The theme for this year’s MMLA conference explores the relational dynamics inherent in an archive. Since Derrida’s Archive Fever, the role of the archive has been conceived as a site for both the storage and construction of memory. What is selected and how it is framed by the archival materials works both to capture memory and history and shape how something or someone should be remembered. In keeping with this theme, the permanent section for comics and graphic novels is interested in research that interrogates the intersection of comic studies and the archive.

British literature of the 1800s has a close relationship to archival forms and practices. With a boom in bureaucratic record-keeping, extensive imperial documentation, meticulous medical and legal case histories, and the development of libraries and institutional archives, Victorian literary texts frequently include, copy, or contest letters, ledgers, case files, diaries, and serialized records. By engaging with and appropriating formal aspects of “the archive,” Victorian literature often blurred the boundaries between history and literature, fact and fiction, what is real and what is constructed. But who was keeping records? And of whom?

The 123rd Annual Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA) Conference will take place this November in Seattle, Washington, from November 12-15.

This session seeks papers that explore forms of play in American fiction from 1945 to the present. There are many conceptual genealogies of play within fields such as psychoanalytic theory, Marxist theory, structuralist and poststructuralist theory, affect theory, critical race theory, queer theory, and video game theory.

Call for Papers
PAMLA 2026 Special Session: Seattle
Spanish and Portuguese (Peninsular)

This special session invites papers that explore the rich and multifaceted landscape of Spanish and Portuguese literature, film, and cultural studies within the Iberian Peninsula. We welcome presentations that engage with a broad spectrum of topics, particularly those that foreground the experiences of historically marginalized communities, including (but not limited to) Romani/Gypsy and Afro-Hispanic populations.

Reading in the Digital Age: R. E. Sterling Havens Writing and Reading Symposium

Call for Papers – Opens April 6, 2026

Deadline for submissions: May 25, 2026 

Sponsored by: R. E. Sterling Havens Writing and Reading Symposium, September 19, 2026

Writing and Reasoning Program, Department of English

Southern Methodist University

Dallas, Texas 75205

Reading in the Digital Age

Reading is one of the oldest academic practices, and certainly one of the most rapidly changing.

The Charles Olson Society will sponsor panels at the Re-Viewing Black Mountain College Conference, to take place in Asheville, North Carolina, October 2-4. 2026 marks the Centenary of poet Robert Creeley’s birth, and the Charles Olson Society will welcome abstracts pertaining to any aspect of Creeley’s life and work. Creeley was a central poet in the development of Black Mountain Poetry, and along with his life-long friend and companion in verse, Charles Olson, Creeley greatly influenced the development of American poetics after World War II. As he said, “I write to realize the world as one has come to live in it, thus to give testament. I write to move in words, a human delight. I write when no other act is possible.”

One of the fundamental limitations of English literature before 1800 is that in order to study this literature it must have survived to us in some form: it must have been preserved, intentionally or accidentally, in whole or in part, and usually in some form of archive. This call seeks papers that reflect on or account for the impact of this archival presence in premodern studies. How has or does the need for our texts to have been archived impact the field, whether broadly or through its effect on the understanding of a particular text, author, or genre? How does reading “after the archive” in this subfield differ from similar readings in other subfields, or from readings that do not consider the significance of the archive?

Invitation to Publish 

in ACTA IASSYENSIA COMPARATIONIS no. 37 (2026)

Thematic issue:CITIES IN LITERATURE  / LA VILLE DANS LA LITTÉRATURE/ ORAŞUL ÎN LITERATURĂ

The deadline for the submission of articles and book reviews (in Romanian, English, French, German, Spanish or Italian) is September 01, 2026.

The final decision of the AIC Editorial Board will be passed on before December 15, 2026.

Corrections (if required) and comments by the authors expected between December 15, 2026 and January 15, 2027.

 Lyric / Narrative: Crossings, Tensions, Reconfigurations

Sixth Biennial Conference of the International Network for the Study of Lyric (INSL) University of Liège, Interdisciplinary Center for Applied Poetics (UR Traverses), June 1-3, 2027 Languages: French, English German

RAILIMAGE Conference, 1-3 April 2027, Turku, Finland

Call for Papers

Imagining Railways from 1900 to the Present: Places, People, Infrastructures, Texts

The project ‘Twentieth-Century Railway Imaginations: Building the Mobility and Infrastructural Humanities’ (RAILIMAGE) invites scholars from all backgrounds to submit paper proposals for its 2027 conference. We also warmly encourage early-career researchers to apply.

African writers such as Chris Abani, Teju Cole, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, NoViolet Bulawayo, Biyanvanga Wainaina, Dinaw Mengestu and many others are committed to reimagining the concept of “home” and “what it means to be African?” in the era of mass globalization and “new” diasporic belonging.

The inaugural Edinburgh Bibliographical Seminar and Workshop (EBSW) seeks proposals on the theme of ‘Catalogues and Registers as Evidence in the History of Mathematics, Science, and Technology’. The event will occur at the University of Edinburgh from 20 July to 24 July, 2026, the week after the joint meeting of the History of Science Society and the European Society for the History of Science.

Call for Papers: Autumn 2026: Biophilia: The Shape of the Future
Coreopsis

A Multidisciplinary Journal of the Mythic Arts

This journal accepts papers from many disciplines and is welcoming of all faiths and philosophies. We publish about 5 papers per issue that have been peer-reviewed according to academic standards. Final submissions should be 3000 to 10,000 words. 

If you have a finished paper ready for submission, send it directly to coreopsisjournalofmyththeatre@gmail.com

Call for Papers

Biography, Autobiography, Memoir, and Personal Narrative

Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)

2026 SWPACA Summer Salon

June 25-27, 2026

Virtual Conference

https://swpaca.org/

Submissions open on March 30, 2026

Proposal submission deadline: April 27, 2026

Time, Memory and Forgetting in the Western

Two-Day Symposium | 10–11 September 2026 | University of Essex, UK

Deadline for submissions: 30th April 2026

To submit: 250 word outlines for all submission types via email to richard.parker@uc.cl

“There will come a time when you believe everything is finished; that will be the beginning.”— Louis L’Amour, Lonely on the Mountain.

ROUNDTABLE: Writing Communities in and Beyond the Classroom (PAMLA, Seattle, Nov 12-15, 2026)

Deadline for Proposals: May 15

This roundtable revisits writing as a fundamentally social, collaborative, and democratic act at a time when many writers and students experience it as isolated, pressured, and increasingly mediated by technology. Beyond offering emotional and peer support, writing communities in classrooms, online and social spaces, and professional and informal networks shape how writers see themselves, understand their audience, engage in metacognitive practices, and take creative and intellectual risks.

Call for Papers Ecofeminist Drama: Theatre, Performance, and Ecological Futures

Edited by Douglas A. Vakoch and Işıl Şahin Gülter
Under review with the University of Illinois Press

Global Cinema Symposium

Organized by the Harry W. Bass Jr. School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology

 
Nov. 13-14, 2026

In-person at the University of Texas at Dallas

Keynote Speakers:

Professor Katarzyna Marciniak, Occidental College

Professor Meta Mazaj, University of Pennsylvania

Call for Papers

Abstract

This session invites papers exploring the role of affect and emotion in contemporary world literature. Recent developments in affect theory—particularly the work of Sara Ahmed and Lauren Berlant—have emphasized how emotions circulate across individuals, communities, and cultural contexts. Literary texts offer a powerful site for examining how affect shapes narratives of identity, belonging, and social transformation within global and transnational frameworks.

The everlasting debates surrounding the relationship between literature and film as distinct mediums of artistic expression have long fascinated both philosophy and critical theory. While proponents of cinema argue that cinema is superior to other forms of artistic expression, especially literature, in the sense that it has a unique ability to engage emotions, convey abstract concepts in tangible settings, and challenge, what Gilles Deleuze might call, human “sensory-motor” perception through cinematic techniques, others might disagree by saying that cinema is inferior to literature due to its passive nature and over-reliance on immediate sensory experience rather than intellectual abstraction, which is one of the major characteristics of literature.

Call for Papers

dialog, No. 46, Autumn 2025

dialog, a Peer-reviewed, Bi-annual International Journal of the Department of English and Cultural Studies, Panjab University, Chandigarh, India is open to submissions for its next issue, No. 46, Autumn 2025 (ISSN: 0975 - 4881) (final stages of publication). dialog provides a forum for interdisciplinary research on diverse aspects of culture, society and literature. For its 46th issue, Department of English and Cultural Studies, Panjab University specifically invites:

Call for Book Chapters

From Page to Screen: An Examination of Comic Book to Television Adaptation

Edited by Ryan Twomey and Sebastian Sparrevohn

The advancement of artificial intelligence has transformed humanities research and education, deepening computation’s influence on scholarly practice and everyday life. From the early era of “humanities computing” in the 1970s to the rise of “computational humanities” over the past decade, this trajectory highlights the enduring—and expanding—role of computation in shaping inquiry across the humanities. These intersections are especially visible in interdisciplinary work. As T. S. Eliot observes, “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” The same spirit can illuminate how methods and tools migrate across fields.

Panel Stream: Early American Forms and Formalisms This panel stream interrogates formalism in early American literature following a postcritical turn in the field. One result of literary studies’ recent postcritical turn has been renewed attention to aesthetics, feeling, and form as essential aspects of literary analysis. In early American studies, this reassessment has taken a distinctive shape, particularly in work that foregrounds the formal and aesthetic dimensions of literary culture across the long eighteenth century — from special issues and essay collections (Looby and Weinstein; Cahill and Larkin; Pethers and Koenigs; Pethers and Couch) to monographs (Armstrong and Tennenhouse; Koenigs, Couch, Tawil, Gardner, Garrett).