|
a service provided by www.english.upenn.edu |
FAQ changelog |
all recent posts
American Literature Association: “Music and the American Literary Imagination” Symposium
January 28-30, 2027 in Nashville, Tennessee
CFP: “Sounding the Subject in the Nineteenth Century”
Project Overview and Rationale
In her book Bodyminds Reimagined, Sami Schalk asks us “What might it mean to imagine disability differently?” (2) Her work, situated in the exploration of black speculative fiction, engages with (dis)ability studies and black feminism to gesture toward a reimagining of what Margaret Price termed the ‘bodymind’, a concept predicated on “the enmeshment of the mind and body.” (5) How might this enmeshment be understood in the context of chronic conditions, themselves experienced as a direct result of climate change and biomedical violence? Is the planet - made sick by extractive capitalism and anthropogenic action as Shukla, Settee, Lincoln and others claim - now existing in a state of (dis)ability?
Dates of Conference: 4-8 November 2026
Format: Hybrid – Online (via Zoom) & In-Person (Thessaloniki, Greece)
Note: The onsite/in-person conference will take place exclusively on 6-7 November, 2026 and be streamed live on Zoom.
Organizer: KN: F.L.A.ME.S. by Konstantina Kliagkona (www.knflames.gr)
International, interdisciplinary conference titled:
The Hidden Faces of Violence II: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Abuse, Trauma, and Resistance
Recent scholarship in autobiography and life writing has expanded beyond traditional literary forms to encompass a wide range of practices through which individuals narrate, perform, and negotiate their identities. As scholars such as Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson have argued, life writing constitutes not merely the representation of a life but a dynamic process through which identities are constructed, mediated, and made visible within specific social and cultural contexts. Consequently, autobiography has evolved into an interdisciplinary field of inquiry encompassing visual art, graphic narratives, performance, body art, digital media, and other forms of self-representation.
The rapid expansion of digital technologies, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the emergence of artificial intelligence tools, has transformed the language classroom. Students now engage with learning materials, technology, and one another in ways that challenge traditional models of instruction and invite educators to reconsider how learning communities are created and sustained.
“To be or not to be”—Hamlet’s timeless question of existence—resonates with a gendered undertone that continues to echo through literature and culture. This panel asks a related question: what does it mean to be (or not to be) a man, and how do literary texts help illuminate that question across genres, periods, and geographies?
Call fort submissions
"Conversations with the Dead: Excavation as Re-vision"
Chair: Edvige Giunta, Kean University
The session invites presentations of prose, poetry, and/or hybrid writing that “turn” to the dead—not for the purpose of elegiac reminiscence but to unsettle or dismantle notions of chronology, inheritance, and other forms of linear, unidirectional connection between the living and the dead. Writers who turn to the dead find that that past transforms the present through the very process of excavation: communities are remade in the turning. This session will examine what that practice looks like across genres such as intergenerational memoir, speculative memoir, investigative essays, and personal rewritings of myths.
2026: 09-15-26: CFP Holy Grail, Batman? Expanding Knowledge of the Grail Legends in Popular Culture (Online) (9/15/2026; ICMS Kalamazoo/Online 5/13-15/2027)
Holy Grail, Batman? Expanding Knowledge of the Grail Legends in Popular Culture (Online)
62nd International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University (Kalamazoo, MI), Thursday, 13 May, through Saturday, 15 May, 2026
Co-sponsored by Alliance for the Promotion of Research on the Matter of Britain, Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture
CFP: “Bookstore Communities”
Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) annual convention
Newport, RI
March 6-9, 2027
In keeping with the NeMLA 2027 theme of “Empowering Communities,” the purpose of this panel is to explore the role of bookstores in imagined, fictional spaces. What does a bookstore signify? What’s the symbolic difference between a bookstore and a library? How do fictional bookstores create and foster community? What magic, literal or figurative, is inherent in a shop that sells physical, printed texts? What do these commercial spaces represent as far as identity, belonging, or culture?
The rise of the superhero is one of the most significant cultural developments of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Since the debut of Superman in Action Comics #1 (April 18, 1938), superheroes have evolved from colorful comic-book figures into powerful global symbols that shape conversations about politics, morality, identity, technology, gender, race, mythology, trauma, and resistance. What began with the imaginative vision of Jerry Siegel (writer) and Joe Shuster (artist) has expanded into a worldwide phenomenon spanning comics, film, television, literature, gaming, digital media, and academic discourse.
The editors are seeking 750-word abstracts of talks for a symposium at UCLA, February 5, 2027, on “The Great American Novel: A Twenty-First-Century Reckoning.” Early-career scholars as well as tenured faculty are encouraged to apply. Transportation and lodging costs will be provided. While there is a long and thriving history of debates about the GAN, we favor topics and approaches that highlight theoretical and critical concerns that reach beyond the discussion of any single text to consider broader theoretical, political, and aesthetic stakes. Accepted speakers will be asked to revise and expand their presentations into articles to be considered for publication in a special issue of ALH.
The Age of Brutalism: Sacrificial Modernity and the Contemporary Novel
(The edited volume has received an expression of interest from Springer)
Volume Editors:
● Om Prakash Dwivedi, Professor, School of Liberal Arts and Behavioral Sciences, Chandigarh University Uttar Pradesh.
● Madhurima Nayak, Assistant Professor, School of Liberal Arts and Behavioral Sciences, Chandigarh University Uttar Pradesh.
● Arunima Moitra, Assistant Professor, School of Liberal Arts and Behavioral Sciences, Chandigarh University Uttar Pradesh.
Full cfp here: https://www.sal.org.uk/2026/07/crd-cfp/
In bell hooks’ Belonging: A Culture of Place (2009), she posits that “many folks feel no sense of place” (1). She continues by explaining her personal experience with this spatiality, noting that, “Like many of my contemporaries I have yearned to find my place in this world, to have a sense of homecoming, a sense of being wedded to a place” (2). To that end, a commonality shared between all humans is a searching for a place in which we belong, and this is particularly evident in literature that is produced during times of major societal events.
Decadence: Rhetoric and Aesthetics of Decline from Ancient Empire to the Age of Polycrisis
Conference open to scholars of all stages
Venue: British School at Rome, Rome
Dates:21-22nd January 2027
Following a successful symposium in 2025 on the subject of civilisational origins, we are delighted to announce our next event, Decadence, a conference about what happens to civilisations, societies, and cultural movements when they reach and then exceed their peak.
Over the last two decades, we have seen a surge of scholarship at the intersection of Food Studies and New Materialist theory. Thinkers like Elspeth Probyn (2000; 2016), Jane Bennett (2010), Annemarie Mol (2021; 2024), and Kyla Wazana Tompkins (2024) explore the diverse ways in which edible matter acts on our bodies, wills, and dispositions, in multilayered entanglements that involve water, minerals, fungi, bacteria, plants, as well as human and nonhuman animals. These material-discursive networks urge us to rethink not only our notions of agency but also our ways of being, knowing, and relating.
An Edited Volume by
Ruchika Hooda
Assistant Professor at Maharishi Markandeshwar (Deemed to be University), Ambala
Ms. Diksha
Assistant Professor in the Dept. of English at Chandigarh University, Chandigarh
Editor
Dr Kaniphnath Malhari Kudale
Associate Professor of English, Gurunanak Institute of Technology (GNITC), Hyderabad, Telangana, India
General Editor
Dr Tarun Tapas Mukherjee
Editor, Rupkatha Journal
About the Volume
A Volume
Editors
Dr Swastick Sen Chowdhury
Assistant Professor & Head in the Department of Economics, Bhatter College, Dantan (Autonomous)
Dr Supratik Guha
Assistant Professor, Department of Economics at Shahid Matangini Hazra Government General Degree College for Women
To be published under the book series
About the Volume
Changeling Country: Neurodivergence, Disability and the Irish Imaginary
An edited volume proposed for Vernon Press, Irish Studies series Editor: Tess Ezzy — Director, Neurodivergent Creative Methods Lab; PhD candidate, University of New England
Cognitive Ecologies: Thinking With, Through, and Against Environments
A Special Issue of The Apollonian: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies
Complete articles of up to 5,000 words due 30 September 2026. Personal essays, photo essays, poetry, and translation also invited.
Against Agency
NeMLA 2027
Chairs: Nicholas Bujalski (Oberlin College) and Valeria Dani (Hamilton College)
Summon the muse!
Inspired by the emptiness of the National Mall celebration of America’s 250th, we invite 300 word abstracts that consider enclosure and vacancy in Americana and its related aesthetic categories, like the Western and Southern Gothic.
Presenters might engage with a variety of fields, especially black, feminist, and indigenous studies, and take up media across time periods, including contemporary art by Bisa Butler and Jeffrey Gibson, Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter, Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, Aleshea Harris’ Is God Is, and many more.
https://mla.confex.com/mla/2027/webprogrampreliminary/Paper36527.html
The Faculty of Arts and Humanities at Netrokona University, Bangladesh is delighted to inform that it is going to publish its double-blind peer-reviewed academic journal Sphaira: Journal of Arts and Humanities, volume 2, in December, 2026. Scholarly articles in English addressing contemporary issues within the fields of literature, linguistics, language teaching, education, fine arts, performance studies, folklore studies, cultural studies, literary theory, and history and archeology are called for publication in its second volume.
Manuscript development guidelines:
Workshop at the Renaissaince Society of America's annual meeting (Philadelphia. March 11-13, 2027)
The advancement of artificial intelligence has transformed humanities research and education, deepening computation’s influence on scholarly practice and everyday life. From the early era of “humanities computing” in the 1970s to the rise of “computational humanities” over the past decade, this trajectory highlights the enduring—and expanding—role of computation in shaping inquiry across the humanities. These intersections are especially visible in interdisciplinary work. As T. S. Eliot observes, “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” The same spirit can illuminate how methods and tools migrate across fields.
Abstract
In the United States, our lives are marked by an abundance of convenience. From fresh produce year-round to two-day shipping, convenient choices feel soft, easy, and frictionless, as they have specifically been engineered to feel. Until relatively recently, it has been possible to maintain a cultural and systemic sense of alienation that makes the cost of our convenience invisible to us—to localize all of the necessary precarity and exploitation for convenience “somewhere else,” (often in the Global South) and then to ignore it.
Panel Chair: Noah Gallego, M.A.Contact: noahrgallego@gmail.comDates: March 6 - 9, 2027Location: Salve Regina University, Newport, Rhode Island While the exact calendrical origin of punk rock is nebulous, many credit 1977 as year zero. 1977 saw the release of the eponymous debut album of “the only band that matters,” The Clash, among several other iconic releases, including but not limited to: The Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, The Ramones’ Rocket to Russia, Talking Heads' Talking Heads: 77, The Damned’s Damned Damned Damned, and The Runaways’ Queens of Noise.
Now We Are Six at One Hundred: Affect, Atmosphere, and Ordinary Feeling in A. A. Milne's Hundred Acre Wood
Edited Collection for the Children's Literature Association Series: Centennial Studies
Call for Abstracts
In 2027, A. A. Milne's Now We Are Six reaches its centenary. This is the second collection of children's verse and the third book in the Pooh sequence, following When We Were Very Young (1924) and Winnie-the-Pooh (1926). It contains 35 poems, all illustrated by Ernest H. Shepard. Unlike the prose Pooh books, it is a collection of self-contained poems. The poems move between several interconnected worlds:
Abstract
Demanding that student writers maintain an objective, third-person stance when writing academic essays persists in the academy. However, we hold that providing students with strategies that help them develop a hospitable mindset in the writing process, one in which they aim to make a meaningful connection with their readers through the use of both first person and personal experience, does not diminish the scholarly rigor of college-level work. Moreover, by adopting the attitude that student writing is not immediately designed for publication, educators can focus on helping students find ways to connect with readers while cultivating their own writing styles.
Description
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:
CFP: 3rd International Interdisciplinary Conference of the Department of English, University of Zululand and the Department of English and Literary Studies, Federal University Wukari, Nigeria
28-30 September 2026
Ongoye, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
Re-imagining Language, Writing, and Literature in English in a Fast-Changing World
A newly launched, peer-reviewed, biannual journal in the fields of language, literature, cultural studies, linguistics, ELT, translation, discourse analysis, media studies, gender studies, postcolonial studies, philosophy, history, and the broader humanities is currently accepting original research articles, review articles, theoretical papers, book reviews, and research notes.
There are no submission or publication charges for accepted papers.
Submission guidelines and online submission:
Dystopian fiction is having a moment. Classic dystopian fiction like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1986) have renewed relevance since the election of Donald Trump in the U.S., while more recent novels like Ali Smith’s Gliff (2024), Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song (the Man Booker winner in 2023), and John Lanchester’s The Wall (2019) describe worlds sliding into totalitarianism post-Brexit. This panel seeks to raise questions about how contemporary Anglophone speculative fiction addresses the current cultural moment and issues like artificial intelligence, immigration and the internet’s dissolution of privacy. Formally, how do 21st century dystopian novels connect science fiction with realism? With magical realism?
This panel approaches hospitality in the literature classroom through Lauren Groff’s fiction. Groff’s novels, The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia, Fates and Furies, Matrix, and The Vaster Wilds, each engage with acts of welcome, exclusion, refuge, and care in differing ways. How can educators best use Groff’s work within a classroom model of intellectual hospitality?
“It is worse, much worse, than you think” states David Wallace-Wells at the opening of his The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (2019). “When do we start physically attacking the things that consume our planet and destroy them with our own hands?” asks Andreas Malm in How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2021). “I don’t think about hope much anymore. But I do think about imagination,” writes Terry Tempest Williams in an interview contained in A voice in the Wilderness: Conversations with Terry Tempest Williams (2006). In the spaces between these statements we encounter a range of reactions to our warming condition, from blunt pessimism, to righteous anger, to nuanced reframing.
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
Issue 106 of the Virginia Woolf Miscellany
Summer 2027
Special Topic: Woolf and the Affordances of Poetry
Guest editor: Lesley Higgins
Submissions should be no longer than 2500 words
(including the Works Cited)
Submissions are due 29 March 2027
Please send your submission to: 19higgins55@gmail.com
This in-person roundtable will take place at NEMLA 2027 (March 6-9) at Salve Regina University in Newport, RI.
Abstract:
Nonfiction film and media have played a crucial role in advocating for animal welfare, rights and liberation. Although short videos and a number of documentaries were produced and distributed with activist purposes during the 1980s, it is during the so-called “documentary renaissance” of the early twenty-first century, together with the communicative advances of digital media, that nonfiction moving images emerged as a medium capable of reaching more mainstream audiences, becoming a central cultural tool for instigating transformative change in humans’ speciesist practices and attitudes toward nonhuman animals.
Call for Chapters – Edited volume
The Cultural Life of Beds: Interdisciplinary Perspectives of Materiality, Bodies and Power
University of New England, Australia
For publication with an international publisher
Call for Book Chapters (Scopus)
Date Extended till Sep 15, 2026
We are open to all, but preference will be given to international contributors
Disability in Literature and Cinema
Concept Note:
Call for Book Chapters
Expected Publisher: De Gruyter Brill (Scopus Index)
Recovering Marginalised Theatre, Folk Epics and Songs beyond Literary Canons
Kashyap Deepak
Mahatma Gandhi Central University
Fostering Interpretive Communities in the Classroom and Research through Adaptation Studies (Roundtable) (Virtual)
Co-organizers Michael A. Torregrossa and Carl B. Sell
Sponsored by Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture
Call for Papers - Please Submit Proposals by 30 September 2026
58th Annual Convention of Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)
Salve Regina University (Newport, RI)/Online.
Hybrid event: 6-9 March 2027
Using Comics to Build Community: Approaches to Teaching Comics (Roundtable) (Virtual)
Co-organizers Michael A. Torregrossa and Carl B. Sell
Sponsored by Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture
Call for Papers - Please Submit Proposals by 30 September 2026
58th Annual Convention of Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)
Salve Regina University (Newport, RI)/Online.
Hybrid event: 6-9 March 2027
This session’s modality is Virtual Only, meaning all presentations will be delivered via Zoom regardless of whether the presenters are in-person.
Surrealism and Arts-Based Research:
Bridging the Imagination and Reality Divide
A Transdisciplinary Conference
Conference Webpage: https://labrc.co.uk/2026/06/17/surrealism-2026/
Conference Dates: September 29-30, 2026
Location: Online
Proposal Deadline: September 10, 2026
Fees:
£100 (for both presenters and attendees)
Prices exclude booking fees
Call for Papers
Call for Papers
Literary Friends and Rivals: Hospitality and Literary Networks in Spain and Latin America
98th South Atlantic Modern Language Association (SAMLA) Convention
Thursday, November 5 - Saturday, November 7, 2026
Atlanta, Georgia
FRIT Graduate Conference 2026
November 6th, 2026
Northwestern University
Keynote Speaker
Jina Kim, Smith College
Author of Care at the End of the World (2025)
CALL FOR PAPERS: WHO CARES?
American Comparative Literature Association 2027 Annual Meeting
University of Houston
May 20-23
The Poverty of Literature
Organizer:
Gabriel Quigley, University of Victoria (gabrielquigley@uvic.ca)