Silences as Resistance in Public Narratives

Silence is generally seen as something to surmount: we break silence; we give voice to silenced stories; we speak out against injustice. But silence can be a powerful mode of expression in its own right. There is a history of silent protest. Silence can reject dominant expectations or refuse to offer up a story for voyeurism, appropriation, or commodification. It can push reader-listeners to listen for something wordless, to play an active role in striving to understand, and simultaneously to recognize the limits of their ability to understand another person’s trauma. Silence is rarely ever singular.

This seminar proposes to approach William S. Burroughs not simply as a subject of study, but as a problem. We invite provocative papers grounded in comparative methodologies and attentive to less-travelled texts, episodes, affiliations, and cultural encounters. Rather than asking what Burroughs “was,” we want to ask what his work does—and to pause over the categories through which we have learned to understand his oeuvre, asking what they illuminate and, perhaps more importantly, what they conceal.

Concept Note

National Seminar on “Gender-Based Violence in South Asia: Literature, Culture and Media”

Call for Chapters

Kenneth Cook’s Australia: Masculinity, Violence, Politics and the Outback on Page and Screen

Before Australian cinema made the outback terrifying, Kenneth Cook was already writing it that way.

Popular Culture Association 2027 Annual Conference

Monsters & the Monstrous Area

Call for Papers

CHICANO/A/X LITERATURE, FILM, AND CULTURE

Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)

48th Annual Conference, February 17-20, 2027

Marriott Albuquerque

Albuquerque, New Mexico

https://www.southwestpca.org

Submissions open: September 1, 2026

Proposal submission deadline: October 31, 2026

Call for Papers: Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies 13 (2026/2027 Issue)

The Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies (JWLS) invites submissions of original articles and book reviews for its upcoming issue. As the pre-eminent peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the life, writings, and art of Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957), JWLS seeks contributions that make decisive, innovative interventions in Lewis scholarship and broader modernist studies.

Submission Guidelines

Public Humanities invites submissions for the upcoming themed issue Memorial Culture in Public Art, which will be guest edited by Rebecca Friedman and Alex Lichenstein.

The deadline for submissions is October 15, 2026.

Description 

This panel is proposed for the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) VIRTUAL 2027 Annual Meeting on May 15 & 16, 2027. 

In 1996, Carl Sagan warned us of a time when people would lose their ability to question, “when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few . . . when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.” Maybe Mr Sagan was somewhat pessimistic when writing The Demon-Haunted World. But then again, in times of conspiracy theories, Ancient Aliens, Antivaxxers, and Holocaust Deniers, the Age of Information appears just as capable of spreading dangerous frauds and charlatans as it is of disseminating reliable scholarship.

In literary fiction, the representation of consciousness has often been understood through what might be called the thought of looking: the ways narrative cognition renders a work into a perceptive, embodied, and self-reflexive experience through language. In cinema, by contrast, cognition typically becomes the look of thought: a mental interiority suggested through framing, editing, gesture, movement, and performance. Interactive stories told in videogames complicate this distinction through their intermedial nature. Games must not only represent what characters think, but also account for the player's "will to activity", translating the audience’s intentions into feedback, movement, and action.

The Global Southern Gothic

58th Northeast Modern Language Association Convention
March 6-9, 2027
Newport, RI

The US South, representative of the nation, has long been associated with gothic forms and tropes in part as a result of the suppression of violent histories. According to Sheri-Marie Harrison, the use of gothic tropes in American literature reveals “how ideologies of American exceptionalism rely on repressing the nation’s history of slavery, racism, and patriarchy.” Like the return of the repressed, what hasn’t been reckoned with in the nation’s history, such as slavery, racial oppression, and cisheteronormative expectations, reemerge in weird or haunted ways.

Shakespeare Here, Shakespeare Now 27-30 May 2027, Cape Town, South Africa

This conference, held as part of the thirteenth triennial congress of the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa (SSOSA), invites delegates to reflect on and utilise the axes of space and time in making new contributions to the field of Shakespeare Studies.

Keynote Speaker: Farah Karim-Cooper (Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC)

In 1900, the Boston-based Colored American Magazine launched its inaugural issue, convinced of the “immediate need of a Race Journal, otherwise than our current local periodicals.” Within a year, Hopkins’s zeal would direct much of the publication. She quickly became the magazine's best-known literary contributor and one of the few Black women editors from the era. Hopkins continued to publish, lecture, and write after new management relocated the Colored American Magazine to New York City and severed the magazine’s relationship with the opinionated editor.

Seventeenth International Conference on Food Studies, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris, France, 9-10 September 2027

Founded in 2011, the Food Studies Research Network is brought together around a common interest to explore new possibilities for sustainable food production and human nutrition, and associated impacts of food systems on culture. We seek to build an epistemic community where we can make linkages across disciplinary, geographic, and cultural boundaries. As a Research Network, we are defined by our scope and concerns and motivated to build strategies for action framed by our shared themes and tensions.

The Seventeenth International Conference on Food Studies calls for research addressing the following themes.

Call for Papers

SPORTS AND POPULAR CULTURE

Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)

48th Annual Conference, February 17-20, 2027

Marriott Albuquerque

Albuquerque, New Mexico

https://swpaca.org/

Submissions open: September 1, 2026

Proposal submission deadline: October 31, 2026

The plantation’s agribiopolitical reorganization of environmental and (enviro-)racial relations has remained a focus of scholarship concerned with the afterlives of its logics. Yet, as Sylvia Wynter has argued, other narrative sites produced by and in dialogue with the plantation, such as the provision grounds, offer a means to think beyond the plantation’s hegemonic, monocultural narrative. In the Caribbean context of Wynter’s work, the provision grounds were found at the edge of the plantation hidden away from the main house, serving as a subsistence refuge for enslaved peoples to cultivate food on Sundays.

A Writer’s Palette: Colour in Late Modernist Literature 

Special Issue CfP for Textual Practice 

‘A Writer’s Palette’ examines the role, relevance, and relational representation of colours 

within late modernist literature. It asks how authors use colour in their work and what this use 

of colour contributes to an author’s creative process, a work’s meaning, and to broader 

literary movements. By extension, this special issue helps both literary and visual arts 

scholars understand how an interdisciplinary text is formed and the effect this aesthetic has 

on the creative milieu. In doing so, it expands upon recent research on colour in literature by 

  In the present digital era, the public sphere, as defined by Jürgen Habermas—a space where citizens negotiate power through collective discussion and political participation—has shifted on digital platforms. 

(ONE WEEK LEFT) The 98th annual SAMLA Conference is taking place Thursday, November, 5, through Saturday, November, 7, 2026, at the Wyndham Atlanta Buckhead Hotel & Conference Center in Atlanta, GA.  For more information, see https://southatlanticmla.org/.

Proposals for 15-20 minute papers responding to the following call for papers are invited for the Dickens Society's panel at NeMLA 2027 (March 6-9, Newport, RI).

Special call for specific chapters on the subject of Vampires and Fashion, for a volume under contract at Peter Lang. 

For the last 100 years vampires have graced screens large and small, dressed in clothing that has become part and parcel of their appeal. From drab gray and black German frock coats to full formal tuxes, from diaphanous gowns to sleek, form-hugging dresses, from haute couture to jeans and leather jackets, and from wing-collared capes to Middle Eastern chadors, vampire fashion is varied and exciting, yet has, to date, received little academic attention.

The Institute for Medieval Studies at the University of New Mexico invites proposals for three
sponsored sessions for ICMS 2027. Proposals must be submitted through the ICMS Confex
Portal (https://shorturl.at/d05So) by 15 September 2026, including title, 300 word abstract and
50 word description.

CALL FOR PAPERS/AMERICAN LITERATURE

COLLEGE ENGLISH ASSOCIATION ANNUAL CONFERENCE

APRIL 1-3, 2027 / ST LOUIS, MO

SUBMISSION SITE IS OPEN: https://www.conftool.pro/cea2027 

DEADLINE: 11/01/2026

For its 2027 annual conference,the College English Association (CEA) invites proposals for papers and panels that explore the theme of “Gateways” and their significance in literature, criticism, and pedagogy. we also encourage proposals on GENERAL TOPICS, including AMERICAN, BRITISH, AND WORLD LITERATURES.

DON'T KNOW CEA? YOU SHOULD!