Current Research in Speculative Fiction 2025

15th Annual Conference

Boundaries: transgression, subversion, deconstruction

July 3rd & 4th 2025

University of Liverpool (Hybrid)

All bodies are, in some sense; engines driven by the health or disease of their owners, jackets of flesh that are the physical sum of their wearers. But to become your disease? To become the consumption itself? (Kathe Koja, The Cipher)

That's how the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live inits reality. (Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation)

The Popular Arts Conference (PAC) invites submissions for our 18th Annual meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, August 28 – September 1, 2025.

PAC is an annual academic conference for the studies of comics and the popular arts, including science/speculative fiction and fantasy literature, film, and other media; comic books; manga; graphic novels; anime; gaming; etc., presented to a mixed audience of scholars and fans. The mission of PAC is to promote scholarship on popular culture and to encourage the engagement between scholars and fans in order to deepen our understanding of the popular arts. PAC presentations are peer reviewed, based on scholarly research.

Call for Papers for the inaugural event of CHASE's newly established Refugee Justice Network for a Borderless World: Borders proliferate and refugeehood expands at the present time. Borders follow us everywhere, they are not just physical; they are as much digital, institutional, social,  imaginative. Bordering methods that exert their force on human lives and experiences by ordering statehood, stagnation and citizenship regimes have for long been in discussion. However, the nuances and challenges of the problem are yet to be re-evaluated and re-thought. While discussions of certain geographical areas and lives affected by borders have been in the spotlight, many remained unanalysed and, as a result, invisible.

Cultural Circulations, Global Mobilities, and Knowledge Translations: Turning Points in the Nineteenth Century

The nineteenth century witnessed an unprecedented acceleration and densification of human movements that generated, perhaps for the first time, cultural circulations on a global scale. With the world more interconnected than it had ever been, the need to classify, translate and hierarchise knowledge became more pressing than ever.

Call for Paper Presentations – Lit-Treat: Edition V

The Department of Languages and Literature – English at SSSIHL invites research scholars and postgraduate students to submit unpublished papers for Lit-Treat: Edition V, a National Conference on “Language, Literature, and Beyond: Exploring New Frontiers in English Studies” to be held on 14 & 15 March 2025 at the Prasanthi Nilayam Campus, Puttaparthi, Andhra Pradesh. The event will feature plenary talks by eminent academicians & writers and a panel discussion.

The proposed panel dovetails with this year’s conference theme for ASALH "African American labor." While it is true that “Black labor has been central to political, economic, social, cultural, and technological transformations,” the hardships of that labor and the intricacies of Black lived experiences have also led to all types of death. As people of African descent continue to be accosted on multiple fronts, examining both our historical and present-day experiences around the subject of death is an undertaking worth engaging. In recent years, conversations about the uncomfortable subject of death were facilitated by the pandemic, and several studies have documented the disproportionate mortality rate from COVID-19 for Black people in the United States.

Everywhere Below Canada: The Black South Outside the South

SSSL-Affiliated Session

MLA 2026, Toronto, Canada

January 8-11

MLA 2026  (Toronto Jan. 8-11 2026)

Feministas Unidas-Non-Guaranteed Session

Title: Sexual Violence and Power: Sexual Assault As a Metaphor for Political Culture.

In recounting how she introduces prison abolition work to skeptics, Ruth Wilson Gilmore shares the principle, “where life is precious, life is precious.” This life-affirming axiom grounds a praxis that is about changing everything, breaking with oppressive power systems and making worlds that reduce harm by investing in care. At the same time, the ongoing climate crisis reinforces a horizon of extinction that reorients the relationships between more-than-human and human lives, demanding more radical conceptions of our collective world(s). A. Naomi Paik, for instance, develops the idea of “abolitionist sanctuary” out of the movement for immigrant rights.

HCIS Journal (2025 Edition)

(Call for Papers & Published Papers)

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Human-centric Computing and Information Sciences (HCIS)

ISSN: 2192-1962, Editor-in-Chief: Jong Hyuk Park

Impact Factor: 3.9

http://hcisj.com/

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CFP: ‘My Wild Heart Bleeds: Exploring Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla’and its legacy’

Sheridan Le Fanu published his sapphic vampire tale ‘Carmilla’ in 1872, reworking the vampire genre, and creating a figure who has inspired subsequent original works and reimaginings. This collection focuses on new explorations and readings of ‘Carmilla’ and its ongoing legacy, from adaptations and reimaginings to more subtle influences on the figure of the female vampire and the vampiric tradition more broadly.

International Society for Philosophy in Film (ISPiF) Fourth Annual Symposium

Call for Abstracts August 28-30, 2025 London, England

https://www.philosophyliterature.com/ispif

Theme: Comedy: Darkness and Light

Abstract Deadline April 15, 2025

Completed papers due July 30, 2025 

The University of Southern Mississippi’s English Graduate Organization (EGO) invites abstracts and proposals from Mississippi and Gulf States graduate students for its annual spring conference, a two-day, in-person event on April 4th and 5th at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, MS. 

Theme: Worlds Beyond

The Jack Williamson Lectureship at Eastern New Mexico University (ENMU) invites scholars, academics, and researchers to submit abstracts for academic papers and/or proposals for panel presentations focused on the intersection of speculative fiction (science fiction, fantasy, horror, and hybrid genres) with the evolving notion of the (post)human. The theme for this year's Lectureship is "Worlds Beyond” with distinguished guest of honor Darcie Little Badger, the Locus, Nebula, Ignyte, and Newberry Honor Award winning author of Elatsoe and A Snake Falls to Earth. The event will also feature several other speculative fiction authors.