Building Spaces of Freedom
Society for the Study of Southern Literature 2026 CFP
Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee, March 28-31, 2026

The Society for the Study of Southern Literature seeks submissions for our biennial conference, which will take place March 28-31, 2026, at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee.

Keynote Speakers: Michele Aaron (University of Warwick) and Jean-Baptiste Thoret (Université
de Poitiers)

Epistemologies and Pathways to Truth

The University of Maryland’s Graduate English Organization (GEO) invites proposals relating to the theme of “Epistemologies and Pathways to Truth” for our 19th annual graduate student conference, to be held in person on Friday, March 27, 2026 at UMD, College Park. 

12–14 March 2026

Queer Bibliography in the South:

Space, Place, Community

Athens, GA and online

Queer Bibliography invites proposals for papers considering how gender, sexuality, and textuality intersect with place in the production of queer identity.

Paper proposals are welcome on any aspect of Hardy’s life, work, and legacy for the Twenty-Seventh International Hardy Conference and Festival (Dorchester, Dorset, UK; July 25th—August 1st 2026). Significant Hardy anniversaries in 2026 include the 150th anniversary of The Hand of Ethelberta, the 140th anniversary of The Mayor of Casterbridge, the 120th anniversary of The Dynasts (Part 2), and the 110th anniversary of Selected Poems. Proposals for papers on any of these anniversary texts are especially welcome.

Papers should be planned for delivery times of a maximum of 20 minutes (approximately 2000 words).

For the occident, a surprising cultural norm in India is that of men holding hands. Seen as unconventional and in sharp contrast to the West, the phenomenon symbolic of India (in particular) and South Asia at large became a project in 2018, whereby photographer Vincent Dolman created a series depicting an organic and intimate aspect of male friendship. Appreciating such uninhibitedness in a country given to rampant homophobia and toxic masculinity, Dolman, in one of his interviews, observes how such practices hold a mirror to society and societal conventions of masculine constructions and performances. 

Duplicity/Duplicität: Betwixt intimates and strangers.

Opening Symposium of the collaborative research project Studies in Remoteness. Sensoria of Absence, Distance and Neglect.

https://userblogs.fu-berlin.de/remoteness/winter-symposium-2026/ 
https://www.nsuweb.org/circle-1-studies-in-remoteness-sensoria-of-absenc...

January 29-31 2026. 

Call for additional chapters for an edited collection (under consideration by publisher): proposals due November 16, 2025

Land of the Free, Home of the Brave?: American Children’s Literature in an Era of Heightened Censorship

In a country advocating, loudly, the rights of the individual, what about child readers? Are they granted an expansive vision of their world? What rights do children have where books are concerned?

Call for Submissions

Queering Sikh Identity and Desire through Lyrical Uprisings and the Poetics of Becoming

We invite poets from India and its diaspora to submit work that explores queerness in relation to their Sikh identity, sexuality, and the body. You do not need to identify as LGBTQIA+ to contribute—this call is open to those navigating self-discovery through poetry, as well as those who affirm and celebrate their queerness on the page.

7TH ANNUAL MODERN LITERATURES & LINGUISTICS INTERDISCIPLINARY GRADUATE CONFERENCE

“Beyond Fracture: Reimagining Futures through Divergence and Convergence”

Constructing New Paths Across Division, Resistance, and Solidarity

Florida State University, Tallahassee Campus

March 5-6, 2026

Submission Deadline: October 17, 2025

Submit Abstracts Here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSd9Eg_pf3fbRWz-67bQY8DeLQ4tkIl-...

The National Humanities Center (NHC) invites proposals for the Being Human Festival (US), a public humanities initiative for diverse, non-academic audiences across regions and subject areas. Events for this year’s Festival will take place April 18–May 2, 2026, and will be organized around the theme of “Between the Lines”–a space of hidden histories, shifting borders, and unspoken meanings.

Poetry’s Environments  (June 9-11 2026)

Poetry shapes and transforms experiences and attitudes toward nature and ecology, just as the natural environment maps the poetic imagination. Poetry roots itself in the environment of the breath, the voice, the hand, and the ear. It roams over pages of books and across digital, computational, performative, archival, monumental, and ephemeral landscapes. Poetry emerges and resides in institutional and ad hoc ecosystems, and it sounds and senses within and without the body of the poet, the audience, the blade of grass.

ELLAK 2026 International Conference

The End: Reclaiming the Beginning

Dates: December 17–19, 2026
Venue: Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul, South Korea
Host: The English Language and Literature Association of Korea (ELLAK)

Keynote Speakers

THE BILLY JOEL SYMPOSIUM

A Two-Day Academic Conference Presented by the Long Island Music and Entertainment Hall of Fame

Stony Brook, NY | June 6–7, 2026

OVERVIEW

We invite submissions for Lands of the Lost: A Field Guide to Dinosaur Parks Physical, Fictional, and for the Future, an edited collection that explores extinct animal parks real, imagined, unrealized, or yet to be. Our goal is to bring together multi-disciplinary perspectives to examine parks across time and space, across fact and fiction. We seek to understand how these projects, which reconstitute and enclose long-extinct life forms, intersect with histories of science, capitalism, imperialism, environmental change, and more.

Peace in the Age of Forever Wars

Temple University

April 3–4, 2026

Today, the Cold War is theorized through the organizational structure of the nation state (political knowledge) and area studies (institutional knowledge). Yet, in this framework, the key role of language—in diplomacy, intelligence, interrogation, and more—is often underlooked. Indeed, the Cold War and the ongoing cold war of today as a cultural, diplomatic exchange relies fundamentally on translation. While language has been privileged within area studies, with its focus on literary translation (Okada 2002), the perforation of the concept of “language” itself as a tool and weapon during the Cold War deserves greater analysis (Martin-Nielsen 2010, Haddadian-Moghaddam & Scott-Smith 2020).

CFP: Lexicon for Animacy

In 2015, i-D magazine declared the year of the ‘sad girl’ (Thelandersson 2022: 157). In the decade since, portrayals of depressed, anxious, and mentally burdened women have scarcely abated, from the breakout success of Sally Rooney to the emergence of Sad Girl BookTok to Gen Z’s recent rediscovery of Lana Del Rey. Meanwhile, in the academy, subfields such as Affect Theory, Disability Studies, and Madness Studies represent growing areas of interest for increasing numbers of researchers and students.

The Hemingway Letters Project, under the direction of General Editor Sandra Spanier and Associate Editor Verna Kale, invites proposals for the panel "The Hemingway Letters Project: Emerging Research" to be presented at the 21st Biennial Hemingway Conference, July 20-25, 2026 in Toronto.

Edouard Glissant and Michael Wiedorn call us to “think” with or like a geography. Evolving out of cultural studies, island and archipelagic studies have spurred a conversation regarding the connection between geography and culture. While Glissant and Wiedorn were particularly preoccupied with thinking (like) an archipelago, it is possible yet to conceive of other modes of geographical thought. Transatlantic, island, and even aquatic matrices of culture and geography have been well documented and studied. This panel welcomes submissions in the field of archipelagic and island studies and is particularly interested in papers exploring methods of geographical thought, the relationship between geography and culture, in the US South.

The Western genre has been widely read within the confines of a national cinema and culture of the United States. However, the field of Film Studies has increasingly sought to emancipate the Western genre from discourses of American myth and identity, instead exploring its ongoing production, circulation, and reception beyond the borders of the United States (including Miller 2013; Higgins 2015; Mayer 2022, among many more). This body of work has significantly expanded our understanding of the Western’s transnational dimensions by highlighting the genre’s local rewritings on a global scale, and unpacking the complex transcultural negotiations involved in appropriating what is often considered an inherently American genre.

[re]frame is an online academic space that aims to amplify and foster early career scholarship as well as provide space for academic dialogue in postcolonial studies and related fields of study. Our academic blog is committed to investigating and problematising the complexities of forms of colonial, anticolonial, and decolonial patterns, phenomena, and infrastructures, as well as how they manifest in literary and cultural studies. Formed under the aegis of the GAPS (Association for Anglophone Postcolonial Studies), [re]frame encourages investigations of academia and academic practices, such as the colonial legacies of universities and the coloniality of knowledge systems that inform epistemologies.

THE LANGUAGES OF FASHION: CRITICAL REFLECTIONS ON FASHION DISCOURSESFashion Highlight Journal Call for paper Issue 7 (2026)

Guest editors Benjamin Wild and Natalia Berger

Fashion has been personified as the younger sister of Death, a daughter of Caducity. It has been portrayed as a lifelong companion and described as capitalism’s favourite child. It has been conceptualised as a belief, a system, and an empire. These varied characterisations hint at fashion’s complexity as both cultural phenomenon and global industry.