In the summer of 2026, Elizabeth and Ines Soto were sentenced to fifty years in prison for their participation in the anti-ICE protests at Prairieland, including a charge of “providing material support to terrorists.” In the trial that led to these exorbitant sentences, the Sotos’ production and distribution of zines, including literature on protest strategy, anti-ICE arguments, gay and trans issues, and plant propagation, were used as evidence in their conviction. Their printing press (a home office printer) was confiscated by the FBI. At the same time, Daniel Sanchez Estrada, who was not present at the protest, was sentenced to thirty years for “concealing documents,” including zines labeled as “political literature.”

The year 2027 will mark the 50th anniversary of the controversial publication of Robert Coover’s The Public Burning. Both to celebrate the event and question its legacy, an international symposium will take place on 10-11 June 2027 in Paris, at Campus Condorcet. The call for papers is available here: https://publicburning50.sciencesconf.org/

Abstracts (300 to 350 words) together with a short biographical note should be sent by October 1st 2026 to the following address: publicburning50@sciencesconf.org

Keynote speakers: Alexandra Kleeman and Mark Doten

International Conference

Vladimir Nabokov: Contemporary Reception and Creative Legacy

April 28-30, 2027

Bordeaux Montaigne University

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Vladimir Nabokov’s passing, the French Vladimir Nabokov Society, in collaboration with the University of Bordeaux-Montaigne and the International Vladimir Nabokov Society, organizes its 10th International Conference, to be held April 28-30, 2027 in Bordeaux, France.

The College Language Association Journal invites submissions for a special issue inspired by Adam J. Banks’s 2016 CLA Journal essay, “Dominant Genre Emeritus: Why It Is Time to Retire the Academic Essay.” In that essay, Banks challenges writing teachers to reconsider the privileged position of the academic essay and to imagine alternative forms of composing, meaning-making, and knowledge production.

The International Journal of Young Adult Literature is accepting proposals for a guest-edited special section for our 2027 issue (Volume 8). We particularly encourage researchers working beyond Anglo-American young adult literature and/or working outside of the UK and US to submit proposals.

Proposals should be sent to ijyal@roehampton.ac.uk by 31 July 2026. 

This panel seeks to explore the precariousness of media, from its physical integrity and digital ephemerality to the complications of human-machine interaction and the elided histories of players, users, fans, and tech developers. With the current encroachment of generative AI in the workplace, media production, information circulation, fan reception, real estate, and the environment, it becomes urgent to question how precariousness underlies the development, deployment, and dissipation of past media.

Transatlantic Connections and the ‘Special Relationship[s]’: BAAS Postgraduate Symposium, 2026

V&A East Storehouse, London

9th November

In 1946, Winston Churchill declared the need for a “special relationship between the British Commonwealth and Empire and the United States” in order to maintain world diplomacy, citing our shared language and cultural values as connecting the two countries. Although this ‘special relationship’ has continually been called into question by scholars, there is undoubtedly a channel of cultural and political exchange between the US and the UK, as well as with other countries, which has become even more urgent for discussion in recent years.

In her foundational text Immigrant Acts, cultural theorist Lisa Lowe argues that the Asian immigrant exists as a “perpetual foreigner within the body politic,” a figure through whom the nation-state defines its own boundaries and citizenship. For Lowe, Asian American cultural production emerges precisely from this “distance from the national culture,” serving as a site that critiques the state’s false promises of universal inclusion.

The Odyssey by Homer is one of the foundational texts of Western culture and has, since antiquity, served as a narrative and symbolic model of the human journey. Odysseus’ long nostos—his return to Ithaca after the Trojan War—is not merely a sequence of mythical adventures but rather a complex process of knowledge, transformation, and the recovery of identity. Already in the ancient world, the poem was interpreted on multiple levels—epic, ethical, and symbolic—and this layering of meanings has contributed to its extraordinary reception in the modern era.

This session extends scholarly conversations on how violence operates in the corpus of poetic and prose Brut texts. We welcome papers exploring violence as a mechanism for securing and projecting political power, as both a destructive force and a tool for empowerment. We also welcome investigations of poetic and rhetorical violence—including on how the translation and redaction of historical texts function as symbolic conquests—and intersections of violence and gender. Suggested topics include: the aesthetics and rhetoric of warfare, conquest, and displacement; gendered dynamics of violence, captivity, and resistance; and the role of environmental devastation (fire, plague) in historiography.

Submission Link: https://tinyurl.com/cwsc26cfp

"How come we can’t be together and think together in a way that feels good, the way it should feel good?"

- Fred Moten in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (117) cited in Emilio Carrero’s 2025 CWSC talk “The Creative Writer’s Unpayable Debts”

EBSN 14TH Annual Conference (Online)

The conference organizers invite proposals for papers, panels, roundtables, and creative performances for the14th Annual Conference of the European Beat Studies Network, which will take place via the online Google Meet platform, November 12-14, 2026.

GIANT MONSTERS ALL-OUT ATTACK: Kaiju Culture in the Twenty-first Century

Edited by Alex Adams, independent scholar

CFP – “BLACK ESSAYSM: FORMAL EXPERIMENTATIONS IN BLACK CREATIVE/CRITICAL PRACTICES”

liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies 12, no. 1, Spring 2028

Guest editor: Walton Muyumba

Submissions due: January 30, 2027

As more and more women's stereotypical images are distributed via digital networks, active counter-activism via digital networks is an urgent need in a post-truth media environment. In the age of audio-visual curation, the cultural narrative has been traditionally controlled by state and corporate power, while today, opaque automated content moderation, algorithmic sorting and filtering, and platform capitalism of transnational streaming networks dominate the scene.

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.