The Australasian Modernist Studies Network and Modernist Studies in Asia present

JOINT AMSN / MSIA ANNUAL CONFERENCE

NOVEMBER 19-21, 2026

In 1916, interviewed for the New York Times, the poet-diplomat Robert Underwood Johnson took up the “new movement” in poetry: “There is an intoxication about the way our contemporary poets fling themselves into a dauntless quest for self-expression.” “Alas!,” he went on, “this is just the trouble! For intoxication is no more desirable in poetry than in the household. Intoxication is not the state of mind in which, as Matthew Arnold says, one may ‘see life clearly and see it whole’.”

The Jadavpur University Sociology Consortium (JUSC) invites original papers based upon the theme of "Rethinking Development: State, Society and Consciousness" for PERSPECTIVES, a hybrid-mode paper presentation to be held as part of its annual academic conclave, Lifeworld 2025–26. Themes for the paper presentation involve, but are not limited to:

Call for Presenters Submit to present for the 2nd Annual Black Scholars in Podcasting Virtual Conference “Picture Me Storytelling”, Saturday, March 28, 2026, 1 pm CST / 2 pm EST via Zoom.  The deadline for submission is February 11, 2026, with notification expected by February 16, 2026.Please use the Google form (linked) to make your submission: https://forms.gle/7b6Bs3PUwSfWaCMv7 This is a call for active scholar podcasters, faculty who teach with podcasts, and/or whose current research agenda includes podcasting.

Accelerationism Revisited

15 June 2026, University College Dublin, Ireland

Guest Speaker: Hari Kunzru, interviewed by Mark O’Connell

Further speakers TBC

A conference hosted by the graduate students of the University at Buffalo’s Department of Media Study 

Keynote TBA 

March 15 at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center

While last year’s Media Study conference asked us to imagine artistic and research creation during the world’s prescribed end, this year we imagine methods of existing, creating, and remediating beyond our present moment.

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. 

Jürgen Habermas suggested that it is through communicative action, that is reasoned and open discourse, that we transmit, change, and recreate cultural knowledge, and that in so-doing we can achieve mutual understanding. 

Communicative action and communicative rationality are self-reflexive dialogues through which we can learn from others, question dominant paradigms, and advocate for cultural change. 

Concept Note

Circus Historical Society Convention 2026

The 2026 Circus Historical Society Convention will be held in Baraboo Wisconsin from June 10 – 13, 2026. Convention will conclude with Baraboo’s Big Top Parade. Registration and other information will be available soon. 

Call for Papers 

Proposals are now being accepted for Convention presentations on any subject related to circus history. We invite proposals for single speakers and groups. All proposals must be received using the online form by March 31, 2026. Visit https://circushistory.org/next-convention/ to submit your proposal today. 

2026 CHS Student Prize

Centre for Comparative Literature, Bhasha Bhavana, Visva-Bharati,

in collaboration with

Department of Yogic Art and Science, Vinaya Bhavana, Visva-Bharati

presents

Of Clay and Dust

6 days extensive body movement workshop

Body awareness

Narrative based movements

Body conditioning

Introduction to Odissi with marshal arts like Mayurbhanj Chhau and Kalaripayattu

Introduction to basic Abhinaya

How to work with musicians and script

How to develop performance

Facilitated by Monami Nandy

February 16-21, 2026

Venue: Dhyana Kutir, Yoga Village Premises, Vinaya Bhavana, Visva-Bharati

Miloš Forman: Between Europe and Hollywood

Symposium organized by the Department of Theatre and Film Studies, Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic
Friday, April 24, 2026
Univerzitní 3, Olomouc, Czech Republic

Global Perestroika and Soviet Literatures

Conference and Subsequent Edited Volume
University of Dresden, March 18–21, 2027

Organizers:
Klavdia Smola (Technology University of Dresden)
Naomi Caffee (Reed College)
Zachary Hicks (UC Berkeley)

29th Southern Writers/Southern Writing Graduate Student Conference 

University of Mississippi

August 8th—9th, 2026

Call for Submissions

Supernatural South(s): The Monstrous, The Fantastic, The Grotesque, The Speculative and So On…

The Southern Writers/Southern Writing Conference (SW/SW) is an interdisciplinary conference, welcoming graduate students, creative writers, activists, and community members with interest in the U.S. or Global South from all departments and fields of study. The 29th meeting of SW/SW will be held at the University of Mississippi from August 8th-August 9th, 2026. 

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.