NRITYAJYOTI FESTIVAL: VIRTUAL CONFERENCE 2025

Organised by 

Foundation for Developed India

20th September, 2025

Call for Papers

Concept Note:

Feminist scholar Peggy Phelan (1993) famously said that “visibility is a trap” and argued for the immense power of the unmarked. Such a theory of the unmarked finds utmost relevance in the case of what R.W. Connell calls hegemonic masculinity, which often maintains its superiority by being the norm and thus abstract, untraceable. However, material bodily practices among marginalized groups of men often subvert such invisibility tactics, expose the nodes of hegemonic and normative masculinities, and articulate a language of resistance. For example, dance scholar Mark Broomfield (2024) observes that black gay male dancers in America use “straight acting” as a way of passing and surviving in a world where white heterosexual masculinity is the norm.

In Positions, Derrida stated that “we will never be finished with the reading or rereading of the Hegelian text.” Hegel's impact on all areas of thought cannot be overstated. Recent decades have seen the efflorescence of publications such as Hegel and the Foundations of Literary Theory (Habib 2018), or Reading Hegel: Irony, Recollection, Critique (Scott 2025), which attempt to retrace the pervasiveness of Hegel's thought, the hostility as well as hospitality it underwent in literary critical discourse, or Hegel and Shakespeare on Moral Imagination (Bates 2010), which cross-reads Hegel and Shakespeare to reciprocally shed light on each other.

Submission deadline: August 5, 2025

We are pleased to announce an open call for bids to host the 2026 Post45 Graduate Symposium. The Post45 Graduate Symposium is a two-day event, typically held in Spring, which brings together graduate students and faculty members working on post-1945 arts, literature, media, and culture. Around fifteen graduate students each submit a work-in-progress and convene in a workshop-style setting along with faculty respondents to discuss each participant's work. 

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.

Stemming from the “How Not to Be a Misogynist” panel at the 2025 meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America, we are soliciting chapters for an edited collection that engages with matters of gender, power, and misogyny. We are particularly interested in interrogations of how—perhaps unwittingly—misogyny is inscribed onto early modern texts and contexts by contemporary scholars and scholarship. Some of the questions we seek to answer in this collection include: 

We invite original, unpublished essays (maximum 5,000 words) for an upcoming Worldview Critical Companion to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. This volume aims to serve as both a scholarly resource and a generative site of contemporary dialogue on one of the most significant dramatic works of the twentieth century. Contributors are encouraged to revisit canonical readings while also offering new, boundary-pushing approaches that open Godot to current critical, theoretical, and performative discourses.

Technical communication, as a field of practice and study, has grown larger and more varied in response to the rapidly developing technologies, new forms of globalization, and shifting institutional demands of the past 20 years—all greatly intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic within the last five. How, then, do today's instructors of technical communication meet the current moment as well as current student needs?

This NeMLA panel invites proposals exploring the social, cultural, and political uses of regionalist aesthetics throughout the 20th cnetury.

From brainwashed assassins to complicated anti-heroes to villains on a redemption arc, comic books, films, television, and novels frequently present readers with complicated antagonists-turned-superheroes, many of which become beloved characters. Through varied processes of regeneration, former antagonists remake themselves into superheroes in fascinating and often unexpected ways.

We seek panelists for Northeast MLA 2026, "The Name of the Witch." 

Conference Details

57th NeMLA Annual Convention, March 5 - 8, 2026, Pittsburgh, PA. Visit https://www.nemla.org/convention/future.html for more details. 

Modality 

Panel / In Person Only: The session will be held fully in person at the hotel. No remote presentations will be included.

Submissions and Deadline

Global South is a phrase often heard in the academic parlance to categorise a group of nations which have been broadly classified in economic terms by the United Nations Trade and Development (UNCTAD) based on certain defining characteristics (socio-economic and political factors). The countries or continents which come under this category are Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia (excluding Australia and New Zealand). However, to classify economic grounds poses severe questions about factors contributing to the dissemination of this inequality. This unevenness as one suspects can be a major reason for armed conflicts often leading to tensions and permanent war zones.

The 57th annual NeMLA Convention is taking place Thursday, March 5, through Sunday, March 8, 2026, at the Wyndham Grand Pittsburgh Downtown in Pittsburgh, PA.  For more information, see https://www.nemla.org/.

In Nick Bantock's Griffin and Sabine, Sabine Strohem and Griffin Moss have never met--not really. They have, though, shared an extraordinary epistolary correspondence. And through this correspondence, Griffin wonders how he can feel so close to someone through letters, only, "How can I miss you this badly when we've never met?" (39).