Across the African continent and its global diasporas, trauma reverberates through histories of slavery, colonialism, racial capitalism, gendered violence, war, migration, and displacement. However, African and Afrodiasporic writers and artists have not only transformed experiences of pain into sites of creativity, survival, and healing but also reflected in their works the use of African approaches to restoration. This edited volume seeks to explore the ways in which trauma is reconstituted, managed, borne, and cured in African and Afrodiasporic literature and cultural expressions.

This panel presents a historical account of the aesthetic and political resistance movements that proliferated across Asia in the 1970s, a decade marked by the legacies of post–World War II decolonization in South and Southeast Asia, as well as by pan-Asian militancy inspired by the 1949 Chinese Revolution. During this period, Asia emerged as a global center of radical politics, with revolutionary energies circulating transnationally and influencing militant movements in the United States, Europe, and beyond.

ALA 2026: The Novel of Ideas in American Fiction

ALA Annual Conference (May 20-23, Chicago, IL)

Stories of Belonging and Nostalgia: South Asian Migrants’ Narratives  

Introductory Note

Call for Papers | Society of Early Americanists
American Literature Association | 37th Annual Conference | May 20–23, 2026 | Chicago, IL

New Directions in Early American Poetry Studies

This panel will develop and expand upon conversations about new directions in early American poetry studies begun at the SEA-sponsored panel on this topic to be convened during the ALA’s “American Poetry: A Symposium” (March 26–28, 2026).

Papers and presentations are invited that highlight new directions and recent developments in the study of early American poetry and poetics. Topics might include (but are not limited to):

Call for Papers | Society of Early Americanists
American Literature Association | 37th Annual Conference | May 20–23, 2026 | Chicago, IL

Teaching Early American Literature Outside the Survey Course

While recent decades have seen significant shifts in pedagogical approaches to early American literature, most undergraduate students (including many English majors) still obtain the bulk of their early American literary knowledge from some version of a broad survey course. Recognizing the potential limitations of such encounters, then, this roundtable asks: Where else in our curricula are we (or should we be) teaching early American literary texts?

THE BILLY JOEL SYMPOSIUM

A Two-Day Academic Conference Presented by the Long Island Music and Entertainment Hall of Fame

Stony Brook, NY | June 6–7, 2026

OVERVIEW

CALL FOR PAPERS

for a joint symposium to be hosted by the

Catharine Maria Sedgwick Society and Lydia Maria Child Society

Williamsburg, Virginia

June 24-27, 2026

(Deadline for proposals: February 5, 2026)

The Catharine Maria Sedgwick Society and the Lydia Maria Child Society invite proposals for a joint symposium to be held on the campus of the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, June 24-27, 2026.

Imagining the Impossible: International Journal for the Fantastic in Contemporary Media

CFP for Volume 5, Issue 1 (2026) Theme: Ciphers and Codes

36th Annual Mardi Gras Conference

Postcolonial Environments: Re-Grounding the Discipline in the State of Emergency

Date: February 12-13, 2026

Location: Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge

Edited Volume with e-ISBN (Digital)

4th National Conference of Translators

organised by

Sri Sri Centre for Translation and Interpreting Studies,

Sri Sri University, Cuttack, Odisha

and

Bharatiya Anuvaad Sahitya

2nd and 3rd February 2026

Re-thinking Trauma: Cinema, Performance, and Mediation - International Conference
Ekphrasis Center for Transdisciplinary, Liberal Arts and Creative Technologies Research

 Department of Theatre and Film, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
2nd to 4th of September 2026

Trauma theory emerged within a historical and conceptual framework that assumed relatively stable relations between experience, representation, and witnessing (as an ethical and narrative position). Questions of testimony, narrative rupture, belatedness (the delayed emergence of traumatic meaning), and symbolic mediation shaped the field’s core vocabulary and continue to frame contemporary trauma research.

Spectral Boundaries: Gender and Sexuality in Asian Horror Cinema

Dr. Soumyarup Bhattacharjee

CALL FOR CHAPTERS

The British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies (BACLS) is pleased to announce our first graduate conference, New Work in Contemporary Literary Studies, which will take place at the University of Leeds on May 20th 2026. This will be a hybrid conference.

Participants will be invited to contribute to a special issue of the soon-to-be relaunched journal Alluvium, to be published after the symposium. 

In Traditional African Festival Drama in Performance, Austine Anigala(2006)draws on the Ukpalabor festival of the Ebedei people in Southern Nigeria to argue for the performance and dramatic potential of the indigenous African festival. This provocative work is against the backdrop of polemics initiated by scholars such as Ruth Finnegan (2012) and Michael J. C. Echeruo (1973) about the dramatic limits of indigenous African festivals. Recall that Echeruo (1973) called for a re-examination of how indigenous festivals are referred to as drama.

The 2026 International Postgraduate Comparative Literature Conference (IPCLC 2026), hosted by the Master of Arts in Literary and Cultural Studies (MALCS) at The University of Hong Kong (HKU), brings together postgraduate students and emerging scholars from Hong Kong and beyond for a day of cross-cultural conversation. Taking place in person at HKU on May 26, 2026, the conference offers a supportive forum for sharing work in progress, building scholarly networks, and testing new comparative methods across literary, cultural, and media studies. Featuring themed panels, a keynote lecture, and Best Paper Award(s), IPCLC 2026 invites participants to consider how comparison can sharpen our understanding of urgent questions in the humanities.

The 1st Symposium on the Chinese Translation of the Greek Septuagint
（第一屆中文七十士譯本翻譯學術研討會）

Hong Kong, 22-24 April 2026 (Wed to Fri)

CALL FOR PAPERS

Theme: Towards a Chinese Translation of the Greek Septuagint: Opportunity and Challenge   

The conference aims to explore both opportunities and complexities involved in rendering the Greek Septuagint into Chinese. Participants are encouraged to present research on the following themes:

Call for Proposals: Edited volume on screenwriter, actor, director, and comedienne Elaine May

***EXTENSION*** Abstracts now due by January 25, 2026.

SCREEN STORYTELLERS

The Works of Elaine May

Edited by Jonathan Winchell

This edited volume on the works of Elaine May will be a book in the SCREEN STORYTELLERS series published by Bloomsbury Academic. Seeking 250-word abstracts for previously unpublished chapters on Elaine May’s work as a screenwriter and comedy writer. Final chapters will be 3,000-3,500 words, written for an audience of student readers.

The SCREEN STORYTELLERS series is designed for students, professors, and enthusiastic

CFP: E. E. Cummings Sessions at the American Literature Association’s 37th Annual Conference, Chicago, Illinois, May 20-23, 2026 

The E. E. Cummings Society will sponsor a session (or two) at the 2026 American Literature Association conference in Chicago [ https://americanliteratureassociation.org/ ]. We invite proposals for papers on any aspect of Cummings’ life and/or work. Proposals that touch upon the following topics will be especially welcome: 

It is with great pleasure that we announce the opening of applications for the 2026 Feminist Decolonial Politics Workshop.

The workshop will be held in a hybrid format, with both in-person and online participation options. We are especially excited to centre this year’s workshop on reading the work of Hortense Spillers, one of the most influential theorists of our time. Spillers is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor at Vanderbilt University, and her scholarship has been foundational to feminist, Black, and decolonial thought.

Participation in the workshop is by application only, and applicants must be accepted in order to attend.

The Institute for Research on Women (IRW) at Rutgers University is seeking guest editors for the Spring 2027 issue of its online journal, Rejoinder (https://irw.rutgers.edu/rejoinder). Rejoinder features work at the intersection of scholarship and activism that reflects feminist/queer and social justice perspectives and is currently published once a year. Guest editors will be responsible for the overall shape of the issue, and Rejoinder staff will advise on the process.

Student Conference on fantasy in cooperation between the Book Lovers Among Students (BLASt) club and the DnD club (Collegium Draconum) of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań!

We invite submissions on themes of diversity, identity politics, race, gender, and queerness in fantasy. The choice of genre can include fantasy, interactive fantasy, DnD, adaptations, offshoots, and appropriations. 

Reading Spells Conference will take place on January 24th 2026, online via MsTeams. 

“WE ARE THE ECOSEXUALS. The Earth is our lover.”  — Beth Stephens & Annie Sprinkle, The Ecosex Manifesto

The Graduate Students of the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University are proud to announce our biennial conference, to be held on April 17–18, 2026. We are pleased to host keynote speaker Heather Davis (The New School).