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.

Seeking folks for our CFP below. Please email Dana Ahern (dtahern@usf.edu) and SJ Dillon (sjdillo@emory.edu).

Shakespeare’s works continue to inhabit what Stephen Greenblatt calls a “circulating energy system,” an ever-renewing sphere in which texts, performances, and interpretations travel across borders and epochs, sustaining the playwright’s presence in world culture. Tiffany Stern’s seminal research further reminds us that Shakespeare should be understood not as a fixed authorial entity but as an ongoing “process”—a dynamic constellation of scripts, fragmentary documents, performance traces, and editorial interventions that resist the notion of a stable text.

Memory, Myth, and Meaning: Cather in Dialogue with America 250

Willa Cather Spring Conference | Thursday, June 4 - Saturday, June 6, 2026 

This year marks the centennial of My Mortal Enemy, one of Cather’s least affirmative works and one not produced in the Cather Scholarly Edition (translation: much important work remains to be done!)  We invite papers on new approaches to My Mortal Enemy, including but not limited to the following considerations of style, form, provenance, and themes:

The Incredible Nineteenth Century: Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Fairy Tale will host its fourth annual conference via Zoom  May 1-2. This conference is completely free. We will be accepting proposals for presentations through April 4th.

CALL FOR PAPERS
Papers are invited for the 18th and 19th issues of the peer-reviewed journal of bi-annual frequency: TRIVIUM A Multi disciplinary Journal of Humanities of Chandernagore College. The scope of the journal includes humanities and social sciences, commerce and management without mathematical application.
Guidelines for Submission

MLA 2027 – Early American and Sexuality Studies Forum 

“The Body Before Sex”

This collaborative panel by the Early American LLC and Sexuality Studies TC of the Modern Language Association aims to bring forward trans, environmental, and affect methodologies to consider the historically and culturally specific ways the body and sex intersect and depart. We are particularly interested in papers that stretch and transgress temporal and spatial domains, offering critical juxtapositions that reexamine the materialities and temporalities that make visible the body before it becomes associated with, and attached to, sex. 

This session will be devoted to academic novels and academic administration. Panelists will consider what these novels (as well as television and films centered in academia) have to say about how higher education institutions are run, and what we might learn about how—and how not—to run them. Equally interested in literary studies (genre, form, representation) and Critical University Studies (history, politics, current events).

CFP for MLA 2027 (7-10 January, 2027), Los Angeles: Guaranteed ACIS Panel

Emancipations in Irish Literature and Culture

Fat has been ever-present in public imagination in various forms. Fat is perceived as a

public enemy and “demonized in medicine and public policy” (Blank 2020). It is “adored by chefs

and nutritional faddists, desired and abhorred when it comes to sex, and continually courted by a

multi-billion-dollar fitness and weight-loss industry” (Blank 2020). Yet, ‘Fat’ as an area of

academic research has remained remarkably underdeveloped in the Humanities and Social

Sciences domain. Only recently, it has emerged as a vibrant interdisciplinary field that interrogates

The International Vladimir Nabokov Society seeks paper proposals for presentations on the following themes for the Modern Language Association’s Annual Convention (January 7-10, 2027, Los Angeles):  

 Nabokov in the ‘70s / Nabokov’s Afterlife

Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU) Prague, Czech Republic

August 20–21, 2026

Call for Papers Deadline for proposals: April 1, 2026

Conference Directors: Petra Dominková (FAMU, Prague, Czech Republic), Thomas Ballhausen (Inter-University Organization Arts & Knowledges + Mozarteum University Salzburg, Austria)

Venues:

INHA – Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art
Académie du Climat
Université Paris 8 | Vincennes – Saint-Denis

Proposals should be sent to: extractivisms2@gmail.com before 30/03/2026

Organising Committee: LAE Network (Literatures, Arts, Extractivisms):

Christian Alonso, University of Lleida
David Castañer, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
Fortunata Calabro, University of Barcelona
Christian Galdón, École Polytechnique, Paris 8
Alessia Gervasone, University of Barcelona
Benoît Turquety, Université Paris 8

We invite additional submissions for Lands of the Lost, an edited collection that explores extinct animal parks real, imagined, unrealized, or yet to be. Our goal is to bring together multi-disciplinary perspectives to examine parks across time and space, across fact and fiction. We seek to understand how these projects, which reconstitute and enclose long-extinct life forms, intersect with histories of science, capitalism, imperialism, environmental change, and more.

The Margaret Atwood Society invites paper proposals for an online panel on testimony and resistance in Margaret Atwood’s work. In keeping with the MLA 2027 presidential theme, this panel welcomes papers that examine how Atwood’s narratives represent coercion and constraint while also tracing the risk and agency at stake in claiming liberatory space. Possible topics include but are not limited to:

• Testimony, witnessing, and the politics of voice

• Surveillance, secrecy, confession, and the archive

• Gendered power, reproductive politics, and bodily autonomy

• Critical reception and adaptation

The London Arts-Based Research Centre

Women who Create: The Feminine and the Arts
A Transdisciplinary Conference

Conference webpage: https://labrc.co.uk/2025/11/18/women-who-create-2026/

March 28-30, 2026

Where:
March 28-29: In person participation at Cambridge University and online
March 30: Fully online

Fees (for both presenters and attendees):        
195 GBP (in person)
100 GBP (Online)
Prices exclude eventbrite fees

Abstract: Deadline February 22, 2026

*EXTENDED DEADLINE FOR CHAPTER SUBMISSIONS*

Call for Papers (proposals)

CONTRIBUTION TO EDITED VOLUME (Please read the full CfP before sending a proposal)

Mediated Masculinities in European networks: Discourse and performativity in the Information Age 

NEW Deadline for abstract submissions: March 1, 2026 

Notifications of acceptance: March 10, 2026 

Deadline for first draft after notification of acceptance: April 30, 2026

CALL FOR PAPERS

for a joint symposium to be hosted by the

Catharine Maria Sedgwick Society and Lydia Maria Child Society

Williamsburg, Virginia

June 24-27, 2026

(Extended deadline for proposals: February 20, 2026)

The Catharine Maria Sedgwick Society and the Lydia Maria Child Society invite proposals for a joint symposium to be held on the campus of the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, June 24-27, 2026.