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?

Wallace Stevens’s poetry abounds with animals, from the bucks and firecat of “Earthy Anecdote” to the “gold-feathered bird” of “Of Mere Being.” This session invites papers on Stevens’s animals and animal imagery across his oeuvre. How do animals in Stevens’s poems reflect or complicate his sense of human perception, subjectivity, and the environment? In what ways do they trouble distinctions between the human and the nonhuman, the domestic and the wild, the material and the symbolic?

Proposals might consider individual poems or sequences, the wider bestiary of The Collected Poems, or Stevens’s animals in relation to earlier, contemporaneous, or later writers.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

Journal of American Studies of Turkey (JAST) 

2026 Fall Issue: Science Fiction and the American Imagination 

Guest Editor: Firuze Güzel, Ege University, Izmir, Türkiye

Deadline for Full-Text Submissions: July 15, 2026

The forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present.

— Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844)

Lose your mind and come to your senses.

— Frederich (Fritz) Perls, Gestalt Therapy Verbatim (1969)

CFP Journal of the European Association for Studies of Australia

Special Issue: Minding the Present. Bodies, Places, Matter in and between Australia and Europe

Deadline for proposals: 15 March 2026

Taking its cue from a very vibrant conference held in Padova (Italy) in September 2025, the Journal of the European Association for Studies of Australia is seeking articles that examine the shaping experiences, identities, and perceptions of the present as a catalyst to urgent action both in Australia—with a special alertness to the very rooted cultures of Indigenous Australia—and in the complex relations between Europe and Australia.  

Call for Papers: 

I am pleased to share a call for chapter proposals for an edited collection currently in development titled Black Feminist Practices and AI in the Composition Classroom: Memoir, Pedagogy, and Futures. This volume invites scholars, teachers, and practitioners to explore how Black Feminist rhetorical traditions can guide ethical, humanizing, and culturally responsive uses of artificial intelligence in writing instruction.

CFP | Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins Society (PEHS) session 

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

Hopkins’s America, Then & Now

CFP “A Vision for Liberating Our Democracy” Conference, February 27–28, 2026

The conference builds on a growing body of research that examines the theological, cultural, and political intersections of democracy, citizenship, and power. Participants will investigate how worldviews and faith traditions have informed concepts of governance, belonging, and personhood from the founding era to the present. The conference will highlight not only the Haudenosaunee Influence on American Democracy but also the historic and present contributions to Democratic thought by Black, Indigenous, and Latine communities, contributions which are often forgotten and ignored.

Featured Speakers

Elmira 2026: The Tenth International Conference on the State of Mark Twain Studies

Conference Theme: Irreverence, Rebellion, and Resilience

We are pleased to invite participants to a four-day intensive book reading workshop on Antonio Gramsci (online), focused on questions of hegemony, culture, subaltern politics, and political struggle. This workshop brings together students, scholars, researchers, activists, and readers for a sustained and collective engagement with Gramsci’s writings. Written largely under conditions of imprisonment and censorship, Gramsci’s work challenges us to think about power not only as domination, but as consent, culture, and everyday common sense.

The last few years have seen the publication of a number of fantasy novels for young people written by authors from the postcolonial diaspora, including Tomi Adeyemi’s Legacy of Orisha trilogy, Jordan Ifueko’s Raybearer series, Nnedi Okarofor’s The Nsibidi Scripts series and Roshani Chokshi’s The Gilded Wolves series. Additionally, there are YA fantasy series that deal with hierarchies and inequities resulting from colonization and settler colonialism, such as Naomi Novik’s Scholomance series and Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves duology.

Abstract 

The “end of the world” names a methodological problem before it names an apocalypse: how do humanities scholars and artist-researchers think, make, and teach when climate disruption, extinction, extractive infrastructures, forced displacement, and slow violence reformat what counts as evidence, what counts as futurity, and what counts as responsibility? This conference convenes research and practice across film, theatre, performance, and allied arts to ask how (post)Anthropocene conditions are not only represented but produced, felt, and negotiated through aesthetic forms, production systems, embodied publics, and more-than-human milieus. 

(Extended Deadline)

MEMORY

University of Virginia Department of English Graduate Symposium

March 27 & 28, 2026

Dates: Thursday 25 June - Friday 26 June 2026
Venue: Jesus College, University of Cambridge

Culture, Food, and Literature in the New Millennium (Hybrid)

March 25-26, 2026

School of Liberal Arts

University of Management and Technology, Lahore

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

MICHIGAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCE, ARTS & LETTERS 614 Superior Street, Alma College, Alma, MI 48801 - Fax: 989-463-7970 - michiganacademy@alma.edu Call for Papers Women's & Gender Studies 

INVITATION 2026 conference: Friday, March 27, 2026, virtual conference held via Zoom.

You are invited to submit a 200-word abstract of the paper you wish to present at the conference.

PROCEDURES  Abstract submission deadline is 1/23/26.

Presentations are up to 20 minutes each, followed by discussion.

Undergraduates may present faculty co-authored or sponsored papers (section leaders may require proof that paper/research was reviewed by a faculty sponsor).

MLA Annual Convention 2027
Los Angeles, California | 7–10 January 2027

Analog Game Studies and Game in Lab are proud to announce Generation Analog 2026.  This year’s online conference will take place July 16-17, 2026.  The online event is free and open to the public with registration.  All presentations will be recorded and made available after the event.  Check out the presentations from previous years via AGS’s YouTube channel (like and subscribe).

Queer Ecologies Across Socialisms 

15-16 October 2026

University of Regensburg, October 15-16, 2026 | CfP deadline: Feb 15, 2026
Organizers: Martyna Miernecka, Paweł Matusz

In literary and arts research on socialist worlds, both queer studies and environmental histories have been expanding – yet we still lack approaches that would systematically integrate these strands across global state socialisms. This conference responds to that gap by inviting work that reads queer practices alongside institutional and environmental policies and traces the queer ecological impulses emerging from socialist contexts across the globe.

The International Congress on Narrative and Aesthetics in Film, Series, TV, and Audiovisual Experimentation is a platform for discussion and dissemination of studies and projects related to audiovisual creation in its various areas of production and distribution. It encompasses research related to cinematography and film history across a wide range of fields (sociology, industry, aesthetics, etc.), formats (fiction, documentary, animation, music videos, etc.), and genres (from thrillers and comedies to the connections between film and comics or video games).

Osgood Perkins is emerging as one of the most significant directors of horror in the 21st century. His films are wildly diverse and have elicited an equally wild diversity of response from viewers and critics. Perkins has thought a lot about horror, has frequently spoken about its larger meanings in interviews, and is committed to its centrality as a genre – something he articulates in this 2025 conversation with Interview Magazine:

The Department of English and Cultural Studies, School of Humanities and Performing Arts, CHRIST (Deemed to be University), Delhi NCR Campus, is hosting its 3rd International Conference on Global Digital Cultures: Texts, Technologies, and Audiences (Hybrid Mode). 

Date: 23 - 24 February, 2026

In the era of rapid technological change, digitalization, globalization, and platformization are reshaping film, media, and creative industries. This conference critically explores the intersections of texts, technologies, and audiences in global digital cultures, with a focus on South Asia and the Global South.

Call for Papers: Perspectives on Netflix’s Ripley

I am pleased to announce a call for papers for the first edited volume devoted to the Netflix limited series Ripley (Zaillian, 2024). Perspectives on Netflix’s Ripley seeks to explore the myriad ways in which this striking adaptation reimagines Patricia Highsmith’s iconic character for a new era of streaming television. I invite proposals from scholars, practitioners, and critics whose work engages with adaptation, media studies, sexuality, and screen cultures.

About the Volume

Studiolo is a series of essays on objects, books, and early technologies, written in the spirit of the chockablock Renaissance study from which it takes its name and published monthly at the Pittsburgh Review of Books (http://www.pghrev.com)