Like stories themselves, forests have little respect for geopolitical boundaries. And like forests, stories have always played a crucial role in human imaginations around the world. The wide distribution of forests across most of the planet's biospheres suggests that stories about forests, as well as the stories that forests tell, should be understood in relation to literary and theoretical encounters both with plants and with the planet. While discourse on climate change focuses on deforestation and reforestation in relation to the problem of dangerously increased carbon dioxide levels, trees and forests are treated in large part instrumentally rather than as agents in their own right.

In Poetics of Dislocation, Meena Alexander recalls her childhood migration as an experience of “unselving.” The ocean that makes her an immigrant also dissolves inherited identities. Yet this loss, for Alexander, is generative: a crucible of poetic vision, where the self, fluid as tidewater, reshapes itself from poem to poem, contouring itself to each new shore that it meets. 

This is a call for papers for a hybrid session at the Northeast Modern Language Association Conference in Pittsburgh, PA which will take place March 5-8, 2026. Please see this link for the CFP and to submit through the NeMLA site: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21963 .

Edouard Glissant and Michael Wiedorn call us to “think” with or like a geography. Evolving out of cultural studies, island and archipelagic studies have spurred a conversation regarding the connection between geography and culture. While Glissant and Wiedorn were particularly preoccupied with thinking (like) an archipelago, it is possible yet to conceive of other modes of geographical thought. Transatlantic, island, and even aquatic matrices of culture and geography have been well documented and studied. This panel welcomes submissions in the field of archipelagic and island studies and is particularly interested in papers exploring methods of geographical thought, the relationship between geography and culture, in the US South.

We invite submissions for a paper panel themed “Non-Western Aesthetics: Rhetoric, Resistance, and Representation” – an exploration of aesthetics from diverse cultural perspectives, non-Western rhetorical traditions, and globalized literary theory. Our aim is to examine non-Western, non-hegemonic discourses from non-White nations that incorporate indigenous critical approaches and local theories within artistic and literary practices. We are particularly interested in South and Southeast Asian literary and cultural studies.

Broad areas of exploration may include, but are certainly not limited to, the following literary and cultural theoretical perspectives:

The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin invites applications for its 2026–2027 research fellowship program. Up to 50 fellowships will be awarded to support projects that require substantial on-site use of the Center’s internationally renowned collections in all areas of the humanities, including literature, photography, film, art, the performing arts, music, and cultural history.

Second Conference of the European Children’s Literature Research Network.
Munich, Schloss Blutenburg, International Youth Library

19-21 October 2026

Concept Note

The rapidly escalating planetary crisis has precipitated a profound epistemic rupture, compelling the humanities to reconfigure their disciplinary coordinates in dialogue with the ecological. The evolving domain of ecological humanities has taken on the task of interrogating not only the material devastation wrought by extractive capitalism, militarised modernities, and petrochemical globalisation, but also the conceptual frameworks—ontological, epistemological, and ethical—that have historically sustained such devastation.

De-extinction - the resurrection of extinct species by back breeding, gene editing or synthetic biology - is a rapidly advancing biopolitical technology of conservation science which aims to create proxies of previously extinct species. This collection advances that de-extinction is a cultural and political phenomenon that intersects, communicates, and speaks to the limits of scientific discourses. It offers an intervention into debates about de-extinction from the rich and innovative perspectives of the humanities, social sciences, and creative arts.

Paper Pushers and Ink Suckers: Objectifying the Administrative Subject in Bureaucratic Fiction

Call for Proposals

Cinematic Memory: Narrative, Recollection, and Identity

Edited by David Ryan

______________________________________________________________________________

“I have to believe in a world outside my own mind. I have to believe that my actions still have meaning, even if I can’t remember them.”
— Leonard Shelby, Memento (2000)

“Memories can be vile, repulsive little brutes. Like children, I suppose. But can we live without them?”
— The Joker, Batman: The Killing Joke (2016)

*Fresh Words* is now accepting submissions for its **Special One-Minute Horror Plays Anthology**, titled ***SHHH! BREATHE SLOW!* (Volume 4)**. We invite playwrights worldwide to submit original, spine-chilling short works that deliver maximum impact in just 60 seconds.

Website:  https://sites.google.com/view/freshwordsmagazine/announcements?authuser=0

Anglistik (e-ISSN: 2625-2147) is a peer-reviewed German-based triannual open-access journal for Anglophone Studies

https://angl.winter-verlag.de/?_locale=en

Back in the mid-twentieth century, the political novel used to be a respectable field of study, commanding the attention of influential critics like Irwing Howe. These days, not so much. In fact, most scholarly books with the phrase ‘political novel’ in the title published over the past three decades or so were not written by professional critics, but rather by historians and political scientists (including Christopher Harvie, John Uhr, and Stuart A. Scheingold).

See ACLA (American Comparative Literature Association) listing for submission portal: https://www.acla.org/seminar/10bd9b61-e065-472a-8698-c8949a85f069 

Paper proposals cannot be accepted via email.

Death Studies is a field of study that not only draws from a host of disciplines like anthropology, sociology, philosophy, and psychology but also cuts across fields such as bereavement studies, trauma studies, and health humanities. 

We invite papers on the cerebral Dickens, but also on “the mind of the heart” (David Copperfield): on how Charles Dickens thought, but also how and what we think about him. Suitable topics might include:

• Dickens and philosophy, psychology, statistics, or the natural sciences

• Dickens and his intellectual friends and contemporaries, such as Thomas Carlyle and George Eliot

• How Dickens and his readers develop ideas through and by means of language

• Plotting, planning, and making connections

SUBJECT: Lorefest Call for Papers

Lorefest – Oct 29-Nov 01, 2025. Lorefest Conference 9am-5pm, Nov 01, 2025, Texas A&M University,

College Station, TX.

Lorefest is an annual festival combining scholarly research and creative practice

inspired by local and “glocal” (i.e. globally-inspired, locally-rooted) folklore. It brings together

the Texas A&M student body, their family and friends, and local Bryan/College Station

communities culminating in a four-day event in late October/early November. Its organizers

Weeks after the death of Nobel Prize-winning author Alice Munro last year, her daughter Andrea Skinner disclosed the sexual abuse she'd suffered as a child—abuse about which Munro had known and stayed silent. The disclosure is but one of many revelations in recent years to upend the legacy of a cultural icon. Neil Gaiman, Louis CK, Jean Vanier, and Avital Ronell are only a few public figures to be reassessed in the wake of accounts of sexual abuse. Similarly, disputed claims to Indigenous ancestry touted by artists including novelist Joseph Boyden and singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie have generated outrage and heartbreak among Indigenous groups and innumerable admirers, compounding generational traumas.

Mapping the Black Digital and Public Humanities formally invites Black Digital/Public Humanities project directors to submit their projects to our interactive map and searchable database of 650+ international Black Digital/Public Humanities projects.

Mapping BDPH is an interactive and searchable map of digital and public humanities projects related to Black history & culture. The goals of this project are threefold: 

• to help people find digital and public projects about Black history and culture by topic, type, location, contributors, and more.

In her 2006 book Queer Phenomenology: Objects, Orientations, Others, Sara Ahmed asks how we are oriented and how we come to find our way. Ahmed thus thinks across queer feminist theories of sexuality and traditional phenomenology, evaluating the latter’s efforts to bring what is commonplace or taken-for-granted into focus, and doing so through matrices of gender, race, and sexuality.

Odour and Order: Smell, Culture and Representation

Keynote: Jonathan Reinarz (University of Birmingham)

Call for Papers

SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY

Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)

47th Annual Conference, February 25-28, 2026

Marriott Albuquerque

Albuquerque, New Mexico

https://www.southwestpca.org

Submissions open: September 1, 2025

Proposal submission deadline: October 31, 2025

The Mystery & Detective Fiction Area of the Popular Culture Association invites proposals for the 56th annual conference in Atlanta, Georgia, April 8-11, 2026, to be held at the Atlanta Marriott Marquis.

We seek proposals from researchers, academics, graduate students, and independent scholars for scholarly discussions on all aspects and periods of mystery and detective fiction. Interdisciplinary approaches are strongly encouraged.

We ask that proposals extend existing scholarship in new directions and avoid plot summary or review. Proposals should have a clear and focused argument that can be developed adequately in a 15-minute presentation.

Some possible topics for the 2026 conference:

CAIS Fall Teaching Symposium

New Directions in Italian Language and Culture Teaching: North American Perspectives

October 25, 2025

University of Guelph and Online

The Canadian Association for Italian Studies invites proposals for a one-day conference, with in-person panels to be held at the University of Guelph and online panels via Zoom, that offers an opportunity to reflect on the current state of the evolving field of Italian language pedagogy in North America.