In the Middle Ages, Christian liturgy was far more than a sequence of prayers and ceremonies: it structured religious practice, shaped sacred space, and gave material form to the expression of faith. Objects, vestments, and books played a central role in this framework, endowed with a visual, tactile, and symbolic language that embodied the theology of the sacred. The International Conference Instrumenta altaris: Ritual Artefacts and Their Images for Medieval Liturgy seeks to refocus attention on the material dimension that, throughout the medieval centuries, rendered the invisible visible and preserved —often in fragmentary form— a tangible legacy of devotion.

18th ESSE Conference (European Society for the Study of English)
31st August – 4th September 2026
Santiago de Compostela, Spain

Call for Contributions to the ESSE Panel "Infrastructures of Feeling: The European City in Contemporary Literature and Visual Media"

Shakespeare exists across and between multiple worlds today. After centuries of circulation in Asia, Shakespeare inhabits all locales and cultural formations in ever-changing forms, but is contained by none. Neither completely virtual nor concretely embodied, long dead yet very much alive, inhabiting past, present and future in equal measure, Shakespeare continues to thrive in the act of playing, teaching and thinking. Recent Asian Shakespeare scholarship has critically reflected upon, yet ultimately celebrated such cross-cultural, international, world-wide flourishing, bringing together new arrangements, forms and collaborations of Shakespeare’s work across art, performance and cultures.

Call for Papers: Special Issue of Cross-Cultural Studies on Han Kang and the Cross-Cultural Imagination

• Deadline for abstract submissions: November 30, 2025
• Deadline for full manuscript submissions (upon acceptance of abstract): September, 2026
• Publication Date: December, 2026
• Languages accepted: English
• Full name / name of organization: The Center for Cross-Cultural Studies, Kyung Hee University, South Korea
• Guest Editor: Dr. Hyeryung Hwang, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona
• Contact email: hhwang@cpp.edu

Overview

How do we reimagine the past? How can we envision the future? In our present moment, how do we tell the story of a past that has become just as contentious as the many visions of where we want to go? The concept of legacies allows us to think through the continuum, the spectrum, and the sometimes-chaotic mishmash of the relationship of past, present, and future. The ideas of tradition, innovation, nostalgia, and refashionings can open up texts to consider their temporal, historical, and intertextual contexts.

New Directions in Early American Poetry Studies

A panel organized and sponsored by the Society of Early Americanists as part of "American Poetry: A Symposium," sponsored by the American Literature Association and the Society for the Study of American Poetry, to be held March 26–28, 2026 at the Hawthorne Hotel in Salem, MA. For more information: https://americanliteratureassociation.org/ala-conferences/ala-symposia/a...

The DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND AMERICAN STUDIES AT MASARYK UNIVERSITY, Brno, is pleased to announce the Brno Graduate Conference in English Studies, to be held on NOVEMBER 20-21, 2025.

This year's theme – "CULTURAL MEMORY: REMEMBERING THE FORGOTTEN" – invites doctoral students to explore numerous ways in which literary, cultural and linguistic practices contribute to the construction, preservation, and transformation of cultural memory.

The confirmed keynote speaker of the conference is prof. Dr. Volker Depkat from University of Regensburg.

SILENCES
Northeast Victorian Studies Association
Cornell University April 10-12, 2026
Keynote Panel with Rachel Ablow, Jason Camlot, and Priya Joshi

View the full call here >> https://northeastvictorianstudies.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/...

Call for Papers and Workshops: “History up for Debate: Literature, Storytelling and the Imagined Past” 

1-2 July 2026, University of Salzburg, Department of English and American Studies, UniparkNonntal 

Conference within the Framework of the Salzburg Conferences on English Literature and Culture (SEC) 

Organisers: Dorothea Flothow, Julia Hartinger, Sarah Herbe, Christopher Herzog, Eva-Maria Kubin, Markus Oppolzer, and Elisabeth Schober 

Call for Articles - The Politics of Emotion: Affect, Identity and Power

IDEA – Interdisciplinary Discourses, Education and Analysis launches its new issue on the topic The Politics of Emotion: Affect, Identity and Power.

Emotions shape the way individuals and communities navigate their personal and collective lives, influencing decisions, relationships and the structures that govern societies. They are deeply embedded in social, cultural and political contexts, acting as both a personal experience and a force that drives public action.

I’m reaching out regarding a proposed forthcoming academic volume titled Other(ed) Worlds: Transgender Representations in Lusophone and Portuguese-Based Creole Societies, which I will be editing. This volume will be part of Trans Studies, a book series published by Bloomsbury Academic and edited by Dr. Douglas Vakoch (General Editor) and Courtney Morales (Senior Acquisitions Editor).

This proposed volume will bring together interdisciplinary essays exploring transgender narratives, identities, and resistances in the Lusophone World (from Portugal and Brazil to Lusophone Africa and Asia) / regions shaped by Portuguese colonial legacies (Africa, Asia, and the Americas).

Conference at the University of Bonn, 18-20 May, 2026

The AI revolution has accelerated in recent years, propelled by the widespread use of large language models (LLMs). Today, AI systems are not only transforming technical environments but also shaping our thoughts, emotions, and everyday linguistic practices. Increasingly, AI research and industry are shifting their attention from rational problem-solving toward aspects of human life once considered the last bastions of humanity. We can contrast this approach to AI as a simulation of ‘rationality’ with the expansion of applications into the realm of the expression of emotions and other aspects of human life often seen as ‘irrational’.

Editors-in-chief: Inês Fernandes and Teresa Weinholtz 

Issue 12 | Speak at Your Own Risk: The Many Faces of (Self-)Censorship

International Conference 

Women Filmmakers and New Feminist Cinemas in France, Great Britain, and the USA in the 21st Century 

21-22-23 October 2026, Université Toulouse 2 Jean-Jaurès, France 

Deadline: Submissions due has been extended to October 15, 2025 to invisible.culture@ur.rochester.edu. 

It feels only appropriate, given the recent UR graduate worker strike, that Issue 41 of InVisible Culture focus on the problem of labor. Amid the erosion of labor protections in academia, increasing challenges faced by immigrant workers in the US, and global labor conflicts in fields like healthcare and agriculture, this moment calls for a reconsideration of what labor is and how its value is structured.

Ecocriticism in German Narratives
Book Series: Interdisciplinary Studies on German Philology

About the Series

The book series Interdisciplinary Studies on German Philology (Istanbul University Press) explores intersections of German literature, culture, and society with broader interdisciplinary fields.

Utopia, Dystopia, and Heterotopia in Narratives
Third volume of the book series: Interdisciplinary Studies on Philology

About the Series

Interdisciplinary Studies on Philology brings together research that bridges literary studies with adjacent human and social sciences.

• Volume I: Mythological Motifs in Narratives (published)
• Volume II: Redefining Communication in Posthuman Age (published)
• Volume III: Utopia, Dystopia, and Heterotopia in Narratives (planned)

Aim and Scope

From Indigenous testimonies about extraction economies to eco-dystopian manga, comics across the world function as powerful visual laboratories for engaging with the natural world. The graphic form—with its unique interplay of word and image, its use of framing, juxtaposition, and sequentiality—stages ecological questions in ways prose often cannot. By dramatizing the temporality of both sudden catastrophes and slow processes of degradation, comics enable us to see environmental crises unfolding across multiple scales of time and space. They ask us to imagine multispecies entanglements, toxic futures, and alternative modes of dwelling, while also foregrounding human complicity in environmental collapse.

The Music Graduate Student Organization at the University of Pittsburgh welcomes proposals for 20 minute paper presentations, performance demonstrations, or work that integrates research and practice for its 2026 conference, “Sonic Power: Speculation, Surveillance, and Strength.” We invite students, researchers, musicians, sound artists, and practitioners from diverse disciplines to consider how sound organizes power and how people reorganize power through sound. Sonic life shapes worlds, whether in the hush of archival erasure, the loudness of protest, or the sorting of listening within media infrastructures.

Call for Papers
Coming of Age, Coming Undone: Abortion, Adolescence, Teen Pregnancy, and Reproductive Justice in Global Popular Culture

Audience: Media Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, Youth Studies, Reproductive Justice, Popular Culture, Girlhood Studies, Global Health, Queer Studies

Do Humans Also Dream of Electric Sheeps?
Technoscientific, Cultural, and Cognitive Challenges of AI

International Conference – Rome, February 27-28, 2026

Organized by:

• University of Rome Tor Vergata
• Res Viva – Interuniversity Research Center on the Epistemology and History of Life Sciences
• Italian Society for the History of Science (SISS)
• With the support of CNR – Institute for the History of Philosophical and Scientific Thought in Modern Age (ISPF), Naples

Conference theme

Since the 1990s, comics and graphic narratives have emerged as an emphatic media form for exploring the embodied experiences of disability and identity (e.g., Alaniz, Chute, Czerwiec, Dolmage, and Refaie). To date, much scholarship has focused on Anglophone or Euro-American paradigms, leaving significant gaps in our understanding of how disability intersects with race, gender, class, and colonial histories in graphic narratives from diverse contexts. To bridge the gap, this seminar brings together international scholars from multiple disciplines (e.g., comics narratology and 4EA cognition, graphic medicine, posthumanist studies, history, and visual studies) to discuss both established and emerging works, especially those from the Global South.

We invite short abstracts (100-200 words) in response to our call for contributions for an edited volume, ‘The Medieval in Museums’. Please send abstracts by 5pm GMT on Monday 3 November to Fran Allfrey (University of York) and Maia Blumberg (QMUL) fran.allfrey@york.ac.uk ; m.blumberg@qmul.ac.uk. Please be in touch with us to discuss your idea more informally should you wish.

Call for Papers

Midwest Winter Workshop 2026

Rhetoric Program

Indiana University Bloomington

Friday, February 6th – Saturday, February 7th, 2026