SDSU Press Presents

[caption] the journal of visual cultural studies

Issue 001 – “CAPTION THIS”

[caption] emerges from the collision of theory and spectacle. Annual, audacious, and gloriously hybrid, the journal stages encounters between scholarship and image-making—where Arbus’s restless gaze meets the ghosts of Benjamin, Mulvey, and Stuart Hall. We publish work that refuses to choose between seeing and thinking, between the archive and the avant-garde. 

Call for Papers: Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds

Special Issue: ‘Save State: Ethics, Politics and Poetics of Video Game Preservation’

Guest Editors: Paweł Frelik (University of Warsaw), Magdalena Kozyra (SWPS University), Tomasz Z. Majkowski (Jagiellonian University) 

Important Dates 

• Abstract Submission Deadline: 1 March 2026

• Notification of Acceptance: 10 March 2026

• Full Article Submission: 15 June 2026

• Peer Review Returned: 1 August 2026

• Revised Article Submission: 31 August 2026

The recent Mandarin Chinese translation of The Canterbury Tales (Linking Publishing, 2025) by Dr. Francis K. H. So offers a timely opportunity to reflect on the growing presence, vitality, and diversity of Chaucerian studies outside the Anglophone world. This significant contribution not only opens new avenues for engaging with Geoffrey Chaucer’s language and narrative art, but also foregrounds the crucial role of translation, pedagogy, and local scholarly traditions in shaping how Chaucer is read, interpreted, and taught across different linguistic and cultural contexts.

In 2016, Oxford Dictionaries named “post-truth” its Word of the Year, marking a shift towards skepticism of facts and scientific institutions alongside the rising influence of emotion and opinion in shaping public knowledge. In the decade since, we have witnessed the further erosion of consensus truth as multiple constructions of the “real” proliferate throughout divergent media ecosystems, accelerated by emerging technologies and polarizing political orientations towards race, gender, class, and sexuality. 

Conference online (via Zoom): 12-13 March 2026

CFP:​

“Unfinished Declarations: Independence, Identity, and Imagination in American Culture” 

Hosted by the Irish Association for American Studies 

Date: 24th and 25th April 2026 

Location: Ulster University, Coleraine Campus, Northern Ireland 

Our conference theme, “All Things Made New: Creation, Re-creation, and Redemption,” aims to explore the multifaceted dimensions of the creative and re-creative acts embedded in our discipline practices and the works we study. As a number of Christian scholars have pointed out, reading and writing literature is one way we can carry out our responsibility to establish a world that pleases and praises God by cultivating its potential. Just as Adam and Eve cultivated the fruits of the Garden of Eden, so are we to cultivate the talents and abilities God has given us in all areas: technology, literature, art, music, science, social and political structures, etc.

The Apollonian: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies has foregrounded special issues as crucial sites for shaping emerging conversations, opening new interdisciplinary pathways, and bringing into visibility critical questions that cut across literature, culture, philosophy, interdisciplinary humanities, and posthumanities thinking. Continuing this commitment, we invite proposals from potential guest editors for several forthcoming special issues of the journal as we shift from our recent annual issue format to a bi-annual format in an attempt to revive the previous publication schedule of the journal (2014-2019).

Victorian popular fiction is replete with animals – racing horses, loyal dogs, caged birds, exotic creatures, and anthropomorphic companions. These beings carried immense symbolic significance: they could function as status symbols, metaphors for the body or soul, expressions of sentiment, or instruments of moral instruction. Animals also frequently offered a lens through which Victorians addressed issues surrounding empire, industrialisation, science, social mobility, and domesticity. In popular fiction, animals were not merely background – they were moral barometers, class indicators, narrative devices, and symbols of broader anxieties regarding industrialisation, gender roles, and empire.

Call for Papers 2026

Deadline: February 28th 2026

Theme: Gender and Supernatural

“You should be women, And yet your beards forbid me to interpret That you are so.” Macbeth 1.3.46-47

Call for Submissions

Eye to the Telescope Guest Editor Angela Acosta is accepting poetry submissions for Issue 60, Paying Tribute

The Zeitpyramide in Germany gains a new block every decade to mark the passage of time until the year 3183. Will future humans remember this art installation, or will it cease to have any meaning by the next millennium?

CALL FOR PAPERS

Anglica: An International Journal of English Studies

Thematic Issue 2027

Apocalypse as Utopia:

Hopeful Visions of Apocalypses in Literature, Media and Culture

Guest Editors:

Magdalena Cieślak, University of Lodz

Paola Spinozzi, University of Ferrara

Katarzyna Więckowska, Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun

The Society for the Study of American Poetry invites proposals for a roundtable to be held at the 37th annual American Literature Association conference in Chicago, IL, May 20-23, 2026. 

Roundtable: “Teaching American Poetry Now”

This roundtable invites participants to reflect on the challenges, possibilities, and urgencies of teaching American poetry in the current moment. Across institutions, student populations, and media environments, instructors are rethinking how—and why—we teach American poetry now.

Announcing

The 2026 First Book Institute

May 31-June 6, 2026

Hosted by the Center for American Literary Studies (CALS) at Pennsylvania State University

Co-Directors

Priscilla Wald, R. Florence Brinkley Distinguished Professor of English, Duke University, and Co-Editor of American Literature

Sean X. Goudie, Director of the Center for American Literary Studies and Past Winner of the MLA Prize for a First Book

CFP | Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins Society (PEHS) session 

American Literature Association Annual Conference, Chicago, IL, May 20-23, 2026

Hopkins’s America, Then & Now

ECOS DEL INTERIOR: POTENCIALIDADES ESTÉTICAS Y POLÍTICAS DE LO AFECTIVO EN LA LITERATURA  

Edificio A, Facultad de Filología de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 11 y 12 de mayo de 2026

Legacies of Performance: Inheriting Pasts & Imagining Futures

Graduate Student Symposium

Sponsored by the Department of Theater and Dance

University of California, Santa Barbara

April 18, 2026

“Every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own threatens to disappear irretrievably.” – Walter Benjamin, 1942

“I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.” – Audre Lorde, 1978

Since Benedict Anderson’s 1983 theorization of imagined communities, the historical alliance between the novel and the nation has been a key problematic of literary studies. And yet, in the post–Cold War decades, the centrality of the nation and its ideological weight seemed to wane. The rise of neoliberalism produced an ideology of free circulation of capital and goods, which heralded a new era of weakening national borders and enhanced cultural exchanges. In literary studies, this period saw the rise of a new critical field, world literature (Moretti, Damrosch), and the theorization of a World Republic of Letters (Casanova), which held a similarly borderless aspiration.

A Two-Day International Conference on Civilizational Literature Texts, Traditions, and Transcultural Dialogues across Civilizations

 Dates: 13 and 14th March, 2026

Venue: Dharwad, Karnataka, India

Mode: Hybrid

Organized by Dharwad Katte, in collaboration with Adikavi Sri Maharishi Valmiki University, Raichur, Janata Shikshana Samity, Dharwad and Peter Lang.

                                                                           Concept Note

Journal of Medieval Worlds

Call for Submissions

CFP: Special Issue on Appalachian Animal Studies

To be published in Spring 2027, co-edited by Drs. Kathryn Kirkpatrick and Jessica Cory

Whether it’s the relationships we have with our animal companions, the meat we (may not) eat, or the countless more-than-human species with whom we share this region, animals are important to our lives and to Appalachian spaces.

Scholarly book reviews sought for new book titled Madness and the Sea: A Literary History. To e published by Palgravve on March 26, 2026. Scholars with interests in the fields of Blue Humanities, Maritime literature, madness in literature and medical humanities and with links to review sites are welcome to contact me to arrange review copies.

Neither ‘queer’ nor ‘beginnings’ are easy to pin down. Queerness is infamous for its ability to slip away from definition; it encompasses – but is not reducible to – sexuality, gender, race, ability, class, politics, and more. Beginnings, too, wriggle from our grasp. Choose a beginning for any historical event, movement, or narrative and there is always something which precedes it. Are beginnings focused into an inciting event, or do they reside in the feelings which precipitate such events? Who gets to decide?