Throughout the past century, many theoretical approaches have put the indexical properties of the photographic image at the center of documentary's claims to the real. In today’s discussions of social media platforms, arguments about fakery, falsity, and deception abound across genres, from political deep fakes to more “innocuous” lifestyle influencing. Remarked on are the ways platforms such as Instagram and TikTok offer mesh-ups, montages, appropriated footage, nostalgic clips, and media plucked from their original contexts.

CALL FOR PAPERS

13th International George Moore Conference

May 5-7, 2026

at

         Atlantic Technological University, Mayo

&

Moore Hall

George Moore:  Landscape and Memory

“A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.” 

Dear Colleagues,

Please consider submitting a paper proposal to the panel, "Boccaccio and Boccaccian Medievalisms: Representatives of Gender in Storytelling" for the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The dates of the conference are May 14-16, 2026. The deadline to submit a paper proposal is September 15. This panel will be in person and is organized by Italian Studies@Kalamazoo.

Description

In Sarah Orne Jewett’s 1886 short story “A White Heron”, young protagonist Sylvia is approached by an itinerant hunter and asked to expose the location of the white heron’s nest. The threat to health, growth, and integrity here is complex, both for Sylvia and the heron, as well as the hunter. The central concept of the nest, as a space simultaneously protected and vulnerable, mundane and coveted, nourishing and abused, is an influential object and space in the narrative.

‘Theory Today’ working group [USC] is organizing an Online theory workshop on the theme of contemporary fascism with one of the most insightful thinkers on the topic―Alberto Toscano. The workshop will take place on October 17, 2025 via Zoom, and will have the following schedule:

………………………………………………

October 17, 2025

Session 1 | Toscano: Contours of Contemporary Fascism [10 am to 1 pm PST]

-          Workshop session focused on reading and discussing primary texts, including Marx, Badiou, Negri, et al.

As Toni Morrison notes in Playing in the Dark, the construction of Africanist ideologies that misread and/or misrepresent Black identities is as American as apple pie. The white gaze has historically and contemporaneously controlled what is known and unknown about African Americans, just as the ingestion of Africanist ideologies has shaped how many people of the African diaspora see themselves. However, the cultural productions of African American people have frequently not only asserted the heterogeneity of African American communities, contesting Africanist collectivization, but have also affirmed ways of knowing beyond the cultural and systemic erasure of Black personhood and agency.

The song lyric occupies little space in academia, where it is less studied, less appreciated, and perceived as less-than other kinds of writing. Despite music’s ubiquitous cultural presence, the song lyric—as creative work—suffers from what renown songwriter Jimmy Webb calls a “status problem”: songwriters do not enjoy the same standing as writers of other kinds of traditionally studied literature. The most common way that song lyrics have earned scholarly attention is by conflating the form with the poem. Goldstein’s (1969) The Poetry of Rock is one of the first books to attend to lyrics as poetry.

In 2025 alone, public arts and humanities organizations have faced constant and systemic threats to their funding, their missions, and their ongoing goals to provide communities with access to the arts. The Trump administration's demolition of funding to the National Endowment for the Humanities immediately harmed the ongoing projects of organizations across the country, while imperiling most of the state humanities councils across the country. More recently, the rescindment of National Endowment for the Arts grants affected the publishing missions of nonprofit, independent publishers like Graywolf and Milkweed, while also shredding the community outreach efforts of public arts, literary arts, and literacy programs across the nation.

This edited volume seeks to collect scholarship on the treatment of political themes and world-building in the Star Wars franchise since Disney acquired Lucasfilm in 2012. Scholars have thoroughly explored political topics in George Lucas’s works, but have paid less attention to how Star Wars projects under Disney have continued, changed, or challenged the franchise’s approach to politics. To advance the scholarship on this subject, we welcome proposals from a variety of disciplines and perspectives, including literary criticism, cultural history, political science, film studies, and fandom studies. 

Possible / Suggested Topics:

Dear friends, colleagues, and students, 

We are excited to announce the Call for Papers for the third issue of the NEW BENJAMIN STUDIES yearbook, centred around the theme “Walter Benjamin in Times of Crisis”.

The editorial collective of NBS is pleased to welcome Anna Migliorini (Florence) and Ana María Miranda Mora (Utrecht) as guest editors for the issue. 

Latinx Visions 2.0

ONE PLANET—MANY WORLDS

CALL FOR PAPERS

ONLINE CONFERENCE

November 3-7, 2025

Co-Organizers: Matthew David Goodwin, Cathryn Merla-Watson, Taryne Jade Taylor

State of the Nation Film and TV in Britain: Representations of the Social, Political, and Cultural Landscape.

How might we illustrate, explore, and begin to define the ‘state of the nation’ film and television text? This edited collection, in collaboration with Intellect, invites consideration of these questions. We are particularly keen for considerations of contemporary nominees such as Adolescence (2025) and Mr Bates vs The Post Office (2024).

The editors invite abstracts for a forthcoming edited volume entitled Disney: A Companion, which will offer a comprehensive critical exploration of The Walt Disney Company’s cultural, historical, aesthetic, political, and industrial significance. The Companion is intended for the Peter Lang Genre Fiction and Film Companion series (https://www.peterlang.com/series/gffc), and aims to bring together a wide range of interdisciplinary perspectives that interrogate Disney’s enduring legacy and its evolving role in global media and culture.