belonging and agency. Topics may include narrative voice, transgenerational memory, silence, storytelling, and archival gaps in multiethnic and immigrant literatures. This session welcomes interdisciplinary approaches and encourages work on Asian American, Black, Indigenous, and other diasporic communities.

Modality: in-person only

Across cultures and histories, women have journeyed through visible and invisible migrations: geographic, emotional, spiritual, intellectual. This panel invites explorations of how these journeys and thresholds: both outer and inner, shape the evolution of selfhood. From the classroom to the kitchen, from the mother’s memory to the daughter's voice, from exile to homemaking, we seek narratives that dwell in moments and spaces of unfolding and becoming. These are stories of transition and tension, of belonging and othering, of rupture and reconciliation. 

Conference Location: NeMLA 2026 March 5-8, Pittsburgh, PA (virtual option available)

In her essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Hortense Spillers articulates the enduring violence of racial enslavement through the concept of the “hieroglyphics of the flesh” (67). This term marks how the captive body, stripped of legal and social personhood, became inscribed with meaning through the violence of racial differentiation. This transformation rendered the Black body not only a surface upon which terror was written but also a metaphysical site from which alternative modes of being might be imagined. In attending to the duality of skin and flesh, Spillers distinguishes between Black skin as legible and social, and Black flesh as ungendered, unsovereign, and open—both wounded and full of radical potential. 

This NeMLA session critically discusses the novels of Sally Rooney. We will ask: is Rooney's oeuvre a critique, a snapshot, a suggestion, or a warning about a way forward for fiction, the novel form, feminism, and contemporary culture?

View full CFP here: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21883

Modality:

In Person Only: The session will be held fully in person at the hotel. No remote presentations will be included.

Questions/Comments:

Contact Kimberlyjcoates@gmail.com

Call for Papers

REACT 2025: Research and Educational Advancements in Culture and Technology

Vienna, October 20–21, 2025

Venue: University of Applied Arts Vienna

More info & submissions: culttech.at/react

The Minotaur and the Labyrinth from multidisciplinary perspectives, specifically on how the symbol of the Minotaur and the Labyrinth has been used from antiquity to now. How has the Minotaur been used, or abused, throughout time? How has the mythology surrounding it been used to generate or regenerate cultural structures? Referencing Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s Monster Culture, what does the Minotaur reveal about the cultures he exists within?

Since its tangential emergence in Said’s Orientalism in 1978, the term Occidentalism accrued multiple significations. Most notably, the term is argued to stage a counter- or reverse-discourse of Orientalism, operating on analogous dichotomic and oppositional paradigms. Most notable, in this context, is Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit’s Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies, which labels Occidentalism as “dehumanizing picture of the West painted by its enemies” (5). This panel queries if we can conceive East-West relations differently, apart from the Orientalist logic that inheres in studies of Occidentalism.

Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) is already recasting numerous aspects of human life. By all accounts, AI has an intense and manifold impact on society, incorporating both positive and negative traits. This session aims to explore how the gendered lens of AI is creating disruptions both for the academic field and the society at large. This panel invites educators, scholars, and researchers to critically investigate the consequences of gendered biases projected through AI stratification. Papers which explore the conference theme (Knowledge) and connect to knowledge production through the gendered lens of AI are especially welcome.

Please submit a 300-word abstract for an edited collection, tentatively titled, Entanglements: Place-Based Literatures for Ecological Liberation. 

Please read the CFP below for details about the collection. We are expanding our search to include diverse geographies including South America, African countries, the Caribbean, the Middle East, Pacific Islands, and South East Asian countries. In addition to a “place” framework, we welcome diverse theoretical approaches and lenses including ones that apply Marxism, feminism, postcolonialism, New Materialism, indigeneity, critical race, nonhumanism, among others.

In her 1981 study of surrealist poetry, The Metapoetics of the Passage, Mary Ann Caws considers the capacity of poetic language to simultaneously arrest itself and enable forward movement: "The word is situated, as Jacques Garelli reminds us, between two deaths, so that each cluster of sounds located within this regenerating rhythm is able to resume its impetus, thus refreshed, as if it were starting again." It is the practice of architextural reading, Caws argues, that reveals the sustained surface tension at work in written texts, a tension often concealed beneath plot, message, the presence of characters, or particularly potent visual images.

Are proms, homecoming parades, lunch lines, hall passes, detentions, and study halls part of your past work life?

Or maybe show and tell, milk break, and recess duty?

And are you now awash in committee work, grant writing, abstract proposals, and syllabus templates?

If so, we want to hear your stories!

This roundtable seeks narrative presentations from academics who have previously taught in elementary, middle school, or high school settings. We will discuss the challenges of transitioning from a PK-12 environment to higher education, the benefits that our backgrounds bring to the higher ed table, and the lived experiences of professors who once taught in the elementary, middle, or secondary classrooms.

In his essay “The Uncanny” (1919), Freud theorized the psychological implications of those aesthetic effects which disturb us without us quite knowing why.  While, according to Freud, the uncanny or das unheimlich evokes a peculiar form of affect within “the field of the frightening” (123), it is a type of fear distinct from that produced by horror and terror.  The uncanny, he argues, registers the traumatic return of “what was once known and had long been familiar” (124), but which had been repressed.  Explorations of the uncanny have linked the affect to repetition and the death drive (Royle 84), surrealism (97), uncertainty (Jentsch 7), and “a certainty that goes beyond any certainty that science can provide” (Dolar 22).