This year, the Center for 21st Century Studies aims to activate “Slow Care”—a practice that places deliberate attention on the beings, things, and sites, which together foster long-term visions of collective life across generations and communities of humans and non-humans, as well as ever-evolving technologies and ecologies. In line with this theme, the Digital Cultures Collaboratory are excited to announce the 4th event in its annual online symposium series, organised around the theme of “Time & Digital Relations.” 

2nd CISMA 2026: International Conference on Technology and Corpora in Discourse, Translation and Interpreting

Khazar University, in collaboration with Shanghai International Studies University (SISU), is pleased to announce the 2nd CISMA 2026 International Conference on Technology and Corpora in Discourse, Translation and Interpreting, which will be held on April 30, 2026, at Khazar University, Baku, Azerbaijan.

This special section of Whatever: A Transdisciplinary Journal of Queer Theories and Studies will function as a critical retrospective on Robert Eggers’s 2015 film The Witch. While much has been written on the film in relation to feminist theory, this special section seeks to excavate the queer possibilities of Eggers’s now iconic film. Taking a broad view of queer theory, we imagine queerness as that which challenges binaries and hierarchies. In this way, The Witch might be understood as queer in terms of the challenges it poses to heteronormative, patriarchal structures, as well as through its dismantling of the boundaries between self and other, human and animal, nature and culture.

Twelfth International Iris Murdoch Conference CFP University of Chichester, 14-16 August 2026: First Call for Papers The Twelfth International Conference on Iris Murdoch studies will take place at the University of Chichester in 2026. The conference will showcase ongoing, and published, Murdoch scholarship with a particular focus on ‘Influences and Inspirations’. Panels should not be confined by this focus, however, and all researchers currently working on Murdoch’s fiction, philosophy, theology, personal journals, letters and poetry – and/or the political and cultural significance of any of these ¬– are invited to submit proposals.

Evolutions in Cinematic Virtual Reality  

Symposium at The University of Hong Kong 

18. – 19. May 2026

 In a Conference Far, Far Away…Traversing Forms of the Folkloric  (Graduate Student Conference)

 New York University, Department of Comparative Literature: Friday, May 1, 2026

WRITING THE MIDWEST: A Symposium of Scholars and Creative Writers

The Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature (SSML)

May 28-29, 2026. Kellogg Hotel and Convention Center, East Lansing, Michigan

About SSML and The Writing the Midwest Symposium: The Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature (SSML), founded in 1971, exists to support the study and dissemination of work in Midwestern literature, art, film, and scholarly study. 

CALL FOR PAPERS

Edited Volume 

Traumatic Geographies.

Marginal Voices in Central and Eastern European Literatures

Editors: Alina Bako (Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu), Merritt Moseley (University of North Carolina at Asheville), Iris Rusu (Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, University of Bucharest)

DEADLINE EXTENDED TO FEBRUARY 28TH

The University of Florida Critical Theory Reading Group Conference presents:

The 28th Annual University of Florida Critical Theory Reading Group Conference

The State of the Unions

April 23rd-25th, Gainesville (FL)

Keynote speakers: Sianne Ngai, Anna Kornbluh

Nicole LaRose Alumni Keynote Speaker: Ryan Kerr

Date of Conference: 23-25 April, 2026

Deadline for Abstract Submission: 24 March 2026

Online, international, interdisciplinary conference titled:

(In-)Visible Wounds: Interdisciplinary Perspectiveson Discrimination and Violence

Across the African continent and its global diasporas, trauma reverberates through histories of slavery, colonialism, racial capitalism, gendered violence, war, migration, and displacement. However, African and Afrodiasporic writers and artists have not only transformed experiences of pain into sites of creativity, survival, and healing but also reflected in their works the use of African approaches to restoration. This edited volume seeks to explore the ways in which trauma is reconstituted, managed, borne, and cured in African and Afrodiasporic literature and cultural expressions.

Designed by Jean-François Vernay, the Routledge Literary BRAIN (Brain-Related Academic Investigations of Narratives) Focus Series combines the language of literary criticism with neurocognitive and health humanities methodologies or explanatory frameworks, providing an innovative way of blending literary analysis with health humanities and neurocognitive approaches.
This exciting BRAIN series is designed to convene conversations across interdisciplinary knowledges, covering all fiction and nonfiction sub-genres such as poetry, drama, novels, short-stories, memoirs, (auto)biographies, essays, etc.

Doing American Studies Outside the US—Now

University of Sydney, Australia
Dates: July 16–18, 2026

About the Conference

2/15/26 - 4/30/26: Subs are open forIssue #9: Collaborations!We are seeking both poetry and art.There are no theme / subject restrictions.

We invite papers on the literature of the Arctic. Especially welcome are proposals on texts and authors that connect the Arctic to contemporary issues of extractivism, securitization, and imperialism. Please send a 250-word abstract and short bio.

5th IRW Theme: “Rhetorical Flows: Building Transnational Solidarities & Cultures of Resistance.”

Submission Deadline (250-word abstracts in English or Spanish): March 21, 2026

Submit here: https://tinyurl.com/IRW-Submissions

The Planning Committee for the 5th Biennial International Rhetoric Workshop invites international PhD students, emerging scholars, and established researchers to come together and consider the myriad ways that our contemporary and established traditions of rhetorical theory, pedagogy, and criticism inform global flows of meaning-making.

Call for Chapters

Evident Tongues, Evident Bodies: Language, Sense, and Proof in the Early Modern World

Editors: Dr Mary Katherine Newman and Dr Rana Banna

What counted as evidence in the early modern world? 

How did language itself – spoken, written, translated, or performed – shape conceptions of proof? 

And how did sensory experience lend authority, or uncertainty, to what language claimed as true?

Walls, barriers, barricades, borders are lines (real and imaginary) reified to divide, define, and contain, but there are also borderlands and border crossings which necessarily blur and defy arbitrary lines and lead to rethinking notions of belonging and belongings.

We are excited to share with you all on behalf of the Conference Planning Committee for the University of Connecticut First-Year Writing Program that we are holding our 21st Annual Conference on the Teaching of Writing on Thursday, April 23, and Friday, April 24, 2026, on our campus in Storrs, CT. Our theme for the upcoming conference is: “Wicked Reading for Wicked Problems." As those who have collaborated with us in the past, we are once again inviting you to help us explore ways of approaching these 'wicked problems', such as those that evade consensus, offer multiple solutions, or may even resist resolution at all.

ACCSFF ‘26

                                                                                         Call for Papers

The 2026 Academic Conference on Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy will be held Saturday and Sunday, May 30-31, 2026, in Toronto, Ontario, at York University, Canada.

This year's author GoH keynote speaker is the Nebula Award winning Premee Mohamed.

We invite proposals for papers in any area of Canadian science fiction and fantasy, including:

    -studies of individual works and authors;
    -comparative studies;
    -studies that place works in their literary and/or
     cultural contexts.

JAMS@AX26

Want to present your work at the one-and-only Anime Expo? The Journal of Anime and Manga Studies(JAMS) and Anime Expo have once-again teamed up to give you the JAMS@AX26 academic symposium, July 2-5, 2026 at the Los Angeles Convention Center. This symposium presents an incredible opportunity to connect fans of all ages directly to scholars researching and writing about the medium we all love. 

The JAMS@AX26 welcomes all papers taking a scholarly perspective on anime, manga, cosplay, and their fandoms.

Concept Note

The Faerie Queene confronts its characters and readers alike with perceptual, cognitive, and physical struggles, and the reader’s passage through Spenser’s monumental work is as arduous and seemingly unending as the journeys and quests of its knights. The parallels between the characters’ trials and the readers’ embodied experience of the poem become more pronounced when The Faerie Queene is read out loud in its entirety. In 2019, the English department at Tampere University organised its first marathon reading of Spenser’s epic romance. The 2026 iteration will be the sixth marathon reading overall, and the second to be attached to an international symposium.

One response to the official archives’ violent erasure(s) of multiethnic subjects (and the associated literatures) in the US has been scholarly investment in digital archiving. Still, the digital archives (and/or the metadata culled from them) can–and often do–reify whiteness as normative and the marginalization of other Americans. MELUS invites papers that consider how digital archiving (re)shapes and/or supports lay communities that inform the literature of the marginalized. We are particularly interested in papers that address how practices of liberatory archiving resist objectification of multiethnic subjects and/or authors. Submit titled proposals (250 words), a brief CV, and AV needs.