2026 Imagining Creative Worlds Online Symposium, 11–12 November 2026

We invite proposals for 2026 Imagining Creative Worlds, an annual online symposium in the Common Ground Imagining Futures Series, taking place 11–12 November 2026.

The symposium brings together scholars, researchers, artists, designers, educators, publishers, museum professionals, media makers, and cultural practitioners working across creative fields and practices. We welcome proposals that explore how creative worlds are made, shared, interpreted, circulated, and transformed.

For 2026, The Arts in Society Research Network serves as the host Network, helping shape the symposium’s emphasis within the wider theme of Imagining Creative Worlds.

2027 Imagining Social WorldsOnline Symposium, 17–18 March 2027

We invite proposals for 2027 Imagining Social Worlds, an annual online symposium in the Common Ground Imagining Futures Series, taking place 17–18 March 2027.

The symposium brings together scholars, researchers, educators, policy thinkers, practitioners, community leaders, organizers, and public-facing professionals working across social, political, civic, organizational, and global fields. We welcome proposals that explore how social worlds are formed, governed, connected, contested, sustained, and transformed.

The New Italians session explores contemporary Italian literature, culture, media, music, and film through the lens of migration, mobility, and evolving forms of Italian identity in a globalized world. In dialogue with PAMLA 2026’s theme, “Our Ruling Classes: Culture, Power, Conflict,” the session considers how cultural production engages structures of power shaping belonging, citizenship, linguistic authority, and cultural legitimacy in Italy and its diasporic contexts.

Conference Details

We are seeking papers for the "Kafka Studies" panel at the 57th annual Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA), which will be held between March 6-9 in Newport, RI. You can find more information about the event on NeMLA's website: https://www.nemla.org/convention.html

Modality

Hybrid: The session will be held in-person but a few remote presentations may be included.

Panel Abstract

We invite you to submit an abstract and bio for the panel “Yesteryear: Cultural and Literary Possibilities”. We are seeking papers that address Caro Claire Burke’s breakout debut novel Yesteryear and its implications on literature and current American culture. How does Burke address established literary conventions? How might one conceive of the evocative narrative style of this novel? How does Burke conceptualize the conscription of motherhood, suppressed queerness, and conservative Christianity? How might the work fit into literary genealogies of sanity, purity, racial prejudice, and womanhood? Proposals should include a title, abstract,  your name, and affiliation.

2026 marks multiple milestones for the legacy of legendary Afrofuturist author Octavia E. Butler: fifty years since the publication of her first novel, Patternmaster (1976), and the twentieth anniversary of her passing, on February 24, 2006. It also marks the announcement of a film version of one of her most famous and most prophetic works, Parable of the Sower (1993), as well as the surprise republishing of her disavowed novel, Survivor (1978), for the first time since the 1980s. These anniversaries arrive at a moment when Butler’s work continues to gain public attention for its prescience and political relevance, and as she continues to amass scholarly attention across scholarly disciplines.

Call for Chapter Proposals for an Edited Book

Digital Precarity and Speculative Narratives in the South Asian Context

Labour is deeply intertwined with caste, gender and class in the socioeconomic fabric of India. However, caste and gender are the two factors that remain ignored in this discourse. In the Hindu social order, the caste system assigns vocations through arbitrary hierarchy, producing pernicious structures of marginalisation. Labour performed by Dalits is often stereotyped through casteist assumptions that naturalise certain kinds of work as “belonging” to these peripheral communities. These stereotypes that are perpetuated historically, culturally and socio-politically, are furthered through mechanisms of caste that operate in the material and affective realms. 

Call for Papers
NeMLA 2027 Annual Convention
Rethinking the Fantastic: Impossibility, Ontology, and Alternative Realities

What makes a text fantastic? While traditional definitions often emphasize the supernatural or the uncanny, many literary works generate the fantastic through impossibility itself. Impossible worlds, contradictory realities, unstable identities, infinite spaces, and paradoxical temporalities challenge readers' assumptions about reality and invite new ways of understanding existence.

As Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson argue, “autobiographical storytelling is a performative act through which narrators construct rather than simply describe selves.” In recent times, “life writing” has become a familiar term in literary and cultural studies, encompassing a range of written texts, including autobiographies, biographies, letters, memoirs, slave narratives, prison narratives, captivity narratives, travel narratives, confessionals, conversion narratives and even in recent times, personal diaries. However, rather than remain transparent records of lived experience, life writings actively shape identities, produce historical knowledge, preserve cultural memory, and intervene in social and political worlds.

While tragedy and horror are often treated as distinct genres, both traditions ask audiences to look steadily at what ordinarily repels them. From unburied corpses and undead monsters to violated kinship and failed agency, these spectacles produce fear, pity, disgust, and sorrow alongside fascination. This session explores what might be understood as a tragedy–horror continuum, examining the aesthetic, affective, and ritual overlaps between tragic and horrific representation across historical periods and media.

This panel proposes a revaluation of boundary-making between early modern and modern generic and affective registers in South Asia. While there is a consensus that genres of composition and cultural sensibilities did not change radically with the coming of print—“print did not so much produce new books as more old books” (Blackburn, 2002)—the precise sites of continuity/rupture differed widely based on the region and language in question.

58th NeMLA Convention
Newport, RI

Format: In Person Only

This panel builds off feminist science fiction studies’ investigation of the role of gender in speculative texts by expanding the field of inquiry to the role of nonbinary characters and even nonbinary worldbuilding in contemporary speculative fiction. It asks how both science fiction as a genre and feminist science fiction as a field have transformed with the emergence of new gender subjectivities. How do these fictions empower trans and nonbinary communities?  How must the methodological tools for studying SF change to meet this moment?

Still Screaming: An Online Conference Celebrating 30 Years of Scream

2026 marks the 30th anniversary of Wes Craven’s Scream (1996), which has had a profound impact on horror films and the slasher subgenre specifically. In the past three decades, Scream has become a franchise of seven films and a television series (2015-16, 2019). Scream has also expanded beyond the screen, reverberating throughout the popular culture landscape and serving as the foundation for a game, collectible figures, multiple Ghostface mask variations, and an entire collection of merchandise at Spirit Halloween (and elsewhere). 

Inclusive teaching and digital accessibility are two important concepts that align with Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles; they move away from "retrofitting" (i.e., fixing a problem after a student struggles) toward a "proactive” design (e.g., building a system that works for everyone from the start). Inclusive teaching is a pedagogical framework that focuses on designing a learning environment where every student (regardless of race, gender, socioeconomic status, or learning style) feels valued and has an equal opportunity to succeed. Whereas digital accessibility is a technical standard that ensures that digital tools, documents, and platforms are usable by everyone, regardless of ability.

Anglica Wratislaviensia 65.2/2027

Anglica Wratislaviensia invites scholarly submissions for its forthcoming issue, which focuses on Anglophone literary and cultural studies and related interdisciplinary fields. While the journal's scope encompasses linguistics, translation studies, and language teaching methodology, this issue welcomes contributions in literary and cultural studies specifically. We seek rigorous, critically engaged work that brings together diverse critical traditions and perspectives from around the world. Comparative and methodologically innovative contributions are particularly welcome.

Submission Guidelines

Disability and Horror: A Companion

Call for Chapters

*** FINAL MONTH ***

What is the real difference between speaking with nature and speaking for it? Is eco-centric thought a universally shared ideology, or does it develop in reaction to historical, philosophical, and socio-cultural contexts? In what way do the fundamental principles of Indian ecology vary from prevailing Western structures? These essential inquiries delineate the parameters of Ramachandra Guha’s Speaking with Nature: The Origins of Indian Environmentalism (2024), which effectively contests the notion that environmentalism is a unidirectional phenomenon dictated by Western influence. This view posits that the rest of the world, particularly the Global South, lacks eco-conscious awareness because it is ‘too poor to be green’.

Who owns mythological creatures? What do they do in modern literature? Based on the reemerging prevalence of mythological influences in popular culture – cf. Madeline Miller, Jennifer Saint, Rick Riordan, etc. – it can be read that monstrosity is having a cultural renaissance and reimagining. With new interpretations and uses of mythology, what happens when a lens of modern feminist or queer theory is applied to these stories?

CFP for NeMLA 2027 Conference

Virtual Only Panel

Oral Community Knowledge as Antidote for Empire in Anglophone Literature

OMNIALANG: International Journal of Language Continuum (Omnia-LC) invites original, unpublished manuscripts for Volume 1, Issue 2.

Omnia-LC is an international, peer-reviewed, open-access journal dedicated to advancing interdisciplinary scholarship on language, literature, linguistics, translation, education, and related fields. The journal welcomes innovative theoretical, empirical, and methodological contributions that deepen our understanding of language and its diverse cultural, social, and literary contexts.

We welcome submissions in (but not limited to) the following areas:

Media, Press Freedom, and Cultural Production in an Authoritarian Age (Submission Deadline Extended, Now July 19, 2026)

CFP: Media, Press Freedom, and Cultural Production in an Authoritarian Age

 Co-sponsored by the Union for Democratic Communications, Project Censored and the Park Center for Independent Media

Oct. 23-24, 2026

Ithaca College, Ithaca, NY

With the arrival of the New Woman at the end of the nineteenth century also came the modernist novel. The beginning of the twentieth century constitutes a period when women struggled with social expectations but decided to leave their own drawing rooms and discover the world; to be power brokers, instead of passive observers; and to gradually move from their interiority to making history. By comparing novels of women writers, both in the US and abroad, this panel attempts to find, in their similarities and differences, the real issues that women faced at the turn of the century, in novels that transitioned from realism and naturalism to modernism.

Gothic Nature is a peer-reviewed, open access journal that engages with the Gothic conceptions of, and relationship to, the natural world. For the TV and film review section of its sixth issue, the journal seeks reviews for ecoGothic television series and films released in the last couple of years (2023–2026). Issue VI of the journal is unthemed, so there is no restriction on the types of film and TV we’d like reviews for. As a general guideline, we’d be interested to see reviews of the following (please note that this is not an exhaustive list, reviews of other relevant films and programmes are more than welcome):

Film: