The so-called “post-secular turn” in Victorian studies has helped produce a more accurate view of the Victorian period by acknowledging the religiosity of the time rather than privileging doubt and skepticism. However, so far the post-secular turn, understandably, has focused on religious movements and the role of the Bible in the literature of the time. This panel seeks to broaden that focus by examining ways in which a consideration of Victorian religiosity sheds new light on a range of scholarly debates – including but not limited to such topics as disability studies, eugenics, “scientific” racism, or animal rights, among many other possibilities. Interdisciplinary papers are welcome.

A trace evokes the marks, remnants, and residues of the past. Rather than static records, trace embodies the temporal and spatial dimensions of the actions that produced them, representing intersections of movement, perception, and interaction. A trace can be the smallest and subtlest thing–a memory knot, a mark left by animals, travelers, or strangers, or can be the space between the lines of historical texts. A trajectory, on the other hand, is the path of movement that implies direction, growth, narrative, discourse, coming into an account, taking shapes, and becoming present. What is the dynamic tension between trace and trajectory? How do trace and trajectory translate and communicate with each other?

While ancient Europe regarded India as a land of material wealth and proverbial wisdom, it also saw it as a land of man-like monkeys, banyan trees, and enormous elephants. Ancient Europeans perceived Indians as wearing bright colors, eating rice and meat, and lacking wine-drinking finesse. Today, portrayals of India in prose fiction, cinema, social media, and historiography have shifted from polarized images of Europe and India to narratives depicting a “Dark” and a “Shining” India. Characters in these texts strive to be part of an economically thriving “shining” India, even as they face social, cultural, and political challenges daily.

Magics, Marvels, Metamorphoses, and Monsters: Horrors of the Medieval Past, Present, and Future (Virtual)

Co-sponsored by Monsters & the Monstrous Area of the Northeast Popular Culture Association, Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture, International Society for the Study of Medievalism

Organized by Michael A. Torregrossa, Bristol Community College, and June-Ann Greeley, Sacred Heart University

Call for Articles

Special Issue: (Re)articulating an Old Ideal: Self-Care and Self-Help in Contemporary Culture

Guest Editors: Alexandra Bacalu (University of Bucharest) & Dragoș Manea (University of Bucharest)

The Charles Olson Society will sponsor panels at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture, to take place in Louisville, Kentucky, February 16-21. 2026 marks the Centenary of poet Robert Creeley’s birth, and the Charles Olson Society will welcome abstracts pertaining to any aspect of Creeley’s life and work. Creeley was a central poet in the development of Black Mountain Poetry, and along with his life-long friend and companion in verse, Charles Olson, Creeley greatly influenced the development of American poetics after World War II. As he said, “I write to realize the world as one has come to live in it, thus to give testament. I write to move in words, a human delight. I write when no other act is possible.”

Pasados Special Issue: Against the Past/Contra Pasados

Co-edited by Jesse Alemán (University of New Mexico) and Evelyn Soto (Rutgers University—New Brunswick)

Deadline: January 15, 2026

Call for papers

Undisciplined Anthropologies: Practices, Trajectories, and Imaginations Beyond “Method”

Cultures and Societies Department, University of Palermo, Italy

Institut Français, Palermo, Italy

International Conference

30th, 31rst October 2025

Institut Français Palermo

Via Paolo Gili 4, 90138, Palermo

Deadline for abstracts: September 25th, 2025

Literary criticism is often treated as a secondary act, the intellectual afterimage of the work it addresses. This seminar proceeds from the opposite premise: criticism can be understood as a compositional art, a practice that gathers elements from different media, genres, and historical moments in order to propose a world in which the work might live. The critic does not merely interpret but constructs, weaving together forms, narratives and temporalities to re-situate a work within a newly configured cultural space, animated by the critical desire to imagine and construct more just and inhabitable worlds. 

NeMLA 2026 will be held in Pittsburgh, PA from March 5-8.

Book Series Title: Contemporary Literary Studies on Language and Literature
Publisher: HJ Verlag Maurer – Maurer Press, Frankfurt, Germany
Website: www.maurer.press

We invite contributions for the next volume of our series, Contemporary Literary Studies on Language and Literature. This volume is dedicated to exploring feminist perspectives in literature and culture, providing a platform for work that highlights the diverse ways feminism continues to shape literary scholarship.

Book Series Title: Contemporary Literary Studies on Language and Literature
Publisher: HJ Verlag Maurer – Maurer Press, Frankfurt, Germany
Website: www.maurer.press

Book Series Title: Contemporary Literary Studies on Language and Literature
Publisher: HJ Verlag Maurer – Maurer Press, Frankfurt, Germany
Website: www.maurer.press

We are delighted to invite contributions for the upcoming third volume of our book series, Contemporary Literary Studies on Language and Literature. This volume turns its focus to postcolonial approaches in literary studies, bringing together scholarship that explores the cultural, political, and historical dimensions of literature shaped by colonial encounters and their legacies.

At a time when any strides that may have been made towards reproductive rights have been thrown into serious question, motherhood—its lived reality, its spectre, and its implications for theory—remains a fraught and undertheorized field. As Adrienne Rich put it in 1976, “we know more about the air we breathe, the seas we travel, than we do about the nature and meaning of motherhood”—and this statement continues to be true nearly fifty years later despite the proliferation of media, both fictional and nonfictional, that takes motherhood as its object. The very definition of “motherhood” continues to be contested even as its boundaries expand and encompass an increasing number of subject positions and relational modes.

Panel Title: Queer Gothic as Resistance: Subverted Classed and Gendered Binaries in 21st-Century Fiction

Conference: Queer–Class Relations Conference

Dates: April 17–18, 2026

Venue: CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York City

Presentation Mode: Online

Panel Chair: Faham Zeeshan (fahamzeeshan82@gmail.com)

Co-Chair & Convener: Dr. Muhammad Numan (UMT, Lahore) (muhammad.nauman@umt.edu.pk / nauman.sa18@gmail.com)

Abstracts are sought for an edited collection on the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA).

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.

Translation Networks in the Decolonising World, 1950s–1970s
King's College, University of Cambridge | 24–25 April 2026

FIRST FORUM CONFERENCE 2025—CALL FOR PROPOSALS 

DIVISION OF CINEMA AND MEDIA STUDIES

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

OCTOBER 17TH AND 18TH 2025

This year’s keynote presentation will be given by Dr. Silpa Mukherjee (University of California, San Diego).

SPEED

Call for Book Proposals

TP Open Books, an open-access initiative by Tarjomeh-Pazhouhan Publications, is currently seeking proposals for original scholarly works in the field of Translation Studies. As part of the broader Tarjomeh Pazhouhan publishing initiative, this Open Access series extends our long-standing commitment to advancing translation research by making knowledge freely accessible to all. 

We welcome original book-length contributions that engage with a wide range of topics and methods in Translation Studies, including but not limited to:

Call for Book ChapterTentative Title- The Naked Mic: Sexpectations & Punchlines in Indian Stand-up Comedy

This volume is currently under preparation for submission to Springer Nature, which has formally requested a detailed book proposal.

Book Overview

https://samla.ballastacademic.com/Home/S/19446

This panel seeks papers that explore how American literature has shaped--and been shaped by--knowledge of the natural world, from the transcendental reflections of the 19th century to contemporary ecofeminst and ecocritical perspectives. How have authors translated environmental observation and ecological awareness into literary forms of knowledge? How does nature writing reflect evolving understandings of identity, power, science, and stewardship.

Description

To bend a phrase by Fredric Jameson, narrative is a historically symbolic act. Literary
scholars and historians have long argued that not only are texts implicated in the time, place,
political events, and economic forces in which they get produced, but they also produce their
own ideas of and uses for history. Indeed, for Marxist, psychoanalytical, and deconstructive
critics (among other schools of thought), a text’s historical contingency needs to be rigorously
elaborated to determine how it works across varied sites (from social to political) and
contexts (from academic to public); moreover, to differing degrees, they all agree that it is

Thursday 4th December 2025, The National Archives, Kew, UK.

‘Talking Records’ is a new collections-based symposium held at The National Archives every year. The theme for 2025 is pollution. Histories of pollution, contamination, and environmental damage can be found in a diverse range of records in the collections at The National Archives.