Panel Proposal for the NeMLA Convention, Newport, RI, March 6–9, 2027

Planetary crises—climate change, toxic pollution, biodiversity loss, and energy transition—are profoundly uneven in their distribution. Their material consequences are shaped by infrastructures of class, race, colonial histories, state power, and global capitalism. Increasingly, literary, artistic, and cultural texts across the world foreground these asymmetries, framing ecological crisis not only as environmental catastrophe but as a question of justice: Who breathes polluted air? Who profits from green transformation? Who consumes melting ice? Who bears the social and environmental costs of planetary change?

Italian Teaching Symposium 2026 - II edition

“Creative Pathways in Italian Language and Culture Teaching”

September 25-26, 2026

St. Jerome’s University (University of Waterloo) & online

This is a CFP seeking panelists for the 2027 Annual Conference of the Association for Asian Studies. We invite papers that examine racialization and ethnicization across Sinophone and Asian contexts in which local projects of improvement and rule are entangled with colonial and imperial systems and epistemologies, both Western and non-Western, external and internal, often sustained by local elites and intermediaries. We understand these contexts in broad terms, including transnational, diasporic, and colonial aspects. Processes of racialization and ethnicization, as well as resistance to and negotiation of such processes, could involve, but are not limited to, discussions of care, gender, and sexuality.

This special issue will highlight new work in queer ecology that engages and extends concepts of queer time developed by theorists such as Lee Edelman, Jack Halberstam, Elizabeth Freeman, José Muñoz, Kathryn Bond Stockton, Carolyn Dinshaw, and others.

https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22362

How is everyone doing?

At a routine meeting of the Editorial Board of this journal in March 2026, this innocuous question erupted into disquiet, tension, unease. Speaking from vastly different parts of the world, there was an unmistakable sense of a planet slipping beyond available comprehension and unplugging us from work and life routines. As wars in the Middle East expand and fires spread from apartment blocks reduced to rubble to bombed oil refineries and shipping corridors, profound geopolitical, personal, even psychic rifts leave us grasping for the language and feel of the moment, the falling apart of things, the zeitgeist of an endangered now.

Cuteness is a twenty-first-century sensation—from the global expansion of Sanrio fandom to the rise of social capital around Labubu and Jellycat, from K-Pop stars (real or animated) to cute animals like the quokka and Fennec fox. This issue explores a “cuteness turn” found in many public realms around the world. The adoration of attractive or cheerful objects associated with childishness and youthfulness is part of the human experience. However, this issue does not examine cuteness as a transcultural aesthetic or psychological condition, but we focus on its larger political implications. Throughout history and around the world, this “universal” sentiment has often been manipulated for commercial and ideological purposes.

Call for Papers

The 2026 Multi-ConTEXT International Graduate Conference

“Interweaving Voices and Worlds:
English Studies in Transformative Contexts”

Call for Proposals for papers, possibly for the ACLA Seminar in Houston March 2027 and for a possible collection of published essays.

Women’s Writings against Oppression in the Middle East and South Asia

This panel explores how Latin American and Latine writers, filmmakers, and artists engage environmental elements as dynamic forces shaping human experience, identity, and social life. Grounded in the environmental humanities, the panel examines how cultural production renders visible the entanglements between ecological conditions and forms of movement, including migration, displacement, circulation, and transformation across human and more-than-human worlds.

This CFP seeks submissions for a Just-in-Time session proposed for the 2027 MLA conference.  If accepted, this panel will analyze the recent slew of literary and genre fiction about "trad wives." Caro Claire Burke's Yesteryear, Saratoga Sch

“I must be mad!” cries Elizabeth Costello at the close of J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals (1999). An author and animal advocate, Costello cannot reconcile how the atrocities of factory farming that keep her awake at night do not likewise haunt her peers. When picking up the character again over two decades later in The Pole and Other Stories (2023), Coetzee presents Costello in the grips of early dementia, which has brought her into even greater communion with the suffering of animals. As she discloses to her son, “I can’t put the image out of my mind, John.

In India, the displacement of Adivasis, tribals, poor, farmers, forest-dwelling and land-based people, and other marginalized communities for development and infrastructure projects like dams, railways, power projects, and bridge construction, or for capitalist accumulation like mining, resource extraction, tourism, and industry, is a common occurrence. The trajectory of such displacement has a long history, starting in the colonial period and being aggravated in the postcolonial period under the Nehruvian model of development. Although such projects are implemented for the sake of the ‘greater common good’ for all, only a few elites enjoy the benefit of these projects, depriving millions of displaced, marginalized people (Roy 1999).

In bell hooks’ Belonging: A Culture of Place (2009), she posits that “many folks feel no sense of place” (1). She continues by explaining her personal experience with this spatiality, noting that, “Like many of my contemporaries I have yearned to find my place in this world, to have a sense of homecoming, a sense of being wedded to a place” (2). To that end, a commonality shared between all humans is a searching for a place in which we belong, and this is particularly evident in literature that is produced during times of major societal events.

CALL FOR PAPERS

In giving visible form to the “crisis of cartographic reason” (Farinelli 2009), the notion of border has become a central concept of the contemporary spatial turn (Guglielmi, Pala 2011), for disciplines such as geography (Winders, Johnson, Schein 2016), cultural anthropology (Wilson 2023), philosophy (Cooper, Tinning 2019), literary theory (Youngs 2019), and political studies (Konrad, Amilhat Szary 2023), emerging as an autonomous field of study.

About the Book

Indian Cultural Heritage: Perspectives is an edited volume that invites interdisciplinary scholarship on the diverse and dynamic dimensions of India's cultural heritage. The volume welcomes original contributions exploring tangible and intangible heritage, indigenous knowledge systems, languages, literature, folklore, performing arts, architecture, material culture, cultural memory, museums, heritage conservation, digital heritage, and contemporary issues of identity, sustainability, and cultural preservation. By bringing together diverse academic perspectives, the volume seeks to advance critical understanding of India's rich cultural traditions and their continuing significance in a rapidly changing world.

The aim of this book series is to examine the history of institutions around the world through the lens of gender. Of interest
are institutions established with the specific purpose of regulating gender and sexuality (e.g. the Magdalen
asylums, Magdalen hospitals, penitentiaries, refuges, mother and baby institutions) as well as those with more general
purposes where gender has had an important role in their operation and function (e.g. prisons, workhouses, lunatic
asylums), including both religious and private organisations. The series supports the increasing interest in these
institutions internationally, both in academia and in the treatment of ‘historical’ abuse.

Nineteenth-century British literature frequently interrogates the boundaries of community dynamics, examining not only what the individual contributes to a collective and what it means to belong, but how communal engagement fundamentally reshapes the individual. 

Consistent with the NeMLA 2027 theme, "Empowering Communities," this panel explores a vital dual imperative within the nineteenth-century British novel: the structural tension between individuals whose actions serve to empower their communities, and communities that conversely function to shield and empower otherwise fragile individuals.

Beecroft argues in The Cambridge Companion to the Novel that, if we understand the novel as storytelling in any narrative form indigenous to a particular culture or people, then we must acknowledge the existence of multiple novels, each with distinct temporal and spatial origins. He maintains that storytelling traditions are embedded in every society, and that many of these traditions have complemented, intersected with, or diverged from Western narrative forms (46–48). However, the narrative form canonized as the “novel” in the Western literary tradition has a specific historical and aesthetic origin in ancient Greece.

In keeping with Katherine Philips’s reputation as an exemplary practitioner of friendship and curator of connections, this panel invites papers that put Philips’s work in conversation with writers outside the Society of Friendship, outside coterie poetry, outside the English context, or even outside the early modern period altogether. 

6/26/26 - 8/31/26: Subs are OPEN for our big 10th Issue: A Day In The Life.

… um, like The Beatles’ song?‍ ‍

YES!

We’re interested in the ways in which art like this exists in the world — with such wildly different fragments and contrasting energies not just coming together but overflowing with a vivid, mad, inventive creativity! (We do like this song.)

So, do we want poems and artworks about this song, or pieces about The Beatles? NO!

When Henry James described the Victorian multi-plot novel as “large loose baggy monsters,” he didn’t have twentieth and twenty-first century horror in mind, but the echoing effects of the Gothic on writers like Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Charles Reade, and others. These writers drew on the multiplied plots and perspectives of the Gothic to represent how social worlds were constructed and constrained. 

William Shakespeare's plays are replete with themes that resonate with contemporary ecological anxieties. From the imagery of nature in The Tempest to the exploration of human ambition and environmental limits in Macbeth, Shakespeare's works offer a rich terrain for ecocritical analysis. This volume seeks to uncover how Shakespeare's plays can inform our understanding of sustainability and inspire new perspectives on human-nature relationships.

In her resolute commitment to telling stories about Black life without the white gaze, Toni Morrison articulated a model of community empowerment grounded in local knowledge, intra-communal collaboration, and the self-reflexive narration of Black worlds. While Morrison remains one of the most visible public advocates of this aesthetic and ethical orientation, practices of Black worldmaking across African and diasporic literatures have long exceeded mere response to anti-Blackness. Even under conditions structured by racial violence, coloniality, displacement, and social rupture, Black communities have continually generated modes of life, relation, memory, and imagination that assert the possibility of worlds otherwise.