This issue aims to restore much-needed scholarly attention to analog effects and other hands-on approaches to filmmaking in analog and contemporary digital cinema. Special effects have become a growing area in film studies with the rise of digital cinema since the turn of the century, sparking renewed interest across academic writing, popular culture, journalism, and fandom. Scholars such as Warren Buckland, Stephen Prince, Charlie Keil, Kristen Whissel, and Julie A. Turnock have primarily focused on the cinematic realism of CGI and its ubiquitous use in Hollywood mainstream cinema. Furthermore, as Dan North, Bob Rehak, and Michael S.

Plant Pedagogy: Words Beyond Walls

Series Editor— Prof. Douglas Vakoch

Editors—  Dr Subhashis Banerjee, Assistant Professor, Department of English, Nagaland University, India and Dr Tanmoy Bhattacharjee, Assistant Professor, Department of English, Women’s Christian College, Kolkata, India

Prospective Publisher— Bloomsbury (Critical Plant Studies Series)

The Lamar Journal of the Humanities is an interdisciplinary journal published annually by the College of Arts and Sciences of Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas. Papers of interdisciplinary or general interest in the fields of literature, history, contemporary culture, and the fine arts are appropriate for submission. Languages accepted are English, Spanish, German, and French. Detailed studies of highly specialized topics, literary explications which do not elucidate broader historical or ideological issues, and statistical essays in the social sciences are not encouraged but will be considered. Manuscripts, normally not to exceed 6,000 words, should conform to the MLA Handbook or the Chicago Manual of Style.

A two-day conference to be held online by the University of Liverpool, in partnership with the Science Fiction Foundation and the Arthur C. Clarke Award, 12-13 December 2026

Keynote Speaker: Andrew M. Butler (non-voting chair of the Arthur C. Clarke Award)

Roundtable discussion with Clarke Award-winning authors Anne Charnock, Adrian Tchaikovsky and Tade Thompson

Korean Literature, Language, and Culture at MMLA invites proposals exploring Korean literary studies, language pedagogy, film and media, translation studies, diaspora studies, and cultural production across historical and contemporary contexts. For the 2026 MMLA Convention, we especially invite proposals that engage with the conference theme, “After the Archive.”

https://asap17.exordo.com/panels/23/contribute/27a7ffdba8a46063d3a14b1de...

PAMLA 2026 Seattle: “Our Ruling Classes: Culture, Power, Conflict”; Venue- Seattle, Washington, Nove 12-15, 2026.

This session invites papers that examine how contemporary climate fiction (cli-fi) reimagines ruling classes, leadership, and social hierarchy under conditions of ecological crisis. In line with PAMLA 2026’s theme, “Our Ruling Classes: Culture, Power, Conflict,” the panel explores how environmental breakdown reshapes the distribution of power, producing new elites and intensifying conflicts over authority, survival, and governance.

“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” claims Percy Bysshe Shelley at the end of his well-known essay A Defence of Poetry, based on the idea that poetry is connatural with the origin of the human. Poetry is one of the most prestigious genres in the literary tradition, if not the most. Whether we go back to its public and ritual function in shamanic chants or in Homeric epic, or we think of its circulation in multimedia formats on digital consumption platforms on the internet, poetry has existed both as an artistic mode of verbal language and as a literary genre that encapsulates the virtues of literature.

JFA Presents: The Ruthven Literary Bulletin – FOCUSED ISSUE CALL FOR PAPERS

Issue Editor: Elizabeth Schechter

Call for Papers

In the Introduction to In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination, Margaret Atwood makes a clear distinction between science fiction and speculative fiction: the former concerns events that could not happen; the latter draws on developments that could happen or that have already occurred in some historical form. The distinction was publicly contested, including in an exchange with Ursula K. Le Guin, and Atwood insists her terminology was descriptive rather than hierarchical. She places The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) within the speculative category on the grounds that nothing in the novel exceeds documented historical precedent (Atwood 5–6). This conference takes Atwood at her word.

CFP: MW/SWCCL, “Taking Care”

Midwest/Southwest Conference on Christianity and Literature

College of the Ozarks
Point Lookout, Missouri
September 25-26, 2026

Beyond Conventional Screens: New Approaches to Audiovisual Storytelling - Call for Chapter Proposals

Edited by Sotiris Petridis 

• Deadline for proposals: 01 June 2026
• Notification of Acceptance: by mid-June 2026
• Deadline for chapters: 15 November 2026

What happens when cosmopolitanism no longer promises the world but reveals its limits?

Cosmopolitanism has long been associated with mobility, openness, translation, and coexistence across difference. In Asian literary and cinematic contexts, it has often been linked to port cities, diasporic networks, colonial encounters, and transregional circulation. Yet this cosmopolitan promise has never been equally available to all.

Theme: The Other Side of the Looking Glass 

29th Southern Writers/Southern Writing Graduate Student Conference 

University of Mississippi

August 8th—9th, 2026

Call for Submissions

Supernatural South(s): The Monstrous, The Fantastic, The Grotesque, The Speculative and So On…

The Southern Writers/Southern Writing Conference (SW/SW) is an interdisciplinary conference, welcoming graduate students, creative writers, activists, and community members with interest in the U.S. or Global South from all departments and fields of study. The 29th meeting of SW/SW will be held at the University of Mississippi from August 8th-August 9th, 2026. 

UVA Wise Medieval-Renaissance Conference XXXIX (9/17-19) deadline for submissions: June 26, 2026 full name / name of organization: University of Virginia-Wise Center for Medieval-Renaissance Studies contact email: kjt9t@uvawise.edu 

Opening Sequences: The Narrative Architecture of TV Titles

This edited volume proposes the first critical anthology devoted to television title sequences as a distinct and influential mode of visual storytelling. By treating opening titles as complex aesthetic and narrative artefacts, this volume seeks to establish a new interdisciplinary space for the study of title design, inviting scholars to rethink how beginnings shape meaning, memory, and emotional architecture in serial television.

                                                                 Call for Abstracts (Circle 3)  

                                        Literature and the Arts as Sites of Resistance and Solidarities
                                                 24 July -31 July 2026, Saulkrasti, Latvia

Focus

Literature and the Arts as tools for intersubjective transformation, resistance, and the forging of solidarities.

Framing Questions

Call for Papers:

The Art of Storytelling: Archetypes in Focus A Transdisciplinary Conference

May 30-31, 2026

Conference Webpage: https://labrc.co.uk/2026/02/24/storytelling-2026/

Where:

Oxford University (and Online)

Fees:

£180 (In person participation)

£100 (Online participation)

The “modern” disentanglement of the realms of subject and object, culture and nature, as Bruno Latour insightfully observes in We Have Never Been Modern (1993), is most evident in the former colonies of the Global South like the Bengal Delta since the entire colonial project in these locations depended on the colonizers’ privileged access to native human bodies and the non-human nature.

Extended deadline for Re-thinking Trauma: Cinema, Performance, and Mediation International Conference

Ekphrasis Center for Transdisciplinary, Liberal Arts and Creative Technologies Research Department of Theatre and Film, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania September 2–4, 2026

DEADLINE EXTENDED: May 1st, 2026

CFP: The Midwest Modern Language Association (MMLA)

2026 MMLA Convention—12-14 November 2026—Chicago, IL

Convention Dates: November 12-14, 2026
Convention Location: voco Chicago Downtown-Riverwalk (350 W. Wolf Point Plaza Building 1, Chicago, IL 60654)

2026 Convention Theme: “After the Archive.”

Convention Panel: Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies Permanent Section

Theme: After the Archive: Archival Recovery, BIPOC Pedagogical Labor, and Lived Resistance

Call for Presenters: The Veterans Studies standing session examines all facets of military life and the veteran experience as exhibited in literature, theater, film, and poetry, written about or by military veterans. Of particular interest is work on the transition from military to civilian life, and the resulting cultural, social, and personal impact of this transition. 

Traditional cultures and nationalism in Asia

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