The term “transgressive fiction” was coined in 1993 by LA Times columnist Michael Silverblatt to describe a loosely related coterie of authors in the ‘80s and ‘90s whose writing has “violation at its core: violation of norms, of humanistic enterprise, of the body.” Silverblatt’s preliminary “sketch” of the genre’s leading voices was primarily American, almost entirely Anglophone, and exclusively white.

On the occasion of the  135th  birth anniversary of Pearl  S. Buck, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1938), this international symposium seeks to revisit her life and  writings   from   the   perspective   of  exchanges   and   mutual   learning   among civilizations. Hailed as “the most influential Westerner to write about China since the 13th  century’s Marco Polo”, Pearl  S. Buck not only introduced Chinese literature and culture to global readers through her literary writings, but also participated actively in transnational   cultural   dialogue,   humanitarian   engagement,   and   the   shaping   of international understandings of China.

Call for Papers

Shakespeare in Pop Culture

Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)

48th Annual Conference, February 17-20, 2027

Marriott Albuquerque

Albuquerque, New Mexico

https://swpaca.org

Submissions open: September 1, 2026

Proposal submission deadline: October 31, 2026

The 2027 CLA Online Research Conference is a forum for researchers of children’s literature to share their work and exchange ideas. The conference is supported by the Children’s Literature Assembly of NCTE’s Endowment Fund and will be held on Friday, February 19th, 2027.

The CLA Online Research Conference seeks proposals that explore this year's conference theme of Children’s Literature in a Changing World: Research in Theory & Praxis.

A variety of theoretical and methodological approaches, presented by established and emerging scholars, are welcomed and encouraged.

Potential topics could explore:

Apologies for crossposting.

Call for Papers: Journal of Caribbean Music & Sound Cultures

Special Issue: ‘Konpa Dirèk: Popular Music and Social Relations in Haiti and the Haitian Diaspora’

Guest Editors

Cécile Accilien, University of Maryland, USA, cecileaccilien22@gmail.com

Sabine Lamour, University of Montréal, Canada

Alexandra Cenatus, University of Maryland, USA

Deadlines

1 November 2026: 250–300-word abstract

15 November 2026: Successful authors notified

15 February 2027: First draft of article due to editors

Submission linkhttps://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=fidn26Submission deadlineSeptember 19, 2026Notification of AcceptanceOctober 3, 2026Presentation SubmissionOctober 31, 2026 The interdisciplinary field of Interactive Digital Narratives (IDNs) combines immersive technologies with the timeless art of storytelling. IDN offers transformative ways to engage audiences, preserve cultural heritage and address social and educational challenges. From branching narratives in video games, to immersive virtual reality experiences and interactive installations, IDNs push the boundaries of how stories can be created and experienced.

The graduate students of the School of Arts & Aesthetics, Jawaharlal

Nehru University, are organising an interdisciplinary conference on the theme

of Cracks & Crossovers, exploring their presence and reflection in visual

culture, performances and media practices. The theme responds to the

urgency of living in a time when systemic limits become visible through cracks.

It asks how we register the differences between categories such as crisis,

fragment and fracture. Do these terms signal a definitive rupture or an ongoing

change? Or do our times demand a new perspective that allows the cracks to

speak? Taking a cue from The Cracked Mirror (2012), the conference seeks to

The 2027 Conference of the Popular Culture Association (PCA) will host a special topic area on UFOs, Cryptids, Conspiracies, and the Paranormal. 

Mushrooms & Acorns & Herbs, Oh My!: Plants and Foraging Across the Humanities

This roundtable investigates the art of wild food gathering across the humanities, including literature, ecology, and multimedia. It seeks to encompass representations of the art of foraging as survival, mutual aid, environmental stewardship, and reciprocity.

The editorial board of the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory (JCRT), a Whitestone Publication, is pleased to announce the relaunch of its book review program. Effective immediately, JCRT is soliciting single-title reviews and cluster reviews from scholars working across religious studies, theology, philosophy of religion, critical theory, and adjacent fields.

Gender and Fragmentation in the Fin de Siècle 

Nineteenth Century Gender Studies Special Issue – Summer 2027

Guest Edited by Emily Waller Singeisen and Ryan Carroll

Setting the stage: a theatre and performance dissertation writing group 

Writing a dissertation can be lonely: we want to change that. Many of us first fell in love with theater because — through exploratory rehearsals, late-night tech runs, and joyful opening nights — we found camaraderie and connection, both of which can feel distant in graduate school. If theater is best practiced with others, how can our research and writing processes be shaped by the same commitment to community-building? 

CRITICAL MYSTERY STUDIES

An Interdisciplinary Symposium

Call for Papers

In-Person + Online                

The University of New Mexico

November 16-17, 2026

Co-Organizers: Matthew David Goodwin, Sarah Hernandez, Nahir Otaño-Gracia

Seminar at the Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA)
University of Houston, Houston, Texas
20–23 May 2027 — in person

Marginalised women in South Asia are read for what was done to them, far less often for what they made. This seminar asks what comparative literature can do about that.

Bulgaria-based (or Bulgarian-abroad) scholars of literature, reading and/or writing in English, are invited to a one-day conference in Blagoevgrad on October 10th 2026, to present projects-in-progress to an audience of interested peers from around the country. 

Hosted at the American University in Bulgaria, by the Department of Literature, Theatre, and Film, the conference will provide a hub for colleagues from across the nation to gather together, showcase and discuss each other’s work in progress, and chart the future of English-language literary study in Bulgaria. Papers will be combined into themed panels, with plenty of time in each panel dedicated for questions, discussion, and feedback.

CFP: Football and Performance

Editors: Eero Laine, Noe Montez, and Shannon Walsh

We are currently seeking chapter abstracts for an edited volume on football and performance. Theatre and performance studies allow us a unique view towards the ways that sports extend into civic space, politics, and daily life. How can the disciplines of theatre, dance, and performance studies serve as an analytic for sport, generally, and American football, in particular?

War does not end; it migrates even after the guns fall silent, crawling into bodies, landscapes, archives, and the grammar of storytelling itself. This seminar inquires into how societies of South Asia and the Middle East, so often positioned as sites of conflicts rather than as theorists of their aftermath, have produced their own vocabularies for narrating what survives war. Michael Rothberg (2009) argues that memories of distinct historical violence do not compete for scarce recognition but can be mutually constitutive.

How does a society remember, preserve, and narrate its past? This proposed two-day
international seminar, “Myth, Orality, and History: Conceptualizing the Past through the Arts
and Cultural Texts,” organised by the Department of English, Panchla Mahavidyalaya in
collaboration with the IQAC, Panchla Mahavidyalaya is a scholarly expedition at exploring
this Daedalian phenomenon. As contemporary interdisciplinary studies have begun to move
beyond conventional archival approaches, this international seminar emphasizes the myriad
of ways in which the past of a nation, culture, group, etc. can be conceptualized, stored, and
reimagined through different mediums such as myths, oral narratives, scriptures, paintings,

Special Call for Book Chapters 

We are pleased to announce a Special Call for Book Chapters for the forthcoming edited volume Beyond Pathology: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Dementia Studies in Humanities, which brings together interdisciplinary humanities scholarship that reconceptualises dementia through diverse representations of lived, narrated, and mediated experiences of the condition.

CALL FOR PAPERS: OBSCURA - INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON HORROR AND CONTEMPORARY MEDIA CULTURE (EXTENDED SUBMISSION DEADLINE NOW OPEN)Dear Colleagues,We are pleased to invite you to participate in Obscura: International Conference on Horror and Contemporary Media Culture, organized by the research group at the University of Seville.This conference aims to establish an international and interdisciplinary academic forum to analyze horror as a backbone of contemporary narrative (cinema, television, video games, and digital platforms), bridging academic theory with professional practice and the media industry.We are currently in the second submission period (extended deadline).

Call for Papers

Roundtable by the Sea

Literary Festival and Conference

Saint Andrews, New Brunswick

November 12-15, 2026

Bloomsbury Publishing

Call for Book Chapters

Chapters from scholars of Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, Maldives  will be given preferences

Trees and Environment in Literature and Cinema

Concept Note for Call for Papers LAW, LITERATURE, LANGUAGE, AND CULTURE: EPISTEMOLOGIES OF JUSTICE 
Background

Technological systems are routinely narrated through a rhetoric of the “high-tech”: futuristic, frictionless, dematerialized, and planetary in scale. Such rhetoric directs the attention of media technologies toward the newest platform, the most advanced infrastructure, the most spectacular feat of engineering. Yet every high-tech system is sustained by processes that are decidedly low-tech: extraction of raw materials, energy consumption at industrial scale, manual and low-wage labor, informal repair and maintenance, grassroots appropriation, and amateur practice operating at the margins of official technological narratives. The “high” is never self-sufficient; it is built on, and constantly obscures, the “low.”