2027 marks the 50th anniversary of the film now generally known as Episode IV: A New Hope, the first instalment in the hugely successful Star Wars franchise created by George Lucas. As beloved as it is divisive, Star Wars now straddles multiple decades and generations while proliferating across narrative media (novels, comics, games, animation, TV). It provides a series of compelling case studies in the relationship between creativity and commerce, from the foundation of Lucasfilm during the New Hollywood period to the 21st century Disney-era, and it has developed via a complex interplay between cutting-edge technological innovation, nostalgia, and mythmaking.

Kala Pani Crossings #4:

Jahaji bhai / Jahaji behen: Fraught Legacies, New Kinships, Reimagined Solidarities

Institut Français de Pondicherry / French Institute of Pondicherry 

in partnership with EMMA (University of Montpellier Paul-Valéry),

IHRIM (ENS-Lyon, France), VALE (Sorbonne University)

& DIRE and LCF (University of Reunion Island)

Dates: February 16-17, 2027

Venue: IFP (French Institute of Pondicherry)

Call for Contributions and Book Reviews for PSA
Newsletter #35: Postcolonial/Decolonial Water Stories
We invite submissions exploring the dynamic intersections between colonialism (past and ongoing)
and water/waterscapes through a humanities perspective. As many scholars have pointed out,
“Unequal access to water and the political processes that direct management are fundamentally
rooted in colonialism” (Hartwig, Jackson, Markham & Osborne 2023, p. 31) Water – oceans, rivers,
seas, and wetlands – has long been central to colonial histories, shaping routes of conquest,
migration, trade, and resistance. In literary texts and other cultural productions, waterscapes often

CALL FOR PAPERS

The Green Wall: Narrating Ethnicity, Belonging, and Environmental Nativism in South Asian Cultural Production

Guest Editors

Dr. Mansi Bose, Assistant Professor, Chandigarh University, India

&

Dr. Pratyusha Pramanik, Assistant Professor, Chandigarh University, India

Rationale

SPECTATOR 47.1 — SPEED - CALL FOR PAPERS/BOOK REVIEWS

DIVISION OF CINEMA AND MEDIA STUDIES

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

Spectator is seeking papers and reviews for issue 47.1, Speed, themed around USC’s 2025 First Forum Conference on the same topic organized by Minji Kim and Tanushree Sharma. Their call for submissions on this theme is copied below:

The contemporary moment is often thought of synonymously with the idea of speed. The 20th

and 21st centuries were marked by rapidly ascending rates of movement: the movement of

Contemporary social, ecological, technological, and existential crises compel a rethinking of what it means to exist, to coexist, and to take form in a posthuman world.

Call for Papers

Edited Volume on Religion, Transhumanism, and Posthumanism

Working Title:
Gods and men? Post- and Transhumanism in Interfaith Perspective

Overview
We invite contributions to an edited academic volume offering a critical theological reflection on transhumanism and posthumanism from an interfaith perspective. While these developments have already generated a growing body of religious and theological responses, this volume seeks to move beyond initial engagements by critically assessing their assumptions, methods, and conclusions.

Call for Papers: Eldridge Bulletin of Advanced Inquiry | Arts and Humanities Series | London, UK

Inaugural Issue (General Topic)
Submission Deadline: 31 May 2026

#OpenAccess
Reduced publication fees available for this issue.

Web: https://london-ap.uk/eldridge-bulletin/humanities/
Email: eldridge@lapub.co.uk

Call for Papers: Representation of Violence in South Asian Graphic Narratives and Comics

Call for Chapters
Edited Volume: Chornobyl in Video Games: Memory, Simulation, and Post-Apocalyptic Play

Editor: Yaraslau Kot
Affiliation: Assistant Professor at University of Warsaw; Researcher at European Humanities University
Publisher: [TBA]

STREAM STREAM ORGANIZER(S)

Meha Gupta CUNY Graduate Center mgupta@gradcenter.cuny.edu

Soham Sen University of New Mexico sen.soham.26@gmail.com

The history of work and labour has long occupied a central place within European social history, offering a key lens through which to examine social relations, hierarchies, forms of power, and economic formations across the longue durée. Rather than approaching work solely as an economic function, historical scholarship has increasingly foregrounded work as a lived social experience –one that has shaped identities, values, and modes of belonging.

This panel invites discussions of Steinbeck's complicated imagination of American life and culture in his novels and nonfiction. Alternately fraught and adoring, critical and laudatory, his works attend with specificity to Americanness as a unique and discernible identity in the first half of the twentieth century. Especially encouraged are papers that attend to the tensions and disjunctures in Steinbeck’s descriptions of American society, including his treatment of gender, decolonial readings of his novels, and approaches that expose often contradictory relationships that extend among people, places, and power in his body of work.

Part of the PAMLA Conference in Seattle, WA from November 12, 2026 - November 15, 2026.

Call for Papers

SMU’s ERAH Graduate Conference

English | History | Anthropology

Date: October 10-11, 2026

Location: SMU Main Campus, Dallas, TX

Theme: Movement & Borderlands

Submission Deadline: August 28, 2026

Keynotes: Dr. Tim Bowman | Dr. Elda María Román 

Abstract:

This panel reexamines life writing in the age of Generative AI, asking who controls the conditions under which individuals narrate their own lives. Submissions reflecting on how AI corporations and Generative AI models are reshaping life writing practices across textual, digital, and visual formats, or on the consequences of such practices for authorship, equity, and cultural power, are especially welcome.

Description:

A Matter of Life and Death

Call for Papers: Victorians Institute Conference 2026

September 11-13, 2026, Crowne Plaza Hotel, Knoxville, TN

Following along from the urgency of last year’s theme, Victorian Studies: Who Cares? this year’s theme asks conference participants to consider matters of life and death in the Victorian era. What did it mean to live and die in Victorian England? How are matters of life and death reflected in the literature of the time?

2027 will mark the thirtieth anniversary of the passing of radical ecologist and labor organizer Judi Bari. Best known for her leadership in the 1990 Redwood Summer campaign in Northern California, Bari sought to overcome the entrenched division between environmentalists and timber workers by identifying corporate capital as the common force exploiting both labor and forests. Her politics extended beyond direct action and formal organizing to include music, storytelling as agitation, and public spectacle, all mobilized to cultivate ecological consciousness within a framework of working-class solidarity.

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS

Late Diagnosis and Neurodivergence:Autoethnographies and Creative Narratives of Recognition

Edited by Tess Ezzy | University of New England Proposals due: 31 July 2026 | Final works due: 30 November 2026

Call for Papers – 2nd International CLOSURE Conference

Tropes of Comics and Manga

Kiel, November 19–21, 2026

Uncharismatic Aliens: Weird Life on Earth and Beyond in Science Fiction and Bio Art

International Conference – Porto, Portugal

(June 5th 2026)

You are invited to submit a paper proposal to the session "(Almost) Fifty Tears Later: Reception of Octavia Butler's Kindred" at the 123rd Annual Pacific Ancient and Modern Languagae Association (PAMLA) conference in Seatlle, WA from Nov. 12-15, 2026.

Gender (In)Equity (SDG #5) and the Global South

International Conference on Gender Studies: “Gender and Crime”5-6  September 2026 – London/Onlineorganised by London Centre for Interdisciplinary ResearchThe relationship between gender and crime has long been a subject of scholarly interest across a wide range of disciplines. Gender influences how crime is committed, experienced, represented, prosecuted and remembered. It shapes both the realities of criminal behaviour and the social, cultural and institutional responses to it.This international conference invites scholars to examine the link between gender and crime from interdisciplinary perspectives.

"Memory and Trauma"International Conference5-6 December 2026 - London/Onlineorganised byLondon Centre for Interdisciplinary Research 

Memory and trauma are two deeply interconnected phenomena that have captivated the attention of scholars and professionals across various disciplines. Understanding the complex interplay between these two elements is essential for comprehending how individuals, communities, and societies cope with and recover from traumatic experiences.