Biennial Conference of the Southeastern American Studies Association (SASA) 
March 18-20, 2027. Montgomery, Alabama 

This session explores how women's bodies function as contested archives of trauma, sites of testimony that dominant social, legal and political structures have often silenced or delegitimised. Drawing on feminist trauma theory, postcolonial critique and affect studies, it examines bodily memory as a form of somatic knowledge that exceeds conventional language and probes the tension between trauma's structural unspeakability and the ethical urgency of testimony and witnessing.

In March 1827, Freedom’s Journal, the first Black newspaper in the United States, famously declared, “We wish to plead our own cause. Too long have others spoken for us.” Across the two centuries that followed, Black newspapers, magazines, and periodicals have served as crucial sites through which Black women articulated political demands, crafted literary identities, challenged racial and gender hierarchies, cultivated communities, and imagined new social futures.

Popular Culture Association: British Popular Culture 

Call for Papers

The British Popular Culture area of the Popular Culture/American Culture Association (PCA/ACA) is now accepting submissions for the 2027 national conference to be held Mar 24-27, 2027, in Boston, MA at the Boston Marriott Copley Plaza.

Academics at all stages in their careers, as well as independent scholars, are encouraged to apply. We particularly encourage submissions by graduate students.

The special issue of our open access, Q2 journal explores how contemporary literary, artistic and cultural practices engage with, interrogate, and imagine decolonial ecologies. While decolonial ecology is best understood as a constellation of different ideas, schools, and disciplines, Malcom Ferdinand’s insistence on the politicization of ecology offers a useful point of departure. In his book, Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World (2019; English trans. 2022), Ferdinand identifies a “double fracture” in modernity:the colonial fracture, which produces hierarchies among people, and the environmental fracture, which separates humans from nature, treating the latter as an object of exploitation.

James Baldwin Review 

American Literature Association 2027

Calls for Papers

CFP 1: 

Baldwin’s Late Style

In “Thoughts on Late Style,” Edward Said describes how an artist’s late works 

cannot be reconciled or resolved, since their irresolution and fragmentariness are constitutive, neither ornamental nor symbolic of something else. The late works are about ‘lost totality’, and it is in this sense that they are catastrophic. 

This seminar seeks to read the concept of “kayfabe” alongside extant concepts in queer theory and criticism. The word “kayfabe” is quite young by linguists’ standards, and bears unclear etymology: coined by professional wrestling executives as an industry code word for manufactured narrative, the first printed reference to “kayfabe” occurs in 1988 wrestling newsletter, and its true linguistic origins remain obscure. Within professional wrestling, “kayfabe” refers to both “the tacit agreement between professional wrestlers and their fans to pretend that overtly staged wrestling events, stories, characters, etc. are genuine,” and “the playacting involved in maintaining kayfabe” (Merriam-Webster).

As a tribute to the recent passing of the prolific and excessively underrated Ted Kotcheff, this seminar will strive to offer a retracing and reevaluation of the director’s phenomenal career. It is stranger than his variegated filmography that there is a total absence of any academic book critically engaging with his works.

CALL FOR PAPERS | ACLA 2027 Virtual Seminar

Seminar Title: Comparative Literature and Commodity Worlds of Mainland Southeast Asia
Co-organizers: Nanthanoot Udomlamun (Kasetsart University) & Chi P. Pham (Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences)
Dates: May 15–16, 2027 (Virtual Sessions)
Co-organizers Nanthanoot Udomlamun and Chi P. Pham invite paper proposals for their seminar at the ACLA 2027 Annual Meeting.

Dear all,

I am pleased to announce the call for papers for the Philosophy of Religion unit at the 2027 American Academy of Religion, Western Region conference, which will be held at The Graduate Theological Union & Pacific School of Religion, Berkeley, California, March 19-21. We welcome all papers engaging this year’s conference theme, “Moving Beyond Boundaries and Silos Toward Interconnection and Collaboration,” as well as topics of general interest in the Philosophy of Religion.

The CFP is attached, so is the requisite proposal form. For further information see the American Academy of Religion Western Regional’s website.

CR: The New Centennial Review Special Issue CFP 

“Spirituality, Technology, and Artificial Intelligence”

This special issue explores how contemporary literary, artistic and cultural practices engage with, interrogate, and imagine decolonial ecologies. While decolonial ecology is best understood as a constellation of different ideas, schools, and disciplines, Malcom Ferdinand’s insistence on the politicization of ecology offers a useful point of departure. In his book, Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World (2019; English trans. 2022), Ferdinand identifies a “double fracture” in modernity:the colonial fracture, which produces hierarchies among people, and the environmental fracture, which separates humans from nature, treating the latter as an object of exploitation.

The 1980s represent a critical, yet highly under-researched decade in film studies. Frequently obscured by the towering grandeur of earlier revolutionary eras or the subsequent post-socialist New Waves of the 2000s, 1980s cinema across the socialist bloc suffers from low historical visibility, trapped in a volatile limbo of stagnant bureaucracy and early, destabilizing marketization.

Silences as Resistance in Public Narratives

Silence is generally seen as something to surmount: we break silence; we give voice to silenced stories; we speak out against injustice. But silence can be a powerful mode of expression in its own right. There is a history of silent protest. Silence can reject dominant expectations or refuse to offer up a story for voyeurism, appropriation, or commodification. It can push reader-listeners to listen for something wordless, to play an active role in striving to understand, and simultaneously to recognize the limits of their ability to understand another person’s trauma. Silence is rarely ever singular.

This seminar proposes to approach William S. Burroughs not simply as a subject of study, but as a problem. We invite provocative papers grounded in comparative methodologies and attentive to less-travelled texts, episodes, affiliations, and cultural encounters. Rather than asking what Burroughs “was,” we want to ask what his work does—and to pause over the categories through which we have learned to understand his oeuvre, asking what they illuminate and, perhaps more importantly, what they conceal.

Concept Note

National Seminar on “Gender-Based Violence in South Asia: Literature, Culture and Media”

Call for Chapters

Kenneth Cook’s Australia: Masculinity, Violence, Politics and the Outback on Page and Screen

Before Australian cinema made the outback terrifying, Kenneth Cook was already writing it that way.

Popular Culture Association 2027 Annual Conference

Monsters & the Monstrous Area

Call for Papers

CHICANO/A/X LITERATURE, FILM, AND CULTURE

Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)

48th Annual Conference, February 17-20, 2027

Marriott Albuquerque

Albuquerque, New Mexico

https://www.southwestpca.org

Submissions open: September 1, 2026

Proposal submission deadline: October 31, 2026

Call for Papers: Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies 13 (2026/2027 Issue)

The Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies (JWLS) invites submissions of original articles and book reviews for its upcoming issue. As the pre-eminent peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the life, writings, and art of Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957), JWLS seeks contributions that make decisive, innovative interventions in Lewis scholarship and broader modernist studies.

Submission Guidelines

Public Humanities invites submissions for the upcoming themed issue Memorial Culture in Public Art, which will be guest edited by Rebecca Friedman and Alex Lichenstein.

The deadline for submissions is October 15, 2026.

Description 

This panel is proposed for the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) VIRTUAL 2027 Annual Meeting on May 15 & 16, 2027. 

In 1996, Carl Sagan warned us of a time when people would lose their ability to question, “when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few . . . when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.” Maybe Mr Sagan was somewhat pessimistic when writing The Demon-Haunted World. But then again, in times of conspiracy theories, Ancient Aliens, Antivaxxers, and Holocaust Deniers, the Age of Information appears just as capable of spreading dangerous frauds and charlatans as it is of disseminating reliable scholarship.

In literary fiction, the representation of consciousness has often been understood through what might be called the thought of looking: the ways narrative cognition renders a work into a perceptive, embodied, and self-reflexive experience through language. In cinema, by contrast, cognition typically becomes the look of thought: a mental interiority suggested through framing, editing, gesture, movement, and performance. Interactive stories told in videogames complicate this distinction through their intermedial nature. Games must not only represent what characters think, but also account for the player's "will to activity", translating the audience’s intentions into feedback, movement, and action.