Queer Drag and Imperial Shadows: Performance Cultures of South Asia (Women's and Gender Studies / Interdisciplinary Humanities)
Session Modality: Hybrid
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Session Modality: Hybrid
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: LITERATURE TODAY'S SEPTEMBER 2025 ISSUE
Website: https://literaturetodayjournal.blogspot.com/
Email: editorliteraturetoday@gmail.com
Submission Deadline: September 25, 2025
The Journal of South Asian Exchanges (ISSN: 3048-8877) invites submissions for its upcoming special issue dedicated to the rich, layered, and dynamic terrain of South Asian Studies. This issue seeks to cultivate cross-disciplinary conversations that explore both the historical depth and contemporary complexities of South Asia, from its ancient entanglements to its evolving place in the 21st-century global order. We are especially interested in papers that foreground interdisciplinary approaches and prioritize marginalized perspectives—scholarship that moves beyond binaries and embraces the messy, hybrid realities of the region.
Please note: This CFP is for the SAMLA Conference in Atlanta, Georgia Nov. 6-8, 2025:
Please note: This CFP is for the SAMLA Conference in Atlanta, Georgia Nov. 6-8, 2025:
Sinners (2025): Critical Approaches to Ryan Coogler’s Groundbreaking Black Vampiric Horror Film
This call for papers invites contributors to submit papers for publication in a university press. The anthology will gather analyses focusing on writers, artists, and others who have engaged with or represented aspects of a Black past. We are seeking works in literature, film, music, art, or any other relevant fields that incorporate elements of the Black past in a broad sense.
NeMLA: March 5 - 8, 2026
Location: Pittsburgh, PA
Session Type: Roundtable (this is a hybrid roundtable with in-person and virtual presentations allowed)
Full Call and Submission: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21632
This panel explores how intersectional feminist frameworks reimagine justice as a regenerative process- one that not only repairs harm but actively cultivates equitable futures. Centering marginalized voices (BIPOC, disabled, and Global South perspectives), we interrogate literary, activist, and pedagogical interventions that challenge systemic oppression while envisioning liberation. Papers might analyze speculative fiction’s role in feminist worldbuilding, decolonial pedagogies that restore Indigenous knowledge, or grassroots movements modeling restorative alternatives to carceral systems.
This roundtable explores how literature and allied forms of cultural expression regenerate acts of resistance across generations and geopolitical contexts. Centering on comparative studies of marginalized communities including Dalit, Black, Indigenous, and diasporic voices, this session interrogates how storytelling practices evolve to challenge hegemonic narratives and recover erased or silenced histories. Participants are invited to reflect on how forms such as autofiction, digital narratives, performance art, eco-poetics, or oral testimony function as regenerative tools that produce continuity between past traumas and present struggles.
Session Title: Classical Hollywood
Organiser: David John Boyd, Stirling Maxwell Centre, University of Glasgow
Submission Deadline: June 30, 2025
Conference Dates: November 20–23, 2025
Location: InterContinental San Francisco, San Francisco, CA
Subm
You do not need to be a NeMLA member to submit a proposal.
NOTE: This session is hybrid. It will be seated and accessible on Zoom. Please indicate which you prefer when you submit your proposals. Thank you.
Annual Northeast Modern Language Association
57th Annual Convention
March 5-8, 2026 in Pittsburgh, PA
at Wyndham Grand Pittsburgh Downtown.
Aldous Huxley, who wrote in the 1930s, is famously remembered for his novels Brave New World and Island as well as for the essays he wrote for William Randolph Hearst. Jerome Meckler’s “Aldous Huxley: Dystopian Essayist of the 1930s.” reviews some of Huxley’s writing.
Submit proposals to: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21664
You do not need to be a NeMLA member to submit a proposal.
NOTE: This session is hybrid. It will be seated and accessible on Zoom. Please indicate which you prefer when you submit your proposals. Thank you.
Annual Northeast Modern Language Association
57th Annual Convention
March 5-8, 2026 in Pittsburgh, PA
at Wyndham Grand Pittsburgh Downtown.
Prayer was central to religious life in the late medieval and early modern period. Despite growing scholarly interest in religious texts, devotional practices, and spirituality, prayer and prayer books remain comparatively understudied. Prayer could take on a multitude of forms and occur in a range of spaces, from public to secluded and private; from monastic, liturgical prayer to short, indulgenced invocations and meditative prayers that evoked a rich scala of emotions and mental images.
Deadline Extended! Call for Proposals
Hate and NonHuman Listening
A Guest Series for Sounding Out! guest edited by Kathryn Huether
Submission Deadline: July 9, 2025, by 11:59pm PDT
Please send a proposed title and 300–350 word abstract to: kathryn.huether@gmail.com
Final pieces should be ~1200 words. Four will be selected for publication.
The 2025 Northeast Popular Culture Association (NEPCA) will host its annual conference this fall as a virtual conference from Thursday, October 9th, to Saturday, October 11th, 2025.
Virtual sessions will take place via Zoom throughout the day on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Registration will open up in mid-July.
We are looking forward to another engaging and rewarding conference for new and seasoned members alike. We are seeking proposals for panels and presentations for this year’s conference.
The Film & History Permanent Panel seeks papers for presentation.
We invite papers for the panel “Meeting the (Re)Generated Other” at NeMLA 2026 annual convention. This panel is in-person only.
What will we want from the constructed companions and servants we build? And what will they want/take from us? SF writers, filmmakers, graphic novelists, and game designers imagine futures featuring sentient artificial beings—domestics, soldiers, sexual partners, protectors—interacting with the humans that make them. These texts operate as thought experiments about how we natural-born humans might coexist and interact with the posthumans we will shortly create.
In honor of the 45th anniversary of the publication of This Bridge Called My Back, this panel seeks to explore the many ways in which ecocritical theory has expressed itself in the critical writings, poetry, prose, memoirs, and plays of Cherrie Moraga. In a time of extreme climate change denialism and the continued increase in global temperatures, directly leading to such climate disasters as the January 2025 wildfires in Southern California and the flooding caused by Hurricane Helene in the southern Appalachias in September 2024, Moraga's work will be read for approaches to climate resistance and positive change.
Who’s afraid of Generative AI? At this in-person (only) roundtable session, we intend to find out by revisiting our post-pandemic practices in the composition classroom. In two of our previous peer-reviewed publications from 2013 and 2014, we questioned the acumen of the “digital native,” as Marc Prensky famously termed the respective generation of university students. To a large degree, and with sometimes surprising results, the collective COVID-era put the technological abilities of these students to the test. At our 2024 NeMLA roundtable, we again assessed this population in light of course design and delivery through the “emergency remote” and “blended” modes of instruction necessitated by the pandemic.
During the past years, there has been a renewed interest in the study of Central American cultural productions. As the geopolitical interests of the Americas and the world are shifting towards new configurations, the countries of Central America have also started garnering interest from scholars in the Americas and Europe. This panel seeks to foster a dialogue amongst scholars and researchers exploring new critical perspectives that analyze both new and classic works of literature and cinema from Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, El Salvador and Belize.
3rd International UTAD Theatre Research Conference
“Evolution”
Transformations in Theatre, Drama, and Performance
Hosted by:
Turkish Society for Theatre Research (UTAD), Süleyman Demirel University, Departments of English Language and Literature and Theatre, Türkiye
Conference Dates: 4-5-6 September 2025
Venue: Süleyman Demirel University, Isparta, Türkiye
This panel interrogates early modern stationer signs by situating them within topographical and cultural contexts of the period. Before the advent of numbered street addresses, wooden signboards fixed in the frontages of printing houses and bookshops signaled sites of literary and social exchange. These signs did double duty: they were simultaneously public-facing trade emblems and paratexts in the title-page imprints of books they authorized. As uniquely biblio-visual arguments, then, they worked in concert to broadcast a stationer’s stock, specialization, and geopositioning in the book trade.
This virtual panel will discuss and argue how reality shows such as RuPaul’s Drag Race, We’re Here, Survivor, The Rehearsal, and Nathan for You challenge expectations and limitations of narrative and media, and how these shows impact social and cultural understanding of underrepresented communities through spectacle, queerness, race, and gender.
This panel welcomes papers, presentations, and works-in-progress (?!) on reality television and how this genre intersects with critical race and gender studies, critical media studies, fan studies, and digital fandom subcultures.
https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21837
In the words of Nathan Crick, transcendentalism is a “rhetorical genre of public advocacy” and “a way of crossing a divide or reconciling a contradiction through a radical act of imagination whereby people are able to see and judge themselves from the perspectives of some distant and different ‘beyond’ (9). How can the transcendentalist philosophy of learning inform our 21st-century pedagogy of higher education, when GenAI is rising? GenAI's one challenge in higher education, especially in teaching writing and interpreting literature, is its increasingly seamless integration into digital devices, which has posed a threat of erasing learners' self or individual voice and perpetuating algorithmic bias.
This September the English Department at Carnegie Mellon University will be launching a new publication called the Pittsburgh Review of Books (or PRoB). To be edited by author and Public Humanities Special Faculty Ed Simon, PRoB will be a home for engaged, creative, and interdisciplinary cultural criticism and analysis across the humanities. The tone of the publication will be similar to other para-academic publications intended for both specialists and a general audience. In addition to book reviews and excerpts, essays and criticism across the humanities and social sciences will be published. Queries and pitches are to be sent to Ed Simon at esimon@andrew.cmu.edu.
Northeast MLA, March 5-8 2026
This session explores how postcolonial Southeast Asian literature grapples with memory, trauma, archival recovery, and cultural identity. Rather than thinking of identity as fixed or linear, selfhood is complex and palimpsestic due to colonial violence, migration, and historical erasure. This session invites papers that analyze how characters or narratives navigate misremembering, inherited trauma, or overwritten histories to reclaim belonging, agency, and identity. Topics may include narrative voice, transgenerational memory, silence, storytelling, and archival gaps in multiethnic and immigrant literatures.
Deadline: SEPTEMBER 15, 2025
Theme: Fleeting Connections
Format: 1-Minute Plays and Monologues
Length: Maximum one page (A4 size).
Submission Email: miniplaysmag@gmail.com
Website: https://sites.google.com/view/the-mini-plays-magazine/submit
International Conference
Ethics and Spectatorship in Film and Screen Media
University College Cork, Ireland
29–30 November 2025
The International Conference “Ethics and Spectatorship in Film and Screen Media” will take place on 29–30 November 2025 at University College Cork (UCC), Ireland.
We are pleased to announce that our keynote speakers will be:
Call for Papers
dialog, No. 45, Spring 2025
dialog, a Peer-reviewed, Bi-annual International Journal of the Department of English and Cultural Studies, Panjab University, Chandigarh, India is open to submissions for its next issue, No. 45, Spring 2025 (ISSN: 0975 - 4881). dialog provides a forum for interdisciplinary research on diverse aspects of culture, society and literature. For its forthcoming issue, Department of English and Cultural Studies, Panjab University specifically invites:
La Cátedra Extraordinaria Virginia Woolf
El Colegio de Letras Modernas
El Departamento de Letras Inglesas
Convocan al Coloquio
“One cannot have too large a party”: a 250 años del nacimiento de Jane Austen
International Seminar
Indigenous Knowledge System and Decolonial Turn: Global South in Focus
16 & 17 October 2025
Venue: Bodoland University, Kokrajhar
A Special Issue will be published in Bandung: Journal of the Global South (De Gruyter Brill)
CONCEPT NOTE
We are pleased to announce our next essay-writing competition. The award is open to all post-graduate research students and to all early career researchers (up to five years after the completion of your PhD) who have yet to find a full-time or tenured position. The prize is guaranteed publication in Foundation in 2026. To be considered for the competition, please submit an original article on any topic, period, theme, author, film or other media within the (broadly defined) field of science fiction and its academic study. Approximate length should be 6000-8000 words. All submitted articles should comply with the guidelines to contributors as set out on the journal pages of the SF Foundation website.
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.
‘Charles Ignatius Sancho: A Black British Man of Letters and His World’
13-14 March, 2026
Northeastern University London
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.
The CfP for the hybrid panel "Indigenous and Creole Transcultural Encounters" (NeMLA 2026 convention) is now open (please see abstract and description below).
The convention will take place in Pittsburgh, PA on March 5-8, 2026.
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.
We invite original and unpublished essays for inclusion in a forthcoming Handbook of Bengali Cinema. This interdisciplinary volume will offer a comprehensive and critical survey of Bengali cinema across periods, geographies, genres, styles, and theoretical frameworks. It will serve as a key reference for students, scholars, and practitioners interested in one of South Asia’s most influential regional cinemas.
Essays should be no longer than 5,000 words, inclusive of notes and works cited, and must follow the MLA citation style (current edition). Contributions may be historical, thematic, theoretical, or practice-based, and are expected to demonstrate critical rigor and originality.
CFP: (Chapter Abstracts) German Romantic Humour (Aug. 1, 2025)
Call for Chapter Abstracts
Due: August 1, 2025
Subject fields: German Romanticism, Humour Studies, Philosophy, Literature Studies, Musicology, Art History, History of Religion
This is a call for abstracts for book chapters to be included in an edited volume on “German Romantic Humour”
Edited by Dr. Pascale LaFountain (Montclair State University, USA)
This NeMLA panel invites proposals exploring the social, cultural, and political uses of regionalist aesthetics throughout the 20th cnetury.
Throughout the nineteenth, twentieth and into the twenty-first century, authoritarianism has proven to be an enduring leadership style in Latin American and has manifested in diverse forms, including the uprisings of regional caudillos, the ascendency of personalist rulers, the formation of solemn cults of personality, the imposition of military dictatorships, the establishment of single-party States, the totalitarian perpetuation of the state of exception, the cultural promotion of ethnonationalism, and the installation of illiberal technocracies, among others.
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.
Children’s Rights &/in Popular Culture (panel/roundtable for NEPCA conference taking place virtually Oct 9-11 2025)
How are children’s rights represented in current popular culture (e.g., videogames, board games, graphic novels, film, TV, social media, music, toys etc.)? In what ways does pop culture today curtail children’s rights (e.g., cellphone apps, tracking devices, surveillance equipment)? How do children themselves define their rights, notions of justice, law and order in their interactions with popular culture (e.g., toys, games, art, fashion, hobbies, social media etc.)?
Philosophy and Literature: A Problematic Relationship
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).