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Graduate Research Meet
11th Edition
Perspectives in Humanities and Social Sciences: Trends, Methods and Challenges
Concept Note:
In the mid-nineteenth century, the literacy rates among women and girls were on the rise. This was due to changing attitudes toward educating girls and women and the increasing popularity and availability of reading materials aimed at girls and women. Authors such as Lydia Maria Child, Louisa May Alcott, Juliana Horatia Ewing, E.D.E.N. Southworth, L.T. Meade, and Sarah Tytler wrote works specifically for girls, from novels and short stories to periodicals and conduct manuals.
The paradigmatic scene in a Western – witnessed in numerous movies, such as High Noon (1952), The Gunfight at the OK Corral (1957), or Tombstone (1993), as well as in classic western novels, such as Louis L’Amour’s The Lonesome Gods (1983) or Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove (1985) – is that of a confrontation between a sheriff and a bandit: it suggests the forces of civilization taking hold on the frontier, even if tentatively, and ultimately a triumph of the order imposed to protect those in need of protection.
The 57th Annual Northeast Modern Language Association Convention will be held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.
Conference Dates - March 5-8, 2026
Topic - Reclaiming History: Trauma, Memory and Resilience in the Narratives from Africa
Deadline for Abstract Submission - September 30th 2025
Modality - hybrid (in-person but accepting remote presentations)
Overview -
LANGUAGE AND THE INEFFABLE: EXPRESSING THE INEXPRESSIBLE
8th Annual International Comparative Literature Conference Louisiana State University March 27-28, 2026 (Friday-Saturday) Virtual Format
Conference Theme
What happens when language encounters its own limits? This year's conference explores how writers, thinkers, and artists across cultures and centuries have grappled with expressing experiences that seem to transcend ordinary language—the mystical, the traumatic, the sublime, the deeply personal, and the utterly foreign.
The 25th Vagantes Conference on Medieval Studies will be hosted by The University of Rochester in Rochester, New York, April 9-11, 2026. Vagantes is an interdisciplinary community of junior and early career scholars that offers an ideal opportunity for sharing new research. The conference accepts submissions on any topic pertaining to the long Middle Ages. We encourage submissions from scholars across all disciplines that engage with medieval studies and welcome work that explores medieval culture, religion, philosophy, literature, art, historiography, as well as medievalisms and reception studies.
PERFORMANCE MATTERS
https://performancematters-thejournal.com/
Call for Papers: “On Being There”
Call for Papers
Teaching Literary Maximalism
Fourth Alumni Research Conference on Linguistics, Literature, Didactics and Communication – 2025
Prishtina: 01.11.2025 - 01.11.2025
Organizer:
AAB College - Faculty of Foreign Languages, Faculty of Mass Communication, Faculty of Social Sciences, Faculty of Public Administration
In partnership with:
Call For Papers Nº 26 (Summer 2026)
"Touch Screen. Imaginaries of Hapticity in Audiovisual Media"
Call for Papers
The consolidation of food studies as a serious academic discipline has coincided with the extraordinary proliferation of food-related cultural forms—ranging from memoirs, cookbooks, and culinary novels to food documentaries, blogs, and digital platforms. These developments remind us that food is not merely a biological necessity, but a symbolic system that mediates between the material and the cultural, the everyday and the aesthetic, the policy and the political. Food operates simultaneously as a sensory artefact, an archive of memory, and a site of political contestation. As anthropologist Brillat-Savarin famously suggested in 1825, “Tell me what you eat, I will tell you what you are.”
Interspaces is an open-access, student-led journal that welcomes submissions in interdisciplinary work and research from inside and outside the proverbial ivory tower of the academic world. Interspaces currently seeks submissions for a special themed section, “Queering the Public Humanities.” The pitch deadline (200 words) is November 1, 2025. The final submission deadline is January 15, 2026. Click the link above to learn more about the theme and submission guidelines.
CFP: Handbook on Digital Activism Overview & Scope
https://paromitapain.com/call-for-chapter-proposals-digitalactivism/
Proposal Guidelines
Each proposal should include:
Masculinities Students' Conference I: Current Issues, Future Directions
Join us for a day filled with insightful discussions, engaging workshops, and networking opportunities. This event aims to create a space for discussing diverse approaches and complexities of contemporary masculinities and their impact on society. Whether you're a student, researcher, or simply interested in the topic, this conference is the place to learn and exchange ideas.
The conference will be held in person.
DATE: Thursday, 11 December 2025
SEXTANT (ISSN 2990-8124) is an online journal which navigates the lenses of masculinities, sexualities, and decolonialities.
SEXTANT aims to shift our understanding of these subjects while looking at the ways they intersect, especially in areas that are often overlooked.
SEXTANT features the work of researchers, activists, and artists, welcoming submissions in a wide variety of mediums, such as research papers, book reviews, creative writing, visual art, and digital projects.
Now accepting submissions for Volume 3, Issue 2. Deadline for submissions is November 17, 2025.
Call for Abstracts for a Special Issue
Interdisciplinary Literary Studies. A Journal Of Criticism and Theory
Contaminated Bodies, Contaminated Lands:
Transcorporeality in Eco-narratives
Editors
Dr. Paula Wieczorek, Assistant Professor, Department of English Studies, University of Information Technology and Management, Poland. E-mail: pwieczorek@wsiz.edu.pl
Journal Literatūra, Vilnius University
CALL FOR PAPERS
The Cultural Imaginaries of (Dis)Trust
Though more to know could not be more to trust,
From whence thou camest, how tended on: but rest
Unquestion’d welcome and undoubted blest.
Give me some help here, ho! If thou proceed
As high as word, my deed shall match thy meed.
Tattva Journal of Philosophy
And
Department of English and Cultural Studies, Central Campus
CHRIST (Deemed to be University), Bengaluru, India
Organizes
Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies
Vol. 52 No. 2 | September 2026
Call for Papers
Transitional Justice?
Representing Legacies of Violence in Asian and Transpacific Frames
Guest Editors
Soo Yeon Kim (Hankuk University of Foreign Studies)
Guy Beauregard (National Taiwan University)
April 10-11, 2026
Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas, USA
Keynote Speakers
Dr. Alan Liu, Distinguished Professor of English, University of California, Santa Barbara
Dr. Kalindi Vora, Professor of Ethnicity, Race, and Migration, Yale University
Dr. Neda Atanasoski, Professor and Chair of the Harriet Tubman Department of
Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park
Dr. Bruce Clarke, Paul Whitfield Horn Distinguished Professor of Literature
and Science Emeritus, Texas Tech University
Marx and Marxism have always had a fraught relationship with geographies beyond Western Europe. In Orientalism, Edward Said famously argues that Marx’s writings on India express sympathy for the suffering of the colonized but ultimately reproduce Romantic Orientalist tropes through concepts like the “Asiatic Mode of Production” and “Oriental Despotism.” Cedric Robinson critiques Marx for severing the analysis of slavery from that of capitalism and argues that Marxism’s emphasis on the industrial working class sidelines other (racialized) actors in revolutionary struggles and proves ill-equipped to interrogate anti-imperialist movements in the 20th century.
Over the past two decades, Blue Humanities has emerged as one of the most dynamic and generative areas within the environmental and cultural humanities, foregrounding the ocean and water as critical sites of knowledge, imagination, and politics. Early scholarship such as Steve Mentz’s At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean (2009) and Shipwreck Modernity (2015) positioned the sea as a space where ecological crisis, literary imagination, and cultural memory converge.
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS — Mini Plays Review | December 2025 Issue
Theme: UNFINISHED BUSINESS
Deadline December 15, 2025
Format: 1-Minute Plays and Monologues
Length: Maximum one page (A4 size)
Submission Email: miniplaysmag@gmail.comWebsite:
—
The curtain didn’t close. The letter was never sent. The apology… still unspoken.
Mini Plays Review invites you to explore the weight of what’s left hanging — the stories suspended mid-air, the emotions caught in the throat, the promises half-made and paths not taken.
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
SNOWFALL AND STARLIGHT: A Christmas Haiku Anthology
Website: https://sites.google.com/view/freshwordsmagazine/announcements
Submissions: specialanthologyfreshwordsmag@gmail.com
Deadline: November 28, 2025
Publication Date: December 5, 2025
Colleges and universities across the country are under attack. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives have lost funding and faced multiple challenges to curriculum. DEI offices have been shuttered, and support groups have been eliminated. Much of the effect has been felt in the Humanities, which has always served as a space for free discussion of writing and literature that embraces diversity. Such conversation is in many ways our lifeblood.
Enmonsterisations in the Fantastic
Annual Symposium of the German Inklings Society
“Epochs throw up the monsters they need.”
— China Miéville, “Theses on Monsters”
The editors of Sargasso invite submissions for a volume on post-narrative futures in Caribbean letters and cultures that will engage works of literature, art, and culture that challenge, subvert, reimagine, and transcend, dominant colonial, postcolonial, and traditional forms of narrative.
Popular Culture Association
Atlanta April 8-11, 2026
Subject Area:
Disasters and Apocalyptic Culture
Submission Deadline: 11/30/25
Scope of the paper topics accepted under this area:
This is a call for chapter abstracts for an upcoming edited volume exploring the cultural, narrative, musical, and global fandom implications of the animated film K-Pop Demon Hunters. The volume will be published as part of the Routledge Advances in Popular Culture Studies book series (https://tinyurl.com/rbtm8fve).
Special Issue, Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film Call for Papers:
Adapting Thackeray
BOSS: The Biannual Online-Journal of Springsteen Studies (http://boss.mcgill.ca/) is an open-access academic journal that publishes peer-reviewed essays on Bruce Springsteen. The editors of BOSS are currently soliciting papers for the journal’s seventh edition, with an expected publication date of December 2026.
Howells Society CFPs for American Literature Association Conference 2026 (Chicago)
The W.D. Howells Society will host two panels at the American Literature Association’s 37th annual conference, which will meet at the Palmer House in Chicago, May 20-23, 2026 (Wednesday through Saturday of Memorial Day weekend).
PANEL 1: HOWELLS & MEDIA
Edited Collection Dark Skies Appalachia
Proposal Deadline: 20 October 2025
Estimated Publication Date: 2027
Call for Papers: Dark Skies Appalachia
We invite proposals for contributions to Dark Skies Appalachia, a multidisciplinary collection which will explore the influence of a dark night sky on identity, culture, and sense of place in the Appalachian region, as well as the ecological and human impacts of light pollution and efforts to protect dark skies in and beyond the region.
This is a CFP for NeMLA 2026, Pittsburg, PA - March 5-8
Inspired by Ruha Benjamin’s Imagination: A Manifesto, how can we listen to and amplify the voices at the margins that are dismissed or silenced because they are otherwise rejected as naive or impossible for embracing the whole? How can we help each other refrain from “policing the parameters of imagination” (ix) as we are often trained to do, and openly encounter the collective imaginations of others? How can we together learn to take on the challenge that radical imagination begs for radical equality?
CFP: Media Futures The Velvet Light Trap, Issue 98 (to be published Fall 2026) Special Issue Theme: Media have always been a tool for us to imagine our possible futures. Dystopias, utopias, robotic dominance or human climate catastrophe, media help humanity play out the hopes, dreams, or nightmares of what’s to come. Scholarship on media futures has often focused on representations of the future, but also on how cultural and technological changes have shaped and are shaping everything from media production, creative labor, distribution, and audience reception. Algorithmic engines that shape taste help to determine what individuals choose to watch, A.I.
[CLOSED FOR SUBMISSIONS AS OF NOW] -- please reach jacquesparker@ucsb.edu with questions.
This CfP is for a panel on religious studies and related fields for the upcoming 2026 What is Research? conference at University of Oregon, Portland (23–25 April 2026).
Special Issue Title: Long Modernism, Altered Natures
Guest Editors: Matthew Gannon, Patrick Whitmarsh, and Kate Marshall
Deadline for Abstracts: 30 November 2025
Deadline for Manuscript Drafts: 31 July 2026
Confirmed Keynote Speakers:
In the Anthropocene, human activities profoundly reshape the climate and environment, disrupting ecological balance and transforming humans into a potent geological force. Dominant strands of Western thought from Descartes to Heidegger have contributed to reinforcing this perceived superiority of humans over other beings, thereby calcifying a dichotomy between the human and the non-human. In the field of translation studies, this human-centered focus has historically been echoed through the discipline’s sustained attention to human languages and culture. However, posthumanism and post-anthropocentrism, which advocate the interconnectedness between humans and non-humans, have challenged the centrality of anthropos in translation.
Horror Studies Now: A Major International Conference (28-29 May 2026, Northumbria University, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK)
The Horror Studies Research Group at Northumbria University invites researchers working in the multidisciplinary field of “Horror Studies” to submit abstracts about their research for the 2026 edition of the major, in-person, annual conference, Horror Studies Now, taking place on 28-29 May 2026.
EXTENDED DEADLINE (OCTOBER 1, 2025) - Killing It In The Classroom: Teaching the Young Adult Detective Genre
Call for Papers – CLOSURE: Journal of Comics Studies #13 (November 2026)
Open Call for Submissions
CLOSURE: Journal of Comics Studies will once again provide a platform for all facets of comic studies in its thirteenth issue, to be published in Fall 2026. From cultural, visual, and media studies to social and natural sciences and beyond, CLOSURE invites essays and academic reviews that engage with the »state of the comic.« Whether in-depth analysis, comic theory, or innovative new approaches—for the open topic section, we welcome diverse contributions from the interdisciplinary field of comics research.
Thematic Section: »Animal Studies«
For more than a decade, the jihadist group Boko Haram—whose name roughly means “Western education is a sin”—has profoundly shaped Nigeria’s political, social, and cultural landscape. The violence perpetrated by the Islamist group—including the regular abduction of children—has caused thousands of deaths, forced population displacements, and a major humanitarian and security crisis, particularly in the northeast of the country.
CALL FOR PAPERS
Sonic Representations of Jewishness, On Screen and Off
In-person conference at UCLA, April 19-21, 2026
Jews’ longstanding involvement with film and television has drawn much attention from scholars and the general public alike, raising the question of the significance of Jewish heritage and Jewishness more broadly for these creative endeavors, both on screen and behind the scenes.
Given the centrality of music to Jewish culture, this conference seeks especially to delve into the ways portrayals of Jewishness are reinforced or made more complicated through music and sound in screen culture.
Monsters, Monstrosities, & the Monstrous Area
Join us for the 2026 Popular Culture/American Culture Association's National Conference.
Our area provides a home for everything monsters at PCA. We are proud to be the sister area of Vampire Studies who inspired us to create this area for the rest of the monsters. Please join us in exploring the themes, influences, and impact of the monster as a cultural and historical touchstone.
To mark the 50th anniversary of Stephen King’s landmark 1977 novel, The Shining, editors Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock and Tony Magistrale solicit chapter proposals for an edited collection of scholarly essays with the working title, Fifty Years of The Shining: New Essays. Proposals are welcome on any aspects of the novel, its adaptations, paratexts, and cultural influence.
Please direct 250-word proposals (demonstrating appropriate conversance with relevant existing scholarly literature), as well as inquiries, to Jeffrey.Weinstock@cmich.edu and Anthony.Magistrale@uvm.edu. The deadline for proposals is December 1st, 2025.
The Manuscript: Journal of Taylor Swift Studies (JOTSS)
Binghamton University’s Inaugural Issue
Call for Papers
Submission Deadline - December 13th, 2025 at 11:59 PM EST
Submission Website: https://orb.binghamton.edu/jotss/
Introduction and Journal Scope:
Bureaucratic Modernism
Edited by Alexandra Irimia and Jonathan Foster
Both modernist literature and modern bureaucracy reshaped how societies imagined authority, individuality, and the written word. Modernist authors not only depicted bureaucracy—they absorbed and transformed its textual forms, procedural rhythms, and rationalized aesthetics. This volume takes that convergence as its starting point, asking how the rise of administrative culture in the early twentieth century influenced modernist style, and how modernist experimentation in turn reframed the experience of bureaucracy.
Heidelberg Center for American Studies
Annual Interdisciplinary Spring Academy Conference
Heidelberg, Germany, March 23-27, 2026
The Heidelberg Center for American Studies (HCA) invites applications for its annual Spring Academy on American Culture, Economics, Geography, History, Literature, Politics, and Religion to be held from March 23-27, 2026.
The HCA Spring Academy provides 20 international Ph.D. students with the opportunity to present and thoroughly discuss their ongoing Ph.D. projects. The conference offers a forum for Ph.D. candidates in which they can present their research candidly and receive valuable feedback.
Call for Papers for the Samuel Beckett Working Group at the IFTR World Congress in Melbourne, Australia, 6–10 July 2026
‘Nothing to be done’: What Samuel Beckett’s Theatre Does and What We Do with It