|
a service provided by www.english.upenn.edu |
FAQ changelog |
all recent posts
Joyce Studies Annual Call for Papers.
JAMES JOYCE; OR, THE IMITATION MACHINE
The development of Large Language Models (LLM) that can output language resembling human-made work have reinvigorated questions regarding the machine in literary production and scholarship.
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
Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture is seeking reviews for upcoming issues. The journal welcomes reviews of a wide range of queer media and cultural artefacts. Like other academic journals, Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture publishes reviews of recently released books on queer subject matter. Consistent with the journal's overall focus, however, we also strongly encourage the submission and publication of reviews pertaining to significant films, musical recordings, plays, television series, video games, exhibitions, and related cultural artefacts that are of relevance to queerness in its various forms.
***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
Call for interest (sign-up below) in a Society for the Study of Unconventional Prose Fiction from the US, 1950-2001.
We're creating a scholarly society for studying unconventional US fiction from the era usually called "postmodern" - sign up here - https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1_n10FmXmaJ1fNmIfzTlozM7udW4RgEMZcpWu4lGWIzs/ - and see below for more details...
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.
ALA 2026: Society for the Study of American Travel Writing CFP
CALL FOR PAPERS – Deadline, January 21, 2026
Society for the Study of American Travel Writing
American Literature Association 37th Annual Conference
May 20-23, 2026, in Chicago, IL.
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.
Special Issue on Brutalism in the Global Novel
Guest Editors: Om Prakash Dwivedi, om_dwivedi2003@yahoo.com and Madhurima Nayak, madhurimanayak@gmail.com, both of Chandigarh University, India
Critical Studies on Bianca Pitzorno, edited by Anna Finozzi and Dalila Forni
Reminder: CFP due soon. Please reach out with any questions!
Special Issue, Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film Call for Papers:
Adapting Thackeray
The Department of English and Communications at South Carolina State University invites proposals for 20-minute individual papers, panels of 3–4 presenters, roundtable discussions, and creative performances or multimedia presentations for the 2026 SC State Intersectional Studies Remote Conference (ISC), which will be held on Friday, March 27, 2026 via Zoom. In addition to proposals from faculty affiliated with higher education institutions, we welcome proposals from independent scholars, graduate students, and undergraduate students from all fields and disciplines.
The Philosophy & Literature Workshop at Stanford and the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute at Johns Hopkins welcome submissions for the 7th annual Philosophy & Literature Graduate Conference to be held in person on May 15-16th, 2026 at Stanford University. This year’s conference topic, “Chrōnos, Tempus, Time: Temporality in Philosophy, Literature & the Arts” brings together doctoral students and scholars that work at the intersection of philosophy, literature, the arts, and media studies.
Description
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 Book Chapters
Trauma and Mental Health in the Writing Workshop:A Theoretical and Practical Toolkit for Teachers
Edited by Jennifer Case
Under Contract with Bloomsbury Academic
Call for Proposals –- Oxford Handbook of the Harlem Renaissance
We're now accepting proposals for our 2026 conference and Volume IV of the Board Game Academics journal through March 15, 2026. If you or someone you know has an idea for a presentation or article about using tabletop gaming to contextualize, historicize, and challenge the ideologies rooted not just within gaming materials but also in their communities at large, please contact us.
Share with the world how you are using tabletop games to support more experiential pedagogies, enhance clinical practice, and engage with students and colleagues.
Text and Texture: Rethinking Materiality in Adaptation Studies
[Edited Collection]
The GITAM School of Humanities and Social Sciences, alongside collaborating institutions, Jadavpur University and Hansraj College, University of Delhi, invite scholars to the two-day national conference on “Embodied Justice: Memory, Violence, and Resilience in India”.
Concept Note
The Palgrave Handbook of Virtual Reality Literature (Re-CFP)
Anik Sarkar and Ratul Nandi
Note: This is a call for additional essays.
About the book:
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.
CALL FOR PAPERS
American Religion and Literature Society
American Literature Association
37th Annual Conference
May 20-23, 2026
The Palmer House Hilton
17 East Monroe Street
Chicago, IL 60603
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.
We invite faculty, advanced graduate students, and independent scholars to apply for a three-week National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on the New Deal era Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), taking place June 29–July 18, 2026. The institute will be conducted in a hybrid format, with the first and third weeks held virtually and the second week convening on site at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. for guided research in its extensive FWP collections. This interdisciplinary program offers participants the opportunity to deepen their understanding of the FWP and to develop hands-on experience using its rich documentation of American lives, communities, and cultures for teaching, research, and scholarship.
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 Many Hands of Book History
Conference of the Bibliographical Society of Canada / Société bibliographique du Canada
8-9 June 2026, University of Toronto
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:
This collection gathers essays centered on how the performance of early modern drama has provided a method both for engaging with the problem of tyranny and for acts of resistance across different periods and in global contexts. How can the staging of early modern drama help us better understand ideas about, and responses to, repression, persecution, totalitarianism, and opposition? In what ways do early modern plays, when performed at particular historical moments and in particular cultural contexts, provide a means both for reflecting political attitudes and anxieties and for shaping political change? What role does early modern drama in performance have to play—if any—in helping diagnose, confront, and challenge tyranny?
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)
This special issue of Frontiers investigates how feminism, even as a discourse of resistance, participates in hegemonic projects. We invite papers that examine the connections between feminism, conservatism, and conservative ideologies during the long twentieth century within the context of the Americas (including North, Central, and South America, the Caribbean, as well as indigenous lands and communities). We welcome crosstemporal and transgeographic approaches, since we aim to put together a comparative, humanistic interdisciplinary analysis that explores how culture articulates and mobilizes notions of femininity, conservative politics, and complex ideological affiliations in transnational, local, border, and/or oceanic frameworks.
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.
Steeped in the primal discomfort of the uncanny, dolls and the houses they inhabit are an especially fluid and perennially creepy motif within popular culture. Revealing historical and on-going tensions between what it means to be human and what it means to only perform those attributes, these remnants of childhood carry with them specific cultural messaging that has been particularly fertile ground for the horror genre.
For special issue #10 (spring 2026) of Horror Homeroom, we’re diving into the world of creepy dollhouses and their inhabitants. We’re interested in abstracts about the dolls and dollhouses of horror - or of horror adjacent narratives (thrillers, mysteries, science fiction etc.).
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 Incredible Nineteenth Century: Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Fairy Tale (I19) seeks to publish the best scholarship on the century that was, in many ways, the time period in which the modern genres of science fiction and fantasy began, and in which the academic study of fairy tale and folklore has its roots.
The Charles Olson Society will sponsor a session at the upcoming ALA Conference, to be held in Chicago, May 20th – 23rd.
Call for Papers: (SPECIAL ISSUE) Digital Education for All (SCOPUS)
We are excited to announce a Special Issue of the SCOPUS Indexed Journal "Quality Education for All" titled "Digital Education for All,” which invites contributions exploring how digital technologies can foster inclusive, equitable, and high-quality learning for communities worldwide.
Why this Special Issue?
The global shift to digital education has opened new opportunities but also exposed deep-rooted inequalities. From infrastructure and affordability to teacher readiness, inclusivity, and ethics—digital education today is as much a socio-cultural and policy challenge as it is a technological one.
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.
As part of the 10th International Conference on the State of Mark Twain Studies, the American Humor Studies Association (AHSA) invites proposals for either a panel or a roundtable discussion. The Elmira conference will expand its traditional focus on Mark Twain by including sister organizations such as AHSA. The conference theme is “Irreverence, Rebellion, and Resilience.”
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
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.
Call for Chapters: Advances in Northeast Indian Languages and Technologies, Volume 1
Digital Futures for Indigenous Languages: Culture, Technology, and Preservation
Proposals are invited to a Special Issue of Feminist German Studies on “Intersections of Gender and Disability in German Studies”
Guest Editors: Judith Bierwolf, Hanna Bingel-Jones, Rachel MagShamhráin, Michaela Schrage-Früh
Stories of Belonging and Nostalgia: South Asian Migrants’ Narratives
Introductory Note
The 2026 International Conference on Human Rights: Youth in Asia is the 4th ICHR series. ICHR has been co-organized by East Asia Young Scholars Association (EAYSA), Young Professionals in Foreign Policy (YPFP) Tokyo, and the Graduate Program on Human Security (HSP) and Research Center for Sustainable Peace (RCSP), the University of Tokyo.
Midnapore College (Autonomous)
International Seminar
on
“Aestheticism in Art and Literature” (সাহিত্য ও শিল্পে নন্দনতত্ত্ব)
To be organized by
Department of Bengali & Cultural Section
in collaboration with IQAC
on 13 January 2026
Mode: Hybrid(Online & Offline)
“The purpose of art is the realization of aesthetic bliss (Ānanda)” - Abhinavagupta.
Edited Collection – Critical Perspectives on the “Flanaverse” of Mike Flanagan
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