7th International Conference (Online Mode)

on

Sustainability in Practice: Re-(Thinking) Literature, Society, and Culture

Date: 15th and 16th October, 2026 (Thursday & Friday)

To be Organized by

New Literaria- An International Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities

in collaboration with

Department of History, Humanities and Society, University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, Italy

The response to our initial Call for Papers for the PAMLA 2026 conference in Seattle, WA (November 12–15) has been absolutely incredible!

Call for Papers - Enthymema Special Issue (December 2027)

Matter, Materials, and (Un)Natural Resources in Science Fiction

Guest editors: Marco Malvestio (University of Padova) and Valentina Romanzi (University of Verona)

Building upon scholarly discussions of royal rule and power, this session seeks papers that examine how prose and verse Brut chronicles engage with the mechanisms of rule, including law, institutional politics, warfare, diplomacy, and peacemaking. We particularly welcome studies that ground these representations in historical contexts: Layamon's portrayal of rulers against the backdrop of the deteriorating Angevin dynasty or the prose Brut’s kings read through the lens of the Wars of the Roses and the loss of English territories in France.

I seek proposals for brief scholarly essays (3500-5000 words) that provide an overview of a chosen aspect of motherhood in the American imagination for a volume under contract with a new Bloomsbury series called Exploring the American Imagination: Ideals, Values, and Myths in Popular Culture. 

These overview essays should cite a number of popular culture texts to provide an overview of the tensions and contradictions as well as the foundational beliefs inherent in various aspects of American motherhood. Essays should cover multiple genres (film, fiction, television, graphic novels, music) and a broad time period. These are overviews or research starters rather than narrow analyses.

This creative session invites scholars, writers, and hybrid practitioner-theorists to explore liminal dialogue as a form of literary creation in which unlikely, displaced, or structurally incompatible voices are brought into conversation. Drawing on the centrality of dialogue in literary and dramatic traditions, this panel reimagines conversational form as a site of constraint-based experimentation, where meaning emerges through the collision of discourses that would not ordinarily coexist. Rather than focusing on artificial intelligence as a technological subject, this session treats AI-assisted generation as a formal device for producing estranged adjacency between voices, genres, and epistemologies.

Formats: short fiction and creative non-fiction (2,500-3,000 words) and graphic fiction (including comics, textile art, collage art, and or visual narratives of 5-10 pages).

Submission Deadline: 15 November 2026 11:59 p.m. (BST).

About This Call

Tales We Were Told is a forthcoming open access edited collection of creative works on oral storytelling, remembrance, and inherited narratives. 

Skenè Research Centre
Interdisciplinary Theatre and Drama Studies
Università di Verona

as part of the agreement with

Dipartimento di Filologia, Letteratura e Linguistica
Università di Pisa

Theatre and Anthropology

Theoretical Approaches to Text, Performance,

and Theatrical Practices

Verona (IT), November 19-20, 2026

Conference venue  
Dipartimento di Lingue e letterature straniere,
Polo Zanotto, Aula Co-Working
via S. Francesco 22,
Verona, Italy

Haunted Thresholds:

The Southern Gothic in Comparative Perspective 

South Atlantic Modern Language Association (SAMLA) 2026
Conference Dates: November 5–7, 2026
Location: Wyndham Atlanta Buckhead Hotel and Conference Center, Atlanta, Georgia

Contact: stacy.stingle@gmail.com

Haunted Thresholds: The Southern Gothic in Comparative Perspective

A quarter century has elapsed since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, both the successful ones targeting the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the unsuccessful one targeting the Capitol.

2027 Imagining Human Worlds Online Symposium, 27–28 January 2027

We invite proposals for 2027 Imagining Human Worlds, an annual online symposium in the Common Ground Imagining Futures Series, taking place 27–28 January 2027, online on CGScholar.

The symposium brings together scholars, researchers, educators, humanities scholars, learning specialists, technologists, practitioners, and community-engaged professionals working across questions of culture, learning, identity, meaning, communication, ethics, and human development. We welcome proposals that explore how human worlds are formed, interpreted, taught, experienced, mediated, and transformed.

2027 Imagining Sustainable Worlds Online Symposium, 12–13 May 2027

We invite proposals for 2027 Imagining Sustainable Worlds, an annual online symposium in the Common Ground Imagining Futures Series, taking place 12–13 May 2027, online on CGScholar.

The symposium brings together scholars, researchers, designers, planners, educators, policy thinkers, practitioners, health and care professionals, environmental researchers, and community-engaged professionals working across questions of sustainability, climate, infrastructure, food systems, mobility, aging, health, wellbeing, and the built environment. We welcome proposals that explore how sustainable worlds are designed, inhabited, maintained, challenged, and transformed.

Conventional cinematic views of New York City are often characterized by aerials, panoramas, and long shots of the archetypal Manhattan skyline, montage of crowded sidewalks, and quick shots of the yellow cabs in congested traffic. Scholars have regularly linked such city views to their historical urban contexts: studies of city symphonies emphasize the concomitance of capitalist modernity, scholars of film noir associate the genre with Cold War anxieties magnified by urban disorientation, while studies of Blaxploitation link the films to the immediate precedents of urban crisis in the 1960s and 1970s.

Accepting Submissions for NeMLA 2027 Roundtable:

In this in-person roundtable conference session, we are looking to open conversation about the unique ways that educators are innovating with forms of gaming, play, and playfulness in the classroom. We are interested in discussing the incorporation of any and all forms of games and gaming, including, but not limited to:
- board, tabletop, and card games
- social deduction games
- tabletop role-playing systems such as Dungeons and Dragons
- invented role-playing scenarios
- gamification of in-class activities
- video and digital games

Abstract / Overview

At its most ambitious, the New Hollywood was a movement intended to cut film free of its evil twin, commerce, enabling it to fly high through the thin air of art. The filmmakers of the '70s hoped to overthrow the studio system, or at least render it irrelevant, by democratizing filmmaking, putting it into the hands of anyone with talent and determination.

Call for Chapter Proposals for an Edited Book

Digital Precarity and Speculative Narratives in the South Asian Context

Labour is deeply intertwined with caste, gender and class in the socioeconomic fabric of India. However, caste and gender are the two factors that remain ignored in this discourse. In the Hindu social order, the caste system assigns vocations through arbitrary hierarchy, producing pernicious structures of marginalisation. Labour performed by Dalits is often stereotyped through casteist assumptions that naturalise certain kinds of work as “belonging” to these peripheral communities. These stereotypes that are perpetuated historically, culturally and socio-politically, are furthered through mechanisms of caste that operate in the material and affective realms. 

Call for Papers
NeMLA 2027 Annual Convention
Rethinking the Fantastic: Impossibility, Ontology, and Alternative Realities

What makes a text fantastic? While traditional definitions often emphasize the supernatural or the uncanny, many literary works generate the fantastic through impossibility itself. Impossible worlds, contradictory realities, unstable identities, infinite spaces, and paradoxical temporalities challenge readers' assumptions about reality and invite new ways of understanding existence.

As Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson argue, “autobiographical storytelling is a performative act through which narrators construct rather than simply describe selves.” In recent times, “life writing” has become a familiar term in literary and cultural studies, encompassing a range of written texts, including autobiographies, biographies, letters, memoirs, slave narratives, prison narratives, captivity narratives, travel narratives, confessionals, conversion narratives and even in recent times, personal diaries. However, rather than remain transparent records of lived experience, life writings actively shape identities, produce historical knowledge, preserve cultural memory, and intervene in social and political worlds.

While tragedy and horror are often treated as distinct genres, both traditions ask audiences to look steadily at what ordinarily repels them. From unburied corpses and undead monsters to violated kinship and failed agency, these spectacles produce fear, pity, disgust, and sorrow alongside fascination. This session explores what might be understood as a tragedy–horror continuum, examining the aesthetic, affective, and ritual overlaps between tragic and horrific representation across historical periods and media.

This panel proposes a revaluation of boundary-making between early modern and modern generic and affective registers in South Asia. While there is a consensus that genres of composition and cultural sensibilities did not change radically with the coming of print—“print did not so much produce new books as more old books” (Blackburn, 2002)—the precise sites of continuity/rupture differed widely based on the region and language in question.

58th NeMLA Convention
Newport, RI

Format: In Person Only

This panel builds off feminist science fiction studies’ investigation of the role of gender in speculative texts by expanding the field of inquiry to the role of nonbinary characters and even nonbinary worldbuilding in contemporary speculative fiction. It asks how both science fiction as a genre and feminist science fiction as a field have transformed with the emergence of new gender subjectivities. How do these fictions empower trans and nonbinary communities?  How must the methodological tools for studying SF change to meet this moment?

Still Screaming: An Online Conference Celebrating 30 Years of Scream

2026 marks the 30th anniversary of Wes Craven’s Scream (1996), which has had a profound impact on horror films and the slasher subgenre specifically. In the past three decades, Scream has become a franchise of seven films and a television series (2015-16, 2019). Scream has also expanded beyond the screen, reverberating throughout the popular culture landscape and serving as the foundation for a game, collectible figures, multiple Ghostface mask variations, and an entire collection of merchandise at Spirit Halloween (and elsewhere). 

Inclusive teaching and digital accessibility are two important concepts that align with Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles; they move away from "retrofitting" (i.e., fixing a problem after a student struggles) toward a "proactive” design (e.g., building a system that works for everyone from the start). Inclusive teaching is a pedagogical framework that focuses on designing a learning environment where every student (regardless of race, gender, socioeconomic status, or learning style) feels valued and has an equal opportunity to succeed. Whereas digital accessibility is a technical standard that ensures that digital tools, documents, and platforms are usable by everyone, regardless of ability.