During the past years, there has been a renewed interest in the study of Central American cultural productions. As the geopolitical interests of the Americas and the world are shifting towards new configurations, the countries of Central America have also started garnering interest from scholars in the Americas and Europe. This panel seeks to foster a dialogue amongst scholars and researchers exploring new critical perspectives that analyze both new and classic works of literature and cinema from Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, El Salvador and Belize.

This panel interrogates early modern stationer signs by situating them within topographical and cultural contexts of the period. Before the advent of numbered street addresses, wooden signboards fixed in the frontages of printing houses and bookshops signaled sites of literary and social exchange. These signs did double duty: they were simultaneously public-facing trade emblems and paratexts in the title-page imprints of books they authorized. As uniquely biblio-visual arguments, then, they worked in concert to broadcast a stationer’s stock, specialization, and geopositioning in the book trade.

In the words of Nathan Crick, transcendentalism is a “rhetorical genre of public advocacy” and “a way of crossing a divide or reconciling a contradiction through a radical act of imagination whereby people are able to see and judge themselves from the perspectives of some distant and different ‘beyond’ (9). How can the transcendentalist philosophy of learning inform our 21st-century pedagogy of higher education, when GenAI is rising? GenAI's one challenge in higher education, especially in teaching writing and interpreting literature, is its increasingly seamless integration into digital devices, which has posed a threat of erasing learners' self or individual voice and perpetuating algorithmic bias.

Northeast MLA, March 5-8 2026

This session explores how postcolonial Southeast Asian literature grapples with memory, trauma, archival recovery, and cultural identity. Rather than thinking of identity as fixed or linear, selfhood is complex and palimpsestic due to colonial violence, migration, and historical erasure. This session invites papers that analyze how characters or narratives navigate misremembering, inherited trauma, or overwritten histories to reclaim belonging, agency, and identity. Topics may include narrative voice, transgenerational memory, silence, storytelling, and archival gaps in multiethnic and immigrant literatures.

International Conference
Ethics and Spectatorship in Film and Screen Media
University College Cork, Ireland
29–30 November 2025

The International Conference “Ethics and Spectatorship in Film and Screen Media” will take place on 29–30 November 2025 at University College Cork (UCC), Ireland. 

We are pleased to announce that our keynote speakers will be:

Feminist scholar Peggy Phelan (1993) famously said that “visibility is a trap” and argued for the immense power of the unmarked. Such a theory of the unmarked finds utmost relevance in the case of what R.W. Connell calls hegemonic masculinity, which often maintains its superiority by being the norm and thus abstract, untraceable. However, material bodily practices among marginalized groups of men often subvert such invisibility tactics, expose the nodes of hegemonic and normative masculinities, and articulate a language of resistance. For example, dance scholar Mark Broomfield (2024) observes that black gay male dancers in America use “straight acting” as a way of passing and surviving in a world where white heterosexual masculinity is the norm.

Weeks after the death of Nobel Prize-winning author Alice Munro last year, her daughter Andrea Skinner disclosed the sexual abuse she'd suffered as a child—abuse about which Munro had known and stayed silent. The disclosure is but one of many revelations in recent years to upend the legacy of a cultural icon. Neil Gaiman, Louis CK, Jean Vanier, and Avital Ronell are only a few public figures to be reassessed in the wake of accounts of sexual abuse. Similarly, disputed claims to Indigenous ancestry touted by artists including novelist Joseph Boyden and singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie have generated outrage and heartbreak among Indigenous groups and innumerable admirers, compounding generational traumas.

We invite original, unpublished essays (maximum 5,000 words) for an upcoming Worldview Critical Companion to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. This volume aims to serve as both a scholarly resource and a generative site of contemporary dialogue on one of the most significant dramatic works of the twentieth century. Contributors are encouraged to revisit canonical readings while also offering new, boundary-pushing approaches that open Godot to current critical, theoretical, and performative discourses.

CFP: (Chapter Abstracts) German Romantic Humour (Aug. 1, 2025)

Call for Chapter Abstracts

Due: August 1, 2025

Subject fields: German Romanticism, Humour Studies, Philosophy, Literature Studies, Musicology, Art History, History of Religion

This is a call for abstracts for book chapters to be included in an edited volume on “German Romantic Humour”

Edited by Dr. Pascale LaFountain (Montclair State University, USA)

Throughout the nineteenth, twentieth and into the twenty-first century, authoritarianism has proven to be an enduring leadership style in Latin American and has manifested in diverse forms, including the uprisings of regional caudillos, the ascendency of personalist rulers, the formation of solemn cults of personality, the imposition of military dictatorships, the establishment of single-party States, the totalitarian perpetuation of the state of exception, the cultural promotion of ethnonationalism, and the installation of illiberal technocracies, among others.

Children’s Rights &/in Popular Culture (panel/roundtable for NEPCA conference taking place virtually Oct 9-11 2025) 

How are children’s rights represented in current popular culture (e.g., videogames, board games, graphic novels, film, TV, social media, music, toys etc.)? In what ways does pop culture today curtail children’s rights (e.g., cellphone apps, tracking devices, surveillance equipment)? How do children themselves define their rights, notions of justice, law and order in their interactions with popular culture (e.g., toys, games, art, fashion, hobbies, social media etc.)?

The 57th annual NeMLA Convention is taking place Thursday, March 5, through Sunday, March 8, 2026, at the Wyndham Grand Pittsburgh Downtown in Pittsburgh, PA.  For more information, see https://www.nemla.org/.

This session explores how postcolonial and diasporic literatures grapple with memory, trauma, and cultural haunting. Rather than thinking of identity as fixed or linear, selfhood is complex and palimpsestic due to colonial violence, migration, and historical erasure. This session invites papers that analyze how characters or narratives navigate misremembering, inherited trauma, or overwritten histories to reclaim belonging and agency. Topics may include narrative voice, transgenerational memory, silence, storytelling, and archival gaps in multiethnic and immigrant literatures. This session welcomes interdisciplinary approaches and encourages work on Asian American, Black, Indigenous, and other diasporic communities.

Modality: in-person only

Across cultures and histories, women have journeyed through visible and invisible migrations: geographic, emotional, spiritual, intellectual. This panel invites explorations of how these journeys and thresholds: both outer and inner, shape the evolution of selfhood. From the classroom to the kitchen, from the mother’s memory to the daughter's voice, from exile to homemaking, we seek narratives that dwell in moments and spaces of unfolding and becoming. These are stories of transition and tension, of belonging and othering, of rupture and reconciliation. 

In her essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Hortense Spillers articulates the enduring violence of racial enslavement through the concept of the “hieroglyphics of the flesh” (67). This term marks how the captive body, stripped of legal and social personhood, became inscribed with meaning through the violence of racial differentiation. This transformation rendered the Black body not only a surface upon which terror was written but also a metaphysical site from which alternative modes of being might be imagined. In attending to the duality of skin and flesh, Spillers distinguishes between Black skin as legible and social, and Black flesh as ungendered, unsovereign, and open—both wounded and full of radical potential. 

This NeMLA session critically discusses the novels of Sally Rooney. We will ask: is Rooney's oeuvre a critique, a snapshot, a suggestion, or a warning about a way forward for fiction, the novel form, feminism, and contemporary culture?

View full CFP here: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21883

Modality:

In Person Only: The session will be held fully in person at the hotel. No remote presentations will be included.

Questions/Comments:

Contact Kimberlyjcoates@gmail.com

Call for Papers

REACT 2025: Research and Educational Advancements in Culture and Technology

Vienna, October 20–21, 2025

Venue: University of Applied Arts Vienna

More info & submissions: culttech.at/react

The Minotaur and the Labyrinth from multidisciplinary perspectives, specifically on how the symbol of the Minotaur and the Labyrinth has been used from antiquity to now. How has the Minotaur been used, or abused, throughout time? How has the mythology surrounding it been used to generate or regenerate cultural structures? Referencing Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s Monster Culture, what does the Minotaur reveal about the cultures he exists within?

Since its tangential emergence in Said’s Orientalism in 1978, the term Occidentalism accrued multiple significations. Most notably, the term is argued to stage a counter- or reverse-discourse of Orientalism, operating on analogous dichotomic and oppositional paradigms. Most notable, in this context, is Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit’s Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies, which labels Occidentalism as “dehumanizing picture of the West painted by its enemies” (5). This panel queries if we can conceive East-West relations differently, apart from the Orientalist logic that inheres in studies of Occidentalism.

Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) is already recasting numerous aspects of human life. By all accounts, AI has an intense and manifold impact on society, incorporating both positive and negative traits. This session aims to explore how the gendered lens of AI is creating disruptions both for the academic field and the society at large. This panel invites educators, scholars, and researchers to critically investigate the consequences of gendered biases projected through AI stratification. Papers which explore the conference theme (Knowledge) and connect to knowledge production through the gendered lens of AI are especially welcome.

Please submit a 300-word abstract for an edited collection, tentatively titled, Entanglements: Place-Based Literatures for Ecological Liberation. 

Please read the CFP below for details about the collection. We are expanding our search to include diverse geographies including South America, African countries, the Caribbean, the Middle East, Pacific Islands, and South East Asian countries. In addition to a “place” framework, we welcome diverse theoretical approaches and lenses including ones that apply Marxism, feminism, postcolonialism, New Materialism, indigeneity, critical race, nonhumanism, among others.