Transatlantic Connections and the ‘Special Relationship[s]’: BAAS Postgraduate Symposium, 2026

V&A East Storehouse, London

9th November

In 1946, Winston Churchill declared the need for a “special relationship between the British Commonwealth and Empire and the United States” in order to maintain world diplomacy, citing our shared language and cultural values as connecting the two countries. Although this ‘special relationship’ has continually been called into question by scholars, there is undoubtedly a channel of cultural and political exchange between the US and the UK, as well as with other countries, which has become even more urgent for discussion in recent years.

In her foundational text Immigrant Acts, cultural theorist Lisa Lowe argues that the Asian immigrant exists as a “perpetual foreigner within the body politic,” a figure through whom the nation-state defines its own boundaries and citizenship. For Lowe, Asian American cultural production emerges precisely from this “distance from the national culture,” serving as a site that critiques the state’s false promises of universal inclusion.

The Odyssey by Homer is one of the foundational texts of Western culture and has, since antiquity, served as a narrative and symbolic model of the human journey. Odysseus’ long nostos—his return to Ithaca after the Trojan War—is not merely a sequence of mythical adventures but rather a complex process of knowledge, transformation, and the recovery of identity. Already in the ancient world, the poem was interpreted on multiple levels—epic, ethical, and symbolic—and this layering of meanings has contributed to its extraordinary reception in the modern era.

This session extends scholarly conversations on how violence operates in the corpus of poetic and prose Brut texts. We welcome papers exploring violence as a mechanism for securing and projecting political power, as both a destructive force and a tool for empowerment. We also welcome investigations of poetic and rhetorical violence—including on how the translation and redaction of historical texts function as symbolic conquests—and intersections of violence and gender. Suggested topics include: the aesthetics and rhetoric of warfare, conquest, and displacement; gendered dynamics of violence, captivity, and resistance; and the role of environmental devastation (fire, plague) in historiography.

Submission Link: https://tinyurl.com/cwsc26cfp

"How come we can’t be together and think together in a way that feels good, the way it should feel good?"

- Fred Moten in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (117) cited in Emilio Carrero’s 2025 CWSC talk “The Creative Writer’s Unpayable Debts”

EBSN 14TH Annual Conference (Online)

The conference organizers invite proposals for papers, panels, roundtables, and creative performances for the14th Annual Conference of the European Beat Studies Network, which will take place via the online Google Meet platform, November 12-14, 2026.

GIANT MONSTERS ALL-OUT ATTACK: Kaiju Culture in the Twenty-first Century

Edited by Alex Adams, independent scholar

CFP – “BLACK ESSAYSM: FORMAL EXPERIMENTATIONS IN BLACK CREATIVE/CRITICAL PRACTICES”

liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies 12, no. 1, Spring 2028

Guest editor: Walton Muyumba

Submissions due: January 30, 2027

As more and more women's stereotypical images are distributed via digital networks, active counter-activism via digital networks is an urgent need in a post-truth media environment. In the age of audio-visual curation, the cultural narrative has been traditionally controlled by state and corporate power, while today, opaque automated content moderation, algorithmic sorting and filtering, and platform capitalism of transnational streaming networks dominate the scene.

2027 Imagining Human Worlds Online Symposium, 27–28 January 2027

We invite proposals for 2027 Imagining Human Worlds, an annual online symposium in the Common Ground Imagining Futures Series, taking place 27–28 January 2027, online on CGScholar.

The symposium brings together scholars, researchers, educators, humanities scholars, learning specialists, technologists, practitioners, and community-engaged professionals working across questions of culture, learning, identity, meaning, communication, ethics, and human development. We welcome proposals that explore how human worlds are formed, interpreted, taught, experienced, mediated, and transformed.

2027 Imagining Sustainable Worlds Online Symposium, 12–13 May 2027

We invite proposals for 2027 Imagining Sustainable Worlds, an annual online symposium in the Common Ground Imagining Futures Series, taking place 12–13 May 2027, online on CGScholar.

The symposium brings together scholars, researchers, designers, planners, educators, policy thinkers, practitioners, health and care professionals, environmental researchers, and community-engaged professionals working across questions of sustainability, climate, infrastructure, food systems, mobility, aging, health, wellbeing, and the built environment. We welcome proposals that explore how sustainable worlds are designed, inhabited, maintained, challenged, and transformed.

Conventional cinematic views of New York City are often characterized by aerials, panoramas, and long shots of the archetypal Manhattan skyline, montage of crowded sidewalks, and quick shots of the yellow cabs in congested traffic. Scholars have regularly linked such city views to their historical urban contexts: studies of city symphonies emphasize the concomitance of capitalist modernity, scholars of film noir associate the genre with Cold War anxieties magnified by urban disorientation, while studies of Blaxploitation link the films to the immediate precedents of urban crisis in the 1960s and 1970s.

Accepting Submissions for NeMLA 2027 Roundtable:

In this in-person roundtable conference session, we are looking to open conversation about the unique ways that educators are innovating with forms of gaming, play, and playfulness in the classroom. We are interested in discussing the incorporation of any and all forms of games and gaming, including, but not limited to:
- board, tabletop, and card games
- social deduction games
- tabletop role-playing systems such as Dungeons and Dragons
- invented role-playing scenarios
- gamification of in-class activities
- video and digital games

Abstract / Overview

At its most ambitious, the New Hollywood was a movement intended to cut film free of its evil twin, commerce, enabling it to fly high through the thin air of art. The filmmakers of the '70s hoped to overthrow the studio system, or at least render it irrelevant, by democratizing filmmaking, putting it into the hands of anyone with talent and determination.

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