The 2026 Benedict College International Multidisciplinary Conference (2026 BCIMC)
Thursday and Friday, April 23-24, 2026, at 9:00 AM-5:00 PM

Sponsored by the School of Communication, Arts, and Social Sciences (CASS)

CONFERENCE WEBSITE
https://benedict.edu/bciimc

CONFERENCE FORMAT
Hybrid
In-Person and Virtual

CONFERENCE VENUE
Benedict College
Dr. David H. Swinton Campus Center 
1616 Oak Street
Columbia, SC 29204

CONFERENCE THEME
The Age of Artificial Intelligence Across Academic Disciplines

Call for Papers 2026

For the inaugural 2026 meeting of our research group, Race, Ethnicity, and Identity in the Bible and the Ancient Mediterranean, we invite papers that explore how ancient identities were forged, reshaped, or contested in contexts of conflict, tension, and instability. Our theme for this year is Contested Identities in the Bible and the Ancient Mediterranean: Identity Formation in Contexts of Struggle and Conflict.

This panel explores the intersections of literature, sociability, and the history of emotions in the Hispanic world during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Following Raymond Williams’s notion of “structures of feeling” and Barbara Rosenwein’s concept of “emotional communities,” as well as more recent work in affect theory (Ahmed 2004), we consider emotions not as private, psychological states but as cultural and social practices. Recent scholarship has also stressed the dual nature of emotion concepts—oscillating between natural and normative kinds (Scarantino 2025)—and their role in shaping both political discourses and collective identities.

 “I, I wear a plastic suit / Plastic is my food / Perhaps, I’m plastic too,” sang the iconic Yugoslav New Wave band Idoli in their 1981 song “Plastika” (“Plastics”). These lyrics captured a 1980s moment in which Yugoslav production, import, and consumption of plastics reached their peak. Yet the groundwork for it had been laid in the preceding decades, since plastics production had begun shortly after the Second World War and rapidly permeated all aspects of everyday life (see Filipović 2023). Importantly, Yugoslavia’s trajectory differed from that of the Eastern Bloc.

Call for Papers

Following the success of the I International Conference on Gender Studies & Intermedial Narratives (UCM, 2024), this new edition seeks to go further, deeper, and bolder. If last year we worked around the idea of intermediality, this year we want to explore its most visceral and material dimension: how gender is inscribed on, through, and as bodies—and how bodies themselves become texts, interfaces, archives, and narrative machines.We begin with a simple premise: every text is a body, and every body is a text.

This is a Call for Papers for a special issue titled, "Mapping the Diverse Horizons of Oral History in India: Theory, Method, Practice." The central idea of the special issue is to map the multiple directions in which oral history is evolving within India today and to highlight its significance in understanding lives, histories, and identities that often remain outside conventional archives. The issue will be published in collaboration with The Oral History Review [ https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/uohr20  Scopus, Q1].

We invite interested individuals to send us an abstract based on the following themes, but not limited to:

NATIONAL SEMINAR ONDigital Futures and Beyond: Emerging Paradigms in English Studies

27 December 2025

Organised by
Department of English, Hill-Top Degree College, Mohana, Gajapati, Odisha
Venue: Seminar Hall, Hill-Top Degree College
Website:www.hilltopdegreecollegemohana.edu.in

 Invitation

Perennially understudied, Eurasia – as both a geographical and conceptual constellation – opens up a novel and fertile space for scholarly contributions. This call for papers invites submissions that engage with the region’s alternative media, information, and communications histories, bridging past and future frameworks, methodologies and forms.

ATHE 2026

“ACTIVATING IMAGINATION IN/AND COMMUNITY”
July 22–26, 2026  |  Baltimore, Maryland

This year’s conference theme, "Activating Imagination in/and Community," asks us to think deeply and courageously about the role of theatre and performance in shaping our shared presents and collective futures. It challenges us to contemplate not just what we do, but how and with whom we do it, while recognizing that, in the face of growing political repression and institutional instability, our collaborations—across disciplines, communities, and identities—are simultaneously more vulnerable and vital than ever.

Strangeness and Oddity:
Embracing the Extraordinary in Arts-Based Research

Conference Webpage: https://labrc.co.uk/2025/12/08/strangeness-and-oddity-2026/

A Transdisciplinary Conference
March 10-11, 2026
Online

Abstract Submission Deadline: January 31, 2026

Focusing on the past decade – particularly the summer of 2020 and its aftermath, which witnessed an unprecedented wave of iconoclastic acts against monuments and statues linked to colonialism, white supremacy, and slavery, alongside renewed calls for the decolonisation of museums and urban toponyms – much of the subsequent scholarly attention in English has centred on developments in the Anglophone world.

For Critical Insights volume under contract:

Madness in Literature

DEADLINE FOR PROPOSALS: January 9, 2026

Please consider submitting an abstract for the edited collection, Reconfiguring Critical Thinking in Higher Education for the 21st Century (Springer, Education).

We welcome research on critical thinking in higher education in Southeast Asia. The first section of the collection endeavours to define critical thinking in the current climate. The essays of the second section share classroom activities and curriculum design that aim to teach critical thinking. And the final section considers how LLMs can both facilitate and inhibit the cultivation of critical thinking in student learners. 

We aim to have completed articles ready for submission by August, 2026. 

FOR LANCELOT ANDREWES

September 25th 2026 marks the 400th anniversary of Lancelot Andrewes’ death. It also marks the 100th anniversary of an essay by T. S. Eliot which appeared first in the TLS and was later collected into the volume named after it: For Lancelot Andrewes. This essay instigated modern critical interest in Andrewes’ intellectual and imaginative legacy, and is a significant event not just for sermon studies but for the conjunction of modernism and early modernism, and the influence of the renaissance period on the poets and thinkers of the twentieth century and beyond.

Queering food in the 21st Century

Generally, the notion of identity is misinterpreted to be something concrete or even an inherited attribute and hence resistant to changes. However, as we delve deeper into the idea of self and the factors that constitute it, a fact becomes evident: that an individual’s identity is in fact not very rigid but rather fluid and dynamic in nature. A number of societal factors influence the construction of the character that an individual identifies themselves with. Through a close textual analysis of The Last White Man (2022) by Mohsin Hamid, this paper aims to explore the concept of identity in contrast to its conventional definition of something unalterable, and rather look at it as an idea that is constantly in motion.

The Black Theatre Association (BTA), a focus group of the Association of Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), invites submissions for our upcoming 2026 Summer Conference in Baltimore, MD, from July 22-26, 2026.

Theme: Revival and Rejuvenation

Call for papers

XIV Global IABA Conference 2026

International Auto/Biography Association

RESIST TO EXIST:

Life writing, democracy, and conceivable futures

State University of Bahia (UNEB)

Salvador, Bahia, Brazil

July 21-24, 2026

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS--January 30, 2026

The Journal of Research in Contemporary World Literature (indexed in Scopus) invites original, unpublished research articles for a special issue dedicated to Contemporary African and Arabic Literature. This issue seeks contributions that explore literary production, cross-cultural encounters, postcolonial and decolonial aesthetics, migration and diaspora, oral and performance traditions, and new media literatures within African and Arabic-speaking contexts. The journal is a peer-reviewed, open-access quarterly that publishes in English.

Themes and Topics

We are pleased to announce that the 42nd International Conference on Psychology and the Arts will be held at University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, CO4 3SQ, England, UK, June 23-June 26, 2026. The University of Essex, with three campuses, was founded as a research university by public charter in 1965, and is one of the original plate glass universities. With a commitment to academic excellence and diversity, The University of Essex’s Colchester campus is “a world in one place,” home to 15,000 students from over 130 countries.

RMMLA 2026 – Call for Papers
Asian Drama and Performance Panel
 
REVOLUTIONARY BODIES
Staging Thought and Affect on the Asian Stage
How do bodies on Asian stages think, feel, and make worlds?
This panel explores the performing body as a site where concepts are articulated and affects are distributed. Inspired by Emily Wilcox’s Revolutionary Bodies and theoretical work by Bruno Latour, Rita Felski, Susan Leigh Foster, André Lepecki, among others, we consider the body not as a mute vehicle for meaning, but as an interface that negotiates power, history, and desire.

Call for Papers to the special issue “Dalit Studies in India: Interrogating Epistemological Injuries and Silences” for Global South Literary Studies

Special issue editors:

Arunima Ray, Lady Shri Ram College for Women, University of Delhi, India

Milind E. Awad, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India

Austerity 

April 10-11, 2026 

 The 2026 edition of the Equinoxes graduate student conference at Brown University 

Call for Papers

Spark: HKCAL Postgraduate Lightning Talks

Theme: Emerging Voices – Testing Ideas in Research on Hong Kong

Date: 5-6 June 2026 (online)

The Hong Kong Cultures, Arts and Languages (HKCAL) Research Network invites submissions for Spark: HKCAL Postgraduate Lightning Talks, to be held on 12-13 June 2026.