Patterson Prize 2025 (English submission)
Deadline: May 1, 2025
Prize: $500 USD and publication in Simone de Beauvoir Studies, vol. 36, no. 2

The award is named after Yolanda Astarita Patterson, one of the founding editors of Simone de Beauvoir Studies and Editor in Chief of the journal for more than thirty years (1985-2016). The Patterson Prize is awarded annually to a work that demonstrates excellence in writing while also embodying modes of thought and expression characteristic of Beauvoir’s oeuvre.

Modernist literature emerges at the intersection of industrialization and the rapid expansion of fossil fuels—railways, power grids, and oil pipelines—that define the modern city while also exposing its vulnerabilities. This panel explores how modernist works engage with the materiality and aesthetics of infrastructure to critique the systems that sustain modern life and the forms in which modern life is communicated.

This session invites abstracts for papers that engage meaningfully with Toni Morrison’s 2008 novel A Mercy. This session seeks to bring together a wide variety of approaches to and thematic interests in the novel. Papers might explore questions as diverse as possession/haunting, coloniality, race, the archive, gender, or theories of reading.

Please submit a 250-word abstract and a 150-word bio through the Google form below:

 https://forms.gle/kzYew6K7XLPEpiG6A

Title: Religion and AI Romance in Popular Media: Wired for Love

Edited by: Amanda Furiasse, Nova Southeastern University

Call for Papers

“Pictorial Punch – Treasures from the Archive”

 British Library Study Day, 7th November 2025

Confirmed Keynote Speakers: Patrick Leary (Historian of the Victorian Press) and Julia Thomas (Cardiff University)

This session seeks 250-word abstracts of critical and creative pieces on women’s war narratives from postcolonial experiences, like – partition, apartheid, independence, internal colonization, gendered, racialized or sectarian violence.

The MLA Forum on Seventeenth-Century English Studies (LLC 17th-Century English) invites submissions for a guaranteed session on “Eco-criticism in an Age of Emergency.” Eco-critical approaches to early modern literature have flourished since the turn of the twenty-first century. As the climate crisis continually becomes more urgent, however, the need for us as scholars to re-assess our history and culture through an ecological lens also steadily increases. Where is seventeenth-century ecocriticism now, and where is it going?

Call for Papers: (Re)Reading Encyclopedic Narratives in the Digital Age

RSAJournal - Special Issue no. 37 (September 2026)

Guest editors: Giorgio Mariani (Sapienza University of Rome), Ali Dehdarirad (Sapienza University of Rome), Sascha Pöhlmann (TU Dortmund University)

Call for Papers: Catalan Journal of Communication & Cultural Studies Issue 17.2

Special Issue: 'Ludomythologies: the Creation, Circulation & Transformation of Imaginaries in Games'

View the full call here>>

The MLA Drama and Performance Forum is currently accepting proposals for the two panels it is sponsoring for the 2026 conference in Toronto: https://www.mla.org/Events/2026-MLA-Convention.

Crowd Work: Audiences in Drama and Performance

How do drama and performance engage audiences as spectators and participants? What work does the audience do and how is it negotiated across local, transnational, economic, generic, or mediatized performance and reception contexts?

Please submit brief bios and 200-word proposals.

Deadline for submissions: Friday, 21 March 2025

Call for Chapters in an Edited Volume

Soundscapes in Indian Art, Literature and Culture

The Gaskell Journal

Joan Leach Memorial

Graduate Student Essay Prize 2026

Deadline for submissions: 1 February 2026

The Gaskell Journal runs a biennial Graduate Student Essay Prize in honour of Joan Leach MBE, founder of the Gaskell Society. The winning essay will be published in the Gaskell Journal (with revisions as appropriate), and its author will receive £200 from the Gaskell Society, and a complimentary copy of the Journal.

The Doris Lessing Society, an allied organization of the MLA, invites proposals for the two 2026 MLA sessions; for details of the Calls, see below:

                                               Calls for Paper for the 2026 MLA Convention (01/08--01/11/2026)

1       Doris Lessing the Storyteller: Literature and Social Change

The goal is to explore the ways in which Lessing uses fiction for social transformation through the elaboration and dissemination of knowledge, e.g., self-education, constructing knowledge, questioning moral/political values, and the relationship to language.

Deadline for submissions: Sunday, 23 March 2025

Call for Papers

The ATHE Theory & Criticism Focus Group seeks papers for its annual Graduate Student Essay Contest.

The contest presents an exciting opportunity for an emergent theatre and performance studies scholar. It introduces the winning writer to the ATHE conference and provides them with a venue in which to showcase their work. 

The contest prizes are intended to support the development of the student’s academic work, ease financial challenges related to conference attendance, and connect the student with appropriate scholarly resources for the paper’s development and impact. 

The winning scholar will receive: