Diasporic literature is often deeply engaged with the tensions between displacement and belonging, rupture and continuity, loss and recovery. In narratives of migration, exile, and forced displacement, family becomes both a site of longing and a contested space where histories of trauma and survival play out. Diasporic texts frequently challenge normative understandings of kinship, moving beyond biological ties to reimagine family through memory, affect, and political solidarities.

This is a non-guaranteed panel co-sponsored by the GS Children’s and Young Adult Literature Forum and the TS Age Studies Forum for the Modern Language Association (MLA) Annual Convention, January 8-11 in Toronto, ON. In the spirit of the conference theme “Family Resemblances”, we are interested in opening conversations on the interdisciplinary intersections of Health Humanities, Children’s Literature, and Age Studies. These offer a rich space for exploring how contemporary narratives shape our understanding of mental health across generations.

CFP for SPECIAL ISSUE

Translating Silence—Gender, Trauma, and the Untranslatable in Postcolonial Asian Literature

Journal:                      Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific
Publisher:                   The Australian National University
Guest-editors:             Dr. Moussa Pourya Asl & Dr. Roya Monsefi
Abstract deadline:        15 May 2025

By 2026, all nine volumes of The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins will be published, including the much-anticipated final volume in the series, Poetry. The 2026 international Hopkins conference will focus on the new research possibilities and provocations afforded by the texts. Hopkins 2026 will be held in historic Salem, Massachusetts (USA), at Salem State University, and will feature a Hopkins display and reception at the Burns Library, Boston College.
Topics could include:
• How to reassess Hopkins’ texts because of newly available materials.
• Hopkins the collector (of inscapes; of sensations; the writings of others).
• How to rethink Hopkins’s position in the “collectivity” of Victorian writers.

Call for Papers

Special Issue on: Eco-Narratives and Climate Fiction

New Literaria: An International Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Humanities

“Not to be made happy is to refuse the promise of this conversion. Not to cheer is to withdraw from the situation. Not being in the mood for happiness becomes a political action. And you know what: I am not in the mood.” – Sara Ahmed, “Too Much and Not in the Mood” 

“I laughed a little. I didn’t mean to, but unsure of what kind of face I should be making, I started laughing, in an odd way that betrayed the fact that I was used to living my life in a daze, without giving anything much thought.” Meiko Kawakami All the Lovers in the Night

Lost Girls & New Women: Woolf, Conrad, & the Regendering of Empire

 Comparative panel considering Conrad’s and Woolf’s female characters as challenging imperial gender norms.  Papers might range from Conrad’s often biracial colonial feminine roles to Woolf on threatening sexualities or “New Women.”  Short bio, 300wd proposals.

 Deadline for submissions: Saturday, 15 March 2025

Ben Leubner, Montana State University < leubnerb@montana.edu >

Mark Deggan, Simon Fraser University < mark_deggan@sfu.ca >

Joseph Conrad: False Truth & the Absurd

 Panel on Conrad’s critique of false or misleading “truths” in a world without set meanings.  Papers considered on national/imperial truisms, or the “absurd” as a mode of actuality or critique.  Short bio, 250wd proposals.

 Deadline for submissions: Sunday, 16 March 2025

Mark Deggan, Simon Fraser University < mark_deggan@sfu.ca >

“Margaret Fuller and 19C American Women Writers Observing Nature, Engaging Science”

Margaret Fuller’s “Entertainments of the Past Winter,” published in the July 1842 issue of the Dial, relays, “Wherever we went, there was Lyell’s Geology on the table, and many of the suggestions made by these lectures lingered in conversation throughout the winter.” She is referencing Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, which made the then relatively new concept of deep time palatable to a wide audience. Lyell aided Fuller’s understanding of how past and present are connected, and helped her to see the long and ongoing processes of nature. 

This is a special panel proposed for MLA Conference 2026 in Toronto, Canada (Scheduled from January 8 – 11). This panel focuses on the entangled legacies of colonialism, environmental degradation, and forced migration in contemporary literature and cinema. It interrogates how literary texts reimagine the relationship between ecological crises and human displacement, foregrounding the uneven impacts of climate change, resource extraction, and border regimes on postcolonial subjects.

Abstract should focus on the following areas (not limited to):

Postcolonial ecologies

Postcolonial disasters and indigenous knowledge

Postcolonial borders and geopolitics

Decolonialization and resistance

In 1892, the satirical magazine Moonshine published “The Commission on Ghosts,” a mock-article recounting the “first sitting” of the Society for General Psychology’s Royal Commission on spirits. Those present are “The Chairman, the Editor of Light, Mrs. Annie Besant, Miss Florence Marryat, Mr. W. Eglinton, Mr. Dawson Rogers, Mr. C. N. Williamson, and Mr. W. T. Stead” (315). Each member was a public supporter/purveyor of spiritualist belief at the fin de siècle.

In-yer-Ear: Performing in the Headphone era

Open CFP:  Contemporary Theatre Review Upcoming Special Issue 
https://www.contemporarytheatrereview.org/upcoming-special-issues/

Guest Editors:
Maria Ristani (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki)
Sotirios Bampatzimopoulos (Ankara University)

In our daily lives, we frequently encounter terms like "culture," "cultured," "high-cultured," "low-cultured," and "uncultured." We often hastily label individuals based on their appearance or social status; for instance, a shabbily dressed person or a homeless individual might be instantly deemed "uncultured." Certain activities, such as traditional children's games like using a gulti (slingshot) to collect mangoes, playing hopscotch, or spinning tops, are sometimes dismissively categorized as pastimes of the chotolok or lower classes.

“The desire for transcendence is the longing for something that breaks this cycle of means and ends and enables us to escape the everydayness of the everyday.”

— John Lachs, “Transcendence in Philosophy and in Everyday Life” (1997)