The ongoing developments in artificial intelligence and machine learning automation announce an imminent technological revolution like nothing we have ever seen. Our relation to traditional labor markets, artistic creation, and modes of education has already been drastically disrupted and will potentially change even more. It seems that we are witnessing the dawn of a new age in which human intellectual and productive capacities are outsourced to machines and human connection is mediated by algorithms in digital spaces.

Rising water levels in oceans and rivers, streams with high flood waves, and torrential rains that turn puddles into lakes: houses that are currently exposed to such increasingly regular water events are becoming a problematic, if not catastrophic, environment. The protective function that the house is supposed to have according to its original idea and design is being compromised. While roofs and walls are supposed to keep out wind and water—and the traditional European gabled roof is primarily designed to divert water from above—in these extreme weather scenarios, basements are flooded, roofs are torn off, entire houses stand like islands in the water or are even swept away.

How do playwrights imagine and stage ways of being, hoping, and memorializing against censorship and erasure? We invite papers that explore alternative historiographies in post-war Sri Lankan theater and performance. Please share a 300-word abstract and bio.

The Eco-esotericism panel invites submissions that examine the intersection of esoteric thought and ecological consciousness as expressed in literature, cultural texts, and critical theory. Eco-esotericism encompasses approaches that unite spiritual or mystical understandings of nature with ecological critique and environmental activism. Engaging with PAMLA’s 2026 theme, “Our Ruling Classes: Culture, Power, Conflict,” this panel asks: How do esoteric ecological imaginaries reinforce, negotiate, or resist ruling ideologies? How have spiritualized visions of nature shaped elite cultural production, countercultural movements, or alternative political communities?

Special Session Proposal for the 2027 MLA Convention (Los Angeles, 7–10 January 2027).

This MLA 2027 special session, “Unfinished Histories: Literary and Cultural Acts of Hope,” explores radical hope as an emancipatory and dynamic framework for examining how literature, film, and art cultivate creative and relational modes of remembrance. Rather than approaching the past solely through paradigms of loss, grievance, or melancholia, the panel asks how cultural narratives open generative spaces for imagining unfinished futures.

For the 2027 Modern Langauge Association Convention, the MLA Committee on Disability Issues in the Profession welcomes papers about:

• disability restricting ascent within social or academic hierarchies
• anti-hierarchical thinking in literature portraying disabled people
• representations of disabilities according to an imagined hierarchy

Please submit a 300-word abstract and CV to: Cassandra.falke@uit.no

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS

A Cultural History of the Avant-garde in East Asia

Part of: Cultural Histories of the Avant-Garde: A Companion Series (www.brill.com/CHAG)

The companion series is part of an ongoing, large-scale project launched by De Gruyter Brill (a merger of two international publishing houses) that uncovers the cultural history of the avant-garde in major regions of the world. The series on East Asia consists of four volumes, each dealing with specific decades and topics as follows: 

In her introduction to Science in the Archives (2017), Lorraine Daston explores the way that scientific archives function as “repository” of scientific empiricism (10), a process through which scientists preserve scientific findings. What is occluded in this understanding, Daston explains, is that, when scientists ‘convert’ the natural world into its ‘second nature’—i.e. data—the conditions for that translation are controlled, selective, entangled, slowed, sped up, and digitized (10). Daston’s research helps us to consider how science arbitrarily constructs archivable data at an increasing rate: “more people are manipulating more information in more ways, and all at a tempo that baffles ‘what next?’ predictions” (10).

The journal Korpusgermanistik invites submissions for its June 2026 issue. The journal provides an international platform for research across the full spectrum of German Studies, including linguistics, literary studies, cultural studies, and media studies.

All submissions undergo a double-blind peer-review process.

Important Dates

• Full-text submission deadline: 15 April 2026
• Publication of the issue: June 2026

Submission

Authors are kindly asked to submit their full manuscripts via the journal’s online submission system:

Please ensure that your manuscript follows the author guidelines available on the journal website.

The Pleasures and Problems of Pooh

The 3rd Biennial kidlit@hollins Children’s Literature Symposium 

On Zoom

Friday-Sunday, July 10-12, 2026

Hollins University Graduate Programs in Children’s Literature

Chaired by Lisa Rowe Fraustino

This year’s hundredth anniversary of A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, published in 1926, provides a springboard for reflection on the role of classic children’s literature. This online symposium seeks presentation proposals from authors, illustrators, librarians, publishers, educators, and scholars in any field. Possible topics for exploration include:                                     

Children’s accounts of violence occupy a paradoxical space in public discourse: they are framed as both essential, unquestionable evidence, and, sometimes at the same time, as unreliable and prone to outside influence. Both framings rely on cultural constructions of the child’s “innocence.” This panel invites papers examining narratives of violence told by children, with a particular interest in experiences of institutional or state violence. How do these narratives complicate familiar tropes of children as voiceless victims in need of saving, or of certain topics as exclusively “adult” or “childish”?  How do child narrators themselves exploit, resist, and play with or into these tropes?

Seeking presentations addressing multilingualism and linguistic rights in South Asian literature and culture for a guaranteed panel of the MLA-allied South Asian Literary Association. 300-word abstract and short CV.

Deadline for submissions: Sunday, March 15, 2026

Hans-Georg Erney, Georgia Southern U (herney@georgiasouthern.edu )

Video Game and Memory

Call for Book Chapters

"To live an age, yet remember so little…
 Perhaps I should be thankful?”
 Quirrel, NPC in Hollow Knight (2017)
 

Recent archival initiatives have made accessible significant bodies of media work by writers associated with the Black Arts Movement, including projects in film, radio, and television. These rediscoveries invite renewed attention to the movement’s engagement with broadcast and screen media and challenge the longstanding emphasis on poetry, theater, and print culture in scholarship on the period.

CALL FOR PAPERS

October 23–24, 2026

Children, Literature, and the Christian Imagination

An International Conference

Keynote Speaker: Frank Cottrell-Boyce, Screenwriter, Novelist, and Children’s Laureate (UK)

The University of St. Michael’s College invites proposals of individual papers or panels for a conference on the theme of Children, Literature, and the Christian Imagination. The keynote will take place on the evening of October 23 and the conference will take place the following day, October 24, 2026.

Call for ProposalsEthos in Contemporary Contexts: Authority, Identity, and Trust in Contemporary RhetoricEdited, Academic Collection

Panel on the rewards, risks, and ethics of public humanities approaches in the undergraduate classroom. Some possible topics: public project assignments, public writing, community-engaged learning, university/humanities in current political climate, faculty-student collaboration.

Deadline for submissions: Friday, March 20, 2026

Please send 250-500-word abstracts & CVs to Roya Biggie, Knox College (royabiggie@gmail.com ) and Danica Savonick, SUNY Cortland (danicasavonick@gmail.com ).

Humanities Bulletin - Call for papers
Submission Deadline: April 25, 2026
Vol. 9, No. 1 - May, 2026

ISSN 2517-4266

Humanities Bulletin is a multidisciplinary peer-reviewed Journal which features original studies and reviews in the various branches of Humanities, including History, Literature, Philosophy, Arts.
This journal is not allied with any specific school of thinking or cultural tradition; instead, it encourages dialogue between ideas and people with different points of view. Our aim is to bring together different international scholars, in order to promote the dialogue between cultures, ideas and new academic researches.
The Journal is hosted by London Academic Publishing, London, UK.

This panel seeks papers that explore the early modern relationship between loss and melancholy for the Sixteenth Century Society Conference to be held in Chicago, 29-31 October 2026. In his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Robert Burton writes, “Now go and brag of thy present happiness… thou seest in what a brittle state thou art, how soon thou mayst be dejected… by bad diet, bad air, a small loss, a little sorrow or discontent.” Bereavement permeates the early modern landscape, appearing in paintings, prints, poems, plays, ego documents, and legal testimony, among many other sources. It may involve the loss of love, friends, honor, possessions, homeland, freedom, political stability, or even religious conviction.

Call for Papers: Temporalities: The Sixth Annual Critical Femininities Conference 

The Critical Femininities Network invites abstracts from scholars, researchers, activists, and artists for the sixth annual Critical Femininities Conference on the theme of ‘Temporalities.’ The conference will take place virtually on August 7 - 9, 2026. 

MLA 2027 Panel Proposal Emancipatory Narratives through Place-Based PedagogyHow does centering humanities classrooms "in place" allow students to create emancipatory, future-oriented, regional narratives? Seeking presenters interested in unpacking the role of emplaced humanities and place-based strategies. 250-word abstracts and one-page CV: katharine.trostel@ursuline.edu. https://mla.confex.com/mla/2027/webprogrampreliminary/Paper33079.html

Deadline for submissions: Sunday, March 25, 2026

CFP: ALTERNATIVE GEOGRAPHIES OF BELONGING IN TRANS LIVES

Deadline for proposals: April 10, 2026

Call for Papers

                                                                        Home, Homecoming, Homesickness.

Online International Emerging Scholars’ Conference

20—21 April 2026

Eliot Society MMLA CFP 2026