The short story has proven to be fertile ground for writers seeking to interrogate what the act of recording lives and the search for meaning entails, often through imagined renderings of the machineries of archive. In works such as Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Library of Babel,” Danilo Kis’s “The Encyclopedia of the Dead,” and Ivan Vladislavic’s “The Loss Library,” for example, writers engage with “the forces that govern preservation and erasure” in line with this year’s MMLA convention theme. 

This panel seeks papers that consider how these and other concerns find expression through the short story form.

C

Call for Applications: R.D. Mullen Fellowships
Named for the founder of our journal, Richard “Dale” Mullen (1915-1998), the Mullen
fellowships are awarded by Science Fiction Studies to support archival research in
topics related to science fiction, broadly construed.

We have two categories of awards:

Category 1
Postdoctoral Research Fellowship
Amount: Up to $3000: 1 award each year

In the collective global imaginary, humans seemingly write the world in isolation. We dictate the climate, biodiversity, and natural resources but we also control the ways in which the world is perceived through literature. This roundtable considers how literature is a co-constitutive process written through connectivity across time and space, landscapes, species, environments, and voices by humans and more-than-humans.

DEADLINE: April 5, 2026

In light of the recent resurgence in scholarly work on the writings of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, we are proposing an MLA volume on “Approaches to Teaching the Works of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman.” Freeman’s oeuvre is extensive, and her work intersects with queer studies, disability studies, animal studies, food studies, Gothic studies, ecocriticism, labor history, and more. The MLA will decide whether to commission a book based on the quality and quantity of survey responses, so if you are a scholar who engages Freeman in the classroom, we would appreciate it if you would complete the survey. If you are interested in contributing to this volume, we also invite you to submit a proposal.

Call for Papers (CFP) for ISBN Edited Volume
Edited Volume Title: Body Politics in Literature

About the Volume

The body in literature is never neutral; it is a site where power is exercised, identities are shaped, and social meanings are constantly negotiated. Rather than viewing the body as a purely biological entity, literary texts reveal it as something produced through cultural norms, political structures, and ideological forces. This edited volume, Body Politics in Literature, aims to investigate how writers across different periods and traditions represent the body as a space of control, conflict, and transformation.

Trans embodiments have been lived and conceptualized in multiple ways throughout the long and complex history of Southeast Europe. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, state institutions – through legal and medical frameworks grounded in early sexology – largely criminalized and pathologized transness. These classifications often entailed invasive and frequently involuntary legal and medical interventions, and were accompanied by profound social marginalization. At the same time, the reception and dissemination of sexological and juridical knowledge across Southeast Europe remained uneven, shaped by the divergent historical trajectories of the region’s post-imperial formations.

William Faulkner and Louise Erdrich

A Conference Sponsored by the Center for Faulkner Studies

Southeast Missouri State University

Cape Girardeau, Missouri

October 22-24, 2026

**DEADLINE EXTENDED to 13 April 2026**

Call for Papers: 

Listening to Possible Worlds 

Sound and Music in Speculative Literature and Culture 

22-23 October 2026, Leiden University, the Netherlands (in-person) 

Confirmed keynote speakers are Anna Snaith (King’s College London) and Chris Tonelli (University of Groningen) 

Narratives of Resistance and African Literature: Articulating Dissent, Disobedience and Pluriversal Futures

Special issue of English Academy Review (Taylor and Francis)

Link: https://think.taylorandfrancis.com/special_issues/narratives-of-resistan...

Special Issue Editor(s)

Goutam Karmakar, University of Hyderabad, India
goutamkarmakar@uohyd.ac.in

Archival Abundance and Silences in Islamic Studies: A Graduate Conference 

Call for Proposals

October 2nd – 3rd 2026

Princeton University

Keynote Speaker: Nancy Khalek, Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Associate Professor of History at Brown University 

The year 2026 marks the centenary of Michel Foucault’s birth, a milestone that invites a profound reassessment of a thinker whose "grey, meticulous" genealogies have fundamentally altered the landscape of the humanities. For the students of literature, Foucault remains an indispensable figure, not merely as a philosopher of the prison or the clinic, but as the premier architect of the "space of language." His move to dissociate the text from the sovereign "Author", famously articulated in his 1969 essay What is an Author?, transformed the literary work from a vessel of personal genius into a site of discursive struggle.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o stands as one of the most formidable literary and intellectual voices of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Novelist, playwright, theorist, memoirist, and advocate of linguistic decolonisation, Ngũgĩ’s work continues to shape debates on coloniality, nationalism, language politics, global capitalism, and epistemic justice.

Call For Papers

The 3rd International Conference on Global Plant Humanities

Botanical Life in Art, Science, and Imagination

Conference Dates:     8–10 May 2026 (Fri–Sun)

Mode:                         Hybrid (Physical & Virtual)

Host:                           Department of English, North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong, Meghalaya, India

Tentative Title- Cross Imagination and Literary Production: African Writers and Indian Characters, Indo- African Writers and African Characters

Globalectics is the interrelationship of all things, the mutual containment of the local and the global.”
— Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing (2012)

CFP: WHAT MIRACLE: NEW REVELATIONS ON THE PROSE POEM

**The deadline for this CFP has now been extended to Wednesday, April 1.** 

October 15 and 16, 2026, in Rome, Italy

In the early stages of understanding the scope of the most horrifying criminal empire in American history, we are grappling with academia’s role in it. Several faculty members and institutions have been implicated. A few were genuinely innocent and ignored Epstein’s invitations, and some were willingly complicit in crimes against humanity. 

Epstein’s co-conspirators have fundamentally compromised the student-teacher relationship and the student-university relationship.

The Journal of Therapeutic and Applied Geek and Gaming Culture (TAGGC) is a new academic journal for professionals studying the intersections of Geek and Gaming cultures and mental health to share their work. 

Between Then and Now: Performing Archives

The Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, 23-24 June 2026

Convened by the Performance Research Group, Manchester School of Theatre, Manchester Metropolitan University

Call for contributions

The way our current globally interconnected and digitally enabled capitalist formation continuously reshapes itself to reinforce categories of class and overarching capitalist structures requires analyses that engage and critique these adaptive forces of capital. Responding to this need, this seminar seeks to examine the relationship of texts to a global capitalist economy by asking how class and capitalism function within and exert force upon texts and their contexts—in film, literature, art, video games, social media, and other extratextual spaces such as fan sites. In concert with this year’s theme, we also invite examinations of representations of the capitalist ruling class and the material and ideological effects of these representations.

Conteseting Scientific Literacies: New Tools for a New WorldEdited by Meg M. Marquardt and Lourdes Cardozo Gaibisso, Mississippi State UniversitySend questions and proposals to: contestingsciliteracy@gmail.com 

Call for Papers: MLA 2027 - Los Angeles

The William Morris Society in the United States is soliciting proposals for two panels at next year's MLA (January 7-10, 2027 in Los Angeles). You are warmly invited to submit proposals for either session. Please submit your proposals to the email addresses listed with each CFP. Submissions must be received by March 22.

William Morris, Labor & the Nineteenth Century

Extended Deadline (MLA 2027): William Morris, Collections Technology & the Virtual Archive

Call for Papers: MLA 2027 - Los Angeles

The William Morris Society in the United States is soliciting proposals for two panels at next year's MLA (January 7-10, 2027 in Los Angeles). You are warmly invited to submit proposals for either session. Please submit your proposals to the email addresses listed with each CFP. Submissions must be received by March 22.

William Morris, Collections Technology & the Virtual Archive

See below for a call for papers to the upcoming ASAP (Association for the Arts of the Present), which takes place in Madison, WI on October 15-17, 2026. We invite contributions on the narrative dimensions of any contemporary "brainrot" or "slop" media- with particular interest in genre, grand narrative, minimal narrative, short form, segmentivity, seriality, plot, character, etc.