Conference at the University of Bonn, 18-20 May, 2026

The AI revolution has accelerated in recent years, propelled by the widespread use of large language models (LLMs). Today, AI systems are not only transforming technical environments but also shaping our thoughts, emotions, and everyday linguistic practices. Increasingly, AI research and industry are shifting their attention from rational problem-solving toward aspects of human life once considered the last bastions of humanity. We can contrast this approach to AI as a simulation of ‘rationality’ with the expansion of applications into the realm of the expression of emotions and other aspects of human life often seen as ‘irrational’.

We are pleased to announce that the International Conference The Prism of Festivals and Performance Studies: Open Historiographical Questions, organized within the framework of the PRIN 2022 project – Theatre of Festivals between the Local and the Global. Rethinking the Italian Stage between the 1950s and the 1970s, involving the Universities of Rome “Tor Vergata” and Parma, will take place in Rome, at the University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, on 9–10 October 2025.

All details, including the full program and the Book of Abstracts, are available on the dedicated page of the MAP – Interuniversity Research Centre for the Memory of the Performing Arts website at the following link:

Deadline: Submissions due has been extended to October 15, 2025 to invisible.culture@ur.rochester.edu. 

It feels only appropriate, given the recent UR graduate worker strike, that Issue 41 of InVisible Culture focus on the problem of labor. Amid the erosion of labor protections in academia, increasing challenges faced by immigrant workers in the US, and global labor conflicts in fields like healthcare and agriculture, this moment calls for a reconsideration of what labor is and how its value is structured.

The Music Graduate Student Organization at the University of Pittsburgh welcomes proposals for 20 minute paper presentations, performance demonstrations, or work that integrates research and practice for its 2026 conference, “Sonic Power: Speculation, Surveillance, and Strength.” We invite students, researchers, musicians, sound artists, and practitioners from diverse disciplines to consider how sound organizes power and how people reorganize power through sound. Sonic life shapes worlds, whether in the hush of archival erasure, the loudness of protest, or the sorting of listening within media infrastructures.

Call for Papers
Coming of Age, Coming Undone: Abortion, Adolescence, Teen Pregnancy, and Reproductive Justice in Global Popular Culture

Audience: Media Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, Youth Studies, Reproductive Justice, Popular Culture, Girlhood Studies, Global Health, Queer Studies

Do Humans Also Dream of Electric Sheeps?
Technoscientific, Cultural, and Cognitive Challenges of AI

International Conference – Rome, February 27-28, 2026

Organized by:

• University of Rome Tor Vergata
• Res Viva – Interuniversity Research Center on the Epistemology and History of Life Sciences
• Italian Society for the History of Science (SISS)
• With the support of CNR – Institute for the History of Philosophical and Scientific Thought in Modern Age (ISPF), Naples

Conference theme

The Center for the Advancement of Women at Mount Saint Mary’s University, Los Angeles

Collectif Research and Writing Anthology 2027 Call for Papers

Do you want to forge community and ignite your scholarship? Connect with scholars, activists, artists, and others passionate about the advancement of women? Impact a wider audience? By publishing in Collectif, Mount Saint Mary’s University’s interdisciplinary journal of research, writing, and art, you will reach 50,000 potential readers. To celebrate the issue’s release, The Center for the Advancement of Women will host a salon, where contributors can share their work and connect with the Center community.

2027 Theme and Call

CFP: Sensation Fiction and the Health Humanities

A VPFA Study Day

Loughborough University, 27 March 2026

Projecting Belief: Cinema and the Re-enchanted World

King’s College London – May 21-23 2026

Conference Organizers – Rachata Sasnanand and Benjamin Y Goff

Call for Papers:

Call for Papers: Teaching Baldwin / Baldwin as Teacher

Debates and initiatives on decolonising knowledge in Africa continue to pay significant attention to the need for increased African/indigenous content in the curriculum as well as raising awareness about biases inherent in historically dominant epistemological paradigms. However, there remains a critical gap regarding theories and theorisation as many African academics continue to rely on colonial western theories, models, concepts and paradigms for research and pedagogical purposes. This can be due to a lack of awareness of existing African-centred theories and the dearth of databases focusing on African-centred theories.

Call for Abstracts for Edited Volume

Urban Waters in South Asian Literary Cultures

Dominican Theology and Practice:
The Past 100 Years
Friday, February 27-Saturday, February 28, 2026
Albertus Magnus College (New Haven, CT) Call for Papers: Dominican sisters and friars, their communities, and their collaborators have made monumental contributions to theological thought and pastoral ministry in the 20th and 21st centuries. This conference seeks to explore how Dominican theology and practice has shaped contemporary theology, ministry, and social engagement over the past hundred years.

We welcome submissions for 20-minute papers that examine Dominican theology and practice. Topics might include (but are not limited to):

“Autofiction was fun,” laments Lauren Oyler, in a 2018 review for the Baffler, “while it lasted, but a self-conscious movement based on the lives and reading lists of young urban artists was never going to break new ground; nor did it give the reader a reason to jump out of bed in the morning." As a form (or a genre – as Oyler points out in an extended essay on the subject, these terms are often used interchangeably, although she favours the former), autofiction first came into being almost fifty years ago, coined on the back cover of Serge Doubrovsky’s Fils (1977) as “autobiography?

submission link: https://www.acla.org/seminar/8f71b36f-66a1-437f-bb70-25512282c0b6

By 2026, all nine volumes of The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins will be published, including the much-anticipated final volume in the series, Poetry. The 2026 international Hopkins conference will focus on the new research possibilities and provocations afforded by the texts. Hopkins 2026 will be held in historic Salem, Massachusetts (USA), at Salem State University, and will feature a Hopkins display and reception at the Burns Library, Boston College.

Topics could include:

As environmental crises intensify, ecocriticism has emerged as a vital interdisciplinary lens for examining how literature and media represent, challenge, and reimagine human relationships with the natural world. Invested in the idea that, in such times, the center cannot [and should not] hold, this seminar explores how queer ecocritical approaches reveal the de-centering cultural, ethical, and political possibilities embedded in apocalyptic environmental narratives in both literary texts and visual media.

For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me.   

-Vladimir Nabokov, The Eye 

The Cornell Medieval Studies Program is pleased to announce the 36th annual Medieval Studies Student Colloquium (MSSC) in person at Cornell University’s A.D. White House on Saturday February 21, 2026. This year’s theme is “Mirror Worlds.”  

This panel invites papers that discuss transpacific, transnational, and cross-racial relations in Asian/American literature. How can literature facilitate the “(Re)generation” of solidarities and exchanges across identities and borders? How can it offer a site of intimacy, which Lisa Lowe defines as “the implied but less visible forms of alliance, affinity, and society among variously colonized peoples beyond the metropolitan national center”? How does literature generate discourses around cross-group tension, conflict, identifications, and disidentifications? How do literary and social forms reflect and reformulate each other, within and across nations? Where do Asian American studies and Global Asian studies meet and diverge?

Ireland has often been held to be somehow exceptional, an island on the edge of Europe whose historical, social and cultural trajectories have at times led it to diverge in surprising ways from both its nearest neighbour, Great Britain, and the wider world. This perception of Irish exceptionalism has long played a role in how the island has been understood both within and beyond its borders.

Call for Papers

ETKI: Journal of Literature, Theatre and Culture Studies

ETKI: Journal of Literature, Theatre and Culture Studies invites submissions for the New issue of the journal - a general issue on literature, theatre and culture studies.

(Un)natural Stevenson

Wild transgressions across literature, ecology, science and gender

Ca’ Foscari University of Venice 

11-12 May 2026 

Aula Baratto

Organizers: Lucio De Capitani & Alessandro Cabiati 

INTERNATIONAL DAVID FOSTER WALLACE CONFERENCE IN AUSTIN

June 4-6, 2026

University of Texas, Austin

CALL FOR PAPERS

#DFW26

To mark the 30th anniversary of the publication of Infinite Jest, the 2026 David Foster Wallace Conference invites papers examining Wallace’s masterwork. 

The 57th Annual Northeast Modern Language Association Convention will be held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.

Conference Dates - March 5-8, 2026

Topic - Reclaiming History: Trauma, Memory and Resilience in the Narratives from Africa

Deadline for Abstract Submission - September 30th 2025

Modality - hybrid (in-person but accepting remote presentations)

Overview -