The editorial board of the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory (JCRT), a Whitestone Publication, is pleased to announce the relaunch of its book review program. Effective immediately, JCRT is soliciting single-title reviews and cluster reviews from scholars working across religious studies, theology, philosophy of religion, critical theory, and adjacent fields.

Gender and Fragmentation in the Fin de Siècle 

Nineteenth Century Gender Studies Special Issue – Summer 2027

Guest Edited by Emily Waller Singeisen and Ryan Carroll

Setting the stage: a theatre and performance dissertation writing group 

Writing a dissertation can be lonely: we want to change that. Many of us first fell in love with theater because — through exploratory rehearsals, late-night tech runs, and joyful opening nights — we found camaraderie and connection, both of which can feel distant in graduate school. If theater is best practiced with others, how can our research and writing processes be shaped by the same commitment to community-building? 

CRITICAL MYSTERY STUDIES

An Interdisciplinary Symposium

Call for Papers

In-Person + Online                

The University of New Mexico

November 16-17, 2026

Co-Organizers: Matthew David Goodwin, Sarah Hernandez, Nahir Otaño-Gracia

Seminar at the Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA)
University of Houston, Houston, Texas
20–23 May 2027 — in person

Marginalised women in South Asia are read for what was done to them, far less often for what they made. This seminar asks what comparative literature can do about that.

Bulgaria-based (or Bulgarian-abroad) scholars of literature, reading and/or writing in English, are invited to a one-day conference in Blagoevgrad on October 10th 2026, to present projects-in-progress to an audience of interested peers from around the country. 

Hosted at the American University in Bulgaria, by the Department of Literature, Theatre, and Film, the conference will provide a hub for colleagues from across the nation to gather together, showcase and discuss each other’s work in progress, and chart the future of English-language literary study in Bulgaria. Papers will be combined into themed panels, with plenty of time in each panel dedicated for questions, discussion, and feedback.

CFP: Football and Performance

Editors: Eero Laine, Noe Montez, and Shannon Walsh

We are currently seeking chapter abstracts for an edited volume on football and performance. Theatre and performance studies allow us a unique view towards the ways that sports extend into civic space, politics, and daily life. How can the disciplines of theatre, dance, and performance studies serve as an analytic for sport, generally, and American football, in particular?

War does not end; it migrates even after the guns fall silent, crawling into bodies, landscapes, archives, and the grammar of storytelling itself. This seminar inquires into how societies of South Asia and the Middle East, so often positioned as sites of conflicts rather than as theorists of their aftermath, have produced their own vocabularies for narrating what survives war. Michael Rothberg (2009) argues that memories of distinct historical violence do not compete for scarce recognition but can be mutually constitutive.

How does a society remember, preserve, and narrate its past? This proposed two-day
international seminar, “Myth, Orality, and History: Conceptualizing the Past through the Arts
and Cultural Texts,” organised by the Department of English, Panchla Mahavidyalaya in
collaboration with the IQAC, Panchla Mahavidyalaya is a scholarly expedition at exploring
this Daedalian phenomenon. As contemporary interdisciplinary studies have begun to move
beyond conventional archival approaches, this international seminar emphasizes the myriad
of ways in which the past of a nation, culture, group, etc. can be conceptualized, stored, and
reimagined through different mediums such as myths, oral narratives, scriptures, paintings,

Special Call for Book Chapters 

We are pleased to announce a Special Call for Book Chapters for the forthcoming edited volume Beyond Pathology: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Dementia Studies in Humanities, which brings together interdisciplinary humanities scholarship that reconceptualises dementia through diverse representations of lived, narrated, and mediated experiences of the condition.

CALL FOR PAPERS: OBSCURA - INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON HORROR AND CONTEMPORARY MEDIA CULTURE (EXTENDED SUBMISSION DEADLINE NOW OPEN)Dear Colleagues,We are pleased to invite you to participate in Obscura: International Conference on Horror and Contemporary Media Culture, organized by the research group at the University of Seville.This conference aims to establish an international and interdisciplinary academic forum to analyze horror as a backbone of contemporary narrative (cinema, television, video games, and digital platforms), bridging academic theory with professional practice and the media industry.We are currently in the second submission period (extended deadline).

Call for Papers

Roundtable by the Sea

Literary Festival and Conference

Saint Andrews, New Brunswick

November 12-15, 2026

Bloomsbury Publishing

Call for Book Chapters

Chapters from scholars of Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, Maldives  will be given preferences

Trees and Environment in Literature and Cinema

Concept Note for Call for Papers LAW, LITERATURE, LANGUAGE, AND CULTURE: EPISTEMOLOGIES OF JUSTICE 
Background

Technological systems are routinely narrated through a rhetoric of the “high-tech”: futuristic, frictionless, dematerialized, and planetary in scale. Such rhetoric directs the attention of media technologies toward the newest platform, the most advanced infrastructure, the most spectacular feat of engineering. Yet every high-tech system is sustained by processes that are decidedly low-tech: extraction of raw materials, energy consumption at industrial scale, manual and low-wage labor, informal repair and maintenance, grassroots appropriation, and amateur practice operating at the margins of official technological narratives. The “high” is never self-sufficient; it is built on, and constantly obscures, the “low.”

LAST CALL! EXTENDED DEADLINE! This panel examines how writers challenge dominant structures of authority in/through narratives of sexual violence. Legal and cultural frameworks often dictate how sexual violence is recognized, narrated, and believed, shaping whose stories are legible and whose are dismissed. This session explores how survivors and writers resist these constraints through alternative narrative strategies, fragmentation, silence, poetic form, visual storytelling and more. It attends to how narrative operates as a site of power, shaping not only representation but the conditions under which sexual violence is acknowledged, legitimized, or denied.

Jordan Peele transformed the horror genre with his film Us, specifically with the creation of “The Tethered,” subterranean clones that are forced to mimic the lives of the people who live on the surface like stringless puppets. Whether intentional or not, Peele not only created a unique horror concept but a metaphor that can explain the everyday terrors experienced by many.

20032. The Picaro and Picaresque Fiction "The Picaro and Picaresque Fiction" examines variations on theme of the picaro from its sixteenth-century Spanish origins to the present day. What does this recurring impish rapscallion have to offer readers in different political and historical contexts?

Deep Cut Magazine, an independent literary magazine, is seeking academic articles on horror for its inaugural issue, to be published December 2026. Academic work will be published alongside original fiction and reprints (by invitation) in an open-access electronic magazine.

While the focus must be on some element of horror as a genre, the scope of the call is purposefully broad: research may focus on literature, film, popular culture, gender studies, history, and more. Interdisciplinary approaches are strongly encouraged.

Call for Papers: Interdisciplinary Symposium on “Reproducing Dystopias”

Deadline for Submission: September 7th at 5:00 PM

Institution: The Center for Modern Studies PGR Forum, University of York

Organisers: Brianna Frentzko, University of York (brianna.frentzko@york.ac.uk) and Megan Woodward, University of York (megan.woodward@york.ac.uk)

AP Photo from Jacquelyn Martin (Deadline; 25 June 2022)

35th Annual CDE Conference, Frankfurt/Bad Homburg, 27-29 May 2027

The German Society for Contemporary Theatre and Drama in English (CDE) is pleased to announce its 35th Annual Conference (27-29 May 2027). It is organized by the Institute of English and American Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt with the assistance of the University of Bamberg and will be held as a residential conference at Goethe University’s Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften in Bad Homburg.

‘Ugly Feelings’: Hope and Anger in Contemporary Theatre

The Robert Lowell Society invites papers on the musical engagements of Confessional and late-Confessional poets with a view to sponsoring a panel at the ALA Symposium "Music and the American Literary Imagination" (January 28-30, 2027, Nashville, TN). Such papers could include inquiries into: 

• The musical forms of Confessional poets' verse—e.g., Sylvia Plath’s stark meters and her refrains, or John Berryman’s jazz-like syncopation, or Adrienne Rich’s and Frank Bidart’s use of musical metaphors and structures;

Call for Papers

Claflin University Conference on Languages and Cultural Studies  (In-person on the campus of Claflin University) *

October 21-22, 2026

THEME: CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE TEACHING IN HIGHER EDUCATION AND SECONDARY SCHOOLS

*(Participants not residing in the United States and those unable to travel may request a virtual option)Scholarly and creative writing panel proposals, roundtable proposals, and paper abstracts on all aspects of reading, writing, and teaching modern languages are invited including papers and panels on

Beyond the Ocean: Maritime Infrastructure and Hydro-Narratives of Indians under the Raj (Tentative Title)

Concept Note

The imperial ships of the British Raj bore millions of Indian migrants across waterways just the way Charon ferried souls across the river Styx to an irreversible fate. Nonetheless, the Indians transformed the vicious vessels into spaces of radical rebirth and enduring kinship.