Critical Arts: south-north cultural and media studies 

【Special Issue】Global thinking and regional acting: From eco-aesthetics to cultural discourses of the Asian natural environment

Guest editor

Goutam Karmakar, University of Hyderabad, India; Durban University of Technology, South Africa
GoutamK@dut.ac.za

CALL FOR PAPERS

Call for Papers

An Archipelagic Turn and the “Other Asias”: Planetary Care in Literature, Politics, Culture

August 4-6, 2025

Jeju National University

South Korea

Keynote: Gayatri Spivak, Columbia University, US

The Critical Island Studies Consortium announces a conference that aims to fundamentally challenge and reconceptualize our understanding of “Asia” by privileging an archipelagic perspective

Call for Papers: Special Issue of English Studies on Digital Humanities and the English Novel

We are pleased to invite submissions for a special issue of English Studies on the intersection of digital humanities (DH) and the study of the English novel. This special issue aims to push the boundaries of how we understand the novel as a genre by leveraging computational and quantitative methods to explore form, structure, and themes in English fiction. We invite scholars from both the digital humanities and literary studies to contribute to this exciting and interdisciplinary dialogue.

Overview:

The African American Literature Permanent Section of the Midwestern Modern Language Association (MMLA) is requesting abstracts from potential panelists for this year’s in-person conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Informed by this year’s conference theme, “The Humanities is Where Hope Lives,” this section is calling for scholarly work that ties literature written by Black Americans to concepts of hope and its relationship to artistic production. Potential questions to address include, but are in no way limited to: How have representations of hope in Black American literature shifted across the centuries? What do depictions of hope look like when it has been disrupted or challenged?

In a 2023 piece in the London Review of Books,Maylin Hays asks,“In the post-marriage era, what happens to the marriage plot?” Despite being in the midst of this alleged “post-marriage era,” conversations about marriage seem to be animating public discourse more than ever—from wildly popular “trad wife” influencers on social media, to the increasing frequency of conversations about gendered household labor in marriage self-help books like Eve Rodsky’s Fair Play (2019) and Kate Mangino’s Equal Partners (2022), to the recent rise in divorce memoirs like Lyz Lenz’s This American Ex-Wife (2024).

The African Literature Permanent Section of the Midwest Modern Language Association (MMLA) requests abstracts for this year’s convention which will be held in person in Milwaukee, WI.

CFP Comics and Graphic Novels Permanent Section
Chair: Keegan Lannon, University of Illinois – Chicago.

Conference: Nov 14-16, 2025
Marquette University
Milwaukee, WI

What Does Hope Look Like?

If it is true, as the CFP for this conference notes, that “hope can be found in the Humanities,” then comics and graphic novels offer a unique glimpse into that hope by drawing on the media affordances of prose and the visual arts. Comics let us “see” hope and optimism is ways other media are unable to.

Bonkbusters and Soap Operas: Representing Sex, Glamour, and Melodrama on Screen 

Saturday 21st June 2025 

Falmouth University 

This freein-person symposium will be an interdisciplinary and global exploration of Bonkbusters, Soap Operas and Made-for-TV Melodramas. 

We are currently seeking contributions from the humanities and social sciences for a scientific network that explores ephemerality in both its material forms and theoretical conceptualizations. This interdisciplinary network aims to bring into dialogue various questions about ephemerality, specifically examining how different fleeting forms of expression are implicated in the continual making and unmaking of proximities, both human and non-human, producing “a matter of temporary intensities and pacts amongst people” and other entities (Vélez-Serna, 14).

The Superhero Project: 9th Global Meeting 

THE MULTIVERSAL SUPERHERO 

Friday 5th to Sunday 7th September 2025 

The View Hotel, Eastbourne, East Sussex, United Kingdom

“Anyone can wear the mask. You can wear the mask. If you didn’t know that before, I hope you do now. Cuz I’m Spider-Man. And I’m not the only one. Not by a long shot”. – Miles Morales, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)  

CALL FOR PROPOSALS: THE SOUTHERN GOTHIC AT PCAS/ ACAS 2025

MMLA 2025 Call for Papers for their Permanent Section: "English III: Literature after 1900" under the theme Optimism Against All Odds in American/English Modernism

Deadline: April 24th, 2025

For consideration: please send a brief abstract (250 words), tentative title, and bio to Sophie Nunberg at snunberg@uwm.edu by April 24th, 2025.

DETAILS: 

MMLA 2025 Animal Studies Panel

“Do Animals Hope?” 

Although many books have been written on hope for non-human animals, their collective or individual survival, this session invites proposals on hope by non-human animals, or representations of such hope. Many different approaches are welcome—literary critical, ethnographic (human or animal), environmental studies, affect studies, thought experiments. Please submit a 1-2 page abstract to Lucinda Cole (lcol@illinois.edu) by April 14, 2025.

Virtual session

Caleidoscopio invites you to submit papers for its series 2, vol. 1, no. 1: under the topic “In Media-Making:  Start-on-and-go-over-Media”

Archives, while carrying out the operation of the gaze, function like a mirror: they point to a spectral exteriority. The archive is of the order of the phantasmagorical and, by definition, they are phantasmatic. This approach points out to what Harun Farocki’s stressed as the definition of a phantom or operational image, images that are built from a non-human perspective, although they call-in human agency.

Why should humans be witnessing and/or scrutinizing images productions? Is that still a need? Are there any ethical or aesthetical motives or meanings to it?