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Special Issue
Shopping Fictions: Representing Shops and Shopping in British Literature and Culture
Dear Scholars and Researchers,
We are delighted to invite original and scholarly book chapters for an upcoming edited volume titled Emerging Trends and Future Directions in Comparative Literature.
We welcome contributions on, but not limited to, the following themes:
Suggested Themes
World Literature as a Comparative Practice
Emerging Trends in Digital Humanities
Future of Comparative Literature
Digital and Cyber Literature
Globalization and Cultural Exchange
Cultural Hybridity, Adaptation, and Translation in a Globalized World
Translation Studies
The Kate Chopin International Society is seeking individual proposals for two sponsored panels at the 2026American Literature Association conference in Chicago, Illinois, May 20–23, 2026
The first panel, a roundtable on “Teaching Kate Chopin,” seeks short (seven- to eight-minute) papers/remarks that address anyaspect of or strategy for teaching Chopin’s life or work to today’s students—to students of any kind at any level using any materials or technology in any educational environment anywhere. Proposals should include a title, your name and affiliation, and a paragraph about your proposed remarks.
Representation matters – but to whom? And how?
This iteration of the Critical Approaches to Black Media Culture conference considers the ongoing significance of representational analysis as well as the critical possibilities enabled by the turn to resonance in Black media and cultural studies. Our theme, Representation and Resonance, invites original research into images and storytelling, circulation and flows, and reception practices.
While we especially invite papers on this topic, we are open to any and all critical inquiry into Black media culture, broadly defined. Our hope is to bring together any and all scholars interested and invested in Black media culture, regardless of discipline or method.
Violence: Legacies of Conflict in Ireland
Comhfhios Boston College
February 7th, 2026
Connolly House, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA
The Irish Studies Graduate Students of Boston College, in conjunction with the Irish Studies Program, are pleased to host the 9th annual Comhfhios Boston College conference. Comhfhios (pronounced “co-is”) meaning “knowledge together,” or “open to all knowledge,” invites emerging scholars in all Irish Studies fields to gather in Boston.
The Saul Bellow Society will host one session at the American Literature Association’s 37th Annual Conference at the Palmer House Hilton, Chicago, on May 20-23, 2026. Proposals for papers on Saul Bellow and Chicago are particularly welcome but may address any aspect of Saul Bellow’s work or life, including comparisons with other authors.
Proposals for presentations should include a title, your name and affiliation, e-mail address, and a short abstract. The Saul Bellow Society welcomes proposals from established and newer scholars, including graduate students.
“Care & Communities” - Shifting Tides, Anxious Borders (STAB) 2026
Binghamton University, Department of English
Conference date: March 21, 2026
Submission deadline: January 31, 2026
“Dominator culture has tried to keep us all afraid, to make us choose safety instead of risk, sameness instead of diversity. Moving through that fear, finding out what connects us, revelling in our differences; this is the process that brings us closer, that gives us a world of shared values, of meaningful community.”
-bell hooks, Teaching Community
Call for Panelists – Rachel Carson Center Conference 2026 (“Beyond Dualism—Thinking Creatively Across Worlds”)
In an era of climate crisis and ecological anxiety, the boundaries between humans, nature, and technology are becoming increasingly blurred.
This panel—Sensing and Repair—invites researchers and practitioners to explore how art, science, and education can work together to restore our connections with the living world.
The long nineteenth century was a period marked by industrial revolution, scattered religious beliefs and technological advancements. The Gothic tradition recorded these significant changes through a language of monstrosity, excess, and horror as the Industrial Revolution gained momentum, coal and steam power expanded, and as soon as the British Empire increased its extractive demands on colonized ecologies and laboring bodies. This edited volume proposes a new way of looking at Gothic figures such as vampires, parasites, doubles, and consuming machines in order to examine how such tropes adumbrated the anxieties, ethics, and violences of environmental extraction.
35TH ANNUAL BRITISH COMMONWEALTH AND POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES CONFERENCE
FEBRUARY 20-21, 2026
DESOTO SAVANNAH, SAVANNAH GA
Call for Papers: Transitions: Journal of Transient Migration
Special Issue: 'Emotions and Emotionality: The Multi-Affects of the Global South'
View the full call here>>
https://www.intellectbooks.com/transitions-journal-of-transient-migration#call-for-papers
Special Issue co-guest editors:
Call for Submissions: Race in Fantasy- for The British Fantasy Society Journal (Summer 2026) ‘Race’—that socially constructed and contentious term and concept—has long been a part of Fantasy. As a way of narrativizing alterity, Fantasy excels (one could argue that it is its sine qua non), but like all other cultural forms it has been prone to the best and worst excesses of this. Although the largesse of Fantasy—its broad, catholic imaginary—embraces a rich spectrum of species, ethnicities, ontologies, and lifeworlds, it has been prone to all the cultural myopias, prejudices, peccadilloes, and stereotyping as any other genre. Exoticism, Orientalism, and Essentialism are only some of its many crimes.
CALL FOR PAPERS
Crossroads VIII: Alterity And The Comparative Imagination
University of Massachusetts Amherst, Program in Comparative Literature | Amherst, MA
April 10-11, 2026 (In-person conference)
Todd Gitlin pointed out in 1983 that ‘‘The three networks now underwrite more original movies than the studios combined” (in Stone, 2017: 616). The made-for-TV movie was a vast cultural phenomenon, commanding huge viewing figures and global, syndicated reach. Many of the most memorable and culturally resonant of these were horror films. Despite this, the made-for-TV film, especially horror, remains largely under-explored in academic writing. If, as Pirie states, ‘Our fears are among the most revealing things about us’ (1994: 224), then what might these hugely popular films suggest about the society that produced them?
Popular Culture Association
Animals and Popular Culture Intrest Area
April 8-11, 2026
Atlanta, Georgia, USA
https://sites.google.com/view/2026pcaconference/home
Issue 105 of the Virginia Woolf Miscellany Special Topic:
Panoramic Woolf (Fall 2026)
Guest Editors: Oliver Case, Evelyn Malinowski, Teresa Prudente
Please submit article proposals of approximately 300 words by 1st December 2025
Final article drafts (no more than 2500 words including Works Cited) will be due by 15 May 2026
Please send submissions to: panoramicwoolf@gmail.com
Call for Papers for an Edited Volume
Train Narratives in India: Marking 100 Years of the Electric Train in India (1925–2025)
Concept Note
2025 marks the centenary of the electric train in India, a moment that invites us to reflect on the rich and complex presence of trains in the subcontinent’s cultural imagination. From their colonial introduction as instruments of control and commerce to their transformation into symbols of progress, partition, migration, and everyday life, trains have profoundly shaped the way India moves—and tells stories.
Call for Submissions – The Soliloquist Winter 2026 Issue
Theme: Beneath the Surface
Winter is a season of stillness—but beneath the frost, roots are reaching, rivers are flowing, and stories are gathering strength.
For our Winter 2026 issue, The Soliloquist invites poets and writers to explore what lies hidden: the unspoken truths, buried memories, secret longings, submerged identities, and quiet rebellions that shape who we are. We seek work that dives below the obvious, the curated, the polished—into the depths where vulnerability, resilience, and revelation intertwine.
Call for Papers
The Society for the Study of Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS)
American Literature Association
37th Annual Conference
May 20-23, 2026
Palmer House
17 East Monroe Street
Chicago, IL 60603
Panel: Where There’s Life: Reading Liberated Futures in Multiethnic Literature
Open Topic: James Fenimore Cooper, an American Novelist
The James Fenimore Cooper Society invites proposals for papers that explore James Fenimore Cooper as a novelist of national narratives, whose interests and innovations to the novel in terms of form and content achieved both literary and commercial success as well as leave an indelible mark on both American and Transatlantic writing across a broad spectrum of literary, cultural, and historical perspectives. This is an open topic panel – all proposals welcomed.
Chair: TBA
The Lasting of the Mohicans: The Leather-stocking novels and legacy
Commemorating the 200-year anniversary of James Fenimore Cooper’s second Leather-stocking novel, The Last of the Mohicans (1826) and its enduring legacy across media and culture, the JFC Society invites proposals that explore topics related to Cooper’s popular novel and/or its influence and legacy. We particularly (but not exclusively) welcome proposals that focus on The Last of the Mohicans and its iconic figures, however proposals that explore the Leather-stocking novels individually or in series, their influence, adaptations, place in the national imaginary, and/or other related concerns or themes.
Chair: TBA
Réseaux dans les mouvements transatlantiques (XIXème-XXIème siècles)
Appel à communications
Colloque international
21-22 mai 2026
Université Bretagne Sud - Lorient (France)
L’océan atlantique occupe une place prépondérante dans l’histoire des mobilités humaines, qu’elles soient forcées – et l’on pensera à la traite négrière – ou volontaires, comme les vagues successives de colons puis de migrants qui se sont installés dans les Amériques le confirment.
Ainsi, dans le sillage des Migration Studies, nous nous intéresserons aux mouvements entre les continents qui bordent l’océan atlantique, à savoir l’Europe, les Amériques, l’Afrique.
Networks in transatlantic transfers and migrations (19th-21st centuries)
Call for Papers
International symposium
21-22 May 2026
University of Southern Brittany – Lorient (France)
The Atlantic Ocean holds a significant place in the history of human mobility, be it forced (in the case of the slave trade for example) or voluntary, as the successive waves of colonists and then migrants who settled in America show.
Then, within the framework of Migration studies, this two-day conference will focus on population movements between the continents which edge the Atlantic Ocean: Europe, America and Africa.
CLiC Into Place: Literatures of the Local (University of Worcester, 5th May 2026)
“None of these things is happening here. They are all happening far away, elsewhere.
But they may as well be, Iris says. What does here mean anyway, I’d like to know. Everywhere’s a here, isn’t it?”
― Ali Smith, Winter
Call for PapersCyber-Intimacies: Queer and Feminist Interventions in Global Cyber Politics
Edited by Amy Lind, Stephen Bryant, and Prateek Srivastava
Abstract Submission Deadline: December 15th, 2025
The 33rd Annual NINE Spring Training Conference (March 4-7, 2026) invites original unpublished papers that study all aspects of baseball, with particular emphasis on history, literature, and social policy implications. Abstracts only, not to exceed 300 words, should be submitted by November 14, 2025, to co-directors Willie Steele (wdsteele@lipscomb.edu) and David Pegram (david.pegram@paradisevalley.edu) for the abstract committee’s consideration. We ask that you please copy your submission to both of us.
In recent years, diverse fields related to literature and science studies, such as the medical humanities, critical neurodiversity studies, and the study of the haptic, have been re-evaluating the human body, its histories, and the impact of those histories today. At the same time, fields such as feminist theory, critical race theory, trans studies, and disability studies have deployed embodied perspectives to re-evaluate how we understand history and historical narratives.
Call for Papers: Companion to International Comics Studies (Intellect Books)
Edited by Julia Round, Shambhavi Singh and Eszter Szép
Deadline for chapter proposals: 31 January 2026
Deadline for first draft chapters: 1 April 2027
In Memoir: An Introduction, Thomas Couser observes that the recent memoir boom has also
given rise to the “some body” memoir, allowing marginalized voices to enter mainstream
discourse. These accounts, he notes, often possess a performative dimension, one that enacts
the clear message: “I’m here, and I can speak for myself.” As such, life narratives by women,
racial minorities, LGBTQ writers, and individuals living with disabilities or illness extend beyond
the detailing of events; they undertake the critical work of interrogating social and cultural
concerns.
Call for Book Chapters: “Japa-ing” to Freedom or/and Slavery
Back in 2001, Simon Gikandi in “Globalization and the Claims of Postcoloniality” discussed the unfortunate case of two dead Guinean boys whose bodies were found in the cargo hold of a plane, stowed away in the bowels of slave ships. The unnamed boys were desperate to go to Europe. The on-going mass exodus of young people from Nigeria (called “japa”) can be read as a contemporary re-enactment of the ideas that drove those Guinea boys to “choose” a deadly migration journey.
Modernism Remodelled
A Transdisciplinary Conference
Conference Webpage: https://labrc.co.uk/2025/10/22/modernism-remodelled-2026/
Oxford University (and online)
February 28-March 1, 2026
Fees: £180 (in person)
£100 (Online)
Abstract Deadline: December 28, 2025
**Participants interested in attending the conference without presenting a paper are also welcome.
Call for Presentations
Music Area
Popular Culture Association
Annual Conference
Atlanta, GA
April 8-11, 2026
The Music Area in the Popular Culture Association invites submissions from individuals or organized panels (3 or preferably 4 persons) focusing on any topic relating to any genre of music. Topics can include but are not limited to individual artists, albums, CDs, genres, scenes, trends, periods, performances, critics, magazines, music and art, music on radio, television, and on stage and in academia. Abstracts on any topic of music will be considered.
The Evelyn Scott Society
The Society for the Study of Southern Literature
March 28th-31st, 2026
Fisk University
Nashville, TN
The Evelyn Scott Society invites abstracts of about 300 words to participate in a proposed panel focused on the writer Evelyn Scott’s life and work at the Society for the Study of Southern Literature’s biannual conference, which will be held at Fisk University from March 28th-31st, 2026.
Fleeting Moments and Wonderful Weirdness in Welty
Panel at Society for the Study of Southern Literature Conference (March 28-31, 2026 at Fisk University in Nashville, TN)
Chaired by Laura Wilson
Call for Papers:
Tolkien in Popular Culture Area
Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)
47th Annual Conference, February 25-28, 2026
Marriott Albuquerque
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Submissions open: September 1, 2025
Proposal submission deadline: October 31, 2025
Welty's Dissident Spaces
Panel at Conference of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature (March 28-31, 2026 at Fisk University in Nashville, TN)
Co-coordinated by Sarah Gilbreath Ford, Mae Miller Claxton, & Rebecca L. Harrison
Call for Submissions for “Ariel’s Corner” (Miranda e-journal)
Submissions for ‘Ariel’s Corner’ section of Miranda e-journal are open.
Miranda is a scholarly e-journal focusing on a wide range of social and cultural practices of the English-speaking world and encouraging the broadest possible spectrum of scholarly approaches. A special section, called ‘Ariel’s Corner,’ is dedicated to the arts in the English-speaking world.
Call for Papers
Beauty and the Sublime in Gestation and Coming into Being:
Art and the Aesthetics of Pregnancy and Birth
2026 Virtual Symposium of the Society for the Study of Pregnancy and Birth
June 4-5, 2026
Co-Keynote Speakers: Lauren Bice, DNP, CRNA and Sheila Lintott, PhD The Society for the Study of Pregnancy and Birth (SSPRB) is pleased to announce the Call for Papers for its second international virtual symposium, Beauty and the Sublime in Gestation and Coming into Being: Art and the Aesthetics of Pregnancy and Birth, a virtual event that will take place online across two half day sessions on June 4th and June 5th, 2026 (to facilitate participation across time zones).
Reading and Writing Highways in the West
A special issue of Western American Literature
Guest edited by Surabhi Balachander and Lauren White
Lisez l'appel à propositions en français sur le site du CLC: https://www.ualberta.ca/en/literatures-in-canada/2026-conference/index.html
ALECC and CLC 2026 20th Anniversary Conference: Cross-Pollinations
16-20 June, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta
Undergraduate students are invited to submit a proposal for presentation at the 2026 Popular Culture Association Annual Conference. Presentation proposals should consist of a 250-to-300 word abstract or summary of your presentation topic which can include any topic as long as it covers some aspect of popular culture, American culture, or international culture.
We are now accepting research articles, scholarly papers, creative writing, artwork, photography, and reviews for our 2025 issue of
1890: A Journal of Undergraduate Research.
1890 provides undergraduate students the opportunity to demonstrate their interests and abilities in various disciplines by accepting works of research, creative writing, poetry, reviews, and art.
Game Studies - PCA/ACA National Conference
Call For Papers
The Game Studies area of the National Popular Culture Association and the American Culture Association Conference invites proposals for papers and panels on games and game studies for the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association National Conference to be held on April 8-11, 2026 in Atlanta, GA. The deadline for proposals is November 30th.
I. Topics of Interest
GENDER AND SOUTH ASIAN VISUAL CULTURES IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY Deadline for 250-word proposals: November 2, 2025 Association for Art History Annual Conference, April 2026Cambridge, UK This panel aims to explore the relationships between women and visual culture in twentieth century South Asia, challenging the oppressive structures that inform postcolonial subjectivities and engaging with practices that inaugurate new visual grammars.
Dear colleagues,
For its upcoming issues, Incontri. Rivista europea di studi italiani is currently accepting essay submissions and proposals for special issues.
The Area of Education, Teaching, History and Popular Culture is now accepting submissions for the 2025 Popular Culture Association National Conference to be held April 8-11, 2026 in Atlanta, GA.
Educators, librarians, archivists, scholars, independent researchers and graduate students are encouraged to apply. Undergraduates are reminded that there is an entire area devoted to undergraduate presentations in which they should submit. Undergraduates who wish to present a paper, panel or round table must do so under the supervision of a faculty sponsor, who must be included in the proposal submission.
Translation is a practice and an academic discipline that is always concerned with otherness. While it can be framed optimistically as an act of connecting and fostering engagement with different cultures, it must also be considered as a potentially harmful act. Especially with regard to so-called cultural realia, translators are increasingly aware of the ethical implications of their work. As Ritva Leppihalme explains, “[s]ince all texts are anchored in their culture, it follows that culture-bound items in the source text can present problems for translators” (126) and translators should thus possess “intercultural awareness” and “metacultural competence” (Leppihalme 127).
3rd ICCPA
East Asia on/as the Global Stage
5-7 Desember 2025
Universitas Padjadjaran, Bandung, Indonesia
We are now accepting submissions for Issue IV (Spring 2026)!
The Student Journal of Asian Studies at USC (SJAS @ USC) is a student-run academic journal supported by the USC East Asian Studies Center to help publish undergraduate and graduate work in various disciplines surrounding Asian Studies from around the world. Our goal is to establish an interdisciplinary atmosphere for student researchers on the rise to share their works and contribute to scholarship in Asian Studies.
Concept Note