The nature of free speech has been a flashpoint in the past decade of contemporary Anglo-American and Western politics. Depending on who you ask, free speech is imperiled by politically correct language and the silencing of right-leaning voices among the elite, or by political administrations, corporations, and other institutions that remove books from libraries and syllabi from classrooms. As these principles collide, the dialectic between freedom of expression and institutional censorship reaches a crucible—a volatile tension that distills our understanding of these core principles.  

Butoh Symposium, Kingston University London, 17-18 September, 2026

We will be holding a Butoh Symposium over two days and two evenings, 17-18 September 2026, at the Main Auditorium of Kingston University’s award-winning Town House Building, in south-west London. The Symposium is organised by researchers attached to the School of Art’s Visual Cultures Research Centre at Kingston University’s School of Art faculty. This symposium follows on from our recent successful symposia of 2024-25 on the work of Antonin Artaud and on ‘experimental archives’.

Call for Submissions

Yeshe: A Journal of Tibetan Literature, Arts and Humanities is an international open-access and peer-reviewed annual e-journal, which provides an outstanding platform for Tibetan writers, translators and all research scholars in the area of Tibet Studies to publish their works. 

Yeshe is currently open to submissions of academic articles, reviews, and interviews related to Tibet, as well as poetry, performance, prose, art, and fiction written in English or translated into English) for its sixth annual issue to be published in October 2026. Please check our submission page for the guidelines.

Seeking 250-word proposals examining feeding and nourishment as maternal practices that shape care, embodiment, and power, through literary, cultural, and medical humanities approaches in contemporary Hispanic and Lusophone contexts. Deadline: March 2

Seeking submissions exploring the formal contours of ecopoetics across time, cultural traditions, and media environments.

250-word abstract, brief bio and CV by March 20, 2026. 

Nikki Skillman, Indiana University-Bloomington

nskillma@iu.edu

Department of Applied Linguistics, Department of Pedagogy and Department of English and American Studies of the University of Gdańsk, Poland, in cooperation with ELLMEnet (Early Language Learning and Multilingual Education Network), are proud to welcome researchers from all over the world to contribute to our 4th International Conference on Early Language Learning and Multilingual Education in Early Childhood.

This roundtable considers positive solutions in the face of disappearing positions and programs, and declining academic freedoms. Successful approaches to reversing this trend desired. We must work together to resist. ~200-word abstracts. ~100-word bios.

Deadline for submissions: Wednesday, March 11, 2026

E. Nicole Meyer, Augusta U (nimeyer@augusta.edu)

“The urban” has taken many forms in the history of film, video and moving image works—with both documentary depictions and speculative representations of poverty, marginal life and geographies, displacement and gentrification, social alienation, racial and ethnic identities, gender and sexual identities, politics and social activism. As both a trope and a subject, the urban—a conceptualization of lifeways existing within the construct of “the city”that are beyond economic capture—has emerged as a distinguishing conceptual frame for understanding the ways that cities have succumbed to their own commoditization and commercialization.

Deadline for proposals: 30 April 2026
Conference date: 19 and 20 November 2026
Location: University of Cologne, Germany

CFP: Heated Rivalry: The Phenomenon

An edited collection of essays on the television series that seduced the world

Heated Rivalry appeared simultaneously across screens in Canada, the United States (via HBO Max) and other countries in late November and quickly, if unexpectedly, became a worldwide phenomenon. Audiences were immediately hooked on the story of star hockey prospects Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) and Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie) and the sexual and romantic relationship that blossoms between them over a span of years.

Call for Proposals: Star Trek and the CourtroomAn Edited Collection on Justice, Law, and the Trial in Star Trek

We invite proposals for an edited volume examining trial and courtroom episodes across the Star Trek franchise. From “Court Martial” (TOS) to “Ad Astra per Aspera” (SNW), Star Trek has used the trial format to explore questions of personhood, justice, military law, civil rights, ethical responsibility, and the limits of legal systems. These episodes serve as philosophical laboratories, testing the boundaries of law when confronted with, for example, artificial intelligence, alien cultures, time travel, and evolving definitions of sentience and citizenship.

Papers, delivered in English, on adaptations of works by Joseph Conrad, in any form and language, including film, television, games, opera, theatre, musical compositions, and graphic novels. This is the planned guaranteed session for the Joseph Conrad Society of America Allied Organization at the Modern Language Association Convention in January 2027. Email 300 word proposals and 100-word biography to Jana Giles, giles@ulm.edu. Deadline: March 22, 2026.

For further information and to see the call posted on the MLA website, see: https://mla.confex.com/mla/2027/webprogrampreliminary/index.html.

How might Black fatherhood be understood as an improvisational practice? Across histories of racial capitalism, displacement, surveillance, and social constraint, Black paternal life has often unfolded beyond the frames of patriarchal authority and normative domesticity. In these conditions, fatherhood may be enacted through adaptive, creative, and relational practices that exceed dominant frameworks of masculinity and family.

Finnish Literary Research Society Annual Conference 2026

 May 20-22, 2026

Online Panel: Indigenous Futurisms Beyond the West: Arab and Global South Speculative Fiction

This issue of Ampersand: An American Studies Journal invites submissions that take up the concept of the “American assemblage”. 

Theme Collection: Sovereign AI and Digital Sovereignty

Submission deadline

Thursday, 31 December  2026

Let’s call it “time work”: Those practices that negotiate the relations between the living and the dead. Time work is not merely conducted by archivists and historians, but by grave diggers and undertakers, documentary filmmakers and memoirists, politicians, war journalists, practitioners of living traditions, speakers of dead languages, as well as by any and all who keep something – a story, a trinket, an heirloom, a song – holding onto it to remember. Time work is not easily done without feeling; It is driven by the weight of mattering, it is attention called by the fact that now – this, ‘our’ now – is in-part composed by the shadows of what and who came before.

"— and then she makes out with her dog! That's the essay." Speaking of Haraway's Companion Species Manifesto, to which I'm the modest witness, Eileen Myles is too a dog person while the Internet is rather more abuzz with considerations for the feline question... Mammalian largeness is a 'do' to be vegan yet rodents and fish deserve inclusion here. 

Send 200-300 word abstracts speculating on how interspecies intimacy (Giddens 1992) may, could, or should evolve zoos out-of-business with reckonings for affect studies as we deconstruct the 'fandom' paradigm together. 

Conference Call for Papers

“Navigating Global Governance in a Multipolar World”

 (28-29 May 2026)

Cergy, France

The Faculty of the Anglo-American Legal Program at the Faculté de droit de l'Université CY Cergy Paris is proud to organize this conference in collaboration with the Laboratoire d'Études Juridiques et Politiques (LEJEP) and the newly formed Institute for Multipolar Governance.

The Activist Author: Contemporary Forms and Historical Precedents of Activist Literature

Dates and Location:

November 9th & 10th, 2026.

UCLouvain (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium).

Confirmed Keynote speakers:

Sara Dimick: Northwestern University; author of Unseasonable: Climate Change in Global Literatures.

Juan Meneses: UNC Charlotte; author of Resisting Dialogue: Modern Fiction and the Future of Dissent and editor of Postpolitics and the Aesthetic Imagination.

We invite in-person or hybrid submissions on any aspect of the medieval studies and their related topics, as well as short reports on ongoing projects, research or funding opportunities, or pedagogical approaches you’d like to share. We also invite in-person and hybrid individual or panel round table submissions addressing the following topics: 

Throughout its consolidation as an academic discipline, museum studies have tended to gravitate around major national and international museums, their emblematic collections, and the management models they have established as standards. These institutions, mostly located in urban centers and supported by solid structures of funding, research, and public outreach, have shaped a “canon” that has influenced not only academic agendas but also collective imaginaries about what a museum is (and what it should be).

Call for Papers:

DEADLINE EXTENDED

Writing the Truth through a Fictional Lens:

Comparing Sinophone and Anglophone Literatures and Cultural Products

Edited by Chi Sum Garfield LAU, Kelly Kar Yue CHAN and Chi Chun CHAN

Over the past decade, and with heightened urgency in the post-Covid period, fashion has undergone a profound digital realignment. No longer confined to discrete tools or isolated innovations, digitalisation has become a structuring condition of contemporary fashion practice. From 3D modeling suites and configurators to generative AI for modeling and product development, digital twins of avatars and garments for production and archival purposes, virtual showrooms, digital fashion for gaming, and platform-based retail infrastructures, digital technologies mediate the conception, production, circulation, and experience of garments.