In an era marked by digital mediation, political polarization, and heightened ethical scrutiny, humour has become a high-stake cultural practice: jokes travel rapidly, provoke backlash, generate solidarity, and often become flashpoints for debates around offence, free speech, and accountability. In the twenty-first century, humour has emerged as one of the most powerful, contested, and ubiquitous modes of cultural expression. Circulating across literary texts, theatrical stages, digital platforms, popular media, and everyday social interactions, humour today functions not merely as entertainment but as a deeply performative, political, and ethical practice.

Call for Proposals:

Italian Americans and the Making of America:
Design, Diaspora, and the Architecture of Belonging

58th Annual Conference of the Italian American Studies Association
November 5-8, 2026

Tufts University, Medford, MA

https://italianamericanstudies.submittable.com/submit/348486/58th-annual-iasa-conference-at-tufts-university

“Creativity, Resistance and Social Change”International Conference13-14 June 2026 - Accra, Ghana / Online

organised by

London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research

Across history and cultures, creativity has played a central role in resisting injustice, challenging dominant narratives and imagining alternative social futures. From storytelling, music and visual art to literature, performance, digital media and everyday creative practices, acts of creation often emerge in response to exclusion, oppression or crisis. Creativity can unite communities, give voice to marginalised experiences and sustain collective struggles for dignity, justice and transformation.

In athletics, athletes are often described as ‘throwing down the gauntlet’ when they record a particularly impressive jump, race, throw, indicating a raise in the competition stakes, a nod to their fellow competitors that they are the champion to beat. In the 2001 movie A Knight’s Tale, jousting enthusiasts are depicted like modern day sports fans, with Ulrich’s friends even singing a football chant in the pub. 

Call for Papers

International Conference on Myths, Archetypes and Symbols:“Models and Alternatives” 26-27 September 2026 – London/Online

 organised by

London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research

“Beyond Labels”: International Conferenceon Disability, Different Ability and Neurodiversity12-13 September 2026Birkbeck, University of London / Online

organised by

London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research

Disability, different ability and neurodiversity are concepts that traverse boundaries, challenging disciplines to rethink foundational assumptions about identity, culture and power. This interdisciplinary conference seeks to bring together scholars from different fields to critically examine the shifting narratives, representations and lived experiences surrounding ability and difference.

Postcolonial Interventions invites scholarly articles for an OPEN ISSUE to be published in June 2026. As the journal enters its eleventh year, we are hoping to continue critical exploration of emerging voices and recent literary creations while remaining mindful of the various threats associated with older imperial aggressions, re-appearing across the globe, fissures within nation states, multiple forms of exclusionary violence and widening inequality and precarity. The next issue of Postcolonial Interventions seeks to explore such issues and more based on postcolonial experiences across the world.

Submission Guidelines:

Seeking 250-word proposals that engage with Filipino/a/x placemaking in literature, ecology, media, the arts, and the built environment. Particularly interested in proposals that bring together some combination of urban humanities, Global Asias, and archipelagic thinking.

The Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies publishes interdisciplinary and cross-cultural articles and interviews on literature, history, politics, and art whose focus, settings, or subjects involve colonialism and its aftermath, with an emphasis on the former British Empire.

James Baldwin ends his “Open Letter to My Sister, Angela Y. Davis” about her imprisonment, the health of the country, and the responsibility of intellectuals, with the assertion that: 

If we know, and do nothing, we are worse than the murderers hired in our name. If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own—which it is—and render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.

How might scholarship today render such corridors impassable? What is our responsibility, and what are we willing to risk? 

Apologies for crossposting.

Call for Papers: Journal of Contemporary Painting Special Issue & Symposium

Special Issue: ‘Conversations between Painting, Fashion and Textiles’

One-day symposium: ‘Painted Garments’

Friday 22 May 2026

The Hub, Camberwell College of Arts, Bonar Road, London SE15 5FB

Keynote: Delaine Le Bas

View the full call here>>

https://www.intellectbooks.com/journal-of-contemporary-painting#call-for-papers

Deadlines

The Cambridge Handbook of Postcolonial Law and Literature is a collection of essays analyzing the relationship between English Common Law and Anglophone literature in the colonial and postcolonial world. The collection is largely complete, but can accommodate a few more essays.   The editors particularly welcome submissions on Disability Studies, Ecological Studies, and/or essays that focus on the Caribbean.  

This year’s ICSAH meeting approaches the Art of Mediation as a framework for understanding cross-cultural interaction in history. Throughout time, individuals, institutions, communities, and cultural forms—ranging from language and performance to visual and material culture—have acted as mediators between societies. In negotiating religious difference, political conflict, economic rivalry, and artistic exchange, they shaped the shared spaces where civilisations met, interacted, and coexisted.

CFP for Special Issue in IMAGO MUNDI: The International Journal for the History of Cartography

“Maps and the Imagination”

In light of the ongoing “cartographic turn” in literary studies and recent critical attempts to

“remap” the field of cartographic history, we are seeking contributions for a special issue that

examines the relationship between maps (from historical prints to digital creations) and the

imagination (from the impact of maps on literary and visual arts to earthworks and new media).

Following the growing interest in cartographic imaginaries, documented, for example, in studies

The Cultural Studies Cell

Department of English and Cultural Studies, Central Campus

In collaboration with

Department of Media Studies, Central Campus

CHRIST (Deemed to be University), Bangalore

Organizes

An International Conference (Hybrid)on

Urban/Media Infrastructures

March 5-7, 2026

Call for Expressions of Interest: Book Reviews Editor for The London Journal

The London Journal is seeking expressions of interest for the role of Joint Book Reviews Editor.

This role will cover the period from roughly 1800 to the present, joining Kirstin Barnard, who covers the medieval and early modern periods. The Book Reviews Editors are full members of the Editorial Board.

POSTHUMANISM AND CONTEMPORARY ARTISTIC PRACTICES 

INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM 7-8 May 2026

Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre

Gedimino Ave. 42, 01110 Vilnius, Lithuania

Call for Papers: Elizabeth von Arnim and Pomerania EXTENDED DEADLINE

Institute of Literature and New Media at the University of Szczecin, Poland invites you to take part in the international academic conference on the 160th anniversary of the birth and 85th anniversary of the death of the author Elizabeth von Arnim and Pomerania

6-7 June 2026

Confirmed plenary speakers:
Dr Jennifer Shepherd, The Open University Belfast, Northern Ireland
prof. Noreen O’Connor, King’s College, Pennsylvania, USA

The next Conference on John Milton will be held at Brigham Young University in Provo, UT from 22–24 October 2026.

We invite proposals for 20-minute papers addressing any aspect of Milton's life or work, including papers that explore connections between Milton and other writers or artists of the time period (or beyond). Proposals for panels or sessions are also welcome.

Please send abstracts of 150–200 words along with a CV to jason_kerr@byu.edu by 31 January 2026. UPDATE: the submission deadline has been extended to 2 March 2026.

Call for Papers: Special Issue on Digital Marginalisation, AI Bias, and Cultural Representation in South Asia

UPDATE: DEADLINE EXTENDED UNTIL 07 February 2026

Our present conjuncture demands urgent engagement with the now of gender. Authoritarian resurgence, border militarization, algorithmic
governance, climate precarity, and uneven recoveries from overlapping pandemics shape how gender is lived, and resisted across diverse contexts: from settler colonial democracies to postcolonial nation-states and stateless territories. Anti-trans legislation, family policing, and reproductive surveillance intensify biopolitical control, while migration regimes, humanitarian aid economies, and asylum adjudication render certain genders and kinship forms precariously provisional.

“Global Early Modern Environmental Crises: Modes of Extraction, Settler Colonialism, and Empire” 

The Forum on Seventeenth-Century English Studies (LLC 17th-Century English) is putting together a guaranteed MLA panel for the 2027 Annual Convention in Los Angeles, CA, USA (7-10 January) on global early modern environmental crises with a focus on human interactions with the earth tied to imperial pursuits, settler colonialism, conflicts in worldviews, and methods of extraction. We hope to feature scholars with expertise in different linguistic traditions to foster cross-cultural discussions. 

Possible topics include but are not limited to: 

The intersection of Rhetoric and Communication continues to attract the interest of many scholars, particularly within the fields of the Humanities and Social Sciences. The scope of analysis is wide-ranging, encompassing literature and culture, language studies and advertising, communication studies and politics, among other domains.