Concept Note

The Margaret Fuller Society invites proposals for a panel at ALA 2026 about teaching in difficult times. As we head into the spring 2026 semester—the mid-point in an academic year when students and educators read U.S. literature amidst rising book bans, closing degree programs and DEI offices, and even the dismantling of the Department of Education—many of us are facing existential crises about how to do what matters to us most. How to support our students? How to sustain our disciplines? How to teach in ways that do justice to our subjects? The most basic day-to-day parts of our teaching lives have never felt more vulnerable—or more urgent.

The Media Mapper project is accepting proposals for the Spring Semester Symposium, which will be held on April 17, 2026, at the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the Annenberg School of Communication, University of Pennsylvania. Please submit your proposals to Ennuri Jo (ennuri.jo@asc.upenn.edu) by Monday, January 12, 2026 11:59pm EST. 

CARGC invites early-career film and media scholars, doctoral candidates, and multimodal media practitioners to try out a new digital humanities tool, Media Mapper, and present their creation to the Annenberg and the UPenn community in CARGC’s Spring Semester Symposium. 

This issue explores storytelling as a discursive practice that reimagines underground waterscapes imaginaries. In an era of rapid urbanisation, overextraction, and environmental degradation, attention to the subterranean is no longer optional but critical—both imaginatively and materially. Groundwater already supports the livelihoods of more than 1 billion urban residents in Asia and 150 million in Latin America, including those in megacities such as Beijing, Jakarta, and Mexico City, yet it remains underacknowledged and increasingly imperilled (British Geological Survey 2). Across Europe, over 15% of mapped aquifers are classified as overexploited or contaminated, representing 26% of aquifer surface area (Sentek et al.).

The Expatriate Archive Centre (EAC) invites master's students worldwide to submit theses that contribute to the scholarship of expatriation studies. 
 
The winner of the thesis award will receive €500, the executive summary of the thesis will be published online by the EAC and organisations involved in this initiative.
 
The submission deadline is 31 March 2026.
 
Candidates must ensure their thesis meets the following criteria:
 

Call for Papers (Abstract deadline: 1 March 2026)

Framing Turkish American Literature: Form, Poetics, and Transnational Imaginaries

Special Forum of the Journal of Transnational American Studies

Edited by Gulsin Ciftci (University of Münster) and Yagmur Su Kolsal (University of Münster)

Creativitas: Critical Explorations in Literary Studies invites scholarly contributions for its annual issue exploring the profound significance of plants to human culture, literature, history, and thought. We seek essays that examine the complex relationships between humans and botanical life from arts, humanities, and social science perspectives.

            Plant blindness remains a significant challenge in cultural representation and environmental awareness. This perceptual tendency causes us to overlook plants in favour of animal life. Yet botanical life constitutes the foundation of all terrestrial ecosystems. Plants remain central to human survival, economy, and imagination.

This conference seeks to critically investigate the potentials and pitfalls of the "material

turn" through the medium of sound. We invite submissions that test, challenge, or refine

materialist theories by examining the "acoustic state": from the state of matter in

vibration, the political State's governance of the sonic realm to the affect of the social.

The recent "material turn" challenges us to reconsider the foundations of the

humanities, the production of the voice, [anti/]biography of bodies (human or

non-human; musical or otherwise), embodiment and the social and politicized

The Charles Olson Society will sponsor a session at the upcoming ALA Conference, to be held in Chicago, May 20th – 23rd.

As technological, ecological, and sociopolitical transformations challenge traditional notions of human identity, the posthuman paradigm offers a framework for exploring how literature and culture imagine, negotiate, and problematise the boundaries between humans, nonhumans, and their surroundings. This conference seeks to critically examine established notions of a posthuman future/present and its representations in contemporary narratives across literature, cinema, advertising, video games, and other media forms. The seminar examines the concepts of authority, marginality, and ambiguity within dystopian and utopian literary visions of posthumanism.

In recent years, there has been a growing scholarly interest in Indigenous literatures
in English, including Native American, First Nations (Canadian), Australian
Aboriginal, Hawaiian, and other related literary traditions. More recently, the term
Oceanic Literatures has gained traction among critics to describe the literary
production of the Pacific Islands, encompassing regions such as New Zealand,
Hawai‘i, Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, and others. These literatures reflect the complex
processes through which “Oceanic” cultural identities are formed—shaped by
Indigenous worldviews and interwoven with the legacies of colonialism,
postcolonialism, migration, and global cultural flows - as present in the works of

Call for Chapters: Advances in Northeast Indian Languages and Technologies, Volume 1

Digital Futures for Indigenous Languages: Culture, Technology, and Preservation

Stories of Belonging and Nostalgia: South Asian Migrants’ Narratives  

Introductory Note

The San Francisco State University CINE Colloquium is proud to announce the call for papers for Chronically Online, the 27th Annual Graduate Research Conference, hosted by the San Francisco State University CINE Colloquium. Submit your work and join us April 24th and 25th, 2026 in person and online for a multidisciplinary deep-dive into all things nerd. See below for conference description and instructions to submit proposals.

DEADLINE EXTENDED: Proposals must be submitted by January 9th, 2026 to be considered.

⸻

Edited Volume with e-ISBN (Digital)

4th National Conference of Translators

organised by

Sri Sri Centre for Translation and Interpreting Studies,

Sri Sri University, Cuttack, Odisha

and

Bharatiya Anuvaad Sahitya

2nd and 3rd February 2026

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
2nd to 4th of September 2026

Trauma theory emerged within a historical and conceptual framework that assumed relatively stable relations between experience, representation, and witnessing (as an ethical and narrative position). Questions of testimony, narrative rupture, belatedness (the delayed emergence of traumatic meaning), and symbolic mediation shaped the field’s core vocabulary and continue to frame contemporary trauma research.

In Traditional African Festival Drama in Performance, Austine Anigala(2006)draws on the Ukpalabor festival of the Ebedei people in Southern Nigeria to argue for the performance and dramatic potential of the indigenous African festival. This provocative work is against the backdrop of polemics initiated by scholars such as Ruth Finnegan (2012) and Michael J. C. Echeruo (1973) about the dramatic limits of indigenous African festivals. Recall that Echeruo (1973) called for a re-examination of how indigenous festivals are referred to as drama.

Wednesday 17th to Friday 19th June 2026

Falmouth University, UK

This in-person conference will launch the new International Women’s Writing Association (IWWA), offering a global celebration of women’s writing in all its forms, mediums, and expressions at the gorgeous Woodlane campus in Falmouth, Cornwall.

Mimbres School Monsoon Session 2026, Aug 10-14.Slavery’s Domestic Economy

The Mimbres School for the Humanities invites applications to participate in our first in-person Monsoon Session Symposium. This symposium takes recent historical and theoretical work on slavery in the Americas as an occasion to ask what it would mean to take the family and the household, rather than labor or industrial profits, as the primary point of departure for understanding the slave power and its various afterlifes in the present.

CFP: E. E. Cummings Sessions at the American Literature Association’s 37th Annual Conference, Chicago, Illinois, May 20-23, 2026 

The E. E. Cummings Society will sponsor a session (or two) at the 2026 American Literature Association conference in Chicago [ https://americanliteratureassociation.org/ ]. We invite proposals for papers on any aspect of Cummings’ life and/or work. Proposals that touch upon the following topics will be especially welcome: 

It is with great pleasure that we announce the opening of applications for the 2026 Feminist Decolonial Politics Workshop.

The workshop will be held in a hybrid format, with both in-person and online participation options. We are especially excited to centre this year’s workshop on reading the work of Hortense Spillers, one of the most influential theorists of our time. Spillers is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor at Vanderbilt University, and her scholarship has been foundational to feminist, Black, and decolonial thought.

Participation in the workshop is by application only, and applicants must be accepted in order to attend.

The Institute for Research on Women (IRW) at Rutgers University is seeking guest editors for the Spring 2027 issue of its online journal, Rejoinder (https://irw.rutgers.edu/rejoinder). Rejoinder features work at the intersection of scholarship and activism that reflects feminist/queer and social justice perspectives and is currently published once a year. Guest editors will be responsible for the overall shape of the issue, and Rejoinder staff will advise on the process.