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Visual Culture Area: 2027 Popular Culture Association Conference

Ivy Roberts / Popular Culture Association
deadline for submissions: 
Saturday, October 31, 2026

Visual culture constitutes an interdisciplinary area flexible enough to facilitate discussion across the arts, media, and communication. Visual culture, broadly defined, exists at the intersection of the visual and the cultural. Distinct from film, television, animation, video game, media, literature and the arts, we study the cultures in which such media circulate. Yet common interests connect visual studies with material culture, digital culture, and media studies, among others, suggesting fertile opportunities for collaboration and crossover. 

South Asian Futurisms: Imagination, Politics and Literature

Maithri
deadline for submissions: 
Tuesday, September 22, 2026

What futures can South Asia imagine for itself—and in whose languages, forms, and cosmologies are they written? This seminar takes up South Asian Futurisms, a concept that remains under-theorized within literary studies, as a lens for reading how South Asian literatures of the past and present, across regional and vernacular traditions, have envisioned the future. Amid the region's rapidly shifting economic, social, and geopolitical landscape, we ask: can there be a South Asian Futurism, and if so, what does it look like?

International Conference Margins of the Anthropocene Waste, Bodies, and Decolonial Futures 2-3 September, 2026

Ramananda Centenary College
deadline for submissions: 
Thursday, August 20, 2026

The Department of English and IQAC, Ramananda Centenary College, are pleased to announce the International Conference 'Margins of the Anthropocene: Waste, Bodies, and Decolonial Futures' to be held on 2–3 September 2026. The conference brings together scholars, artists, filmmakers, activists, and community practitioners to examine how ecological crises are experienced through waste, caste, labour, toxicity, disability, indigeneity, and more-than-human relations while imagining decolonial ecological futures.

ACLA 2027 - Ways of Water: Exploring Legacies of Trauma in Blue Infrastructure

American Comparative Literature Association
deadline for submissions: 
Tuesday, September 22, 2026

We are living in a time of extreme weather, ecological shift, and infrastructural decay, much of which is related to questions surrounding water. To further analyze the ways that water is affected by and in turn shapes our world, Blue Humanities emerges to critically contend with a shifting landscape. Our attempt through this panel is to expand the conversation by intentionally incorporating the nuances of trauma and infrastructure studies.  

The Marilynne Robinson Society at ALA

American Literature Association Conference (ALA); May 26-29, 2027
deadline for submissions: 
Tuesday, December 1, 2026

The Marilynne Robinson Society will be hosting a panel at the annual American Literature Association Conference (May 26-29, 2027; Boston, MA).  The panel will focus on a wide variety of topics connected to Robinson’s essays and novels.

Please submit a 350-word proposal and short bio to haein.park@biola.edu by December 1, 2026.

Healing Narratives: Exploring Humanity in Medicine and Healthcare

Konstantina Kliagkona ("KN: Forensic, Literature, Arts & Media Studies"/ Independent Researcher, Freelancer EFL, Criminology Teacher, & Offender Profiler)
deadline for submissions: 
Sunday, October 4, 2026

Conference Dates: 23-24 October, 2026

Format: Online (via Zoom)

 

International, interdisciplinary conference titled:

 

Healing Narratives: Exploring Humanity in Medicine and Healthcare

 

 

In the realm of medicine and healthcare, narratives- whether spoken, written, visual, or performed- serve among others as powerful tools to humanize clinical experiences, challenge biomedical paradigms as well as foster empathy and understanding. These stories reveal the complex interplay between biological, psychological, social, cultural, and spiritual dimensions of health, illuminating the ways in which healing is intertwined with human dignity, identity, and societal values.

Euromodernism’s ‘Chinese Eyes’: Orientalism and Formal Immediacy

David Seamans
deadline for submissions: 
Tuesday, September 22, 2026

European modernism often imagined aesthetic form as a way to overcome mediation: to make alienated experience, fragmented sociality, or absent truth appear immediately whole or present. At the same time, Edward Said identifies one of the core mechanisms of imperial representation as how it effaces its own mediation of the Orient, as if representation delivered “presence” rather than “re-presence.” This panel explores to what extent the modernist fantasy of formal immediacy was historically enabled by a fantasy of immediacy built into Orientalist representation.

CFP for Fat Studies Research, Artistry, and Activism 2026

Fat Studies Area of the Popular Culture Association
deadline for submissions: 
Saturday, October 31, 2026

PCA/ACA Fat Studies 2027 Call for Papers/Presentations/Panels

Deadline: 10.31.26

 

PCA Fat Studies Area Call for Papers

 

Attention all Fat Studies academics, activists, and artists: Please join other Fat Studies scholars for the 2027 PCA/ACA National Conference in Boston, Massachusetts from March 24-27, 2027. Presenters must become members of the Popular Culture Association. Find more information on the conference and organization at https://sites.google.com/view/2026pcaconference/home.

 

CFP for Fat Studies Research, Artistry, and Activism 2026

Fat Studies Area of the Popular Culture Association
deadline for submissions: 
Saturday, October 31, 2026

PCA/ACA Fat Studies 2027 Call for Papers/Presentations/Panels

Deadline: 10.31.26

 

PCA Fat Studies Area Call for Papers

 

Attention all Fat Studies academics, activists, and artists: Please join other Fat Studies scholars for the 2027 PCA/ACA National Conference in Boston, Massachusetts from March 24-27, 2027. Presenters must become members of the Popular Culture Association. Find more information on the conference and organization at https://sites.google.com/view/2026pcaconference/home.

 

Black Performing Arts: Sound, Movement, Image, Text

Black Performing Arts Area (Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association)
deadline for submissions: 
Saturday, October 31, 2026

Black Performing Arts: Sound, Movement, Image, Text

Submission Deadline: October 31, 2026

The Black Performing Arts Area provides a scholarly forum to share research pertaining to Black performance across expressive forms.  Broadly defined, the area focuses on all forms of performing and visual arts, including all musical genres, theatrical performance and performance art, performance elements in visual art, and connections between different Black expressive forms.  In all these contexts we are interested in investigating where aesthetic technique and embodiment merge across Black diasporic expressivity.

AIYA: Artificial Intelligence and Young Adult Studies [working title]

Sid Dobrin and Kenneth Kidd, University of Florida
deadline for submissions: 
Sunday, November 1, 2026

AIYA: Artificial Intelligence and Young Adult Studies [working title]

Edited by Sidney I. Dobrin and Kenneth B. Kidd, University of Florida

 

Deadline for proposals: November 1, 2026

CALL FOR CHAPTER PROPOSALS

Love and Its Reversals in Peninsular and Latin American Literature (Panel – Virtual Only)

Dr. María Cristina Campos Fuentes, DeSales University
deadline for submissions: 
Wednesday, September 30, 2026

 

Love and Its Reversals in Peninsular and Latin American Literature (Panel –  Virtual Only)

NeMLA 2027 — 58th Annual Convention
March 6–9, 2027 | Newport, Rhode Island
Virtual Only

Love has long occupied a central place in Peninsular and Latin American literature, but literary representations of love also expose its reversals, contradictions, and darker dimensions. This panel explores representations of love and its reversals—including desire, rejection, violence, hate, and eroticism—with particular attention to questions of gender, subjectivity, power, and social norms.

SHAKESPEARE ON FILM AND TELEVISION

Popular Culture Association / American Culture Association
deadline for submissions: 
Saturday, October 31, 2026

Explore Shakespeare in a variety of media beyond traditional stage productions, including film, television, anime, manga, and recent novelizations of the plays. We have previously had papers on the following topics and invite new ideas all the time.

"Healing Narratives: Exploring Humanity in Medicine and Healthcare" (23-24 October, 2026)

KN: F.L.A.ME.S. by Konstantina Kliagkona (www.knflames.gr)
deadline for submissions: 
Sunday, October 4, 2026

International, interdisciplinary conference titled:

 

Healing Narratives: Exploring Humanity in Medicine and Healthcare

 

In the realm of medicine and healthcare, narratives- whether spoken, written, visual, or performed- serve among others as powerful tools to humanize clinical experiences, challenge biomedical paradigms as well as foster empathy and understanding. These stories reveal the complex interplay between biological, psychological, social, cultural, and spiritual dimensions of health, illuminating the ways in which healing is intertwined with human dignity, identity, and societal values.

CFP: The Post-apocalypse in Cinema and Television (edited book)

Christina Lee (Curtin University)
deadline for submissions: 
Wednesday, September 30, 2026

CALL FOR PAPERS: The Post-apocalypse in Cinema and Television (edited book)

Edited by Christina Lee (Curtin University)

I am soliciting contributions for a scholarly, edited book that will explore representations of the post-apocalypse on-screen, specifically in cinema and television. While the “apocalypse” denotes a cataclysmic finale, what is left in its wake is an equally provocative thought experiment. To borrow from the seminal work of James Berger: what comes “after the end”?

Reparation in Sinophone Literature

Writing Chinese: A Journal of Contemporary Sinophone Literature
deadline for submissions: 
Thursday, October 15, 2026

We are currently inviting abstracts for an upcoming Special Issue on “Reparation in Sinophone Literatures”. We are delighted that this issue will be guest-edited by Dr Tammy Lai-Ming Ho, Editor-in-Chief of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Honorary Researcher at the Richard Charles Lee Canada-Hong Kong Library at the University of Toronto, and former Senior Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Centre for Cultural Practices of Reparation (CURE), Saarland University.

The deadline for abstracts for this Special Issue is 15 October 2026, while full papers are expected by 28 February 2027.

Call for Papers

(Re)composing Rot

ACLA VIRTUAL SEMINAR
deadline for submissions: 
Tuesday, September 22, 2026

To decompose is to live too, I know, I know… (Beckett, Molloy)

Gulf Circulations: Transnational Ecologies and Environmental Humanities

American Comparative Literature Association’s convention in Houston May 20th to May 23rd, 2026
deadline for submissions: 
Tuesday, September 22, 2026

This seminar convenes Cuban, Mexican, and U.S. Gulf South scholars to theorize the Gulf of Mexico as a transnational zone of ecological entanglement, rather than a set of discrete national environments. Although the Gulf’s waters, storms, labor histories, and extractive infrastructures circulate across borders, scholarship often remains siloed within national or linguistic frames. This seminar asks how environmental humanities approaches might illuminate the Gulf as a shared, relational ecology shaped by movement, sedimentation, and uneven histories of extraction.

Han as a "Genre"

AAAS 2027
deadline for submissions: 
Thursday, October 1, 2026

This panel invites papers that offer provocative insights into the Korean concept of han (한/恨) across a wide range of cultural forms and genres. Echoing this year's conference theme, this panel asks: how might we recapture the magic of, and reinstill a sense of wonder and joy in, Asian Americanist work on han? Over the past decade, if not longer, han has arguably become one of the most revisited concepts among Korean American writers, artists, and thinkers. If these overlapping prisms of political, cultural, and academic representation have taught us anything, it is that han, at its best, is conceptually elusive.

SAMLA 98: Hospitality GENERAL CALL FOR ABSTRACTS

South Atlantic Modern Language Association
deadline for submissions: 
Tuesday, September 1, 2026

GENERAL CALL FOR ABSTRACTS CFP:

Submit here: https://samla.ballastacademic.com/Home/S/19572

Conference Dates: November 5-7, 2026

Conference Location: Wyndham Atlanta Buckhead Hotel and Conference Center in Atlanta, GA

Papers submitted to our general call for abstracts will be matched by SAMLA staff to appropriate spots on existing panels OR will be combined with similar general call papers to create new panels.

DEADLINE: September 1, 2026

 

SAMLA 98: Hospitality

South Atlantic Modern Language Association
deadline for submissions: 
Saturday, August 1, 2026

We may imagine the act of hospitality benign: to open a door, to welcome another across a threshold, or to make an offer to a guest. Rooted in such acts, however, is an ethics of how we engage with another, whether friend or stranger. Acts of hospitality contain their own contradictions, as to serve as host is to hold power, to set terms, to guard thresholds and entry points. For this year’s SAMLA conference, we invite papers, panels, and creative works that consider the many meanings and complications of hospitality—as practice, metaphor, ethics, affect, and structure.

Empathy and Storytelling Conference November 20-21, 2026

St. Bonaventure University
deadline for submissions: 
Thursday, October 1, 2026

Educators, researchers, writers, and content creators are invited to submit proposals for presentations. Graduate student participation is welcome. Presentation types might include:

• traditional oral readings of papers (15 minutes)
• timed slide presentations
• roundtable presentations
• pre-constituted panels

CFP – Shakespeare's 'The Winter's Tale': From Page to Stage

University of Padova
deadline for submissions: 
Sunday, February 28, 2027

Call for Papers

 

The Winter's Tale: From Page to Stage

 

IASEMS Tempera Seminar 2027

 

University of Padova, Department of Language and Literary Studies

 

7-9 June 2027

 

Literatures of the Global South: Space, Place, Environment

Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Toronto
deadline for submissions: 
Monday, August 31, 2026

CALL FOR PAPERS 

Literatures of the Global South: Space, Place, Environment 

University of Toronto 

2nd-4th June 2027 

Keynote Speakers: Amitav Ghosh and Ato Quayson (Stanford University

The Centre for Comparative Literature invites submissions for a scholarly conference and edited collection that will explore the material and imaginative alignments across literary cultures of the Global South. 

tBTR 4.2. Artificial/Ancestral: Black Theatre and the Question of AI

the Black Theatre Review
deadline for submissions: 
Friday, September 4, 2026

As artificial intelligence rapidly reshapes cultural, educational, and creative institutions, the field of Black theatre confronts a familiar set of questions in a newly technological register: Who creates knowledge, who benefits from it, who gets remembered, and whose labor remains obscured? Public conversations about AI often proceed as though these technologies have arrived without history, entering an empty landscape awaiting innovation. Yet Black theatre has long grappled with questions of representation, embodiment, archives, intellectual inheritance, collective memory, labor, and futurity.

Vampire Studies (PCA/ACA National Conference, March 24-27 2027)

Popular Culture Association
deadline for submissions: 
Saturday, October 31, 2026

The Vampire Studies Area of the Popular Culture Association welcomes papers, presentations, panels, and roundtable discussions exploring all aspects of the vampire throughout global culture.

Our theme for PCA 2027 is L.O.V.E.

L = Lust
O = Obsession
V = Vitality / Virility
E = Eternity / Exsanguination

Sappho’s Mirror: Images of Female Desire in Literature, Music & the Visual Arts

Diana Shaffer /NeMLA’s 58th Annual Convention March 6-9, 2027 / Salve Regina University / Newport, RI /
deadline for submissions: 
Wednesday, September 30, 2026

Sappho’s Mirror: Images of Female Desire in Literature, Music & the Visual Arts 

This seminar explores representations of female desire in music, literature and the visual arts. How have the complex poetics of female desire—the desire to have something, or escape something, or punish, or know—been represented over time? What strategies have been employed to subvert literary conventions defined predominantly by male perspectives on home, love, war, victory and loss? How have female characters navigated the interplay between things done overtly and thought covertly to reveal the inner web of desires, fears and conflicts that constitute a female poetics of love and longing?

This is a virtual session.

Mirrors of Desire: Ekphrasis & Mise en Abyme in Literature, Music & the Visual Arts

Diana Shaffer / NeMLA’s 58th Annual Convention/ March 6-9, 2027 / Salve Regina University / Newport, RI
deadline for submissions: 
Wednesday, September 30, 2026

Mirrors of Desire: Ekphrasis & Mise en Abyme in Literature, Music & the Visual Arts 

This seminar invites papers that explore the concepts of ekphrasis, the mise en abyme, and metaphorical mirrors in literature, music, and the visual arts. How are mirrors used by artists as deliberate tools to represent something else? How are metaphorical mirrors used to compare different types of reflections across mediums? How are mirrors used to suggest that the aesthetic “surface” is a distraction, and true clarity lies in understanding what the observer or listener wants to see or hear? Papers focused on one medium or interdisciplinary approaches from the Ancient, Medieval, Modern, and Postmodern periods are welcome.

Irony: Dramatic and Otherwise

Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate - University of Tübingen
deadline for submissions: 
Saturday, October 31, 2026

Call for Papers: 19th International Connotations Symposium

Irony: Dramatic and Otherwise

Tübingen, Germany, 25-28 July 2027

ACLA SEMINAR: Becoming Monster: Representation and Rights

American Comparative Literature Association
deadline for submissions: 
Tuesday, September 22, 2026

American Comparative Literature Association  IN-PERSON 2027 Annual Meeting (May 20-23, 2027), Houston, Texas

Organizers: Dr. Julia Chan (Lingnan University)

Fatma Betul Ciftci (Lingnan University)

One is not born a monster; the monster is produced. From Beowulf to Ruthven to Dracula to cyborgs, ‘monster’ is a cultural construction, a humanly-produced non-human. This seminar invites scholars to discuss the monster both as a literary figure and as the representation and construction of a cultural and political identity. Through this, it aims to explore the question of where, why, and how monsters are produced, and what these monsterized creatures "show" about the communities that "produce" them. 

Critical Nonbinary Studies

Míša Stekl / CSU
deadline for submissions: 
Friday, August 21, 2026

This MLA just-in-time panel explores the evolving status of non-binariness in trans studies and beyond. Following Marquis Bey’s Nonbinary Life, we ask: Is non-binariness an emancipatory narrative? What are its critical potentialities and limitations? Send 150-200 word abstracts + bio to m.stekl@colostate.edu by 8/21. (The MLA will take place in Los Angeles from 7 to 10 January 2027.)

Critical Nonbinary Studies

Míša Stekl / CSU
deadline for submissions: 
Friday, August 21, 2026

This MLA just-in-time panel explores the evolving status of non-binariness in trans studies and beyond. Following Marquis Bey’s Nonbinary Life, we ask: Is non-binariness an emancipatory narrative? What are its critical potentialities and limitations? Send 150-200 word abstracts + bio to m.stekl@colostate.edu by 8/21. (The MLA will take place in Los Angeles from 7 to 10 January 2027.)

Star Wars 50 Years: Pasts, Presents, and Futures

University of Leicester
deadline for submissions: 
Sunday, November 1, 2026

Conference Call for Papers

The Star Wars 50 Years academic conference will be held by the University of Leicester and the Leverhulme Centre for Humanity and Space at Space Park Leicester on 21-22 May 2027 in anticipation of the 50th anniversary of the original release of the film on 25 May 1977 in the U.S. We are now inviting proposals for conference presentations.

Conference Organisers:

2027 PCA Conference - Neurodivergent Studies

Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association
deadline for submissions: 
Saturday, October 31, 2026

Neurodivergent Studies – Popular Culture Association 2027

 

“Neurodivergent just means a brain that diverges.” – Kassiane Asasumasu, Radical Neurodivergence Speaking

 

Revolutions & Revisions in Popular Culture (in Dime Novels & Juvenile Series Books) - PCA Annual Conference, March 24-27, 2027: Boston, Massachusetts

Popular Culture Association
deadline for submissions: 
Saturday, October 31, 2026

Call for Papers: Dime Novels and Juvenile Series Books, PCA 2027

The PCA Dime Novels and Juvenile Series Books Area is accepting proposals for presentations at the next PCA/ACA annual conference, to be held in Boston, MA from March 24-27, 2027. See the PCA website for more information on the conference and submission guidelines.

Cleveland Symposium 2026: Wear: Indexing the Human Body

Case Western Reserve University
deadline for submissions: 
Friday, August 14, 2026

Wear: Indexing the Human Body

52nd Annual Cleveland Symposium
Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio
Friday, November 13, 2026

NeMLA 2027 Panel | American Solidarities: Bridging Latin American Studies and Latinx Studies

Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)
deadline for submissions: 
Wednesday, September 30, 2026

Despite possessing intersecting histories and languages, Latin American studies and Latinx studies have historically been treated as separate fields of study. This panel seeks to spark a dialogue between fields by exploring themes of transhemispheric and archipelagic solidarity in Latinx and Latin American literature and media. Throughout the past and present century, how have Latinx and Latin American media—literature, film, art, or other forms—constructed expressions of community in dialogue with each other? How do works from Latin America reverberate in Latinx cultural productions, and how do Latinx cultural productions influence Latin American media?

The "Forms" of Academic Work

Fabio Durão (UNICAMP) and Tim Lanzendörfer (Frankfurt University)
deadline for submissions: 
Monday, November 30, 2026

Call for Abstracts / Papers for a Special Issue of MatLit (Materialities of Literature / Materialidades da Literatura), vol. 12, 2027, edited by Fabio Durao and Tim Lanzendörfer

https://impactum-journals.uc.pt/matlit/announcement/view/359

The "Forms" of Academic Work
Editors: Fabio Durão (UNICAMP) and Tim Lanzendörfer (Frankfurt University)

SAMLA panel: "Hospitality, Leisure, Vacations, Entertainment and Travels in Pre-1865 American Literature

Micahel Martin/Nicholls State University
deadline for submissions: 
Tuesday, September 1, 2026

How was the concept of “hospitality” and “leisure” conceived by early American writers? Travelogues, whether from William Bartram, Sara Kemble Knight, or others, served as a major genre type during the period. Topics may include stays at early American hotels, the way that leisure was/is linked to social class, and the Caribbean and European vacation in the early American imagination. What regional places of leisure figured heavily in the early American cultural imaginary? How did Black writers and Native American writers conceive of entertainment and visitation? This panel seeks contributors who can speak to leisure and travel from writings that span the early part of American culture and history into the nineteenth century.

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