DEADLINE EXTENDED!

Call for Papers

ESOTERICISM, OCCULTISM, AND MAGIC

Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA) 

47th Annual Conference, February 25-28, 2026

Marriott Albuquerque

Albuquerque, New Mexico

https://www.southwestpca.org

NEW submission deadline: November 14, 2025 

Call for Papers

Taylor Swift & Swiftie Studies

Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)

47th Annual Conference, February 25-28, 2026

Marriott Albuquerque

Albuquerque, New Mexico

https://www.southwestpca.org

Proposal submission deadline: November 14, 2025.

Call for Papers Extended!

SPORTS & POPULAR CULTURE

Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)

47th Annual Conference, February 25-28, 2026

Marriott Albuquerque

Albuquerque, New Mexico

https://www.southwestpca.org

Submissions open: September 1, 2025

Proposal submission deadline extended: November 14, 2025

Online, international, interdisciplinary conference titled:

The Hidden Faces of Violence: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Abuse, Trauma, and Resistance

Dates of Conference: November 28-29, 2025

WRITING THE MIDWEST: A Symposium of Scholars and Creative Writers

The Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature (SSML)

May 28-29, 2026. Kellogg Hotel and Convention Center, East Lansing, Michigan

About SSML and The Writing the Midwest Symposium: The Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature (SSML), founded in 1971, exists to support the study and dissemination of work in Midwestern literature, art, film, and scholarly study. 

Come join academics and working professionals at the Atlanta Marriott Marquis, April 8-11 2026!

We are considering proposals for sessions organized around a theme, special panels, and/or individual papers.  Sessions are scheduled in 1½ hour slots, typically with four papers or speakers per standard session.  Presentations should not exceed 15 minutes. Working professionals, scholars, educators, and graduate students are all encouraged to submit.

Proposals within animation studies in relation to popular culture are welcomed. Possible themes for papers/panels include but are not restricted to:

Call for Proposals: Edited Volume, North Meridian Press, “Subtle Body Horror.”Oct 15

LEO SEWELL ASSEMBLAGE SCULPTURE (Pennsylvania, born 1945) Seated Woman. Assembled from toys, coins, bits and fragments of metal, glass, wood, and plastic.

Call for Proposals

Anthology Editors: Kailey Tedesco & Mauve Perle Tahat

We invite contributions for Subtle Body Horror, an anthology exploring the intersections of embodiment, pain, and transformation.

The title plays on the idea of the “subtle body," the energetic or spiritual body, and the notion of “subtle” as slight, creeping, or insidious.

CALL FOR PAPERS ANNOUNCEMENT:

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Migration and the Early Modern Spanish Empire

June 10th–12th, 2026

Maynooth, Co. Kildare, Ireland

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Confirmed Keynote Speakers:

Thomas O’Connor

Professor

(History)

Maynooth University

Mayte Green-Mercado

Associate Professor

(History)

The Flannery O’Connor Society
The Society for the Study of Southern Literature
March 28th-31st, 2026
Fisk University
Nashville, TN

The Flannery O’Connor Society invites abstracts (of about 300 words) to be submitted for participation in an open topics panel on Flannery O’Connor’s life and work at the biannual conference of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature.

Call for Papers

Global Indigeneities and Life Narratives: Special Issue of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly

A Special Issue of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly

Guest Editor: J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, 

Eric and Wendy Schmidt Professor of Indigenous Studies and Anthropology, Princeton University

Submit: 400-word abstracts to kauanui@princeton.edu by December 1, 2025

https://manoa.hawaii.edu/cbr/publications-productions/biography/calls-fo...

Call for Proposals: Fredric Jameson and the Future of Critical Theory

April 10–12, 2026

Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

Keynotes by Michael Denning, Jane Gaines, Achille Mbembe, Toril Moi, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.

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Fredric Jameson (1934–2024) insisted on “imagining a future which might be radically and constitutionally other.” The urgency of this task rested on his understanding of Critical Theory “as a way of keeping the negative alive in a period in which praxis, the unity of the negative and the positive, itself seems suspended.” We invite proposals for papers on Jameson’s work and its implications for the future of critical theory.

Call for Papers: The Willa Cather Foundation seeks proposals for 1-2 panels at the 37th annual conference of the American Literature Association, held at the Palmer House in Chicago from May 20-23, 2026.

Topics could include (but are by no means limited to) race and ethnicity, indigeneity, settler colonialism, Queer histories, labor and leisure, Cather and other writers, teaching Cather, urban/rural spaces, philosophy and religion, approaches to Cather’s letters, ecological issues, and material culture.

While proposals on any topic pertaining to Cather’s life and writing are welcome, 2026 marks the centennial of the publication of My Mortal Enemy, so papers on that novel would be of particular interest.

Special Issue

Shopping Fictions: Representing Shops and Shopping in British Literature and Culture

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.

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. 

“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

University of Arizona Graduate Literature Conference: Imagining the End(s)

Conference Dates: March 6-8, 2026, Tucson, AZ, USA

“It is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism” (Mark Fisher)

“But the plot too has its own history” (Wynter 101)

What is it we have in mind when we imagine the end of the world or the end of capitalism? 

Is it the temporal–the closing, conclusion, finale, the end of capitalism’s historical epoch?

Is it the spatial–the enclosure, edge, boundary, limit between persons, places, or things, the end of capitalism’s spread or reach?

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.

The University of Iowa

Department of English

Graduate Student Conference 2026

Elaborating Labor 

Conference date: Friday, April 10, 2026 

Location: Richey Ballroom, Iowa Memorial Union, University of Iowa 

Abstract due date: Wednesday, December 31, 2025

Please email abstracts to c3conf@uiowa.edu 

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.

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?

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 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