"Let Us Tell An Old Story Anew": Revising / Reinventing / Reimagining Disney

Disney’s Maleficent (2014), a live-action retelling of their animated classic, Sleeping Beauty (1957), begins with a narrator challenging us to re-see the stories we’ve been told before. The entire movie, in fact, revolves around correcting past perceptions, ones that Disney originally shaped and is now choosing to reshape. Maleficent is just one example of a spate of live-action remakes and other ways Disney has reimagined itself in the twenty-first century. Such reimaginings invite research into how and why Disney feels the need to make us see them anew.

The history of work and labour has long occupied a central place within European social history, offering a key lens through which to examine social relations, hierarchies, forms of power, and economic formations across the longue durée. Rather than approaching work solely as an economic function, historical scholarship has increasingly foregrounded work as a lived social experience –one that has shaped identities, values, and modes of belonging.

This panel invites discussions of Steinbeck's complicated imagination of American life and culture in his novels and nonfiction. Alternately fraught and adoring, critical and laudatory, his works attend with specificity to Americanness as a unique and discernible identity in the first half of the twentieth century. Especially encouraged are papers that attend to the tensions and disjunctures in Steinbeck’s descriptions of American society, including his treatment of gender, decolonial readings of his novels, and approaches that expose often contradictory relationships that extend among people, places, and power in his body of work.

Part of the PAMLA Conference in Seattle, WA from November 12, 2026 - November 15, 2026.

Call for Papers

SMU’s ERAH Graduate Conference

English | History | Anthropology

Date: October 10-11, 2026

Location: SMU Main Campus, Dallas, TX

Theme: Movement & Borderlands

Submission Deadline: August 28, 2026

Keynotes: Dr. Tim Bowman | Dr. Elda María Román 

Abstract:

This panel reexamines life writing in the age of Generative AI, asking who controls the conditions under which individuals narrate their own lives. Submissions reflecting on how AI corporations and Generative AI models are reshaping life writing practices across textual, digital, and visual formats, or on the consequences of such practices for authorship, equity, and cultural power, are especially welcome.

Description:

A Matter of Life and Death

Call for Papers: Victorians Institute Conference 2026

September 11-13, 2026, Crowne Plaza Hotel, Knoxville, TN

Following along from the urgency of last year’s theme, Victorian Studies: Who Cares? this year’s theme asks conference participants to consider matters of life and death in the Victorian era. What did it mean to live and die in Victorian England? How are matters of life and death reflected in the literature of the time?

Artificial Intelligence, Faith, and Epistemic Coherence

Session Organizer: Dr. Houman Mehrabian, University Canada West

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Alfred Hermida, University of British Columbia

Date of conference: 28-29 August, 2026

Deadline for Abstract Submission: 5 July 2026

Online, international, interdisciplinary conference titled:

A Letter to Video Games:The Mechanisms of Emotions

DEADLINE UPDATED TO JUNE 1ST 2026 due to late application demand. Please continue to share widely.

CFP: “American Carnage”

Canadian Association for American Studies, October 23-25, 2026 (In person at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada)

NEW: Visit our website: https://american-carnage.ca

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS

Late Diagnosis and Neurodivergence:Autoethnographies and Creative Narratives of Recognition

Edited by Tess Ezzy | University of New England Proposals due: 31 July 2026 | Final works due: 30 November 2026

2026 Pacific Ancient Modern Langauges Association (November 12-15) in person in Seattle

 "I Think I'm Gonna Die in this House": Spatiality and Class in Film & Literature 

submission link:

https://pamla.ballastacademic.com/Home/S/20015

Abstract:

Translating Resistance:
Literary Activism in Conflict and Solidarity

• Hosted by The Translation Research & Instruction Program (TRIP) at Binghamton University
• October 3–4, 2026

Funded in part by The International Association for Translation and Intercultural Studies (IATIS) Regional Workshop Fund

• Professor Samah Selim (Rutgers University, USA)
• Dr. Ruth Abou Rached (University of Manchester, UK) 

Scholars, researchers, and practitioners are invited to submit papers for this two-day workshop, hosted by Binghamton University (SUNY), to be held in New York on October 3–4, 2026. 

Australia from Below: Lived Histories and Material Cultures of Everyday Life

The editors of Australia from Below: Lived Histories and Material Cultures of Everyday Lifeareinviting you submit a research article, essay, creative work, poetic or other creative work reflecting the diversity of ways in which lived experience and material culture can be explored.

The Mid-Atlantic Review is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal published annually by the College English Association Mid-Atlantic Group (CEAMAG). The journal specializes in literary and cultural criticism, discussions of pedagogy, public humanities work, reviews of scholarly books published in the last two years, personal essays concerned with the teaching of English, photographs and visual art related to the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States, and creative writing clearly related to the humanities, teaching, or the craft and art of writing. The Mid-Atlantic Review is indexed in the MLA International Bibliography and available to scholars through the EBSCO and ProQuest Literature databases.

PAMLA Seattle (2026) - November 12-15, all in-person conference 

2027 is the centenary year of the birth of US American poet and Pulitzer Prize-winner, Galway Kinnell (1927-2014). This session seeks to celebrate his life and legacy while pointing to future thematic and prosodic engagement in Kinnellian studies. Papers offering approaches to any aspect of Kinnell’s work are invited and most welcome.

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You are invited to submit a paper to the session "Passing Novels Now and Then:Gender, Class" at the 123rd Annual Pacific Ancient and Modern Languagae Association (PAMLA) conference in Seatlle, WA from Nov. 12-15, 2026.

Description:

You are invited to submit a paper proposal to the session "International Bildungsroman" at the 123rd Annual Pacific Ancient and Modern Languagae Association (PAMLA) conference in Seatlle, WA from Nov. 12-15, 2026.

Description:

The "Animals & Culture" Area of the Northeast Popular Culture Association's call for papers for our 2026 virtual conference is live!   See our details below (or at https://www.northeastpca.org/conference-areas): 

The "Animals & Culture" area explores the complex and multifaceted intersections between animals, animal representations, society, and popular culture.

"Narratives of Displacement" International Conference

17-18 October 2026 - London /Online

organised by

London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research 

"AI and Society: Ethics, Creativity and Power in the Digital Age"International Conference30-31 January 2027 – London / Online

organised by

London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research

Artificial Intelligence is no longer a speculative horizon — it is an active force reshaping how we work, create, govern, communicate and understand what it means to be human. From generative AI and automated decision-making to algorithmic governance and digital surveillance, AI technologies are transforming social structures, cultural production and everyday life at an unprecedented pace.

This session focuses on British literature and culture of the long 19th century. Particularly welcome are proposals on underrepresented works, on the 150th anniversary of Queen Victoria’s proclamation as Empress of India and on the 125th anniversary of her passing, on Neo-Victorianism, and on the conference theme “Our Ruling Classes: Culture, Power, Conflict.”

While any proposals dealing with British literature and culture of the long 19th century are welcome, these topics related to the conference theme are of special interest:

Spring 2026 'Theory Today' Workshop w. Prof. Eugenie Brinkema. 

Eugenie Brinkema’s research in film and critical theory focuses on violence, affect, sexuality, aesthetics, and ethics in texts ranging from the horror film to gonzo pornography, from the body of films dubbed “New European Extremism” to works of literature and continental philosophy. She is the author of The Forms of Affect (2014) and Life-Destroying Diagrams (2022), among many other essays and articles.   

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Comics and Graphic Narratives

PAMLA 2026, Seattle, November 12-15

https://www.pamla.org/pamla2026/

CfP – Contested Ground: Ownership and Belonging in the Middle Ages

Heinrich Heine University, Düsseldorf, 3rd-4th September