Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower: Visions of Yesterday and Tomorrow

Special Issue of African and Black Diaspora: an International Journal

The editors invite research articles examining Octavia Butler’s seminal and prophetic novels Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents for a special issue of African and Black Diaspora: an International Journal. In addition, the editors are accepting short creative works inspired by Butler’s Parable series. 

The MLA Forum on Seventeenth-Century English Studies (LLC 17th-Century English) invites submissions for a guaranteed session on “Eco-criticism in an Age of Emergency.” Eco-critical approaches to early modern literature have flourished since the turn of the twenty-first century. As the climate crisis continually becomes more urgent, however, the need for us as scholars to re-assess our history and culture through an ecological lens also steadily increases. Where is seventeenth-century ecocriticism now, and where is it going?

Call for Papers: (Re)Reading Encyclopedic Narratives in the Digital Age

RSAJournal - Special Issue no. 37 (September 2026)

Guest editors: Giorgio Mariani (Sapienza University of Rome), Ali Dehdarirad (Sapienza University of Rome), Sascha Pöhlmann (TU Dortmund University)

Call for Papers: Catalan Journal of Communication & Cultural Studies Issue 17.2

Special Issue: 'Ludomythologies: the Creation, Circulation & Transformation of Imaginaries in Games'

View the full call here>>

The MLA Drama and Performance Forum is currently accepting proposals for the two panels it is sponsoring for the 2026 conference in Toronto: https://www.mla.org/Events/2026-MLA-Convention.

Crowd Work: Audiences in Drama and Performance

How do drama and performance engage audiences as spectators and participants? What work does the audience do and how is it negotiated across local, transnational, economic, generic, or mediatized performance and reception contexts?

Please submit brief bios and 200-word proposals.

Deadline for submissions: Friday, 21 March 2025

Call for Chapters in an Edited Volume

Soundscapes in Indian Art, Literature and Culture

The Gaskell Journal

Joan Leach Memorial

Graduate Student Essay Prize 2026

Deadline for submissions: 1 February 2026

The Gaskell Journal runs a biennial Graduate Student Essay Prize in honour of Joan Leach MBE, founder of the Gaskell Society. The winning essay will be published in the Gaskell Journal (with revisions as appropriate), and its author will receive £200 from the Gaskell Society, and a complimentary copy of the Journal.

The Doris Lessing Society, an allied organization of the MLA, invites proposals for the two 2026 MLA sessions; for details of the Calls, see below:

                                               Calls for Paper for the 2026 MLA Convention (01/08--01/11/2026)

1       Doris Lessing the Storyteller: Literature and Social Change

The goal is to explore the ways in which Lessing uses fiction for social transformation through the elaboration and dissemination of knowledge, e.g., self-education, constructing knowledge, questioning moral/political values, and the relationship to language.

Deadline for submissions: Sunday, 23 March 2025

Call for Papers

The ATHE Theory & Criticism Focus Group seeks papers for its annual Graduate Student Essay Contest.

The contest presents an exciting opportunity for an emergent theatre and performance studies scholar. It introduces the winning writer to the ATHE conference and provides them with a venue in which to showcase their work. 

The contest prizes are intended to support the development of the student’s academic work, ease financial challenges related to conference attendance, and connect the student with appropriate scholarly resources for the paper’s development and impact. 

The winning scholar will receive: 

ACQL General Call for Papers: 2025 ONLINE Conference 

Founded in 1975 in the wake of Canada’s official ratification of multiculturalism, the Association for Canadian and Québec Literatures has, over more than 45 years, emerged as Canada’s premier association for showcasing multilingual and transnational research in Canadian and Québec literatures. 

This year, ACQL will host its annual conference ONLINE between Friday, May 23rd and Sunday, May 25th.

We invite potential participants to submit NEW proposals in English or in French on research, teaching, and professional matters of relevance to current or prospective members. 

We are thrilled to announce an open call for submissions for 'Voices Unbound', a new poetry anthology that seeks to celebrate the diverse, vibrant, and transformative power of poetry. Whether you are an emerging voice or an established poet, we invite you to share your work and contribute to this collective tapestry of human experience.

 Website: https://sites.google.com/view/freshwordsmagazine/home

In his Poetics, Aristotle famously distinguishes poetry from history, claiming that “the distinction between historian and poet is not in the one writing prose and the other verse…it consists really in this, that the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be.” Yet despite their different intentions, history has continued to remain a subject of drama from Aristotle’s time until the present day, often serving to enact the tension between truth and believability in order to highlight the often porous boundary between fact and fiction. This session will explore the depiction of historical subjects on the stage in theatrical works originating from any time period.

This panel, "Of Monsters and Mothers: Challenging Representations and Theories of Maternity in Literature," seeks to explore how literature complicates, subverts, and redefines conventional understandings of motherhood. From monstrous maternal figures to radical reimaginings of care, the maternal body has long been a contested site of power, anxiety, and transformation in literary texts. We invite interdisciplinary perspectives that engage with literature across historical periods and genres, drawing from feminist, psychoanalytic, postcolonial, disability, and queer theories to interrogate the intersections of motherhood, agency, and monstrosity.

Sponsored by the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, the University of Virginia’s College at Wise Medieval-Renaissance Conference promotes scholarly discussion in all disciplines of Medieval and Renaissance studies.