In Serpent, Siren, Maelstrom & Myth (2023),Gerry Smyth links the importance of sea stories to the 2019 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s special report on the endangerment of the world’s oceans. According to Smyth, retelling and interpreting sea myths helps to underline the centrality of the ocean to planetary health.[1] Other contemporary writers, artists, and filmmakers have also remade and reinvented water mythologies both within and beyond the sea as a way of grappling with our current oceanic crises.

A small forest area that holds ecological, historical, cultural, religious and spiritual value, and is protected by the local community, can be understood as a ‘Sacred Grove’. The term ‘sacred’ signifies the importance of these groves as they protect different species despite depletion of forest areas around them. The prohibition to collect or remove any resources from these sacred groves conserve plants, parasites, animals, herbs, and even maintain the water and soil compositions (Khan et al, 2008). As a result, these sites serve as living records of geographical and ecological past, making them invaluable spaces for scientific research.

Call for Papers II -- Queer and Trans of Color Critique: Colonial Legacies, Decolonial Futures

We are living in a rapidly changing world. For the last many decades, the contemporary world has been undergoing fundamental shifts and transformations in the social structures, systems, organisations, institutions, values, norms, and functions of a society. These social changes are often driven by technological breakthroughs, the penetration of social media, economic globalisation, ecological crises, war, disease, disorder, and so on, along with shifts in cultural and social paradigms.

Call for Book Chapters

Influence of Indian Philosophers on Indian Writings in English: A Socio-Cultural Perspective

Editors: Dr. Ashutosh Singh and Dr. Sahabuddin Ahamed

deadline for submission extended: 15 February, 2026 

Call for Papers for Western Literature Association’s guaranteed panel at the 2026 American Literature Association Meeting (Chicago, May 20-23)

This year’s general call seeks proposals related to any aspect of the study of literature of the American West.  Papers on single texts or single authors are welcome, though comparative, transnational, and/or multiethnic approaches are especially encouraged. Graduate students are encouraged to apply.

Centre for Global Migrations Symposium

Crossing Borders

Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka | University of Otago

17-18 February 2026

Keynotes: Anne McNevin | Simon Barber & Gabriella Makerita Hinetu Brayne

Call for Submissions! The Lamp is seeking submissions for its 2026 issue (Volume 16)!

The Lamp is an international literary journal dedicated to showcasing the creative writing of graduate and professional students. If you write poetry, short fiction, scripts, creative nonfiction, or any other form of textual art, please submit your work to The Lamp at thelampeditor@gmail.com. The deadline is Sunday, 11 January 2026. Please follow our submission guidelines below.

Submission Guidelines:

Caleidoscopio – Revista de Comunicação e Cultura is the journal of the Communication Sciences Department of ECATI, Lusófona University.

Now entering its second series, Caleidoscopio is being relaunched with the aim of consolidating its position as an open-access platform dedicated to critical research in communication sciences, with a special focus on the intersection of communication, media, and the arts in contemporary societies.

We invite submissions that engage with approaches from media theory, visual studies, philosophy of technology, cybernetics, or contemporary artistic practices. There are no article processing charges.

 “I, I wear a plastic suit / Plastic is my food / Perhaps, I’m plastic too,” sang the iconic Yugoslav New Wave band Idoli in their 1981 song “Plastika” (“Plastics”). These lyrics captured a 1980s moment in which Yugoslav production, import, and consumption of plastics reached their peak. Yet the groundwork for it had been laid in the preceding decades, since plastics production had begun shortly after the Second World War and rapidly permeated all aspects of everyday life (see Filipović 2023). Importantly, Yugoslavia’s trajectory differed from that of the Eastern Bloc.

Since 1975, pacificREVIEW: A West Coast Arts Review Annual (formerly Pacific Poetry and Fiction Review) has thrived as an experimental editorial cohort made up of driven, wily, undergraduates & graduate students in the department of english and Comparative Literature, san diego state university, san diego, ca 92182-6020. This year, we take on comix again! 

Bloomsbury - Trans Studies Book Series

CALL FOR CHAPTERS

Transgender Entanglements: The shape and limits of transgender 

Edited by Levi C. R. Hord and Wendy Gay Pearson

CFP: The Medieval Comic

MEST Symposium, Indiana University Bloomington

March 6-8

Keynote from Dr. Albrecht Classen: "Laughter on the Stage, Laughter at Court, and Laughter in Public Spaces During the Middle Ages and Early Modern Time."

The Comic is a multivalent concept, which can pull or push scholarship in many directions. It  has been at times described as a social balm, binding agent, and lubricant. This call for papers asks for submissions considering the various ways in which the Comic manifests in the medieval and medievalism, its implications, and importance.

Potential panels might consider:

"Speculative Cultures and the Metamodern Turn"
AmLit: American Literature Special Issue (October 2027)

Guest Editors
Vasileios N. Delioglanis (deliogla@enl.auth.gr)
Aylin D. Walder (aylin-dilek.walder@tu-braunschweig.de)

BWWC 2026: Call for Papers

Society for the Study of Southern Literature Conference 2026

“Building Spaces of Freedom,” March 28th-31st at Fisk University, Nashville, TN

Panel: The Future of Southern Studies

Building on the 2026 theme, Building Spaces of Freedom, this panel seeks work that imagines where southern studies is going and who will help carry it forward. The Emerging Scholars Organization (ESO) invites papers from emerging scholars for an open-call panel that looks ahead toward the next questions, methods, and interventions shaping southern studies. 

“When Humans are On the Menu: Cannibalism and Modernity”

BAMS/MSA 2026

Loughborough, UK, 1-4 July 2026

I’m seeking abstracts for papers exploring representations of cannibalism in global modernist literature and culture for BAMS/MSA 2026. I’m planning this as an entirely virtual panel, but I am open to an in-person panel if that is everyone’s preference!

We welcome proposals that investigate aurality across media and genres, including literature, film, television, radio, theatre, podcasting, music, video games, and performance. Paper proposals might consider how adaptation translates, transforms, or reimagines texts as auditory experiences.

Sessions will be held on the Burman University campus, but we will also offer “Early Bird” and “Night Owl” online sessions for scholars facing travel difficulties at the moment. Please select “Online” on the proposal form if you are interested in this option.

We welcome contributions that engage with any topic related to adaptation studies, but our program will focus particularly on the following topics:

The representation of fatness in media has long been a subject of scrutiny, often intertwined with discourses of desirability, stigma, humor, and social control. Whether in films, advertisements, cartoons, or social media, fat bodies are frequently portrayed through the lens of excess, deviance, or comic relief, shaping cultural perceptions and reinforcing existing hierarchies of appearance and worth. This issue seeks to explore the multiple ways in which fatness is constructed and negotiated across various media forms, interrogating its intersections with gender, sexuality, class, power, and social anxieties.

Edited Volume with e-ISBN (Digital)

CFP | Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins Society (PEHS) session 

American Literature Association Annual Conference, Chicago, IL, May 20-23, 2026

Hopkins’s America, Then & Now

The Society for the History of Women in the Americas (SHAW) welcomes proposals for its annual conference, hosted by the University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès, France.

This year's conference invites papers on any topic relating to histories of women and gender non-conforming people in the Americas, but encourages proposals for papers, panels or roundtables that explore the subject of confinement.

Abstracts are invited on, but not limited to, the following sub-themes:

• Digital Transformations in Literary Studies
• Artificial Intelligence and Literary Criticism
• Hybrid Genres, Graphic Narratives, and New Media
• Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature
• Trauma, Memory, and Narrative Representation
• Identity, Intersectionality, and Representation
• Postcolonialism, Neocolonialism, and Cultural Identity
• Tribal Literatures, Indigenous Knowledge Systems, and Forest Ecologies
• Dalit Literatures and Narratives of Marginality
• Language, Multilingualism, and Cultural Diversity
• Translation, Transculturation, and Cross-Cultural Mediation

Call for papers – Series of Workshops on Sacred Writing Traditions

The HaZen (Handschriftenzentrum) project, based at the Institute for Jewish Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, would like to invite international researchers to three workshops in Berlin.