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Nesir: Journal of Literary Studies welcomes submissions for its October 2026 issue, which seeks to reconsider how literature translates bodily experience into writing and visibility, and how the body, in turn, discloses and shapes literary meaning.
Back in the mid-twentieth century, the political novel used to be a respectable field of study, commanding the attention of influential critics like Irwing Howe. These days, not so much. In fact, most scholarly books with the phrase ‘political novel’ in the title published over the past three decades or so were not written by professional critics, but rather by historians and political scientists (including Christopher Harvie, John Uhr, and Stuart A. Scheingold).
Note on Publishing Opportunity:
We have been encouraged by the general editor of the Bloomsbury Ecocritical Theory and Practice series, Douglas Vakoch, to submit a proposal for an edited collection based upon this CFP. If you're interested in submitting your conference presentation as a proposed book chapter, please let us know in your submission. Bloomsbury requests chapters of at least 6000 words with at least one author with a PhD. More information on the series may be found here: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/series/ecocritical-theory-and-practice/
Panel CFP
Be(Long)ing in Planetary Space
We invite papers on the cerebral Dickens, but also on “the mind of the heart” (David Copperfield): on how Charles Dickens thought, but also how and what we think about him. Suitable topics might include:
Dickens and philosophy, psychology, statistics, or the natural sciences
Dickens and his intellectual friends and contemporaries, such as Thomas Carlyle and George Eliot
How Dickens and his readers develop ideas through and by means of language
Plotting, planning, and making connections
The Dickens Society invites submissions for its sponsored hybrid panel at the 57th NeMLA convention, which takes as its theme the concept of “(Re)generation.” This event, which utilizes the conference app Whova and Zoom to promote accessibility and hybridity, will be held in Pittsburgh, PA at the Wyndham Grand Downtown, on the Point from March 5-8, 2026.
SUBJECT: Lorefest Call for Papers
Lorefest – Oct 29-Nov 01, 2025. Lorefest Conference 9am-5pm, Nov 01, 2025, Texas A&M University,
College Station, TX.
Lorefest is an annual festival combining scholarly research and creative practice
inspired by local and “glocal” (i.e. globally-inspired, locally-rooted) folklore. It brings together
the Texas A&M student body, their family and friends, and local Bryan/College Station
communities culminating in a four-day event in late October/early November. Its organizers
Romancing the Gothic Talk Series
This talk series offers online talks each week and has a global audience and speaker pool. Talks are 40-45 minutes and are run (in real time) twice to catch different time zones. An honorarium is offered. Our categories, laid out below, allow for flexibility. Please contact me (details at the end) if you have any questions. We strongly encourage speakers to attend other sessions as well as there own and join in with the community!
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 chapter proposals for an edited scholarly collection that critically examines the religious dimensions of Indian diasporic women’s literature, with a specific focus on conversion, resistance, and cultural memory. This volume will explore how women writers from the Caribbean, South Africa, Fiji, Mauritius, and other sites of indenture engage with Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam, addressing the gendered and ideological tensions of community rupture, religious fidelity, and transgenerational transmission in diasporic settings.
Mapping the Black Digital and Public Humanities formally invites Black Digital/Public Humanities project directors to submit their projects to our interactive map and searchable database of 650+ international Black Digital/Public Humanities projects.
Mapping BDPH is an interactive and searchable map of digital and public humanities projects related to Black history & culture. The goals of this project are threefold:
to help people find digital and public projects about Black history and culture by topic, type, location, contributors, and more.
This roundtable will explore the theme of mad echoes within contemporary (re)generations of literature and her/their/history. The term (re)generation calls forth processes of renewing or restoring something that has been lost or damaged. Damage and loss have been ways of speaking about the lasting and ongoing violences against marginalized bodies that have been labeled as Mad, pathologized, or institutionalized, but the limits of these concepts have been contested, perhaps most notably in Eve Tuck’s “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities,” which interrogates the (un)helpfulness of damage-focused research to the pursuit of justice and wellbeing for members of marginalized communities.
In her 2006 book Queer Phenomenology: Objects, Orientations, Others, Sara Ahmed asks how we are oriented and how we come to find our way. Ahmed thus thinks across queer feminist theories of sexuality and traditional phenomenology, evaluating the latter’s efforts to bring what is commonplace or taken-for-granted into focus, and doing so through matrices of gender, race, and sexuality.
FINAL CALL for papers: 1 spot remaining
This panel interrogates the title “The Uncanny and Sublime: The Liminality of Knowledge” by asking: what constitutes knowledge when it emerges from thresholds—moments of affect, disorientation, or aesthetic rupture? How does the liminal “unknowing” of the uncanny and sublime inform new modes of intellectual inquiry? Does this liminality reorient traditional ways of thought?
Odour and Order: Smell, Culture and Representation
Keynote: Jonathan Reinarz (University of Birmingham)
In the age of Artificial Intelligence, more accurately, the “age of AI Empire” (Tacheva and Ramasubramanian 2023), machines are no longer defined solely by their ability to process information. They are increasingly imagined as also capable of emotion, bodily awareness and interaction with the natural environment. This seminar examines the representation of embodied AI in literature and digital media focusing on the interrelationships between humans and the more-than-human alongside the growing emphasis on the body as a site of knowledge.
Call for Papers
SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY
Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)
47th Annual Conference, February 25-28, 2026
Marriott Albuquerque
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Submissions open: September 1, 2025
Proposal submission deadline: October 31, 2025
Call for Papers
Science, Technology, and Culture
Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)
47th Annual Conference, February 25-28, 2026
Marriott Albuquerque
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Submissions open: September 1, 2025
Proposal submission deadline: October 31, 2025
The Mystery & Detective Fiction Area of the Popular Culture Association invites proposals for the 56th annual conference in Atlanta, Georgia, April 8-11, 2026, to be held at the Atlanta Marriott Marquis.
We seek proposals from researchers, academics, graduate students, and independent scholars for scholarly discussions on all aspects and periods of mystery and detective fiction. Interdisciplinary approaches are strongly encouraged.
We ask that proposals extend existing scholarship in new directions and avoid plot summary or review. Proposals should have a clear and focused argument that can be developed adequately in a 15-minute presentation.
Some possible topics for the 2026 conference:
I invite you to please consider submitting a abstract for the following panel to be hosted ASECS (American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies) at the 2026 Conference. This conference will be help April 9-11 in Philadelphia.
Seminar title: The World of World Literatures: Practices, Pedagogies, and Possibilities
Organizers: Dr. Mir Islam, Nalanda University, India. Arunav Das, University of South Carolina, USA
American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), Annual Convention 2026, Montreal, Canada
Abstract Submission Deadline: October 2, 2025. Must be submitted through the ACLA portal.
ACLA annual convention: February 26 - March 1, 2026. Montreal, Canada (In-person)
More info: https://www.acla.org/annual-meeting
Department of Liberal Arts
Indian Institute of Technology Bhilai
presents
Gendered Modalities of Remembering in South Asian literatures
A National Conference
15–16 January 2026
Call for Papers
Concept Note:
“And away above all with the body, that idée fixe of the senses!” Nietzsche has philosophy proclaim. For it is “infected with every error of logic there is, refuted, impossible even,” and “impudent enough to behave as if it actually existed.” The body has long been one of philosophy’s more persistent preoccupations as it’s impossible to define without distortion yet impossible to fully discard. From Plato’s call to transcend the body in search of truth to Descartes’ relegation of the body to mere extension, philosophy has long sought to escape or sanitize embodiment. Even phenomenology, which counters the Cartesian account, privileges the lived body of perception over the objective, material body and its historical conditions.
This seminar reflects on the relationship between law and literature, particularly on how literary forms and narratives interact with political and social legal orders. Julie Peters credits the “antidisciplinarity” of both law and literature as central to the movement that emerged in the 1980s. Bringing this conversation to the 21st century, this seminar seeks to bring fresh perspectives on this interdisciplinary approach by expanding its theoretical scope. Sub-fields like trauma studies have long reflected on the challenges and possibilities of representing and aestheticizing atrocity and suffering.
CERÆ: An Australasian Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies
invites submissions for hybrid panels at the Leeds International Medieval Conference 2026 (July 6-9) on the theme of
Premodern Timeliness and Timelessness
Time is a construct with notoriously blurry definitions and boundaries. The artificiality of time can evoke anything from comforting nostalgia to worrying anachronism. Ceræ invites papers that deal with the unfocused and unreal aspects of premodern temporality, including but not limited to:
This is a call for papers for a hybrid session at the Northeast Modern Language Association Conference in Pittsburgh, PA which will take place March 5-8, 2026. Please see this link for the CFP and to submit through the NeMLA site: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21963 .
Open to any languages, this roundtable explores how instructors are integrating AI tools in the context of translation—whether through small tasks, full assignments, or larger projects—and how these technologies can be leveraged to enhance students’ linguistic and cultural competencies. More specifically, how can AI support the development of students’ intercultural awareness, stylistic sensitivity, and translation skills? In what ways might it help students better understand grammar, vocabulary, idiomatic expressions, and register in both the source and target languages? What kinds of assignments can we design to foster a critical and effective use of AI without compromising learning outcomes or creative engagement?
9/1/25 - 9/22/25: Litmag Subs are OPEN!The theme is: The Urge
… as in the many faces of “the feminine urge” — to cave-dwell or home-make, towards tenderness or violence, giddiness or belligerence, nurturing or devouring, and so on.
We’d like to explore a full spectrum of “the female experience,” and especially showcase her inner world. What makes her tick? What’s behind the mask and under her skin? Which desires and urges are rarely spoken but always just below the surface?
The groundbreaking anthology Early American Writings (2001)edited by Carla Mulford, Angela Vietto, and Amy E. Winans, incorporated writing that represented a range of authors and texts that showcased the broad diversity of literature of the early Americas. The volume not only reflected but inspired new areas of research and teaching that have continued today. In keeping with the theme of the 2026 NeMLA conference, (Re)generation, the goal of this session will be to continue this expansive vision of the literature of the early Americas and showcase scholarship that represents innovative ways of thinking about these literatures.
All are cordially invited to present their research regarding current issues of tourism, archaeology, heritage and history in English or Arabic.
The full articles of the conference will be published as the book of conference (provided with International Standard Book Number (ISBN), and according to the Governmental Approval (The Ministry)), and also will be indexed in CIVILICA (however, the book of abstracts will be published too).
You may select either Virtual Presentation or In-Person Presentation.
Conference Themes
A) Tourism (Any issue related to tourism)
Rob Nixon describes, ‘slow violence’, as “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space”, one “that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales” (2). This seminal work raised the critical question of the strategic difficulties of representing the impact of such violence, especially as it crossed national, ethnic, cultural, linguistic and even gendered borders.
This seminar investigates how repression, repetition, and unresolved rhythms shape emotional experience across Anglophone literature, heritage film, and contemporary media. It emphasizes stalled movements of feeling, looping tensions, and residues that resist closure. Such affective patterns disrupt inherited memories and unsettle formations of Englishness and other post-imperial identities. At the center of this seminar lies a guiding question: how do patterns of emotion simultaneously sustain and fracture collective identity?
Call for Abstracts for an Edited Volume
Tastes of Text: Food and Indian Literature
Editors
Dr.Auritra Munshi, Assistant Professor, Raiganj University
Dr. Surabhi Jha, ICSSR Postdoctoral Researcher, Aliah University
Concept Note
In a world that constantly urges us to scale up—to dream bigger, to grow up, to grasp the “big picture”—what does it mean to think small? This seminar turns to the miniature, not merely as an object of study but as a method of inquiry. To think with the miniature is to reconsider scale itself—not as a neutral or fixed formal property of things, but as a way of seeing and knowing, shaped by desire, enabled by technology, and embedded within power relations.
After an enriching conference in 2025, Heavy Childhoods 2026 will run under the title “Curating Future Nostalgia inHeavy Times”
Forms in Dialogue
Universität Konstanz, 11-13 Juni 2026
Note: All abstracts must be submitted through the Annual Meeting and Membership portal at https://www.xcdsystem.com/asecs/member/
You do not need to be a member to submit an abstract through the portal; however, you must be a member of ASECS to present at the conference. The panel chair cannot submit the abstract on your behalf.
Trans-scriptions: Cultural Codings and the Poetics of the Body
International Conference organized by University of Szczecin & University of Wrocław
11-13 February 2026
Institute of English Studies, University of Wrocław, Poland Hybrid On-site Conference
Conference online: 18-19 September 2025 (via Zoom)
Scientific Committee:
Professor Wojciech Owczarski – University of Gdańsk, Poland
Professor Polina Golovátina-Mora – NTNU, Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Professor Ryan Habermeyer - Salisbury University, USA
CFP:
Journal of Chinese Cinemas Special Issue CFP: Before, Besides, and Beyond the Taiwanese New Cinema
This panel invites presentations that explore “extreme geographies”—sites at the limits of habitability and at the horizon of speculation—in literary, visual, and cinematic archives of Latin America. Drawing from David J. Nemeth’s working definition (entry in Encyclopedia of Geography, 2010), we consider both material environments beyond human thresholds, such as polar zones, tropical belts, deserts, volcanic craters, deep-sea trenches, and outer space, and imagined loci including utopias/dystopias, lost islands, fantastic and counterfactual frontiers.
Rust Belt Studies Special Issue
The Regenerative Rust Belt: Environment, EcoLogy, Ecosystems
For too long, the narrative of the Rust Belt has been one of emptiness, decay, decline, and vacancy —
and often, our stories are neglected in the national sphere or controlled by cultural outsiders.
In this issue, we will consider the following and more :
How can the humanities imagine regenerative Rust Belt futures and learn from industrial history?
How can the humanities activate the environmental movement in new ways in the Rust Belt?
How can we use art, literature, and music to teach the environmental Rust Belt in the classroom?
How can we use the humanities to reflect on ecosystems both natural and human?
Video essays are inevitably entwined with today’s content industry, which relies on engagement metrics, personal branding, and like-and-subscribe platforms to generate revenue and increase time-on-device. Perhaps for this reason, they are frequently associated with advertising or edutainment and rarely appear in journals and other scholarly venues.
Kalamazoo 2026, session #7559: Lists as Sources
Any list serves as a direct “source” for the information it contains. A grocery list tells a shopper what to buy. But it may also serve as a source in several other fields: the history of advertising, the history of culinary trends, or the history of an individual family. This panel seeks papers that consider medieval lists that serve as sources in similarly direct and tangential ways. Such lists might include inventories, mnemonics, itineraries, bede rolls, and word lists, as well as lists in literature. We especially welcome papers that take the properties of lists into account in their analyses.
This is an updated CFP for an edited collection representing contemporary “conservative cultural criticism” of books, film, TV, and other media. We are taking a broad view of what conservatism entails, but common influences cited by contributors include Russell Kirk, C. S. Lewis, Paul Elmore More, and Roger Scruton. I have 12 chapters so far on the following topics / authors:
From its origins in racialised heredity science to its violent implementation in 20th-century state policies, eugenics has shaped how modern societies imagine health, heredity, and the value of life. Literature has long played a key role in this history – at times reflecting or affirming eugenic ideals, at others exposing their violence or imagining forms of life beyond them.
Call for Papers
Biography, Autobiography, Memoir, & Personal Narrative
Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)
47th Annual Conference, February 25-28, 2026
Marriott Albuquerque
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Submissions open: September 1, 2025
Proposal submission deadline: October 31, 2025
Call for Abstracts--Seeking abstracts for articles for the forthcoming Bloomsbury Handbook to Kurt Vonnegut, which will include 25-35 brand-new essays on Vonnegut of about 5,000-6,000 words each. The book will be part of a new series with Bloomsbury Publishing UK, aimed at an audience of post-graduates and above.
Books already published in the series include volumes about Toni Morrison and F. Scott Fitzgerald, among others.
Beside You in the C19:
Elizabeth Freeman’s Legacies
The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists Biennial Conference
March 12-14, 2026, Cincinnati, OH