Call for Papers and Workshops: “History up for Debate: Literature, Storytelling and the Imagined Past” 

1-2 July 2026, University of Salzburg, Department of English and American Studies, Unipark Nonntal 

Conference within the Framework of the Salzburg Conferences on English Literature and Culture (SEC) 

Organisers: Dorothea Flothow, Julia Hartinger, Sarah Herbe, Christopher Herzog, Eva-Maria Kubin, Markus Oppolzer, and Elisabeth Schober 

***DEADLINE EXTENDED TO JAN. 15th 2026***

Medieval Engagements with Disability

This edited volume aims to explore the concept of veleno, that is poison, in its material and symbolic
dimensions, examining how it functions as a cultural construct and/or a discursive category within
Italian literature—considered in dialogue with cultural practices and discursive uses of language—
from the Middle Ages to the contemporary period.
Across Italian cultural history, poison operates on a threshold between pharmakon (in its Derridean
sense) and toxin, between language that heals or contaminates, between scientific knowledge and
moral accountability. Far from being confined to medical or chemical meanings, poison emerges as a

Proposing a panel or panels on postmodern-era US Fiction for this year’s American Literature Association Conference, which will happen in Chicago from May 20-23.

A one-day symposium hosted by the Contemporary Intimacies, Sexualities and Genders (CISG) Research Group at Manchester Metropolitan University. 

22 April 2026 10-4, Manchester Metropolitan University, Oxford Road, Manchester, M15 6EB. 

Critical Studies on Bianca Pitzorno, edited by Anna Finozzi and Dalila Forni

Hello,

The University of British Columbia is currently seeking educational materials to populate our Pop Pedagogies Archive page. This will be an open-access resource library for educators teaching students at a variety of levels. We are looking for contributions of teaching materials relevant to the intersection of popular culture and education. Submissions can range from course syllabi to individual lesson plans and unit outlines. All contributors will retain the rights to their submitted materials. 

Call for Papers for an Anthology

“The Colours of Pride: Queer Identities in Literature and Culture”

Submit to minimelow2025@gmail.com

Submissions close on 15 January 2026

Submit your paper to: minimelow2025@gmail.com  

Papers are invited for an anthology to be brought out by a reputed international publisher on the theme, “The Colours of Pride: Queer Identities in Literature and Culture.” 

A small forest area that holds ecological, historical, cultural, religious and spiritual value, and is protected by the local community, can be understood as a ‘Sacred Grove’. The term ‘sacred’ signifies the importance of these groves as they protect different species despite depletion of forest areas around them. The prohibition to collect or remove any resources from these sacred groves conserve plants, parasites, animals, herbs, and even maintain the water and soil compositions (Khan et al, 2008). As a result, these sites serve as living records of geographical and ecological past, making them invaluable spaces for scientific research.

The African American Literature and Culture Society invites abstracts (of no more than 250 words) for presentations at the annual conference of the American Literature Association (http://americanliteratureassociation.org/). We will also consider a limited number of panel proposals (of no more than 500 words).    

The Medieval Comics Project would like to organize a session on comics for the 46th Annual Medieval and Renaissance Forum to be held at Keene State College in Keene, New Hampshire, on Friday and Saturday, 10-11 April 2026.

Presentations can be in-person or remote. 

Possible topics might include 

• “comics” of the medieval and/or Renaissance eras

• comics adaptations of medieval and/or Renaissance literary texts

• comics depictions of medieval and/or Renaissance historical events

Call for Proposals –- Oxford Handbook of the Harlem Renaissance

Text and Texture: Rethinking Materiality in Adaptation Studies

[Edited Collection]

Concept Note

The Margaret Fuller Society invites proposals for a panel at ALA 2026 about teaching in difficult times. As we head into the spring 2026 semester—the mid-point in an academic year when students and educators read U.S. literature amidst rising book bans, closing degree programs and DEI offices, and even the dismantling of the Department of Education—many of us are facing existential crises about how to do what matters to us most. How to support our students? How to sustain our disciplines? How to teach in ways that do justice to our subjects? The most basic day-to-day parts of our teaching lives have never felt more vulnerable—or more urgent.

The Media Mapper project is accepting proposals for the Spring Semester Symposium, which will be held on April 17, 2026, at the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the Annenberg School of Communication, University of Pennsylvania. Please submit your proposals to Ennuri Jo (ennuri.jo@asc.upenn.edu) by Monday, January 12, 2026 11:59pm EST. 

CARGC invites early-career film and media scholars, doctoral candidates, and multimodal media practitioners to try out a new digital humanities tool, Media Mapper, and present their creation to the Annenberg and the UPenn community in CARGC’s Spring Semester Symposium. 

This issue explores storytelling as a discursive practice that reimagines underground waterscapes imaginaries. In an era of rapid urbanisation, overextraction, and environmental degradation, attention to the subterranean is no longer optional but critical—both imaginatively and materially. Groundwater already supports the livelihoods of more than 1 billion urban residents in Asia and 150 million in Latin America, including those in megacities such as Beijing, Jakarta, and Mexico City, yet it remains underacknowledged and increasingly imperilled (British Geological Survey 2). Across Europe, over 15% of mapped aquifers are classified as overexploited or contaminated, representing 26% of aquifer surface area (Sentek et al.).

The Expatriate Archive Centre (EAC) invites master's students worldwide to submit theses that contribute to the scholarship of expatriation studies. 
 
The winner of the thesis award will receive €500, the executive summary of the thesis will be published online by the EAC and organisations involved in this initiative.
 
The submission deadline is 31 March 2026.
 
Candidates must ensure their thesis meets the following criteria:
 

Call for Papers (Abstract deadline: 1 March 2026)

Framing Turkish American Literature: Form, Poetics, and Transnational Imaginaries

Special Forum of the Journal of Transnational American Studies

Edited by Gulsin Ciftci (University of Münster) and Yagmur Su Kolsal (University of Münster)

Creativitas: Critical Explorations in Literary Studies invites scholarly contributions for its annual issue exploring the profound significance of plants to human culture, literature, history, and thought. We seek essays that examine the complex relationships between humans and botanical life from arts, humanities, and social science perspectives.

            Plant blindness remains a significant challenge in cultural representation and environmental awareness. This perceptual tendency causes us to overlook plants in favour of animal life. Yet botanical life constitutes the foundation of all terrestrial ecosystems. Plants remain central to human survival, economy, and imagination.

This conference seeks to critically investigate the potentials and pitfalls of the "material

turn" through the medium of sound. We invite submissions that test, challenge, or refine

materialist theories by examining the "acoustic state": from the state of matter in

vibration, the political State's governance of the sonic realm to the affect of the social.

The recent "material turn" challenges us to reconsider the foundations of the

humanities, the production of the voice, [anti/]biography of bodies (human or

non-human; musical or otherwise), embodiment and the social and politicized

The Charles Olson Society will sponsor a session at the upcoming ALA Conference, to be held in Chicago, May 20th – 23rd.

As technological, ecological, and sociopolitical transformations challenge traditional notions of human identity, the posthuman paradigm offers a framework for exploring how literature and culture imagine, negotiate, and problematise the boundaries between humans, nonhumans, and their surroundings. This conference seeks to critically examine established notions of a posthuman future/present and its representations in contemporary narratives across literature, cinema, advertising, video games, and other media forms. The seminar examines the concepts of authority, marginality, and ambiguity within dystopian and utopian literary visions of posthumanism.

In recent years, there has been a growing scholarly interest in Indigenous literatures
in English, including Native American, First Nations (Canadian), Australian
Aboriginal, Hawaiian, and other related literary traditions. More recently, the term
Oceanic Literatures has gained traction among critics to describe the literary
production of the Pacific Islands, encompassing regions such as New Zealand,
Hawai‘i, Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, and others. These literatures reflect the complex
processes through which “Oceanic” cultural identities are formed—shaped by
Indigenous worldviews and interwoven with the legacies of colonialism,
postcolonialism, migration, and global cultural flows - as present in the works of