John Steinbeck once remarked that fellow-Californian Robinson Jeffers wrote some the “greatest poetry since Whitman.” Steinbeck kept a significant collection of Jeffers work both in his personal library and Ed Ricketts’ Lab, where Jeffers was an influential topic in their endlessly varied conversations. When asked about possibility of meeting the poet, Steinbeck declined with a telling degree of reverence: “His poetry is perfect to me, and I don’t think one should get the man mixed up with his work.” Although they did eventually meet—notably when Steinbeck lived in Monterey in 1944—their relationship was one of distant, though friendly, mutual respect.

This seminar is seeking like-minded presenters for a productive discussion focused on noise as a concept and an approach to exploring the intersection of sound studies and literature! The 2027 ACLA conference will take place in Houston, Texas (the University of Houston) on May 20-23, 2027. Please submit an abstract (around 250 words) with title to the seminar via the ACLA online portal by September 22, 2026. Please feel free to reach out to the seminar organizer Dr. Yiren Zheng (yiren.zheng@dartmouth.edu) with any questions!

Neighborhood Modernisms

Modernism/modernity Print Plus Cluster Pitch

Anushka Sen, Loyola University Chicago (asen2@luc.edu)

Ria Banerjee, CUNY Guttman Community College and the Graduate Center (sbanerjee@gc.cuny.edu)

The editors of a volume under contract with Routledge’s Environmental Literature, Culture and Media series are seeking a 7,000-word essay on Monique Roffey’s The Mermaid of Black Conch. The volume focuses on rewritten water myths in English and situates itself in current debates in the blue and environmental humanities. It grows out of an international conference on the topic that the editors held at Lund University in June 2026.

Coaching, Psychology and the Art of Leadership
A Transdisciplinary Conference Inspired by Ted Lasso

 Conference page: https://labrc.co.uk/2026/08/17/coaching-psychology/

Date: November 27-28, 2026

Location: Nov 27: Duke Street Church Richmond, London, United Kingdom (and online)

Nov 28: Online

Fees (for both attendees and presenters):
£180 (In person participation)
£100 (Online participation)
Prices exclude Eventbrite fees

Graphic Narratives has become part of an expanding literary field, absorbing and redirecting the ideological, formal, and creative energies of contemporary fiction.

(Chute and DeKoven768)

Online Conference 26-27 November 2027

Punk has never stayed where it was put. Emerging from the economic, political and cultural upheavals of the 1970s, punk became music, style, attitude, subculture, political language and cultural mythology. From London, New York, Sydney, Belfast, Berlin, Tokyo and Jakarta, punk travelled rapidly while taking radically different local forms. It transformed music and fashion, challenged conventions of gender and sexuality, generated distinctive visual and material cultures, and provided a language through which alienation, anger, resistance and belonging could be expressed.

The Evelyn Scott Society invites abstracts of 1-2 pages on the American writer Evelyn Scott (1893-1963).

Papers may focus on any of her works (novels, memoirs, poetry, young adult literature) and take any contemporary critical approach. We are especially interested in papers investigating the canonicity process, the literary networks to which Scott belonged, or the role of disability in her career, but all topics will be considered. Scott participated in various and major literary currents during her writing life, including Imagism, naturalism, and modernism,. She had a variety of literary mentors, including Lola Ridge, Theodore Dreiser, Waldo Frank, William Carlos Williams, Emma Goldman, and Jean Rhys, among others. 

This panel seeks papers that interrogate Asian American injury as a recurring motif and rhetoric in literature and media. Recent Asian American scholarship and aesthetic/cultural production have promoted the political utility of minor affects (Sianne Ngai, Cathy Park Hong), new discourses and praxes of collectivity and community (“cut fruit diaspora”; the emergence of “Wasia” and “Wasian meetups”), and sentimental identification through commodities and commodification in the current moment of late-stage capitalism (Crying in HMart; Ocean Vuong’s inclusion in Oprah’s Book Club).

CFP: DLC+ Presents Current Keywords in Digital Literary Culture Mini-Conference: "Trope" and "Maxxing"

We are excited to announce the third installment of our Current Keywords in Digital Literary Culture series, mini-conferences devoted to studying the most pressing and emerging concepts actively shaping digital literary culture.

Call for Papers

Digital & Analog Cultures

Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)

48th Annual Conference, February 17-20, 2027

Marriott Albuquerque

Albuquerque, New Mexico

https://swpaca.org

Submissions open: September 1, 2026

Proposal submission deadline: October 31, 2026

CFP “Troubler of the Poor World’s Peace?”

An International Symposium on Global Richard III

University of Murcia (Spain)

16-18 February, 2027

Keynote speakers:

Nicoletta Caputo (University of Pisa)

Genevieve Love (Colorado College)

Sonia Massai (University of Rome/KCL)

Erica Sheen (University of York)

Jeffrey R. Wilson (University of Harvard)

In an environment of increasing digital distraction, courses exploring nineteenth-century literature and culture ask students to engage with some of literature’s lengthiest texts. How can we encourage meaningful engagement with nineteenth century “loose, baggy monsters” in today’s university? What resources can we call upon to better engage our students and support their learning in light of the rise of AI and the challenges of online distraction?

For this panel, participants will share a 5-10-minute presentation and include discussion of a specific working assignment, assessment strategy, experiential learning opportunity, or in-class activity.

British Scene, British Scenes ?

The Local Worlds of Rock Music in the United Kingdom

Call for articles for a special issue of the

Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique - French Journal of British Studies: https://journals.openedition.org/rfcb/

Since the widespread emergence of Generative AI a few years ago, educators across disciplines have been reconsidering how technology shapes teaching, learning, writing, and assessment. While some departments and faculty have leaned into these new Large Language Models and the technological "advances" they offer, others have worked just as diligently to keep AI out of their classrooms.

Call for SubmissionsMusicTheatreDance: The Journal of the Music Theatre Dance AssociationIssue 1 (2027) “Imagine it”Editors: Stephanie Lim, Kathryn Edney, Hye Won Kim, Vicki Hoskins, Shiraz Biggie, and Adrienne Oehlers Imagine it: Scholarship as performance. Performance as practice. Practice as inquiry. Inquiry as pedagogy. Join us in imagining what MusicTheatreDance Journal can be. We call upon you, the scholars, educators, and practitioners in and across the performing arts, to help us envision how to break down the barriers in traditional scholarship and the communities in which we co-exist.

An International Conference on Climate Change and Epistemic Recovery: Indigenous Pathways

Conference date: 6-7 February 2027
Submission of abstract: 1 October 2026
Notification of Acceptance: 7 October 2026

Organised by the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, BITS Pilani, in academic collaboration with the Department of English, Bodoland University, Kokrajhar

“Culture,” notes Raymond Williams, “is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language” (87). Its etymological root in cultivation—the tending and propagation of life—signals a resistance to being contained. Classroom pedagogy encompasses various elements into it—mythology, rituals, religion, tradition; movies, songs, literature; fashion, food, art—classifying it as ‘a whole way of life.’ Yet, culture surpasses being merely a way of life; it represents a way of understanding life and saturating existence with meaning. In the 19th Century, Matthew Arnold viewed culture as a framework supporting liberal humanist ideology, which aimed to prescribe a universal definition of excellence.

The Lives and Memory of Objects

Editors Marta Caraion, Arleen Ionescu, Mirta Kupferminc and Simona Mitroiu

Call for Papers

Bloomsbury Cultural Histories Series

A Cultural History of Countercultures in the Long-Nineteenth Century

Volume Editors:

Rhi Johnson (Indiana University Bloomington)

Gabrielle Miller (Baylor University)

Although the term “counterculture” is a recent development, tracing back only to the 1970s, cultural

movements and ideals that reject established social values and practices, or that oppose traditional,

Conference Dates: 23-24 October 2026

Format: Online (via ZOOM)

International, interdisciplinary conference titled:

Healing Narratives: Exploring Humanity in Medicine and Healthcare

Journal Submissions: Indiana English deadline for submissions: May 30, 2027 full name / name of organization: Indiana English (Indiana College English Association) contact email: zimmerlys@uindy.edu 

Call for Papers

The Silences of the Lyric

« The best communion men have is in silence »

Thoreau, Walden

In-Person Seminar at American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) in Houston, TX, May 20-23, 2027.