In this modern moment, there have been a myriad of proposals exploring the contours of “speculative fiction”—be that social, environmental, &c. This session seeks to deconstruct the ways in which the speculative shapes the contours of the “real” or realized. Though sensationalization can be found in works of fiction, the threads of one’s reality—intersectional as it may be—provides a rich narrative that encourages further exploration and the fears provided in what we would safely relegate to fiction. However, there remains a “seeping out” of those fears that can eerily be represented in the real world.

New Work in Eliot Studies
South Atlantic Modern Languages Association

November 5–7, 2026, Atlanta, GA

Hosting Identity: Boundaries, Bodies, and Belonging in Popular Culture
Who—or what—do we let in?

This panel invites papers that examine how identity in popular culture is shaped through the logics of hospitality: encounters structured by thresholds, boundaries, and negotiations of belonging. From the body to the home to the platform, popular media repeatedly stages identity as something that must be received, managed, or refused.

International Coference (Hybrid)  in collabortion with South Asian Studies Research Group, London Metropolitan University and Emerald India as Academic Partner

This panel explores how multimodal science fiction and fantasy pedagogies invites student engagement, retention, and career readiness across disciplines. Building on research demonstrating that storytelling supports the retention and transfer of knowledge, the panel argues that speculative and multimodal teaching practices create immersive learning environments that connect imagination to real-world application.

Since 1991 the Pulitzer Prize has been awarded to four novels that reimagined literary works that have long been a part of the canon. They are: A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley (a contemporary King Lear); March by Geraldine Brooks (Little Women from the perspective of the absent father); Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (David Copperfield set in Appalachia); and James by Percival Everett (Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim). This panel looks to open a discussion about how these and other contemporary novels both explore and challenge the themes of the source material. What do they say about society, race, gender, feminism, and marginalization?

Narratives of Space: Eco-Feminist Perspectives on Postcolonial Environmental Discourse

Submission deadline: 2027-07-31

Organization: Environment and Social Psychology Journal (Scopus-indexed), ISSN: 2424-8975  Special Issue Editors: Dr. Behzad Pourgharib,  Dr. Moein Moradi 

Contact Email: 

moein.moradi1988@gmail.com 

b.pourgharib@umz.ac.ir

CFP: Smell Studies Journal

General Editors: Will Tullett, University of York and Manon Raffard, University of Manchester.

Editorial board: Andrew Kettler, Chanelle Dupuis, Jayanthan Sriram, Ally Louks, Hsuan Hsu, Sandra Barré.

The Passage of Time and Generational Conflict: Theory, Narrative, Thought

Submission deadline: Friday, 30th October 2026. We kindly invite prospective authors to register on the journal website some days ahead of the deadline.

Peer-review (est.): March 2027.

Publication date: 30 May 2027.

Editors: Alessandro Cifariello (University of Tuscia), Emanuela De Blasio (University of Tuscia), Giovanni Palilla (University of Tuscia), Roberto Romagnino (University of Tuscia), Victoria Almonte (University of Tuscia)

Call for Chapters

Horror has long been described as a genre about the unknown — the thing lurking just beyond the edges of civilization. But as Stephen Graham Jones (Blackfeet Nation) has written, horror uniquely allows "two timelines — the past and the present, the legacy of colonialism and the world of the story — to simultaneously exist. Not just exist, but intersect."[1] It is this capacity for temporal and cultural intersection that has made horror and the Gothic not merely accessible to Indigenous writers, but essential.

American Comparative Literature Association 2027 Annual Meeting

University of Houston

May 20-23

The Poverty of Literature

Organizer:

Gabriel Quigley, University of Victoria (gabrielquigley@uvic.ca)

“Unruly Realism: Conventions and Contestations in 19th-Century American Realist Fiction”

Workshop at the University of Erfurt – November 26 - 27, 2026

Co-organized by Ilka Saal (Erfurt) and Antonia Purk (Mannheim)

Resources for American Literary Study (Penn State UP), a peer-reviewed journal of archival and bibliographical scholarship in American literature, invites submissions for our upcoming 2027 issues. Covering all periods and genres of American literature, RALS welcomes both traditional and digital approaches to archival and bibliographical analysis. We also welcome proposals for our "Prospects" series in which scholars forecast future developments (and identify scholarly gaps) in the study of major authors.

Instructions for submissions may be found @ http://www.psupress.org/Journals/jnls_rals.html. 

Centre for Science, Technology, and Society Studies at the Czech Academy of Sciences invites prospective participants to submit abstracts for presentation at the international research symposium Novelty and Inequalities in Science, to be held in Prague, Czechia, on October 8-9, 2026.

Novelty and Inequalities in Science

International Research Symposium on Recognizing and Rewarding Novelty in Science

October 8-9, 2026 Prague, Czechia

Submit abstract of 150-300 words or find more information here:

https://stss.flu.cas.cz/novelty2026

Call for Abstracts

When we think of the Central Valley, that strange opaque space between Los Angeles and San Francisco, we often think of heat, smog, and sometimes fruits and vegetables. What we don’t think about, however, is the immense literary scene of writers from the Central Valley and/or writing about the Central Valley. From Manuel Muñoz, to Gary Soto, to Juan Felipe Herrera, to Lee Herrick, to Marisol Baca, to David Dominguez, to many others, the Central Valley literary community is capacious and deserves attention. As such, this panel session invites papers that discuss the literary community of the Central Valley.

This panel at the SAMLA 97 conference (Nov. 5-7, 2026) examines hospitality as a critical framework within postcolonial studies, attending to the ways literary and cultural texts negotiate welcome, refusal, obligation, and exposure in the aftermath of empire. Within empire studies, hospitality emerges as a fraught ethical and aesthetic relation shaped by colonial histories, uneven mobility, and asymmetrical power. We consider how such texts register these dynamics across postcolonial contexts. Readings across genres and media—including novels, graphic novels, life writing, film, poetry, and theory—deploy hospitality as a vital lens for understanding postcolonial subjectivity, relationality, and the ongoing legacies of colonial governance.

MLA 2027 - Just-in-Time Session Proposal

Conference Date: January 7 to 10, 2027. 
Location: (Los Angeles, CA)
Submission Deadline: (August 17th, 2026)

TITLE: Many Stories, One History: Re-examining the Diverse Coalition of the American Revolution

Transnational Feminisms have emerged out of the need for women’s groups to address oppression that crosses national borders and to build solidarities rooted in an exploration of the articulation between the local and the global. These forms of feminisms examine the ways in which women’s groups transcend location beyond national boundaries to address their political and ideological struggles, exploring the interrelationships between discrete factors such as caste, class, ethnicity, sexuality, ability, age, and multiple other positionalities and contexts of inequalities as they overlap and are shaped by neoliberal economic and political forces, patriarchies and various other systems of stratification.

The Cultural Translation and Mobility: Processes, Spaces, Objects Working Group invites proposals for a panel titled “Planetary thinking at the intersections of cultural translation and mobility“ as part of the Canadian Association of Cultural Studies Biennial Conference (hybrid), November 5-7, 2026, hosted  by the Cultural Studies Department, Trent University, Canada.

Femspec seeks both scholarly and creative submissions for its upcoming Issue 26.2.  Femspec is an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed feminist academic journal dedicated to science fiction, fantasy, magical realism, surrealism, myth, folklore, and other supernatural genres.  Femspec publishes both academic scholarship and creative writing. Creative writing submissions could include short fiction, poetry, or experimental forms.

**DEADLINE EXTENDED TO 7/15/26**

The Writing, Speaking, and Argument Program, along with the Department of English and the Film and Media Studies Program at the University of Rochester are pleased to announce an upcoming undergraduate conference on horror, to be held October 23-25, 2026. The conference will featuring a keynote address by the University of Rochester’s own Jason Middleton, author of numerous articles on horror films, co-editor (with Aviva Briefel) of Labors of Fear: The Modern Horror Film Goes to Work (U of Texas P, 2023), and a featured expert on the AMC series Eli Roth’s History of Horror.

Drawing inspiration from Adrienne Rich's seminal book Of Woman Born (1976), in 2006, Andrea O'Reilly coined the term "Motherhood Studies" and established a new interdisciplinary academic field aimed at studying "motherhood" as an institution and "mothering" as an experience. O'Reilly emphasized the importance of adopting a feminist framework designed expressly for mothers: a "matricentric feminism" necessary for an intersectional exploration of motherhood. Within "Motherhood Studies," being or not being a mother matters, and the experience of motherhood is treated as a category alongside gender, class, and race.

One hundred years:
still, the fire burns.

In 1926, Wallace Thurman, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Aaron Douglas lit a match called FIRE!!, a journal by younger Black artists who refused to wait for permission.

It ran one issue. It changed everything.

Now, we strike the match, one century later.

FIRE!!! returns to publish twenty-one new pieces, paid, in the spirit of the original.

There are seats at this table for emerging African American writers, poets, photographers, makers, and artists.