In the words of Nathan Crick, transcendentalism is a “rhetorical genre of public advocacy” and “a way of crossing a divide or reconciling a contradiction through a radical act of imagination whereby people are able to see and judge themselves from the perspectives of some distant and different ‘beyond’ (9). How can the transcendentalist philosophy of learning inform our 21st-century pedagogy of higher education, when GenAI is rising? GenAI's one challenge in higher education, especially in teaching writing and interpreting literature, is its increasingly seamless integration into digital devices, which has posed a threat of erasing learners' self or individual voice and perpetuating algorithmic bias.

Northeast MLA, March 5-8 2026

This session explores how postcolonial Southeast Asian literature grapples with memory, trauma, archival recovery, and cultural identity. 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, agency, and identity. Topics may include narrative voice, transgenerational memory, silence, storytelling, and archival gaps in multiethnic and immigrant literatures.

International Conference
Ethics and Spectatorship in Film and Screen Media
University College Cork, Ireland
29–30 November 2025

The International Conference “Ethics and Spectatorship in Film and Screen Media” will take place on 29–30 November 2025 at University College Cork (UCC), Ireland. 

We are pleased to announce that our keynote speakers will be:

‘Charles Ignatius Sancho: A Black British Man of Letters and His World’ 

13-14  March, 2026

Northeastern University London

The CfP for the hybrid panel "Indigenous and Creole Transcultural Encounters" (NeMLA 2026 convention) is now open (please see abstract and description below). 

 The convention will take place in Pittsburgh, PA on March 5-8, 2026.

We invite original and unpublished essays for inclusion in a forthcoming Handbook of Bengali Cinema. This interdisciplinary volume will offer a comprehensive and critical survey of Bengali cinema across periods, geographies, genres, styles, and theoretical frameworks. It will serve as a key reference for students, scholars, and practitioners interested in one of South Asia’s most influential regional cinemas.

Essays should be no longer than 5,000 words, inclusive of notes and works cited, and must follow the MLA citation style (current edition). Contributions may be historical, thematic, theoretical, or practice-based, and are expected to demonstrate critical rigor and originality.

This NeMLA panel invites proposals exploring the social, cultural, and political uses of regionalist aesthetics throughout the 20th cnetury.

From brainwashed assassins to complicated anti-heroes to villains on a redemption arc, comic books, films, television, and novels frequently present readers with complicated antagonists-turned-superheroes, many of which become beloved characters. Through varied processes of regeneration, former antagonists remake themselves into superheroes in fascinating and often unexpected ways.

Philosophy and Literature:  A Problematic Relationship

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.