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CFP - MLA 2027, "Translation as an Emancipatory Practice in Italian Literary and Cultural History”
Roundtable Sponsor: Forum on 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-Century Italian
Call for Papers: Democracy and the Nature of Familial and Unaccompanied Mobilities in the 21st Century
Location: University of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA)
Dates: April 24–26, 2026
Submission Deadline: March 5, 2026 (accepted on rolling basis too after deadline)
Format: In-person (travel support available; honoraria provided)
Keynote: Dr. Lauren Heidbrink, author of Migranthood: Youth in a New Era of Deportation (Stanford University Press, 2020) and Migrant Youth, Transnational Families, and the State: Care and Contested Interests (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014)
Overview
CFP - MLA 2027, "Science and Intellectual Emancipation in Italian Literary and Cultural History”
Panel Sponsor: Forum on 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-Century Italian
Borders and Languages
One-day Conference at the University of Kent
21 May 2026
Keynote Speaker: Prof. Anna Bernard (King’s College London)
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Call for Papers
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Richard Linklater’s Slacker (1991) is a cult classic with a crucial role in the history of American cinema. The movie is unusual in many ways. It does not have a traditional narrative; it follows 100 characters around the UT Austin area in a way that seems completely random. There is no protagonist, no story, no thread to the individual events, yet somehow it is a completely coherent and engaging movie that sparks as many reflections as the number of scenes it has.
We are looking for chapter proposals in the form of abstracts. Topics already included are work, capitalism, Buddhism, film as a dream, narrative, episodic views of life, and absurdity. Possible topics for new chapters include:
The Louisiana Creole Research Association (LA Creole, http://www.lacreole.org) invites submissions for its 2026 journal, La Créole, on subjects relevant to its mission of advancing family research, providing education, and celebrating Creole history and culture. There is evidence that both French and Spanish colonial Louisiana identified all its people (white, black, and mixed), both free and enslaved, who were born in the new world of old world stock, as Créole. That included the offspring of Europeans (predominantly French and Spanish), Africans, and a mixture of both that could also include Native Americans. Therefore, the descendants of all these people
THE 25th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
LANGUAGE, LITERATURE AND CULTURAL POLICIES (LLCP)
WEATHERING CHANGE:
THE HUMANITIES IN A WARMING WORLD
to be held in Craiova, Romania
22-24 October 2026
FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS
“When shall we three meet again?
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?”
(Shakespeare, Macbeth, 1.1: 1-2)
Call for Chapters
Matricentric Futures: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Motherhood
Edited by Dr Antonia Mackay (Oxford Brookes University)
Under contract with Palgrave Macmillan
Abstract deadline: Friday 5 June 2026
Full chapter drafts due: Friday 30 July 2027
We invite you to participate at the 19th annual Norwegian Forum for English for Academic Purposes summer conference:
NFEAP 2026 - Mythologies
First Call for Papers
The 2026 NFEAP summer conference will take place on Thursday the 11th and Friday the 12th of June 2026 at Oslo Metropolitan University (OsloMet), Oslo, Norway.
The theme for the 2026 conference is Mythologies.
In the last fifteen years, a new generation of African female and nonbinary authors have made major interventions in the field of African Literatures, from Akwaeke Emezi to NoViolet Bulawayo, Djaïli Amadou Amal to Kopano Matlwa. In parallel, women writers from earlier generations, such as Tsitsi Dangarembga (winner of a Windham-Campbell Literature Prize in 2021), Paulina Chiziane or Ana Paula Tavares (who were both awarded with the Camões Prize in 2021 and 2025 respectively) have received major literary distinctions, celebrating their contributions to African postcolonial literatures in particular, and literature in general.
Hello! Seeking 1-2 additional papers to join a trans studies panel at the 2026 American Studies Association Conference. Abstract for the proposed panel is below; please contact Anna James (AJames@franklincollege.edu) if interested. Thanks!
Panel Title: Minoritarian Gestures, Improvised Lives: Everyday Performance of Trans Resistance
Our Victorians, Ourselves: Rethinking Victorian Texts & Contexts
An online student conference hosted by the Undergraduate and Graduate Student Victorian Association (UGSVA)
Conference on April 28th, 2026 and Abstracts due March 31st, 2026
Keynote:
Sarah Bliss, Florida State University
“Reading the Forest with the Trees: Victorian Fiction and Periodicals”
Interactive Closing Session:
Sabarno Sinha, University of Texas at Austin
“UnConferencing (v. 1860): The Black-Out Victorian Poetry Edition”
I am hoping to organize a panel for the upcoming NAVSA conference (Nov 11-15, 2026 in Pasadena), examining the exploration of anxieties associated with trafficking and transport in nineteenth-century British literature.
The conference web link is attached: https://traffic2026.ucr.edu/
Please send 300-word abstracts and 1-page CVs to charlotte.fiehn@yu.edu by February 28th, 2026.
Discourse in the Age of Political Upheaval and Artificial Intelligence
Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference at UCLA
Keynote speaker: Dr. Julia Alekseyeva, University of Pennsylvania
Submission form: https://forms.gle/ynHiRZothVVkgVdp8
If you face any difficulties in the submission process or have questions about the conference,
please email: discourseconferenceucla@gmail.com
Submission deadline: March 13th at 11:59PM PST
The Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities (LCH) is accepting submissions for the 2026 Julien Mezey Dissertation Award. This annual prize is awarded to the dissertation that most promises to enrich and advance interdisciplinary scholarship at the intersection of law, culture, and the humanities.
New (and Old) Experiments in Translation (and Writing)
International Conference, Brock University (St. Catharines, ON, Canada) October 22nd to 24th, 2026
Organized by Dr. Nicholas Hauck, Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures, Brock University (nhauck@brocku.ca) and Dante Ognibene, Brock University
Dates: October 22, 23 and 24, 2026
Location: Brock University, St. Catharines, ON, Canada
CFP--MLA 2027: The Melville Society
Melville and McCarthyism
This panel invites papers reflecting on the value of Melville’s work for our authoritarian present. A pivotal revival of Melville during the nineteen-fifties by C.L.R. James and F.O. Matthiessen (both victims of McCarthyist surveillance and fear tactics) catapults Moby-Dick to attain the status of an American “classic” emblematic of a more, free democratic ethos. Moreover, Melville remains the author of the longest poem, Clarel, on Palestine in American literary history. Recent literary scholars of Melville also mobilize his writings to analyze the limits and possibilities of U.S. constitutionalism, including the First Amendment.
MLA 2027: The Melville Society CFP: Melville and Hawthorne Revisited
Affective Shakespeare and the Early Modern Imagination:
Empathy, Voice, and Spectatorship
The Seventeenth IASEMS Conference
University of Naples Federico II, Naples, 28–30 May 2026
Convenors: Michele Stanco, Angela Leonardi, and the IASEMS Executive Board
CALL FOR BOOK CHAPTERS
Criminologies, Borders, and Humanities in North Africa
An Edited Volume for the Emerald Borders, Criminalisation and Society Series
Editor: Dr. Rachid Benharrousse*
*Tilburg Law School, Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands
Email: rachid.benharrousse@proton.me
About the Series
This volume is proposed for the Emerald Borders, Criminalisation and Society Series: an interdisciplinary and inclusive space that examines how laws, policies, and practices shape, regulate, and contest borders and the people affected by them.
Call for Book Proposals: Secrecy in Literature and Culture Secrecy in Literature and Culture (Edinburgh University Press) Series Editors: Simon Cooke (University of Edinburgh) and Natalie Ferris (University of Bristol) We invite proposals for critical studies exploring the pivotal role of secrecy in literature and culture, with interdisciplinary, international and transhistorical scopeThe ‘secret’ is a concept of pivotal importance across a range of disciplines – from political studies of espionage and the ethics of intelligence work to law, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and literary and cultural studies – inflected by diverse cultural and historical contexts, and in terms of gender, sexuality, race and cla
“What is Theory, and why are they saying such terrible things about it? (And who—if we indulge in paranoiac criticism—are ‘they’, anyway?) To take the second part of the question first, ‘they’ say terrible things about Theory because much of it is admittedly jargon-ridden and often appears incomprehensible. But also (and this is the uncharitable answer) because: (i) it takes considerable patience and effort to understand the ‘key’ essays, and most diatribes against Theory come from people unwilling to make that effort; and (ii) it destabilises authority over interpretation and authority is precisely what teachers (especially teachers of literary studies) seek to impose over texts, meanings, and readers.”
Special Session Title: Anglophone Ottoman/Turkish Writers from the Ottoman Empire to Contemporary Turkey (Online Session)
The theme for Volume 13 of Ceræ: An Australasian Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, as well as for our 3rd annual online Conference, is Fame and Fortune.
We invite submissions to both the conference and the journal on this theme.
Full details can be found here: 2026 Ceræ Call For Papers – CERÆ: An Australasian Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies
The Patrick Leary Resource Development Grant is named for long-time RSVP supporter, Board member and former President, Patrick Leary. It is intended to support one scholar or a team of researchers in creating resources that will facilitate the work of other scholars in their studies of British newspapers and periodicals from the long nineteenth century. The grant was created with funds from a generous bequest to RSVP by the late Eileen Curran, pioneering researcher and Emerita Professor of English at Colby College.
The Sally Mitchell Dissertation Prize is awarded annually to the best Ph.D. dissertation, defended in the previous calendar year, that explores the British periodical press of the long nineteenth century (including magazines, newspapers, and serial publications of all kinds) as an object of study in its own right, not as a source of material for other historical topics. Winners of the prize receive a monetary award of $1,000 and a two-year membership to RSVP.
Microgrants are seed grants designed to support new research projects and/or explore ideas in the field of periodical studies.
The Microgrants scheme was established in response to the 2025 survey of RSVP’s members, who informed us that they would benefit greatly from access to smaller pockets of funding for existing or exploratory projects. (For our full list of awards, please see the Eligibility chart). The funding for these grants is made possible through the generosity of the late Eileen Curran, Professor Emerita of English, Colby College, and inspired by her pioneering research on Victorian periodicals.
This guaranteed panel (in-person at the Modern Language Association in Los Angeles, California; January 7-10, 2027) takes a cue from the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of African American Humor Studies and seeks 250-word proposals that discuss how African American humorists eschew "just jokes" to articulate personal and collective selfhood and freedom. Please submit abstracts by Monday, March 16 to dmorgan@scu.edu. This panel is sponsored by the Screen Arts and Culture Committee.
Accepted presenters must be MLA members by April 1, 2026.
Call for Abstracts!Elvis and Philosophy: Essays Concerning the King
Edited by Joshua Heter and Richard Greene
Abstracts are sought for a collection of essays on any philosophical topic related to Elvis Aaron Presley to be published with Wallace & Jacobs Press. We hope to receive a number of submissions concerning his music and movies as well as his persona, life, relationships, cultural impact, legacy, mythos, etc.
C21 is inviting scholars and researchers to contribute book review essays for upcoming issues. We currently have a selection of titles published in 2025 available for review, spanning literary studies, film and media studies, cultural studies, and gender and sexuality studies. We invite prospective authors to submit ideas for review essays that discuss 2–3 recently published scholarly texts. For the full CFP, and to see our list of available titles, please visit: https://c21.openlibhums.org/news/923/.
The image of California as the Golden State—a land of promise, risk, reinvention, and imagined abundance—has long shaped literary and cultural narratives of aspiration and freedom. Yet “golden states” are not bound to geography: they materialize wherever communities imagine possibility, long for deliverance, or chart pathways beyond constraint.
Existing scholarship in Asian (North) American Literature has long examined travel narratives about Asian travelers within immigrant or diasporic paradigms: Sau-ling Wong famously establishes the Necessity/Extravagance framework in understanding transpacific mobility by early Asian American immigrants (1993), whereas Chih-ming Wang reads the autobiographical travelogues by diasporic Vietnamese American writers as “homecoming stories” (2013), and Patricia Chu interprets them as “return narratives” deploying acts of countermemory and postmemory to address racial melancholia (2019).
The King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies (KFCRIS), through its UNESCO Chair in Translating Cultures and with the support of the Literature, Publishing and Translation Commission, is pleased to invite applications for the Early Scholars Publication Grants. These grants support the publication of outstanding PhD dissertations that critically examine contemporary debates related to the UNESCO Chair’s two themes for this year and adopt a global perspective that moves beyond Eurocentrism. Early Scholars Publication Grants will be awarded for this year's two themes:
1) Modern Arab Thought in Translation
This year, the Center for 21st Century Studies aims to activate “Slow Care”—a practice that places deliberate attention on the beings, things, and sites, which together foster long-term visions of collective life across generations and communities of humans and non-humans, as well as ever-evolving technologies and ecologies. In line with this theme, the Digital Cultures Collaboratory are excited to announce the 4th event in its annual online symposium series, organised around the theme of “Time & Digital Relations.”
What makes literary collaboration unexpected, difficult, or strange? How have authors transcended barriers – national, social, ideological, religious, temporal – in the collaborative production of texts?
For the upcoming EGO conference at Oxford University, we invite students to write on the prismatic theme of “strange bedfellows”. From plagiarism of unusual sources to fraught collaboration between literary “frenemies” to allyship across religious and political lines, this theme lends itself to discussions of the way literature is shaped by the collaboration of radically different perspectives and interests.
2nd CISMA 2026: International Conference on Technology and Corpora in Discourse, Translation and Interpreting
Khazar University, in collaboration with Shanghai International Studies University (SISU), is pleased to announce the 2nd CISMA 2026 International Conference on Technology and Corpora in Discourse, Translation and Interpreting, which will be held on April 30, 2026, at Khazar University, Baku, Azerbaijan.
Children and adolescents frequently appear in Doris Lessing's fiction, specifically in her African short stories. However, Lessing did not write these stories with a child audience in mind; rather, she used child and adolescent characters to dissect African colonial society in the aftermath of the break-up of the British Empire (García Navarro, 2021). We invite contributions to a co-edited collection exploring what it means to be educated and to grow up as a child in Lessing's African stories, particularly in the context of 20th-century African society ruled by white European colonists.
This special section of Whatever: A Transdisciplinary Journal of Queer Theories and Studies will function as a critical retrospective on Robert Eggers’s 2015 film The Witch. While much has been written on the film in relation to feminist theory, this special section seeks to excavate the queer possibilities of Eggers’s now iconic film. Taking a broad view of queer theory, we imagine queerness as that which challenges binaries and hierarchies. In this way, The Witch might be understood as queer in terms of the challenges it poses to heteronormative, patriarchal structures, as well as through its dismantling of the boundaries between self and other, human and animal, nature and culture.
We are delighted to announce the return of the Raymond Williams Society postgraduate essay competition for its 12th year. The deadline for entries is Friday 3 April 2026.
The prize for the winning entry is £250 and a year’s subscription to the Society. The winning essay will be considered for publication in the academic journal Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism (subject to peer review). The competition aims to encourage a new generation of scholars working in the tradition of cultural materialism, especially those whose research is rooted in the work of Raymond Williams.
Twelfth International Iris Murdoch Conference CFP University of Chichester, 14-16 August 2026: First Call for Papers The Twelfth International Conference on Iris Murdoch studies will take place at the University of Chichester in 2026. The conference will showcase ongoing, and published, Murdoch scholarship with a particular focus on ‘Influences and Inspirations’. Panels should not be confined by this focus, however, and all researchers currently working on Murdoch’s fiction, philosophy, theology, personal journals, letters and poetry – and/or the political and cultural significance of any of these ¬– are invited to submit proposals.
Evolutions in Cinematic Virtual Reality
Symposium at The University of Hong Kong
18. – 19. May 2026
In a Conference Far, Far Away…Traversing Forms of the Folkloric (Graduate Student Conference)
New York University, Department of Comparative Literature: Friday, May 1, 2026
Call for PapersCaliban Speaks: International Conference on Recentering Indigenous Thought in the Age of Decolonialism and Technology
April 21–22, 2026 | International Islamic University Islamabad (IIUI)
Conference Rationale
In the contemporary intellectual landscape, postcolonial theory has illuminated important questions of empire, identity, and resistance. Yet, its limits are increasingly visible: while interrogating colonial legacies, it has too often re-centered Eurocentric epistemologies and sidelined Indigenous thought.
CALL FOR PAPERS
Edited Volume
Traumatic Geographies.
Marginal Voices in Central and Eastern European Literatures
Editors: Alina Bako (Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu), Merritt Moseley (University of North Carolina at Asheville), Iris Rusu (Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, University of Bucharest)
DEADLINE EXTENDED TO FEBRUARY 28TH
The University of Florida Critical Theory Reading Group Conference presents:
The 28th Annual University of Florida Critical Theory Reading Group Conference
The State of the Unions
April 23rd-25th, Gainesville (FL)
Keynote speakers: Sianne Ngai, Anna Kornbluh
Nicole LaRose Alumni Keynote Speaker: Ryan Kerr
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.
Liverpool John Moores University, UK
6-8th July 2026
Confirmed keynotes:
Melissa Gustin (National Museums Liverpool), with guided tours of the Walker Art Gallery
Tara MacDonald (University of Lethbridge, Canada) “Public Institutions, Private Care: Sex Work and Care Work in Victorian Popular Fiction”
War leaves lasting marks not only on people and communities, but also on the natural world that witnesses, and endures, its violence. Long after the fighting has stopped, landscapes shaped by destruction remain living archives, bearing the aftereffects of conflict: damaged forests, polluted rivers and seas, and disrupted ecosystems that continue to hold its traces. These ‘trauma ecologies’ pass on the legacy of war from one generation to the next, forming what we call ‘environmental postmemory.’
Doing American Studies Outside the US—Now
University of Sydney, Australia
Dates: July 16–18, 2026
About the Conference
Call for Papers
University of Delaware’s 5th CMCS Conference in Material Culture
April 2-3, 2027
“What’s the Matter with Description? Form, Practice, and Material Culture”
Keynote Speaker
SUSAN STEWART
(Princeton University)