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.

Call for Papers

UCLA QGrad 2026: SELVAGE

Queer/Trans Studies Graduate Student Research Conference

Keynote: Dr. PJ DiPietro

Conference Date: Friday, October 30, 2026

Abstracts Due: Friday, April 10, 2026

https://tinyurl.com/qgrad2026

UCLA’s 29th annual QGrad Conference invites graduate students working in any discipline engaging with queer, trans, and sexuality studies to convene under its 2026 theme, “Selvage.”

Anuario de Letras Modernas

Convocatoria

Literaturas modernas y estudios literarios en el primer cuarto del siglo XXI

Editores invitados:

Mario Alfonso Álvarez Domínguez

Universidad de Lille – Universidad Paris Nanterre

Odette de Siena Cortés London

José Alfredo Valerio Luna

Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present

October 15-17, 2026   |   Madison, WI

https://www.artsofthepresent.org/conference/362/

- Call for Papers - 

Panel: “Electric Séance: Conjuring Between the Archive and the Machine”

Scholarly discussions on environmental concerns have long been Euro-American-centric. In his 2005 essay, Rob Nixon critiques literary representations of environmentalism as an “offshoot of American Studies,” which has excluded non-American and non-Western perspectives on environmental degradation from critical inquiry. Nixon highlights Nigeria’s Abacha regime’s execution of Saro-Wiwa, a writer, activist and poet, who died fighting for his Ogoni people’s farmlands and the encroachment of their fishing waters by American and European conglomerates, supported by the local despotic regime. Nixon observes that Saro-Wiwa’s writings have received little attention from ecocriticism scholars (2005).

Literary Inspirations

(A Peer reviewed Journal of Research in English Language and Literature)

ISSN:3108-3269 (Print)

Call for Papers - Volume 2 (2026)

Guidelines for Contributors:

We warmly invite original, unpublished and high-quality scholarly articles in any area of English Language and

Literature, book reviews and creative writings for publication in the second volume of our journal . All submissions

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

Description

FEMSPEC, an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal dedicated to challenging gender through speculative means in any genre, seeks submissions for cover art.

Are you a visual artist?  Does your work engage with representations of the feminine or speculative?  If so, please consider submitting your artwork to FEMSPEC to be considered as cover art!

FEMSPEC publishes two issues per year and uses voluntary submissions of visual art as cover art for each issue.

It is NOT necessary to subscribe to the journal to submit art for consideration.  If your piece is selected to be used as cover art, you will receive a free print copy of that issue.

Archives are not neutral: they tell stories about who counts, whose experiences are remembered, and whose are erased. For centuries, racial hierarchies have shaped the preservation of knowledge, leaving silences where Black, Indigenous, and other marginalized voices should be. The Antiracism Permanent Section of the MMLA invites submissions that move beyond critique, asking how we can reimagine, rebuild, and transform the archive to reflect justice, equity, and shared humanity.We are especially interested in work that explores:

CONFERENCE

2026 PAMLA Conference, taking place November 12–15 at the Hyatt Regency Seattle

SESSION/PANEL ABSTRACT

Research group “Translation and Language Studies” (Faculty of Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities, Kaunas University of Technology) is organising an international conference on linguistics, discourse, media, communication, translation, cultural literacy and impact on society “Intermediality in Communication: Translation, Media, Discourse” held in Kaunas, Lithuania.

The scope of the conference includes 8 thematic sections with their own set of topics:

Linguistics. This section aims to examine the current directions in linguistic research, particularly focusing on how language interacts with different forms of media. 

Many notable comic book scholars highlight Alan Moore as one of the most ambitious writers in mainstream American and British comics. Along with writers like Grant Morrison and artists like Dave McKean, Moore was part of the so-called “British Invasion” of the American comic book industry in the 1980s, and artists of this period are credited as bringing an air of credibility as well as transforming the artistic standards of the medium. Greg Carpenter, for instance, likens the work of these artists to “Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson, elevating the English language into a vehicle for poetic drama.

Call for proposals: no-stage PressCritical Ballet Studies 

no-stage press invites submissions for its inaugural publication, dedicated to critical ballet studies. We seek academic articles, critical essays, and interviews that interrogate the histories, aesthetics, and power structures embedded in ballet and ballet-adjacent forms.

The theme for this year’s MMLA conference explores the relational dynamics inherent in an archive. Since Derrida’s Archive Fever, the role of the archive has been conceived as a site for both the storage and construction of memory. What is selected and how it is framed by the archival materials works both to capture memory and history and shape how something or someone should be remembered. In keeping with this theme, the permanent section for comics and graphic novels is interested in research that interrogates the intersection of comic studies and the archive.

British literature of the 1800s has a close relationship to archival forms and practices. With a boom in bureaucratic record-keeping, extensive imperial documentation, meticulous medical and legal case histories, and the development of libraries and institutional archives, Victorian literary texts frequently include, copy, or contest letters, ledgers, case files, diaries, and serialized records. By engaging with and appropriating formal aspects of “the archive,” Victorian literature often blurred the boundaries between history and literature, fact and fiction, what is real and what is constructed. But who was keeping records? And of whom?

The 123rd Annual Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA) Conference will take place this November in Seattle, Washington, from November 12-15.

This session seeks papers that explore forms of play in American fiction from 1945 to the present. There are many conceptual genealogies of play within fields such as psychoanalytic theory, Marxist theory, structuralist and poststructuralist theory, affect theory, critical race theory, queer theory, and video game theory.

Call for Papers
PAMLA 2026 Special Session: Seattle
Spanish and Portuguese (Peninsular)

This special session invites papers that explore the rich and multifaceted landscape of Spanish and Portuguese literature, film, and cultural studies within the Iberian Peninsula. We welcome presentations that engage with a broad spectrum of topics, particularly those that foreground the experiences of historically marginalized communities, including (but not limited to) Romani/Gypsy and Afro-Hispanic populations.

Reading in the Digital Age: R. E. Sterling Havens Writing and Reading Symposium

Call for Papers – Opens April 6, 2026

Deadline for submissions: May 25, 2026 

Sponsored by: R. E. Sterling Havens Writing and Reading Symposium, September 19, 2026

Writing and Reasoning Program, Department of English

Southern Methodist University

Dallas, Texas 75205

Reading in the Digital Age

Reading is one of the oldest academic practices, and certainly one of the most rapidly changing.

Conference Dates: June 1–2, 2026 

Location: North Carolina A&T State University 

Proposal Submission Deadline: April 23, 2026 

Who Is This For? The Access Illusion of XR

Immersive Impact Review — Issue 2 Call for Submissions

Open Date: 4/1/26

Closing Date:  5/15/26

The Immersive Impact Review invites submissions for its second issue around the theme of “Who Is This For? The Access Illusion of XR.” The Review is an open-access publication dedicated to advancing knowledge at the intersection of immersive technologies and social good.  It is published by the Immersive Experience Alliance with funding from Agog.