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In the present digital era, the public sphere, as defined by Jürgen Habermas—a space where citizens negotiate power through collective discussion and political participation—has shifted on digital platforms.
Step right up! Circus and sideshow have long occupied a distinctive place within popular culture, functioning as community sites for entertainment, business, logistics, spectacle, performance, and insider culture. Circus and sideshow continually shape how we view the extraordinary.
(ONE WEEK LEFT) The 98th annual SAMLA Conference is taking place Thursday, November, 5, through Saturday, November, 7, 2026, at the Wyndham Atlanta Buckhead Hotel & Conference Center in Atlanta, GA. For more information, see https://southatlanticmla.org/.
The organizers of the PCA’s special topic on UFOs, Cryptids, Conspiracies, and the Paranormal welcome proposals for papers and presentations from an interdisciplinary range of fields, including sociology, literature, media studies, anthropology, folklore, religion, history, political science, medieval studies, rhetoric, education, and bibliography. Papers in this area will not seek to prove or disprove the reality of any of the stigmatized subjects under discussion; instead, they will explore the cultural forces at work in their origin and development, their form and content, and the audiences that receive them.
Proposals for 15-20 minute papers responding to the following call for papers are invited for the Dickens Society's panel at NeMLA 2027 (March 6-9, Newport, RI).
Call for Papers_Entanglements_Volume 3, Issue 1 (Open Issue) Manuscript Submission Deadline: 30.10.2026
Tentative Publication Date: 30 January 2027
CFP link: https://www.entanglements.in/call-for-papers-docs/CFP_Entanglements%203.1_Aug-2026.pdf
Special call for specific chapters on the subject of Vampires and Fashion, for a volume under contract at Peter Lang.
For the last 100 years vampires have graced screens large and small, dressed in clothing that has become part and parcel of their appeal. From drab gray and black German frock coats to full formal tuxes, from diaphanous gowns to sleek, form-hugging dresses, from haute couture to jeans and leather jackets, and from wing-collared capes to Middle Eastern chadors, vampire fashion is varied and exciting, yet has, to date, received little academic attention.
The Institute for Medieval Studies at the University of New Mexico invites proposals for three
sponsored sessions for ICMS 2027. Proposals must be submitted through the ICMS Confex
Portal (https://shorturl.at/d05So) by 15 September 2026, including title, 300 word abstract and
50 word description.
The Institute for Medieval Studies at the University of New Mexico invites proposals for three
sponsored sessions for ICMS 2027. Proposals must be submitted through the ICMS Confex
Portal (https://shorturl.at/d05So) by 15 September 2026, including title, 300 word abstract and
50 word description.
Conference online (via Zoom)
8-9 October 2026
Deadline for proposals: 18 September 2026
CFP:
CALL FOR PAPERS/AMERICAN LITERATURE
COLLEGE ENGLISH ASSOCIATION ANNUAL CONFERENCE
APRIL 1-3, 2027 / ST LOUIS, MO
SUBMISSION SITE IS OPEN: https://www.conftool.pro/cea2027
DEADLINE: 11/01/2026
For its 2027 annual conference,the College English Association (CEA) invites proposals for papers and panels that explore the theme of “Gateways” and their significance in literature, criticism, and pedagogy. we also encourage proposals on GENERAL TOPICS, including AMERICAN, BRITISH, AND WORLD LITERATURES.
DON'T KNOW CEA? YOU SHOULD!
Through an interdisciplinary approach drawing from rhetorical, gender, and literary studies, this panel explores how immigrant and diasporic communities, who are often socially marginalized in the West, create hospitality for each other. In particular, food sites and practices make belonging possible in otherwise displaced circumstances. For example, Michelle Zauner’s memoir Crying in H Mart (2021) shows how ethnic grocery stores and restaurants are material spaces in which cultural memory is archived especially across generations. Similarly, Chithra Banerjee Divakaruni’s novel The Mistress of Spices (1997) showcases how food stores can offer healing and sanctuary for a community.
Call for Papers | Chronologies
The Velvet Light Trap, Volume 100 (to be published fall 2027)
Submission deadline: September 20, 2026
Modern Language Association sessio Los Angeles
Staging Endings:Cultural Representations of Ageing, End of Life, and Care
Framing the Human in the Nineteenth Century
48th Annual Conference
Nineteenth-Century Studies Association
Philadelphia, PA
March 11-13, 2027
Conference website: https://ncsaweb.net/2027-conference-information/
Call for Proposals
Submission Deadline: October 31, 2026
Notification of Acceptance: January 2027
Please submit proposals via this Google Form
Questions? Email the conference organizers at ncsa2027conference@gmail.com
This is a final call for papers for the Journal of Beat Studies' 14th volume, welcoming new and renewed contributions on any Beat Generation or Beat Generation-adjacent relevant subject (including the New York School, Black Mountain College, San Francisco Renaissance, Umbra Writers Workshop, etc.). The journal is interested in essays that reconsider familiar figures, recover overlooked ones, and explore the connections as well as any frictions between these overlapping scenes and their legacies.
CALL FOR PAPERSDHARTI 2026 Biennial ConferenceDecolonising the Digital: Social Justice, Inclusion, and Equitable Knowledge Production
18–20 December 2026
KIIT Deemed to be University, Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India
Hosted by KIIT Deemed to be University in collaboration with the Digital Humanities Alliance for Research and Teaching Innovations (DHARTI).
Conference Theme
The interdisciplinary field of Interactive Digital Narratives (IDNs) combines immersive technologies with the timeless art of storytelling. IDN offers transformative ways to engage audiences, preserve cultural heritage and address social and educational challenges. From branching narratives in video games, to immersive virtual reality experiences and interactive installations, IDNs push the boundaries of how stories can be created and experienced.
This panel seeks to examine the profound significance of food as a central narrative element in literature and its broader implications for literary scholarship. Inspired by this year's conference theme, Empowering Communities, the panel explores moments in which food transcends its culinary function to become a source of cultural knowledge, communal identity, and collective agency. Whether gathered around a dinner table, preserving family recipes, or cultivating food traditions in the face of displacement or oppression, literary communities frequently use food to sustain memory, foster belonging, and resist erasure.
This roundtable seeks to put in conversation Blue Humanities from around the world, exploring how literature, cultural texts, and film can inform, reveal, or create new ideological perspectives on water. Informed by Blue Humanities, as well as a global movement to protect water’s right to flow and be free from pollution (Ecuador Constitution of 2008: Rights of Nature, Policy Brief: Water rights in Chile, Canada Water Act of 1985, among others), this timely roundtable connects directly with NeMLA’s 58th Annual Convention theme of Empowering Communities. As the theme specifies, cultural knowledge serves as a source of empowerment, and literature, cultural texts, and film are primary ways that cultural knowledge is shared amongst communities.
West Coast Review (SDSU Press) is seeking art, flash fiction, short stories, and any creative prose that falls in-between. This includes creative non-fiction, memoires, craft essays and experimental prose pieces. We accept all genres--we just want pieces that are bold and embrace the diversity found on the west coast!
Guidelines:
We are currently accepting flash fiction, short stories, and any creative prose that falls in-between (this includes creative non-fiction, craft essays, and experimental work). Our maximum word count is 5000 words. For flash fiction, we accept up to three stories in a single submission.
While the Gothic has long been associated with monsters, haunted houses, unstable hierarchies, and hidden knowledge, the servant's specific connections to the genre's core dynamics of space, affect, and plot have been critically undertheorized. Yet Gothic narratives fundamentally depend upon servant figures to produce narrative tension, mediate hidden knowledge, and expose the instability of domestic, social, and political order. This panel therefore positions the Gothic servant not as a supplementary character but as a central Gothic mechanism and epistemological problem worthy of scholarly attention and analysis.
What strategies can paper ephemera teach us in the digital age? This panel invites conversations by writing instructors, educators, poets, and artists exploring the work that happens at/within the margins of writing. Both literally and figuratively, we take an expansive scope to the term “margins,” imagining not only the writing that appears on the space of the printed page, but writing that would normally be scrapped, discarded, remixed, or ephemeralized. This can include digital ephemera, such as “disappearing” messages in Instagram or other communication services. At another angle: margins can also mean the liminality of writing, the furthermost edges of what’s often standard and visible.
The Ralph Waldo Emerson Society invites proposals for a panel on “Emerson and Poetry” at the American Literature Association’s 38th Annual Conference, to be held May 26–29, 2027, in Boston at the Westin Copley Place, 10 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA 02116.In “Circles” (1841), Emerson describes “the poet” as a representative seer who breaks the reader’s “whole chain of habits” while opening up new possibilities.
We are seeking chapter proposals for a new edited collection entitled Modern Meta Myths, examining intersections of mythic adaptation/reception with critical self-awareness. The collection aims to bring together a diverse array of chapters, working through different methodologies, generic focuses, and analyzing adaptations/receptions of various world mythological traditions. We define “myth” broadly, to include legends, fairy tales, religious stories, even folk tales, in addition to more traditional bodies of mythology. In particular, we’re excited to read proposals about world mythic engagement beyond the Euro-American tradition.
Consuming US Popular Culture: Media Aesthetics, Ethics and Literacy
Virtual Conference | 27–28 November 2026
In his seminal and final film Black Is…Black Ain’t, the documentarian Marlon Riggs utilizes a pot of gumbo to articulate his thesis that Blackness necessitates an identity built on multiplicity, complication, and depth, a production requiring expansiveness in its sustained attention (Riggs 1995). Such a vision contests and destabilizes narratives depicted within the film that sought to limit Black identities and identifications, and it cuts against the second half of his title, which suggests Blackness in terms of negation, evasion, and minimization. The title to this conference continues a conversation with Riggs and also with Ralph Ellison, Ama Ata Aidoo, Toni Morrison, Stuart Hall, and centuries of international Black thought.
Postcolonial thinking has often been defined by questions of cosmopolitan and pluralist living in the decolonizing world: through figurations of exile and unrootedness (Edward Said, Eqbal Ahmad), poetics of identity, hybridity, and relation (Frantz Fanon, Homi Bhabha, and Édouard Glissant), intimacies across racial and colonial differences (Lisa Lowe, Leela Gandhi, Rahul Rao), or the territorial and planetary entrapments of multiculturalism and globalization (Rey Chow, Sylvia Wynter, Gayatri Spivak). We ask, how do postcolonial and subaltern subjects excluded by global elites make claims of cosmopolitan (non/)belonging?
Society for Reformation Research (SRR) welcomes 20 minute papers across the disciplines for our four Virtual Sessions at the 62nd Medieval Congress May 13-15, 2027. Focus on the Long Reformation (medieval roots to current iterations).
Sessions are:
Society for Reformation Research (SRR) welcomes 20 minute papers across the disciplines for our four Virtual Sessions at the 62nd Medieval Congress May 13-15, 2027. Focus on the Long Reformation (medieval roots to current iterations).
Sessions are:
Call for Proposals: Sessions, Panels, Papers
Come join a vivid and diverse community of scholars and professionals to discuss the history and depiction of the sea through a popular culture perspective!
We are considering proposals for individual papers, panels, creative sessions, and roundtables. Sessions are scheduled in 1½ hour slots, typically with four papers or speakers per session. Scholars, undergraduate and graduate students, and working professionals are all encouraged to submit. Proposals may include (but are not restricted to):
CALL FOR BOOK CHAPTERS:
Indian Knowledge Systems:
Foundations, Frameworks, and Continuity
What if craft is not the lesser twin of art, but another theory of making, one in which the hand thinks, the material answers, and form emerges through a dialogue with earth, fibre, clay, metal, wood, stone, pigment, or thread? What if the translator is not a mere carrier but a craftsperson, whose hands weaves culture, sound, meaning and memory? Is craft merely an act of mechanical repetition, or is it a profound performance of material translation? Is translation a routine reproduction or a craftsperson of cultural artefacts?
Concept Note
Bengal as a cultural, social, and analytical territorial space carries a series of nuances that bear, directly and indirectly, on the processes of identity formation. While these processes may be read as organic phenomena in pre-colonial and undivided Bengal, they became a prominent aspect of colonial and national identity politics in post-Partition Bengal. This volume explores the spectrum of such processes as they unfold across the transition from the pre-colonial to the post-colonial cultural and political history of Bengal, from the eighteenth century to the present.
CFP for an in person session of papers at the International Cogress on Medieval Studies (ICMS) at Kalamazoo, MI, May 13-15, 2027
Session #8642: Intangible, Intelligible, Intractable: Unruly (Re)readings of the Medieval
As human rights institutions and legal frameworks are discredited, defunded, dismantled, and openly ignored across multiple national contexts, the question of what literature has to do with rights returns with new urgency. This moment demands new ways of thinking about these problems. This seminar responds by turning to the many literary traditions from the Global South and postcolonial contexts in which writers have narrated human rights and personhood on their own cultural terms and grounds.
We are seeking authors for chapters of a forthcoming book collection, Women, Gender, and Protest: Transnational Activism and Movements of Resistance, edited by Mehra Shirazi, Patti Duncan, and aman agah. This is a reference volume for Bloomsbury Academic Publishing on the topic of transnational feminist protest movements, and will be part of the series, Women and Society around the World, marketed as an accessible text for undergraduate college students, upper-level high school students, and public libraries. Chapters must be structured around specific world regions and each chapter should be approximately 10,000 words.
The National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions' Journal of Collective Bargaining in the Academy, is an open-access, peer-reviewed, online periodical advancing research and scholarly thought related to collective bargaining and other issues in higher education, and making relevant and pragmatic peer-reviewed research readily accessible.
Hosted by James Madison University, Harrisonburg, VA
Conference Dates: February 10-12, 2027
Submission Deadline: October 23, 2026
The African, African American, and Diaspora Studies Center at James Madison University invites proposals for its annual interdisciplinary conference Beyond Repair: Reconciliations, Restorations, Resurgences. The conference will be held from Wednesday, February 10 to Friday, February 12, 2027 and brings together scholars, archivists, and practitioners from a variety of overlapping and intersecting fields. Submit proposals by October 23, 2026.
We invite submissions to participate in two free events organized and coordinated by the ‘Senses and Society’ Thematic Group (TG07) of the International Sociological Association and hosted by the Sociology Department of National University of Singapore (NUS). A vibrant and multicultural city like Singapore offers a highly suitable location for a conference and graduate workshop that seeks to engage with new and exciting scholarship on sensory approaches to embodied practices, urban experience, tourism, heritage, mobilities, food cultures, and more.
Thinking Stupidity: Literature, Philosophy, and Critical Theory
This seminar explores the problem of stupidity, ignorance, and idiocy in literature, philosophy, and critical theory.
Over the past two decades, the environmental humanities have profoundly reshaped our understanding of oceans, rivers, and other aquatic environments. Simultaneously, Gothic studies have increasingly turned toward maritime spaces, revealing the sea not merely as a sublime backdrop but as a haunted archive where colonial violence, environmental catastrophe, and spectral histories continually return. This seminar proposes a dialogue between Blue Humanities and the Gothic by examining how oceans, rivers, and littoral zones emerge as spaces of haunting in world literature.
PAEDEIA: NSU Journal of Humanities, Social Sciences
PLEASE CLICK THE FOLLOWING LINK Submit
*"Online First" publication upon acceptance
*Expected print publication in December 2026
56TH ANNUAL COLLEGE ENGLISH ASSOCIATION CONFERENCE
CEA 2027/GATEWAYS
WESTIN HOTEL/ST. LOUIS, MO.
APRIL1-3,2027
CONFERENCE THEME:GATEWAYS
PAPERS ON GENERAL TOPICS ALSO WELCOMED
For its 2027 annual conference,the College English Association (CEA) invites proposals for papers and panels that explore the theme of “Gateways” and their significance in literature, criticism, and pedagogy.
ICAF is excited to announce its first conference outside of North America and invites proposals for scholarly presentations for its twenty-second meeting, to be held online and in person at Edinburgh Napier University in Edinburgh, Scotland.
While the purpose-built playhouses of early modern London – such as the Globe, Rose, and Blackfriars – dominate histories of early modern performance, theatrical activity frequently spilled out into non-dedicated, non-purpose-built sites. Command performances often took place at the royal court or on country estates, while the evidence for London playing companies on tour compiled by projects such as Records of Early English Drama (REED) has unveiled a rich regional theatre history in guildhalls, chapels, inn yards, open streets, and even the deck of an East India Company ship. Performance in early modern England was profoundly adaptable.
~Call for FULL Chapter:
Update: The manuscript is nearly finished however a planned chapter has fallen through. Replacement chapter needed immediately. Please review the details below and contact me: maureen.fadem@gmail.com
This is a call for chapters for The Routledge Research Companion to Toni Morrison, a new companion volume intended for a scholarly audience, as support for newer Morrison scholars approaching their research, as well as graduate students working on Morrison.
In the introduction to the Fourth Edition of The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Valerie Smith emphasize the imitativeness of literature—Black literature, specifically. To them, literature begets newer literature. At the same time, readers have traced formal patterns of repetition and imitation in Black literature across centuries, dating back to the antebellum.
This panel seeks papers that interrogate Asian American injury as a recurring motif and rhetoric in literature and media. Recent Asian American scholarship and aesthetic/cultural production have promoted the political utility of minor affects (Sianne Ngai, Cathy Park Hong), new discourses and praxes of collectivity and community (“cut fruit diaspora”; the emergence of “Wasia” and “Wasian meetups”), and sentimental identification through commodities and commodification in the current moment of late-stage capitalism (Crying in HMart; Ocean Vuong’s inclusion in Oprah’s Book Club).
The Art of Chaos
A Transdisciplinary Conference
Conference Dates: December 2-3, 2026
Location: Online
Proposal Deadline: November 1, 2026
Conference Fee: £100
Conference Webpage: https://labrc.co.uk/2026/08/13/the-art-of-chaos/
" In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order."
— C.G. Jung