Conference online (via Zoom): 16-17 April 2026

CFP:

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Affects, emotions and perceptions have always been at the center of philosophical discussion. Yet the so-called “Affective turn” in social studies and humanities is a relatively new phenomenon inspired by Deleuze and Guattari´s influential works among others. Affective turn challenges the still dominant representational approach in semiotics, discourse analysis and text analyses of all kinds.

Special issue of the Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies

We are issuing a brief second call for papers for the special issue Motherhoods around the World in the peer-reviewed, Scopus indexed journal, the Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies.

Due to the withdrawal of one or two previously accepted contributions, additional article slots have become available.

The Editorial Board of “Acta Academiae Artium Vilnensis” invites submissions of scholarly articles for the peer-reviewed thematic issue “Faces of Childhood: Representations and Experiences in Art and Society.”

This panel invites scholarship exploring South-Asian diasporic poetics, transnational feminist perspectives, negotiations of identities, and practices of resistance. Please submit a 250-word abstract and a brief bio to subrata-chandra.mozumder1@louisiana.edu.

Deadline for submissions: Monday, March 23, 2026

Subrata Chandra Mozumder, U of Louisiana, Lafayette (subrata-chandra.mozumder1@louisiana.edu )

The ongoing developments in artificial intelligence and machine learning automation announce an imminent technological revolution like nothing we have ever seen. Our relation to traditional labor markets, artistic creation, and modes of education has already been drastically disrupted and will potentially change even more. It seems that we are witnessing the dawn of a new age in which human intellectual and productive capacities are outsourced to machines and human connection is mediated by algorithms in digital spaces.

Rising water levels in oceans and rivers, streams with high flood waves, and torrential rains that turn puddles into lakes: houses that are currently exposed to such increasingly regular water events are becoming a problematic, if not catastrophic, environment. The protective function that the house is supposed to have according to its original idea and design is being compromised. While roofs and walls are supposed to keep out wind and water—and the traditional European gabled roof is primarily designed to divert water from above—in these extreme weather scenarios, basements are flooded, roofs are torn off, entire houses stand like islands in the water or are even swept away.

How do playwrights imagine and stage ways of being, hoping, and memorializing against censorship and erasure? We invite papers that explore alternative historiographies in post-war Sri Lankan theater and performance. Please share a 300-word abstract and bio.

The Eco-esotericism panel invites submissions that examine the intersection of esoteric thought and ecological consciousness as expressed in literature, cultural texts, and critical theory. Eco-esotericism encompasses approaches that unite spiritual or mystical understandings of nature with ecological critique and environmental activism. Engaging with PAMLA’s 2026 theme, “Our Ruling Classes: Culture, Power, Conflict,” this panel asks: How do esoteric ecological imaginaries reinforce, negotiate, or resist ruling ideologies? How have spiritualized visions of nature shaped elite cultural production, countercultural movements, or alternative political communities?

Special Session Proposal for the 2027 MLA Convention (Los Angeles, 7–10 January 2027).

This MLA 2027 special session, “Unfinished Histories: Literary and Cultural Acts of Hope,” explores radical hope as an emancipatory and dynamic framework for examining how literature, film, and art cultivate creative and relational modes of remembrance. Rather than approaching the past solely through paradigms of loss, grievance, or melancholia, the panel asks how cultural narratives open generative spaces for imagining unfinished futures.

For the 2027 Modern Langauge Association Convention, the MLA Committee on Disability Issues in the Profession welcomes papers about:

• disability restricting ascent within social or academic hierarchies
• anti-hierarchical thinking in literature portraying disabled people
• representations of disabilities according to an imagined hierarchy

Please submit a 300-word abstract and CV to: Cassandra.falke@uit.no

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS

A Cultural History of the Avant-garde in East Asia

Part of: Cultural Histories of the Avant-Garde: A Companion Series (www.brill.com/CHAG)

The companion series is part of an ongoing, large-scale project launched by De Gruyter Brill (a merger of two international publishing houses) that uncovers the cultural history of the avant-garde in major regions of the world. The series on East Asia consists of four volumes, each dealing with specific decades and topics as follows: 

In her introduction to Science in the Archives (2017), Lorraine Daston explores the way that scientific archives function as “repository” of scientific empiricism (10), a process through which scientists preserve scientific findings. What is occluded in this understanding, Daston explains, is that, when scientists ‘convert’ the natural world into its ‘second nature’—i.e. data—the conditions for that translation are controlled, selective, entangled, slowed, sped up, and digitized (10). Daston’s research helps us to consider how science arbitrarily constructs archivable data at an increasing rate: “more people are manipulating more information in more ways, and all at a tempo that baffles ‘what next?’ predictions” (10).

On December 9, 2014, the release of Ezell Ford’s autopsy report inspired an 18-day protest held in
record-breaking cold in front of LAPD headquarters. The evidence confirming that Ford had been shot by
police at close range inspired a group of dance activists, led by Black Lives Matter founding member Dr.
Shamell Bell, not only to occupy space but also to move within it. The protest represented what she coined
“street dance activism” based on “radical joy” and “collecting freedom dreaming.”

“I Put a Spell on You” @ 70: 3rd Annual Goth Music and Subculture Symposium

Theme: “Hyphenated Hauntings: Examining Proto-goth and Goth-adjacent Bands” 

Submission Deadline: 

June 12, 2026 

Symposium Date: 

August 15, 2026

Format: 

Online (via Zoom, Pacific)

Abstract: 

• 200 words

• Biographical Statement, inclusive of position, institutional affiliation, previous publications, accolades, research interests, etc.  

• Time Zone

Submit to: 

Recent archival initiatives have made accessible significant bodies of media work by writers associated with the Black Arts Movement, including projects in film, radio, and television. These rediscoveries invite renewed attention to the movement’s engagement with broadcast and screen media and challenge the longstanding emphasis on poetry, theater, and print culture in scholarship on the period.

CALL FOR PAPERS

October 23–24, 2026

Children, Literature, and the Christian Imagination

An International Conference

Keynote Speaker: Frank Cottrell-Boyce, Screenwriter, Novelist, and Children’s Laureate (UK)

The University of St. Michael’s College invites proposals of individual papers or panels for a conference on the theme of Children, Literature, and the Christian Imagination. The keynote will take place on the evening of October 23 and the conference will take place the following day, October 24, 2026.

Call for ProposalsEthos in Contemporary Contexts: Authority, Identity, and Trust in Contemporary RhetoricEdited, Academic Collection

This is the last call to submit abstracts for the Bodies of Culture: Somaesthetic Explorations conference, taking place at Florida Atlantic University on November 6–7, 2026.

Abstract submission deadline: August 18, 2026

We welcome proposals from scholars and practitioners across the humanities, social sciences, medical humanities, and the arts. Selected papers may be considered for publication in The Journal of Somaesthetics or an edited volume in Brill's Studies in Somaesthetics series.

Since September of 2025 the English Department at Carnegie Mellon University has housed a new publication called The Pittsburgh Review of Books (or PRoB), available at http://www.pghrev.com

Edited by author and Public Humanities Lecturer Ed Simon, PRoB is a home for engaged, creative, and interdisciplinary cultural criticism and analysis across the humanities. The tone of the publication is similar to other para-academic publications intended for both specialists and a general audience. Currently we are particularly interested in analysis that intersects with breaking news that can be produced by scholars quickly.

The Tenth Faulkner Studies in the UK Colloquium

The Time Has Come: William Faulkner, James Baldwin, and American Modernity

May 1st and 2nd, 2027

Online via Zoom

With keynote addresses by

Professor Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman

(author of Millennial Style: The Politics of Experiment in Contemporary African Diasporic Culture [2024])

and

Professor Douglas Field

(author of Walking in the Dark: James Baldwin, My Father, and Me [2024])

The American Literature Association will hold a symposium on “Music and the American Literary Imagination” in Nashville, TN (January 28-30, 2027), and the Robert Frost Society seeks proposals for papers on Frost and music. Topics might include 

-new readings of Frost poems explicitly about music

-Frost’s interest in musical notation, meter, intonation, voice, pitch, timbre

-Frost's uses of musical forms

-Frost’s poems about thrushes, ovenbirds, brooks, and other musicians of the nonhuman world 

-Frost’s references to (e.g. metaphors drawing on) music, sound, or voice

-Frost and sound studies, recitation, performance, audio recordings

-musical settings of or responses to Frost’s poems

Penn State will host the Global Asias 8 Conference in spring 2027. Sponsored by the Global Asias Initiative (GAI) and the Department of Asian Studies, GA8 complements the work of the award-winning journal Verge: Studies in Global Asias and the Global Asias: Method, Architecture, Praxis book series. By bringing into relation work in Asian studies, Asian American studies, and Asian diaspora studies, these Global Asias projects cover Asia and its diasporas, East to West, across and around the Pacific, from a variety of humanistic perspectives—anthropology, art history, literature, history, sociology, and political science—to develop comparative analyses that recognize Asia’s place(s) in the development of global culture and history.

Texas Association for Asian American Diaspora Studies (TAAADS) contact email: taaadscollab@gmail.com 

The Call for Papers for the Texas Association for Asian American Diaspora Studies (TAAADS) 2027 conference, taking place February 19-20 2027 at the University of Texas, Austin, is now live!

The full CFP is available at https://tinyurl.com/TAAADS-2027.

By the time he passed away at the age of 90, British filmmaker Peter Watkins had cemented his legacy as one of the preeminent media scholars of the late-20th and early 21st centuries. Over the course of eight decades, Watkins’ oeuvre represented unrelenting interventions in an industry that was repeatedly acquiescing to the profit motive. Among the themes explored in the director’s work are war (The War Game) and revolution (La Commune). Within these films, his most common approach was the pseudo-documentary. This format helped Watkins combat what he viewed as the passivity that was the dominant mode of discourse in media.