Call for Papers: The Legacy of Norman Bates: Essays on the Psycho Franchise

Editor: Shane H Weathers, Bowling Green State University

Editors Introduction:

Welcoming submissions for a free scholarly conference on scary literature to be hosted online from October 22nd-24th, 2026 by graduate student, Anais Shelley.

Research may draw inspiration from (but is not limited to) these prompts:

• Supernatural themes

• Domestic horror

• The role of setting within scary stories

• Frightening myths and folklore

• The gothic novel and short story

• Monsters and the monstrous

• Multicultural superstition and regional ghost stories

2026 Global K-Culture Conference

August 20 (Thu.) ~ August 22 (Sat.), 2026 (3 days)

Chungbuk National University, Korea

Korean, English, or the presenter’s preferred language

Deadline for submissions: May 31, 2026

The Department of Global K-Culture at Chungbuk National University is pleased to invite submissions for the upcoming Global K-Culture Conference, aimed at fostering meaningful dialogue and the exchange of ideas among instructors and researchers working across diverse educational and cultural contexts.

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the literatures of the Spanish State have witnessed a remarkable proliferation of Bildungsroman-inflected narratives, testimonial accounts, and coming-of-age fictions that fundamentally interrogate received models of subjectivity, identity formation, and social progress. This international congress invites critical engagement with a corpus of works — spanning authors such as Najat El Hachmi, Marta Sanz, Belén Gopegui, and Alana S. Portero — that contest hegemonic discourses of selfhood and becoming from positions of social, gendered, and cultural marginality.

We invite you to submit an abstract and bio by June 17, 2026, to participate in a Modern Language Association (MLA) 2027 seminar, "Queer Literary Studies NOW." Seminar participants will precirculate 1500-word papers on the theme, and we will discuss the papers and the larger theme during the seminar on the first day of the MLA 2027 conference. MLA 2027 will take place in Los Angeles, California, January 7-10, 2027. Participants must be MLA members and register for the conference.

Call for Papers
The Playful Monster
24–25 September 2026

20th Century Southern Women Writers Conference
presented by the Elizabeth Madox Roberts Society
​October 15-18, 2026Springfield, Kentucky 

Language programs across the United States are navigating a period of significant uncertainty marked by declining enrollments, the loss of federal funding, shifting institutional priorities, and increasing budget constraints. In many cases, these pressures reflect broader institutional and political dynamics in which decisions about resource allocation, curricular value, and program viability are shaped by structures of power within higher education. As a result, language programs often find themselves particularly vulnerable within these hierarchies, with some facing downsizing or closure.

Hogg’s Worlds Now

Theorizing Gender, Sex and Sexuality through Speculative Literatures

Edited Volume — Call for Contributions

Editors: Drs. Joshua Horton (Arizona State University) and Sandra Cox (Southeast Missouri State University)

contact emails: jthorto2@asu.edu and scox@semo.edu

Deadlines:

Abstracts (200-300 words) due September 30, 2026

Completed drafts (5000-8000 words, including MLA style citations and minimal endnotes) of accepted chapters due February 28, 2027

Overview:

The 2026 Northeast Popular Culture Association (NEPCA) will host its annual conference this fall as a virtual conference from Thursday, October 15th through Saturday October 17th.

We are looking forward to another engaging and rewarding conference for new and seasoned members alike. We are seeking proposals for panels and presentations for this year’s conference, including proposals for the Philosophy, Belief, and Pop Culture Area.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literature and Popular Music

This comprehensive, interdisciplinary handbook will be published by Bloomsbury Academic in late 2027.

This collection explores how literature and popular music intersect, influence each other, and create new possibilities for artistic expression, and seeks to map the rich terrain where these two cultural forms meet. We will work from broad definitions of both literature and popular music, encompassing work from traditional novels and poetry to digital narratives and graphic novels, from classical and folk sound traditions to electric and contemporary electronic music.

Call for Papers: Global Hip Hop Studies

Special Issue: ‘Hip-Hop Diaspora: Memory, Technology and the Politics of Electric Infrastructure’

View the full call here>>

https://www.intellectbooks.com/global-hip-hop-studies#call-for-papers

Guest editors

Pablo D. Herrera Veitia, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy

Francesca D’Amico Cuthbert, University of Toronto, Canada

Myrtle D. Millares, University of Toronto, Canada

Dennis Howard, University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica

Special thematic dossier 8.2 | Aesthetics, Performance, Discourse and Spectacle in the Age of Trumpism

Editor: Anna Marta Marini (JFKI–Freie Universität Berlin)

Reception, including reading, listening and viewing, occurs at the tail-end of a complex process of production and reproduction that can create a significant distance between the authors who begin the process and the individual recipients who enact multiple, unique endings in their idiosyncratic experience. With an acknowledgement of the digital reproduction that enables this online conference to occur, we invite papers that address the impact of reproduction at any stage of this process. We especially welcome papers that address the impact of reproduction on the textual, material and cultural meaning of the work, text or image that is reproduced on, amongst others:

The annual graduate student conference organized by the Division of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California is now accepting applications. EXTENDED submission deadline is June 15, 2026.

This year’s conference invites proposals that engage broadly with the theme, Delirium. 

It will take place on October 23–24, 2026, at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, with Professor Eugenie Brinkema joining for the Keynote. 

We welcome submissions from a wide range of disciplines and methodological approaches, including creative works.

South Atlantic MLA Conference 
November 5-7, 2026 
In-Person Conference 
Atlanta, GA 

Panel Proposal: “Intertextual ‘Innerleckchuls’: Reading O’Connor in Conversation” 

The Flannery O’Connor Society seeks abstract proposal submissions for a panel to be held at SAMLA’s annual conference (November 5-7, 2026) in Atlanta, GA.  

Seeking critical and critical-creative presentations for a proposed panel at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture After 1900, Feb.18-20 2027

In-Between Wor(l)ds: Liminality, Poetry and Performance

Extended Deadine: June 7th! 

Call for Papers – GNSD Graduate Conference, University of Minnesota
Nov. 6 - 7th, 2026 (in person)
Keynote by Adeena Karasick

Three peer seminars are lined up for the 2026 meeting of the International T. S. Eliot Society in St. Louis, from 25-27 September.

They are:

Four Quartets, led by Christina Lambert

This roundtable invites speakers to address any aspect of the so-called Renaissance self. Borrowing from Jan Goldstein, the cultural historian Elwin Hofman describes the self as “individuated mental stuff.” How might this definition inform our understanding of conceptions of the self that developed during the early modern period? What was the relationship between selfhood, self-consciousness, and identity? What kinds of evidence—artistic, confessional, visual, literary, legal, philosophical, textual, or medical—allow us to approach this question? What methodologies offer the most promise? Given the paradoxical nature of the self, both historically and in our own moment, how might it be treated as a proper object of study?

If You Rebuild It, They Will Come: Reimagining Higher Ed with Pedagogies of Hope

“Hope is a discipline.”  Mariame Kaba We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice. (2021) 

“We must dare to imagine and to dream. It is precisely in hopeless times that the act of teaching becomes a radical gesture of hope.” Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Hope (1994)

The Animal Studies standing session seeks papers broadly related to the intersection of literature or media and animal studies, across genres and national literatures, with a special—but not exclusive —interest in proposals that engage with the 2026 PAMLA conference theme, "Our Ruling Classes: Culture, Power, Conflict." As such, it aims to enliven the conversation surrounding the conference theme through animal studies and literature, while making cross-disciplinary pathways with science, conservation, and public policy.

For PAMLA 2026 123rd Annual Conference (Seattle, WA) – Nov. 12-15, 2026