DEADLINE EXTENDED!

Call for Papers

“Horror (Literary & Cinematic)”

Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)

47th Annual Conference, February 25-28, 2026

Marriott Albuquerque

Albuquerque, New Mexico

https://www.southwestpca.org

NEW Submission Deadline: November 14, 2025

The esoteric, occult, and magical roots of deep ecology have become increasingly interconnected with the growing popularity of witchcraft practices, neopagan worldviews, and explicitly spiritual climate activism and environmentalism.  These developments include specific foci on particular ecological concerns and crises, but such trends are equally exemplified by transdisciplinary dialogues in which holistic scientific perspectives intersect with diverse systems of belief. This special panel seeks 15-20 conference presentations to explore these connections and their influence on, reception by, and expression through popular culture in any and all of its manifestations.  

The extraordinary success of K-Pop Demon Hunters (2025) as the most-watched original title in the history of Netflix (with over 325 million views) invites the reconsideration of a surprisingly vast and multivalent “mega-trope” that has proliferated throughout popular culture in numerous variations for centuries.  Its deep roots in folklore and mythology remain to be further explored, mapped, and connected with its various historical expressions throughout indigenous worldviews, Classical cultures and civilizations into Late Antiquity and ultimately through the global Middle Ages and straight through into the interactions of Western, East/Asian, and diverse global civilizations of the contemporary period.  While this mega-trope is here identified

Call for Papers

Medievalisms Area

Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)

47th Annual Conference, February 25-28, 2026

Marriott Albuquerque

Albuquerque, New Mexico

https://www.southwestpca.org

Submissions open: September 1, 2025

Proposal submission deadline: November 14, 2025

Utopian Impulses in the 2020sAn Interdisciplinary Graduate Student ConferenceUniversity of Cincinnati - Friday, February 6th, 2026 Among its political and technological predicaments, America’s 2020s have been a time of steady upheaval, crisis, and change. As we continue to wrestle our way through the agendas, regimes, and big-data systems of this historical moment as teachers, students, and researchers, we recall the utopian thinking of More and Marx, which reminds us “to keep from being blinded by what seems normal — to help us see that what is natural is constructed, not inevitable” (Elbow, p. 83).

Online, international, interdisciplinary conference titled:

The Hidden Faces of Violence: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Abuse, Trauma, and Resistance

Dates of Conference: November 28-29, 2025

What happens when the present becomes historical to itself and the contemporary turns into a categorizable literary-historical formation? Is that even possible, that is: can the contemporary ever become historical (to) itself? This special issue seeks to examine the conditions that would allow us to understand the contemporary as a distinct literary period which began in the 1990s—with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the rise of neoliberalism, and the growing sense that postmodern irony had outlived itself—and has now arguably come to an end. Not coincidentally, this was a period of almost uncontested, unipolar US political hegemony on a global scale.

Focus- Intra-European colonial histories/linguistic nationalism, the Nordic colonial legacies and the Sámi/de-centering dominant narratives of North-South polarity. Further to explore points of convergence between the North-South, South- South, paving way for transversal exchanges.

Framing Question– To what extent can multilingual interactions in the Nordic regions disrupt linguistic hierarchies rooted in colonial legacies and reshape dominant language ideologies? How do these disruptions inter-act with the multilingual societies elsewhere such as South Asia, South Africa, Chile and Colombia,  and processes of vernacularisation set in motion with respect to colonisation in some cases. 

Creative Editor 

FEMSPEC, an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal dedicated to challenging gender through speculative means in any genre, seeks a volunteer editorial collective member starting for 26.1 no later than January 1.

Duties include:

Attending collective meetings on a regular basis (now Friday 10:30 AM EST)

Receiving creative submissions to screen and coordinate peer-review 

Seeking creative submissions and reviewers through professional channels and personal networks, and by distribution of brochures at appropriate conferences and to Creative Writing programs

“Teaching Annie Baker”

Comparative Drama Conference

Madison, WI, July 9-11, 2026

Deadline: December 12, 2025

“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”

George Orwell, 1984

Call for Papers: The Willa Cather Foundation seeks proposals for 1-2 panels at the 37th annual conference of the American Literature Association, held at the Palmer House in Chicago from May 20-23, 2026.

Topics could include (but are by no means limited to) race and ethnicity, indigeneity, settler colonialism, Queer histories, labor and leisure, Cather and other writers, teaching Cather, urban/rural spaces, philosophy and religion, approaches to Cather’s letters, ecological issues, and material culture.

While proposals on any topic pertaining to Cather’s life and writing are welcome, 2026 marks the centennial of the publication of My Mortal Enemy, so papers on that novel would be of particular interest.

Special Issue

Shopping Fictions: Representing Shops and Shopping in British Literature and Culture

The Kate Chopin International Society is seeking individual proposals for two sponsored panels at the 2026American Literature Association conference in Chicago, Illinois, May 20–23, 2026

The first panel, a roundtable on “Teaching Kate Chopin,” seeks short (seven- to eight-minute) papers/remarks that address anyaspect of or strategy for teaching Chopin’s life or work to today’s students—to students of any kind at any level using any materials or technology in any educational environment anywhere. Proposals should include a title, your name and affiliation, and a paragraph about your proposed remarks.

Violence: Legacies of Conflict in Ireland

Comhfhios Boston College

February 7th, 2026

Connolly House, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA

The Irish Studies Graduate Students of Boston College, in conjunction with the Irish Studies Program, are pleased to host the 9th annual Comhfhios Boston College conference. Comhfhios (pronounced “co-is”) meaning “knowledge together,” or “open to all knowledge,” invites emerging scholars in all Irish Studies fields to gather in Boston. 

“Care & Communities” - Shifting Tides, Anxious Borders (STAB) 2026

Binghamton University, Department of English 

Conference date: March 21, 2026

Submission deadline: January 31, 2026

“Dominator culture has tried to keep us all afraid, to make us choose safety instead of risk, sameness instead of diversity. Moving through that fear, finding out what connects us, revelling in our differences; this is the process that brings us closer, that gives us a world of shared values, of meaningful community.” 

-bell hooks, Teaching Community

The long nineteenth century was a period marked by industrial revolution, scattered religious beliefs and technological advancements. The Gothic tradition recorded these significant changes through a language of monstrosity, excess, and horror as the Industrial Revolution gained momentum, coal and steam power expanded, and as soon as the British Empire increased its extractive demands on colonized ecologies and laboring bodies. This edited volume proposes a new way of looking at Gothic figures such as vampires, parasites, doubles, and consuming machines in order to examine how such tropes adumbrated the anxieties, ethics, and violences of environmental extraction.

Call for Papers: Transitions: Journal of Transient Migration

Special Issue: 'Emotions and Emotionality: The Multi-Affects of the Global South'

View the full call here>>

https://www.intellectbooks.com/transitions-journal-of-transient-migration#call-for-papers

Special Issue co-guest editors:

CALL FOR PAPERS

Crossroads VIII: Alterity And The Comparative Imagination

University of Massachusetts Amherst, Program in Comparative Literature | Amherst, MA

April 10-11, 2026 (In-person conference)

Popular Culture Association

Animals and Popular Culture Intrest Area

April 8-11, 2026

Atlanta, Georgia, USA

https://sites.google.com/view/2026pcaconference/home

Call for Papers for an Edited Volume

Train Narratives in India: Marking 100 Years of the Electric Train in India (1925–2025)

Concept Note

2025 marks the centenary of the electric train in India, a moment that invites us to reflect on the rich and complex presence of trains in the subcontinent’s cultural imagination. From their colonial introduction as instruments of control and commerce to their transformation into symbols of progress, partition, migration, and everyday life, trains have profoundly shaped the way India moves—and tells stories.

Call for Papers

The Society for the Study of Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS)

American Literature Association

37th Annual Conference

May 20-23, 2026

Palmer House

17 East Monroe Street

Chicago, IL 60603

Panel: Where There’s Life: Reading Liberated Futures in Multiethnic Literature

The Lasting of the Mohicans: The Leather-stocking novels and legacy

Commemorating the 200-year anniversary of James Fenimore Cooper’s second Leather-stocking novel, The Last of the Mohicans (1826) and its enduring legacy across media and culture, the JFC Society invites proposals that explore topics related to Cooper’s popular novel and/or its influence and legacy. We particularly (but not exclusively) welcome proposals that focus on The Last of the Mohicans and its iconic figures, however proposals that explore the Leather-stocking novels individually or in series, their influence, adaptations, place in the national imaginary, and/or other related concerns or themes.

Chair: TBA

Networks in transatlantic transfers and migrations (19th-21st centuries)

Call for Papers

International symposium

21-22 May 2026

University of Southern Brittany – Lorient (France)

The Atlantic Ocean holds a significant place in the history of human mobility, be it forced (in the case of the slave trade for example) or voluntary, as the successive waves of colonists and then migrants who settled in America show.

Then, within the framework of Migration studies, this two-day conference will focus on population movements between the continents which edge the Atlantic Ocean: Europe, America and Africa.