Existing scholarship in Asian (North) American Literature has long examined travel narratives about Asian travelers within immigrant or diasporic paradigms: Sau-ling Wong famously establishes the Necessity/Extravagance framework in understanding transpacific mobility by early Asian American immigrants (1993), whereas Chih-ming Wang reads the autobiographical travelogues by diasporic Vietnamese American writers as “homecoming stories” (2013), and Patricia Chu interprets them as “return narratives” deploying acts of countermemory and postmemory to address racial melancholia (2019).

This year, the Center for 21st Century Studies aims to activate “Slow Care”—a practice that places deliberate attention on the beings, things, and sites, which together foster long-term visions of collective life across generations and communities of humans and non-humans, as well as ever-evolving technologies and ecologies. In line with this theme, the Digital Cultures Collaboratory are excited to announce the 4th event in its annual online symposium series, organised around the theme of “Time & Digital Relations.” 

2nd CISMA 2026: International Conference on Technology and Corpora in Discourse, Translation and Interpreting

Khazar University, in collaboration with Shanghai International Studies University (SISU), is pleased to announce the 2nd CISMA 2026 International Conference on Technology and Corpora in Discourse, Translation and Interpreting, which will be held on April 30, 2026, at Khazar University, Baku, Azerbaijan.

This special section of Whatever: A Transdisciplinary Journal of Queer Theories and Studies will function as a critical retrospective on Robert Eggers’s 2015 film The Witch. While much has been written on the film in relation to feminist theory, this special section seeks to excavate the queer possibilities of Eggers’s now iconic film. Taking a broad view of queer theory, we imagine queerness as that which challenges binaries and hierarchies. In this way, The Witch might be understood as queer in terms of the challenges it poses to heteronormative, patriarchal structures, as well as through its dismantling of the boundaries between self and other, human and animal, nature and culture.

Twelfth International Iris Murdoch Conference CFP University of Chichester, 14-16 August 2026: First Call for Papers The Twelfth International Conference on Iris Murdoch studies will take place at the University of Chichester in 2026. The conference will showcase ongoing, and published, Murdoch scholarship with a particular focus on ‘Influences and Inspirations’. Panels should not be confined by this focus, however, and all researchers currently working on Murdoch’s fiction, philosophy, theology, personal journals, letters and poetry – and/or the political and cultural significance of any of these ¬– are invited to submit proposals.

 In a Conference Far, Far Away…Traversing Forms of the Folkloric  (Graduate Student Conference)

 New York University, Department of Comparative Literature: Friday, May 1, 2026

Call for PapersCaliban Speaks: International Conference on Recentering Indigenous Thought in the Age of Decolonialism and Technology

April 21–22, 2026 | International Islamic University Islamabad (IIUI)

1. Conference Rationale

In the contemporary intellectual landscape, postcolonial theory has illuminated important questions of empire, identity, and resistance. Yet, its limits are increasingly visible: while interrogating colonial legacies, it has too often re-centered Eurocentric epistemologies and sidelined Indigenous thought.

DEADLINE EXTENDED TO FEBRUARY 28TH

The University of Florida Critical Theory Reading Group Conference presents:

The 28th Annual University of Florida Critical Theory Reading Group Conference

The State of the Unions

April 23rd-25th, Gainesville (FL)

Keynote speakers: Sianne Ngai, Anna Kornbluh

Nicole LaRose Alumni Keynote Speaker: Ryan Kerr

Liverpool John Moores University, UK

6-8th July 2026

Confirmed keynotes:

Melissa Gustin (National Museums Liverpool), with guided tours of the Walker Art Gallery

Tara MacDonald (University of Lethbridge, Canada) “Public Institutions, Private Care: Sex Work and Care Work in Victorian Popular Fiction”

Doing American Studies Outside the US—Now

University of Sydney, Australia
Dates: July 16–18, 2026

About the Conference

2/15/26 - 4/30/26: Subs are open forIssue #9: Collaborations!We are seeking both poetry and art.There are no theme / subject restrictions.

We invite papers on the literature of the Arctic. Especially welcome are proposals on texts and authors that connect the Arctic to contemporary issues of extractivism, securitization, and imperialism. Please send a 250-word abstract and short bio.

5th IRW Theme: “Rhetorical Flows: Building Transnational Solidarities & Cultures of Resistance.”

Submission Deadline (250-word abstracts in English or Spanish): March 21, 2026

Submit here: https://tinyurl.com/IRW-Submissions

The Planning Committee for the 5th Biennial International Rhetoric Workshop invites international PhD students, emerging scholars, and established researchers to come together and consider the myriad ways that our contemporary and established traditions of rhetorical theory, pedagogy, and criticism inform global flows of meaning-making.

Call for Chapters

Evident Tongues, Evident Bodies: Language, Sense, and Proof in the Early Modern World

Editors: Dr Mary Katherine Newman and Dr Rana Banna

What counted as evidence in the early modern world? 

How did language itself – spoken, written, translated, or performed – shape conceptions of proof? 

And how did sensory experience lend authority, or uncertainty, to what language claimed as true?

Walls, barriers, barricades, borders are lines (real and imaginary) reified to divide, define, and contain, but there are also borderlands and border crossings which necessarily blur and defy arbitrary lines and lead to rethinking notions of belonging and belongings.

We are excited to share with you all on behalf of the Conference Planning Committee for the University of Connecticut First-Year Writing Program that we are holding our 21st Annual Conference on the Teaching of Writing on Thursday, April 23, and Friday, April 24, 2026, on our campus in Storrs, CT. Our theme for the upcoming conference is: “Wicked Reading for Wicked Problems." As those who have collaborated with us in the past, we are once again inviting you to help us explore ways of approaching these 'wicked problems', such as those that evade consensus, offer multiple solutions, or may even resist resolution at all.

ACCSFF ‘26

                                                                                         Call for Papers

The 2026 Academic Conference on Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy will be held Saturday and Sunday, May 30-31, 2026, in Toronto, Ontario, at York University, Canada.

This year's author GoH keynote speaker is the Nebula Award winning Premee Mohamed.

We invite proposals for papers in any area of Canadian science fiction and fantasy, including:

    -studies of individual works and authors;
    -comparative studies;
    -studies that place works in their literary and/or
     cultural contexts.

JAMS@AX26

Want to present your work at the one-and-only Anime Expo? The Journal of Anime and Manga Studies(JAMS) and Anime Expo have once-again teamed up to give you the JAMS@AX26 academic symposium, July 2-5, 2026 at the Los Angeles Convention Center. This symposium presents an incredible opportunity to connect fans of all ages directly to scholars researching and writing about the medium we all love. 

The JAMS@AX26 welcomes all papers taking a scholarly perspective on anime, manga, cosplay, and their fandoms.

Concept Note

The Faerie Queene confronts its characters and readers alike with perceptual, cognitive, and physical struggles, and the reader’s passage through Spenser’s monumental work is as arduous and seemingly unending as the journeys and quests of its knights. The parallels between the characters’ trials and the readers’ embodied experience of the poem become more pronounced when The Faerie Queene is read out loud in its entirety. In 2019, the English department at Tampere University organised its first marathon reading of Spenser’s epic romance. The 2026 iteration will be the sixth marathon reading overall, and the second to be attached to an international symposium.

One response to the official archives’ violent erasure(s) of multiethnic subjects (and the associated literatures) in the US has been scholarly investment in digital archiving. Still, the digital archives (and/or the metadata culled from them) can–and often do–reify whiteness as normative and the marginalization of other Americans. MELUS invites papers that consider how digital archiving (re)shapes and/or supports lay communities that inform the literature of the marginalized. We are particularly interested in papers that address how practices of liberatory archiving resist objectification of multiethnic subjects and/or authors. Submit titled proposals (250 words), a brief CV, and AV needs.

Seeking folks for our CFP below. Please email Dana Ahern (dtahern@usf.edu) and SJ Dillon (sjdillo@emory.edu).

Shakespeare’s works continue to inhabit what Stephen Greenblatt calls a “circulating energy system,” an ever-renewing sphere in which texts, performances, and interpretations travel across borders and epochs, sustaining the playwright’s presence in world culture. Tiffany Stern’s seminal research further reminds us that Shakespeare should be understood not as a fixed authorial entity but as an ongoing “process”—a dynamic constellation of scripts, fragmentary documents, performance traces, and editorial interventions that resist the notion of a stable text.

2026 Wenshan x TSA International Conference Call for Papers

Hosted by: NCCU Department of English, Taiwan Shakespeare Association

Date: November 29, 2026

Venue: National Chengchi University

Shakespeare Across Centuries:

Reception, Resonance, and Reinvention

Shakespeare’s works continue to inhabit what Stephen Greenblatt calls a “circulating