This year’s ICSAH meeting approaches the Art of Mediation as a framework for understanding cross-cultural interaction in history. Throughout time, individuals, institutions, communities, and cultural forms—ranging from language and performance to visual and material culture—have acted as mediators between societies. In negotiating religious difference, political conflict, economic rivalry, and artistic exchange, they shaped the shared spaces where civilisations met, interacted, and coexisted.

CFP for Special Issue in IMAGO MUNDI: The International Journal for the History of Cartography

“Maps and the Imagination”

In light of the ongoing “cartographic turn” in literary studies and recent critical attempts to

“remap” the field of cartographic history, we are seeking contributions for a special issue that

examines the relationship between maps (from historical prints to digital creations) and the

imagination (from the impact of maps on literary and visual arts to earthworks and new media).

Following the growing interest in cartographic imaginaries, documented, for example, in studies

Finnish Literary Research Society Annual Conference 2026

 May 20-22, 2026

Online Panel: Indigenous Futurisms Beyond the West: Arab and Global South Speculative Fiction

The USC Korean Studies Institute invites applications for its annual Pacific Graduate Conference for Korean Studies at USC (PaCKS). This conference aims to foster a multidisciplinary community of local and regional graduate students whose research projects significantly engage Korean society and culture across the periods. It offers a platform for emerging scholars to present their work-in-progress, receive feedback from faculty and peers, and participate in interdisciplinary discussions within a supportive environment.

Call for Papers

Journal of West Indian Literature Special Issue on Caribbean Health Humanities

 November 2027

Special issue editors: Jarrel De Matas and April Shemak

Papers on Joseph Conrad and reading, including close reading, book culture, intertextuality, Conrad’s own reading, Conrad’s global readers, and the challenges of reading Conrad in the age of artificial intelligence. This is one of several planned panels for the Joseph Conrad Society of America Allied Organization at the Modern Language Association Convention in January 2027. Email 300 word proposals and a 100-word biography to Jana Giles, giles@ulm.edu. Deadline: March 15, 2026.

For further information and to see the call posted on the MLA website, see: https://mla.confex.com/mla/2027/webprogrampreliminary/index.html.

POSTHUMANISM AND CONTEMPORARY ARTISTIC PRACTICES 

INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM 7-8 May 2026

Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre

Gedimino Ave. 42, 01110 Vilnius, Lithuania

Call for Papers: Elizabeth von Arnim and Pomerania EXTENDED DEADLINE

Institute of Literature and New Media at the University of Szczecin, Poland invites you to take part in the international academic conference on the 160th anniversary of the birth and 85th anniversary of the death of the author Elizabeth von Arnim and Pomerania

6-7 June 2026

Confirmed plenary speakers:
Dr Jennifer Shepherd, The Open University Belfast, Northern Ireland
prof. Noreen O’Connor, King’s College, Pennsylvania, USA

This guaranteed online session of the TC Religion and Literature forum at the January 2027 MLA convention invites papers on literary production and culture that occurs at the intersections of Black Studies and spirituality. How have texts by Black writers imagined, challenged, and embraced traditional, new, and syncretic forms of spirituality?

Possible topics could include: 

CALL FOR BOOK CHAPTERS - DEADLINE EXTENDED

 The Final Frontier: Race, Ecology & Colonialism in Space Opera

Edited by Mikail Boz & Cenk Tan

Editors’ Introduction

The next Conference on John Milton will be held at Brigham Young University in Provo, UT from 22–24 October 2026.

We invite proposals for 20-minute papers addressing any aspect of Milton's life or work, including papers that explore connections between Milton and other writers or artists of the time period (or beyond). Proposals for panels or sessions are also welcome.

Please send abstracts of 150–200 words along with a CV to jason_kerr@byu.edu by 31 January 2026. UPDATE: the submission deadline has been extended to 2 March 2026.

Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies

Brutalism in the Global Novel  (https://journals.upress.ufl.edu/jgps/cfp) 

• Guest Editors: Om Prakash Dwivedi, Chandigarh University, India

                                 Madhurima Nayak, Chandigarh University, India

The Aquatic Presence-Absence in World Literatures

Critical Language and Literary Studies (CLLS) invites original, unpublished research articles for a themed issue to be published in Fall 2026. The theme is examining aquatic presences and absences in world literatures.

Updated CFP: We invite three additional contributors to join the volume, replacing previously shortlisted chapter authors who were unfortunately unable to continue with the project. This presents an excellent opportunity to participate in a substantial scholarly publication that already includes confirmed contributions from researchers based in India, Palestine, Indonesia, the Netherlands, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

HOME

UCI Comparative Literature Graduate Conference 2026 

 Keynote Speakers: Prof. Rizvana Bradley and Prof. Samiha Khalil

The infiltration of chaos into any home is not an abrupt occurrence. A fine dust settles on the cracks of wood, sheet folds, window seams, and curtain pleats, waiting for a wind to find its way into the home and liberate the components of scatteredness from their ambush.

Ghazaleh Alizadeh, The House of Edrisis

For those who dominate and oppress us benefit most when we have nothing to give our own, when they have so taken from us our dignity, our humanness that we have nothing left, no "homeplace" where we can recover ourselves.

Our present conjuncture demands urgent engagement with the now of gender. Authoritarian resurgence, border militarization, algorithmic
governance, climate precarity, and uneven recoveries from overlapping pandemics shape how gender is lived, and resisted across diverse contexts: from settler colonial democracies to postcolonial nation-states and stateless territories. Anti-trans legislation, family policing, and reproductive surveillance intensify biopolitical control, while migration regimes, humanitarian aid economies, and asylum adjudication render certain genders and kinship forms precariously provisional.

“Global Early Modern Environmental Crises: Modes of Extraction, Settler Colonialism, and Empire” 

The Forum on Seventeenth-Century English Studies (LLC 17th-Century English) is putting together a guaranteed MLA panel for the 2027 Annual Convention in Los Angeles, CA, USA (7-10 January) on global early modern environmental crises with a focus on human interactions with the earth tied to imperial pursuits, settler colonialism, conflicts in worldviews, and methods of extraction. We hope to feature scholars with expertise in different linguistic traditions to foster cross-cultural discussions. 

Possible topics include but are not limited to: 

The intersection of Rhetoric and Communication continues to attract the interest of many scholars, particularly within the fields of the Humanities and Social Sciences. The scope of analysis is wide-ranging, encompassing literature and culture, language studies and advertising, communication studies and politics, among other domains.

Inspired by the Brontë Parsonage Museum’s 2025 exhibition From Haworth to Eternity,

Brontë Studies invites new and original articles of no more than 7,500 words that respond to the theme of ‘the Brontës and adaptation’ across film, screen, and the visual and performing arts—including digital, transmedia, and other emerging media forms. The special issue will be published in 2027.

Evolutions in Cinematic Virtual Reality  

Symposium at The University of Hong Kong 

18. – 19. May 2026

Call for Papers – Lucius Annaeus Seneca: International Journal of Senecan Studies (LAS)

Lucius Annaeus Seneca (LAS), an open-access, peer-reviewed annual journal devoted to Senecan studies and published by Sapienza Università Editrice, invites submissions for its upcoming volume. LAS welcomes high-quality, original research on all aspects of the life, works, reception, and philosophical, literary, and historical impact of Lucius Annaeus Seneca 

Personhood is having a cultural moment. The ambiguous status of agency and rights animates compelling and diverse critical responses: from studies of animals, AI, and fetal protection laws (Kurki and Pietrzykowski, 2017), to Frankenstein as a model for corporate personhood (Atkinson, 2022), to anthropocentric ideas of personhood versus the environment (Rochford, 2024), to studies of  “potential people” including chatbots and embryos (Kalantry 2025).

Hotels are often the first destination of any traveler. Not just a place to unpack and sleep, they are often one’s first exposure to a new culture, a base of operations, and an enormous factor in travel experience outcomes. Given their essential role in travel, hotels especially cater to the tourism industry. In Discourses in Place (2003), Scollon and Scollon develop an important, multi-faceted framework for analyzing text in space, arguing “we can only interpret the meaning of public texts like road signs, notices and brand logos by considering the social and physical world that surrounds them” (1).

Please note this is a call for potential SITE AND PROGRAM DIRECTORS to organize the 2028 Hemingway Society Conference. We are not accepting individual paper or panel proposals at this time.

The Hemingway Society Welcomes Preliminary Site Proposals for 2028 Conference

The executive board of the Hemingway Society (hemingwaysociety.org) welcomes preliminary proposals for our 2028 international conference. Please share this call widely with your professional networks.

Teams wishing to be considered should submit to Hemingway Society President Verna Kale (vlk123@psu.edu) a letter of interest that includes the following information: