Since the release of the Canadian-produced streaming TV show Heated Rivalry, the show and its actors have exploded across traditional and social media, prompting wide discussions about sexuality in sports and the female consumption of MM (male/male) romance. Based on the Game Changers novel series by Rachel Reid, Heated Rivalry follows the illicit romance between two male hockey players. In the months since, both NHL ticket and queer romance novel sales have skyrocketed; parodies of Heated Rivalry have popped up on SNL and off-Broadway stages.

CALL FOR PAPERS2026 Technology for Second Language Learning ConferenceOctober 15-16, 2026Hybrid (Online & Iowa State University)

The Constructed Agents theme provides a forum for exploring how humans develop their understanding of AI agents from their exposure to representations of agents in literature and film. The conference explores how and to what extent representations of non-human sentient agents such as Frankenstein’s creature in Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel and Hal in 2001 Space Odyssey may shape views of today’s language-using AI agents including those for language learning.

International Conference

VASSALS AND LORDS. CHRISTIANS, MUSLIMS, AND JEWS

IN THE WESTERN MEDITERRANEAN (13TH-15TH CENTURIES)

October 26-28, 2026

Faculty of Geography and History, UNED

Madrid (Spain)

Building the Avant-Garde Abroad: East-Central European Artists in Paris

18–19 September, 2026, Institut Bibliothèque Polonaise de Paris 

Call for PapersEcofeminist Drama: Theatre, Performance, and Ecological Futures

Edited by Douglas A. Vakoch and Işıl Şahin Gülter
Under review with the University of Illinois Press

Femspec seeks a guest peer reviewer to review an article submission about the television series The Orville.

Qualifications:

1. The applicant has watched the series.

2. The applicant possesses an MA or PhD in English, Women's and Gender Studies, or a related field, or is an advanced graduate student pursuing a degree in one of these fields.

Femspec is an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed feminist academic journal dedicated to science fiction, fantasy, magical realism, surrealism, myth, folklore, and other supernatural genres.  Femspec publishes both academic scholarship and creative writing.

The 18th Annual Louisiana Studies Conference will be held September 12, 2026, at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana. The conference committee is now accepting presentation proposals for the upcoming conference. Presentation proposals on any aspect of the 2026 conference theme “Remembering Louisiana,” as well as creative texts by, about, and/or for Louisiana and Louisianans, are sought for this year’s conference.

This sessions welcomes 300-word abstracts that actively engage the ways that Black-girl centered literature (novel, poetry, media, etc.) reimagines modes of resistance, resilience, and world-making through historical and modern definitions of freedom and emancipation.

Non-guaranteed panel at MLA 2027 co-sponsored by the Children’s Literature Association and the MLA forum on Science and Literature. This panel seeks papers on how children’s and young adult literature has engaged the natural sciences across historical and contemporary contexts, including plants, animals, evolution, and the scientific study of the natural world. We invite papers exploring the diverse ways literature for children and young adults mediates knowledge of the natural world, sometimes to instruct, sometimes to inspire wonder, sometimes to question the very authority of empirical observation. How does a text balance the excitement of botanical, zoological, or ecological discovery with the weight of explanation?

Critical essays are invited for an edited collection on the Historical Horror novel in the twenty-first century. This volume will focus on the intersection of women, history and the horror novel. It will explore representations of gender, sexuality and power in historical horror novels.

Horror and history have been intertwined since the publication of the first Gothic novel, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, in 1764. The past is a useful landscape for the horror novel, as it allows both a distancing—horror is imagined to happen on other shores or in other times—as well as a closer exploration of the horrors to be found at home.

The emergence and growing predominance of artificial intelligence have fundamentally reshaped how we understand knowledge, creativity, labour, and subjectivity. As AI models increasingly participate in writing, visual creation, research, and cultural production, long-standing assumptions within the Arts & Humanities (such as authorship, interpretation, agency, and even human experience) are being unsettled. Yet this disruption, rather than signaling the eclipse of the Humanities, intensifies their relevance. As algorithmic systems appropriate tasks once considered uniquely human, they reinvite considering some of the foundational questions of the Humanities: What constitutes a human? Where does meaning reside?

Why is close reading a particularly valuable learning strategy/professional practice at the current moment? This MLA seminar (a guaranteed session) seeks participants interested in thinking and talking through aspects of close reading with an eye towards producing pieces of public writing (e.g. an OpEd, think piece, lyric essay, call to action, etc. published in a newspaper, magazine, or periodical, in print or online). Topics for exploration may include, but are not limited to:

University of Toronto Quarterly (UTQ) is currently seeking submissions. Established in 1931, UTQ publishes innovative and exemplary scholarship from all areas in the humanities. As an interdisciplinary journal, UTQ favours articles that appeal to a scholarly readership beyond the specialists of a given discipline or field.

This in-person panel invites 250-word abstracts that examine women’s narratives, (self)representations, and forms of agency within resistance movements across film and digital platforms.

Related topics are welcome to be discussed.

Call for Papers: International Journal of Education Through Art

Special Issue: ‘Reimagining Place and Place-Based Art Education’

View the full call here>>

https://www.intellectbooks.com/international-journal-of-education-through-art#call-for-papers

Guest Editors:

Rabindranath Tagore and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, two of the greatest thinkers of the world had, between them, a kinship and appreciation of profound depth and mutuality. Both stood for universal humanism and emancipation of the dispossessed though their paths were seminally divergent.

Call for Proposals

Fan Studies Network North America Conference 2026 (virtual)

October 22-25, 2026

THE BOUNDARIES OF FAN STUDIES AND FANDOM

Hi all,

See the below CFP for a panel on Pacific early American literature for next year’s MLA. Please circulate to anyone you think might be interested!

Conspiracy Theories in the Wake of Disaster

Matthew N. Hannah

Associate Professor

Department of Communication Arts

University of Wisconsin—Madison

mhannah2@wisc.edu

Zachary Loeb

Assistant Professor

Department of History

Purdue University

zloeb@purdue.edu

Vulnerability has become a key term in contemporary critical theory, ethics, trauma studies, gender studies, disability studies, postcolonial studies, and affect theory. But fiction has long engaged with vulnerability – not necessarily as weakness or exposure, but as a condition of relationality, openness, resistance, and change. From tragic protagonists to marginalized bodies and precarious subjectivities, literary texts have repeatedly returned to fragility, dependency, and risk.

AICED-27

THE 27th ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OF THE ENGLISH DEPARTMENT,

UNIVERSITY OF BUCHAREST

5-6 June 2026

CALL FOR PAPERS

Representations of

Crime in Literature and the Arts

University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures

7-13 Pitar Moș Street, Bucharest, Romania

National Video Games: Cultures, Industries, Communities
international conference

10–12 September 2026
University of Warsaw, Poland

The end of history was cancelled years ago, and national ideas have been on the rise ever since. Game scholars, too, have been studying the relationships between national cultures, video games and game industries for about a decade. We now have a wealth of material about the game cultures of numerous different countries across the world; there are also publications that examine the national categorization of games itself.

Concept Note

Research Scholar’s National Conference CFP – 22nd and 23rd April 2026

New Paradigms, New Epistemes: Literature and Criticality in the 21st Century

PAMLA 2026 Seattle: “Our Ruling Classes: Class, Power, Conflict” - https://www.pamla.org/pamla2026/

The 123rd Annual PAMLA Conference will be held November 12–15, 2026, at the Hyatt Regency Seattle,
808 Howell St., Seattle, Washington 98101.