The Shirley Jackson Society invites scholars at all stages of their careers to submit to our panels for the American Literature Association’s 37th Annual Conference in Chicago, May 20-23, 2026.

For “Shirley Jackson in an Age of Anxiety,” we invite papers that explore how Jackson’s texts speak to, reflect, or anticipate our current age of political instability, social fragmentation, economic uncertainty, and concerted attacks on human rights. Topics of interest include cultural and historical trauma, social conformity and marginalization, surveillance and paranoia, the uncanny in everyday life, prejudice, mob mentality, the dismantling of the American Dream, and mental illness as a cultural phenomenon.

Proposed Panel at the International Seminar, "Cultures of Body, Bodies of Culture: Thinking Plurality Today" organised by the Department of English, University of North Bengal on 17th and 18th January, 2026 with opportunity for publication

(in-person panel; online presenters too may send proposals which, if selected, will be accommodated in one of the hybrid/online panels)

Panel Theme and Rationale

Call for Abstracts: “Cultures of Waste” International conference (Offline)

Deadline for abstract submissions: Now Dec 31, 2025

Full name / name of organization: Department of Liberal Arts. Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad, India and UNESCO Chair in Vulnerability Studies, Department of English, The University of Hyderabad

Contact email: culturesofwaste@gmail.com

Plant Lives: Sacred Interdependencies in the Arts of the Americas

A planting event and conference hosted by the Yale Institute of Sacred Music

April 11, 2026

In 1831, the preacher Nat Turner testified that hieroglyphics had appeared to him on leaves and corn stalks in a field. These hieroglyphics, he said, relayed divine messages that inspired him to lead a rebellion of enslaved Virginians. The starting point for this one-day conference is the many capacities of plants to transmit divine insights across time. This event at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music will explore the ways in which plants perform, evoke, and embody sacred relations throughout the Americas.

Mysteries and Mayhem is our fourth conference theme. Why do we continue to crave mystery stories?  What do they tell us about our need for suspense and our desire to solve riddles,  including the most famous of all:Whodunnit?  What do these stories of murder and mayhem teach us about the nature of evil, ideas of sin, and the essence of a villain? What do we hope to see in the survivors of these threats?  –And what do we expect from the detectives and heroes who reveal the truth in these stories? We seek papers and creative projects that explore these and related questions. 

YSLS (Young Scholars Literary Sympsium) welcomes your undergraduate,  graduate,  educator,  and independent scholar proposals! 

… Ond þis geþeaht ic sylle eallum wyrhtum, þæt anra gehwylc cræft his geornlice begange, forþam se þe cræft his forlæt, he byþ forlæten fram þam cræfte. Swa hwæðer þu sy, swa mæsseprest, swa munuc, swa ceorl, swa kempa, bega oþþe behwyrf þe sylfne on þisum, ond beo þæt þu eart; forþam micel hynð ond sceamu hyt is menn nellan wesan þæt þæt he ys ond þæt he wesan sceal. 

DATE: Feb. 25-27

Humanities Education and Research Association

Theme: “The Essential Humanities in Practice and Perseverance” (Virtual Conference)

In keeping with HERA’s mission to promote the study of the humanities across a wide range of disciplines and interdisciplinary studies, we invite proposals for the 2026 conference. Submissions are encouraged from educators at all levels (including undergraduate and graduate students) and from anyone with an interest in the arts and humanities. Proposals for papers, panels, or workshops must be submitted through the conference web portals.

 *Imaginations - Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies (open access and peer-reviewed)*

 <https://imaginationsjournal.ca/index.php/imaginations>

The London Journal Early Career Publishing Workshop

The London Journal is committed to supporting early career scholars develop work into a publishable journal article. To this end, we are hosting a free workshop to provide practical advice and support on developing research (which might include thesis chapters or conference papers) into publishable, full-length journal articles.

Fabulating history in contemporary bio/fiction

1 /2027

Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai. Philologia

philologia.studia@ubbcluj.ro

Guest editors

Ágnes Zsófia Kovács, University of Szeged, Hungary

agnes.zsofia.kovacs@gmail.com

Anna Kérchy, University of Szeged, Hungary 

Lolly Willowes at 100: Sylvia Townsend Warner, Religion, and the Supernatural

IAS Common Ground, University College London, 29-30 May 2026

Call for Nominations:

2026 Award for Best Scholarly Monograph on the American Gothic

The Society for the Study of the American Gothic (SSAG) invites nominations for its biennial Award for Best Scholarly Monograph. This award is open to all scholarly monographs published in the past two years that focus on some aspect of the American Gothic. The winner of the award will be announced at the Society for the Study of the American Gothic business meeting, at the American Literature Association conference in May 2026 (exact date TBA).

Eligibility

This panel explores the intersections of literature, sociability, and the history of emotions in the Hispanic world during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Following Raymond Williams’s notion of “structures of feeling” and Barbara Rosenwein’s concept of “emotional communities,” as well as more recent work in affect theory (Ahmed 2004), we consider emotions not as private, psychological states but as cultural and social practices. Recent scholarship has also stressed the dual nature of emotion concepts—oscillating between natural and normative kinds (Scarantino 2025)—and their role in shaping both political discourses and collective identities.

 “I, I wear a plastic suit / Plastic is my food / Perhaps, I’m plastic too,” sang the iconic Yugoslav New Wave band Idoli in their 1981 song “Plastika” (“Plastics”). These lyrics captured a 1980s moment in which Yugoslav production, import, and consumption of plastics reached their peak. Yet the groundwork for it had been laid in the preceding decades, since plastics production had begun shortly after the Second World War and rapidly permeated all aspects of everyday life (see Filipović 2023). Importantly, Yugoslavia’s trajectory differed from that of the Eastern Bloc.

Call for Papers

Following the success of the I International Conference on Gender Studies & Intermedial Narratives (UCM, 2024), this new edition seeks to go further, deeper, and bolder. If last year we worked around the idea of intermediality, this year we want to explore its most visceral and material dimension: how gender is inscribed on, through, and as bodies—and how bodies themselves become texts, interfaces, archives, and narrative machines.We begin with a simple premise: every text is a body, and every body is a text.

Call for Papers:

Conventions and Subversions in Sino-Western Theatrical Settings

Edited by Kelly Kar Yue CHAN, Chi Sum Garfield LAU and Chi Chun CHAN

We are soliciting chapter proposals for an edited volume that contains 8-10 chapters of research articles which represent the efforts from both members of the academia and practitioners of theatre to sustain the tradition of Sino-Western theatrics, while demonstrating the evolving aspects of contemporary performances under the inexorable trends of digitalization and globalization.

The UI English Graduate Association is excited to announce our 2026 conference theme “(k)no(w) books, (k)no(w) people: Multidisciplinary Studies of Narrative, Media, and the Anthropocene.” At the forefront of our conference is the power of narratives. Humans are storytellers by nature, and for thousands of years we have used stories to remember our pasts and envision our futures. We have used them to entertain and inspire us, to empower us in the face of oppression, and to understand the world around us. And, as the Anthropocene makes strikingly clear, human stories have shaped the world, to an irreversible degree.

Watermark, the annual, peer-reviewed scholarly journal published by English graduate students at California State University, Long Beach, is now seeking submissions for its twentieth volume. Our journal is dedicated to publishing original, critical, and theoretical papers concerned with literature of all genres and periods or current issues in the field of rhetoric and composition. We also accept submissions from other areas including but not limited to: Comparative World Literature, Medieval Studies, Translation Studies, and Gender & Women’s Studies. As this journal is intended to provide a forum for emerging voices, only graduate and undergraduate student work will be considered.

WANT TO PUBLISH YOUR SCHOLARLY WORK?

• The Journal of Undergraduate Research in the Humanities (JURH) is looking for excellent undergraduate essays.

WHAT IS JURH?

Focusing on the past decade – particularly the summer of 2020 and its aftermath, which witnessed an unprecedented wave of iconoclastic acts against monuments and statues linked to colonialism, white supremacy, and slavery, alongside renewed calls for the decolonisation of museums and urban toponyms – much of the subsequent scholarly attention in English has centred on developments in the Anglophone world.

For Critical Insights volume under contract:

Madness in Literature

DEADLINE FOR PROPOSALS: January 9, 2026

Please consider submitting an abstract for the edited collection, Reconfiguring Critical Thinking in Higher Education for the 21st Century (Springer, Education).

We welcome research on critical thinking in higher education in Southeast Asia. The first section of the collection endeavours to define critical thinking in the current climate. The essays of the second section share classroom activities and curriculum design that aim to teach critical thinking. And the final section considers how LLMs can both facilitate and inhibit the cultivation of critical thinking in student learners. 

We aim to have completed articles ready for submission by August, 2026. 

Nesir: Journal of Literary Studies invites submissions for its 10th issue (April 2026) and 12th issue (April 2027), dedicated to the twin special issues “Theoretical Inquiries, Critical Dialogues I–II.”

These issues welcome original research articles that explore classical or contemporary literary theories, modes of interpretation, textual analysis, narrative studies, world literature, comparative approaches, and interdisciplinary perspectives.

Prioritizing conceptual depth and metaphorical dynamism, Nesir seeks contributions that move beyond descriptive analysis of a single work, period, or national context. We encourage articles that:

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS / ÉTUDES IRLANDAISES (French Journal of Irish Studies)

Fall/Winter 2026 issue

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION: March 1st, 2026

The Editorial Board of Études Irlandaises  is currently seeking submissions for its Fall/Winter 2026 issue.