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Deadline Extended to 30 April 2025
Not Without Laughter: Tracing Humour in African American Literature Across the Ages
Many philosophers, from Aristotle to Hobbes, Freud to Schopenhauer, Spencer to Peter McGraw, have given interesting insights on matters concerning humour, comedy, and laughter. While the classical theories of humour, namely the superiority theory, the incongruity theory, and the relief theory, discuss the fundamental nature of humour, its evolved forms, such as the benign violation theory, provide a more compact version of the same. Nevertheless, humour is pervasive and can be witnessed in all aspects of life.
Call For Paper
“History provides numerous examples of people who were convinced that they were doing the right thing and committed terrible crimes because of it.”
---Christopher Paolini
Critical Arts: south-north cultural and media studies
【Special Issue】Global thinking and regional acting: From eco-aesthetics to cultural discourses of the Asian natural environment
Guest editor
Goutam Karmakar, University of Hyderabad, India; Durban University of Technology, South Africa
GoutamK@dut.ac.za
CALL FOR PAPERS
BOOK SERIES: South Asian Literature in Focus (Routledge, Global Edition)
Series Editors: Goutam Karmakar, Puspa Damai, Payel Pal, and Deimantas Valančiūnas
Call for Papers
An Archipelagic Turn and the “Other Asias”: Planetary Care in Literature, Politics, Culture
August 4-6, 2025
Jeju National University
South Korea
Keynote: Gayatri Spivak, Columbia University, US
The Critical Island Studies Consortium announces a conference that aims to fundamentally challenge and reconceptualize our understanding of “Asia” by privileging an archipelagic perspective
The GPA is accepting submissions for a special edition of The Journal of the Georgia Philological Association on the 19th century. Papers focused on literature, language, composition, history, philosophy, translation, the general humanities, interdisciplinary studies, and pedagogy as they relate to the 19th century will be considered.
Please send submissions to Nate Gilbert, Editor-in-Chief, at jgpasubmissions@gmail.com by April 30, 2025.
Please visit our website for information on submitting to the journal: https://www.mga.edu/arts-letters/english/gpa/index.php
Call for Papers: Special Issue of English Studies on Digital Humanities and the English Novel
We are pleased to invite submissions for a special issue of English Studies on the intersection of digital humanities (DH) and the study of the English novel. This special issue aims to push the boundaries of how we understand the novel as a genre by leveraging computational and quantitative methods to explore form, structure, and themes in English fiction. We invite scholars from both the digital humanities and literary studies to contribute to this exciting and interdisciplinary dialogue.
Overview:
In February 2024, the Center for the Study of Ethics in Society at Western Michigan University hosted the Privileged Logics 2024 Conference that examined how privilege shapes STEM research, research ethics, and the very definitions of research quality and research access. The National Science Foundation-funded conference sparked enriching exchanges and fresh perspectives — conversations we want to continue.
The African American Literature Permanent Section of the Midwestern Modern Language Association (MMLA) is requesting abstracts from potential panelists for this year’s in-person conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Informed by this year’s conference theme, “The Humanities is Where Hope Lives,” this section is calling for scholarly work that ties literature written by Black Americans to concepts of hope and its relationship to artistic production. Potential questions to address include, but are in no way limited to: How have representations of hope in Black American literature shifted across the centuries? What do depictions of hope look like when it has been disrupted or challenged?
Call for Articles:
Word and Text – A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics, XVI (2026)
Edited by Stefan Herbrechter and Ivan Callus
(De)Constructions of the Future
In a 2023 piece in the London Review of Books,Maylin Hays asks,“In the post-marriage era, what happens to the marriage plot?” Despite being in the midst of this alleged “post-marriage era,” conversations about marriage seem to be animating public discourse more than ever—from wildly popular “trad wife” influencers on social media, to the increasing frequency of conversations about gendered household labor in marriage self-help books like Eve Rodsky’s Fair Play (2019) and Kate Mangino’s Equal Partners (2022), to the recent rise in divorce memoirs like Lyz Lenz’s This American Ex-Wife (2024).
Abstract
Queer palimpsests are texts from which queerness has been erased – but only on the surface. Scholars, therefore, are invited to reinvestigate these texts and their underlying queerness. This project includes books, movies, songs, fashion, artifacts, architecture, archives… a queer excavation in order to indicate the traces, specters, echoes, or presences of the past that remain even as many past narrative elements, structures, or tropes are forgotten.
Description
The African Literature Permanent Section of the Midwest Modern Language Association (MMLA) requests abstracts for this year’s convention which will be held in person in Milwaukee, WI.
The Creative Writing II: Poetry permanent section of the Midwest Modern Language Association seeks creative, critical, and hybrid proposals that connect to this year’s convention theme of "The Humanities is Where Hope Lives”. We are particularly interested in presentations from poets and poet-scholars who engage with the value of the Humanities in languages, literature, pedagogy, writing studies, linguistics, folklore, film studies, the digital humanities, and library studies. Any humanities-oriented poetics and praxis are welcome to address any element of these considerations that are pertinent to the discussion.
CFP Comics and Graphic Novels Permanent Section
Chair: Keegan Lannon, University of Illinois – Chicago.
Conference: Nov 14-16, 2025
Marquette University
Milwaukee, WI
What Does Hope Look Like?
If it is true, as the CFP for this conference notes, that “hope can be found in the Humanities,” then comics and graphic novels offer a unique glimpse into that hope by drawing on the media affordances of prose and the visual arts. Comics let us “see” hope and optimism is ways other media are unable to.
The Language Education and Multilingualism (LEM) Strand of ELINET is pleased to announce the Call for Abstracts for the ELINET LEM Early Career Researcher (ECR) Workshop, which will be held virtually on May 23, 2025. This workshop is an opportunity for ECRs in language education and multilingualism to present their research to an international academic audience, engage in discussions, receive feedback, and connect with peers and experts. With this workshop, we aim to promote multilingual education research and policy development by engaging in interdisciplinary dialogue and encouraging collaboration and professional networking.
Location: Online
Submission Deadline: 31-Mar-2025
Bonkbusters and Soap Operas: Representing Sex, Glamour, and Melodrama on Screen
Saturday 21st June 2025
Falmouth University
This freein-person symposium will be an interdisciplinary and global exploration of Bonkbusters, Soap Operas and Made-for-TV Melodramas.
We are currently seeking contributions from the humanities and social sciences for a scientific network that explores ephemerality in both its material forms and theoretical conceptualizations. This interdisciplinary network aims to bring into dialogue various questions about ephemerality, specifically examining how different fleeting forms of expression are implicated in the continual making and unmaking of proximities, both human and non-human, producing “a matter of temporary intensities and pacts amongst people” and other entities (Vélez-Serna, 14).
Literature and film are filled with characters whose choices shape worlds, inspire audiences, and sometimes make no sense at all. This session takes a playful yet insightful approach to the conference theme of Palimpsests: Memory and Oblivion by examining how cultural memory preserves, distorts, or over-glorifies certain fictional figures. Through witty critiques and audience participation, we’ll interrogate why some characters remain revered despite glaring flaws while others are unfairly forgotten or misunderstood. What does our collective memory choose to retain, and what are we rewriting with each new adaptation, retelling, or reinterpretation?
The Superhero Project: 9th Global Meeting
THE MULTIVERSAL SUPERHERO
Friday 5th to Sunday 7th September 2025
The View Hotel, Eastbourne, East Sussex, United Kingdom
“Anyone can wear the mask. You can wear the mask. If you didn’t know that before, I hope you do now. Cuz I’m Spider-Man. And I’m not the only one. Not by a long shot”. – Miles Morales, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
CALL FOR PROPOSALS: THE SOUTHERN GOTHIC AT PCAS/ ACAS 2025
This prospective Panel-Session at the Modern Language Association (MLA) 2026 Convention will Focus on Decipherment of Multiple-Births in Literature, with Themes such as Bonding and Resemblance. I Invite Scholarship through Lenses such as Literary-Criticism, Genetics, Psychoanalysis, etc. Please Submit an Abstract of 250-300 Words to padmini.sukumaran@gmail.com.
MMLA 2025 Call for Papers for their Permanent Section: "English III: Literature after 1900" under the theme Optimism Against All Odds in American/English Modernism
Deadline: April 24th, 2025
For consideration: please send a brief abstract (250 words), tentative title, and bio to Sophie Nunberg at snunberg@uwm.edu by April 24th, 2025.
DETAILS:
The 122nd annual conference of the Pacific Ancient & Modern Languages Association (PAMLA) will be held in San Francisco at the InterContinental Hotel San Francisco, from Thursday, November 20, to Sunday, November 23, 2025.
Cultural History
MMLA 2025 Animal Studies Panel
“Do Animals Hope?”
Although many books have been written on hope for non-human animals, their collective or individual survival, this session invites proposals on hope by non-human animals, or representations of such hope. Many different approaches are welcome—literary critical, ethnographic (human or animal), environmental studies, affect studies, thought experiments. Please submit a 1-2 page abstract to Lucinda Cole (lcol@illinois.edu) by April 14, 2025.
Virtual session
All photography takes place somewhere, but only some photography makes that place the focal point. From its conception, photographers have used the medium to document places, ranging from specific sites to regional and national landscapes, with the aim to educate, archive, preserve, and critique. Photographs of home and the local allow for reflections on belonging, community, and personal identity, whereas images taken elsewhere, perhaps in foreign lands, suggest an anthropological drive to capture (the essence of) the unfamiliar.
Caleidoscopio invites you to submit papers for its series 2, vol. 1, no. 1: under the topic “In Media-Making: Start-on-and-go-over-Media”
Archives, while carrying out the operation of the gaze, function like a mirror: they point to a spectral exteriority. The archive is of the order of the phantasmagorical and, by definition, they are phantasmatic. This approach points out to what Harun Farocki’s stressed as the definition of a phantom or operational image, images that are built from a non-human perspective, although they call-in human agency.
Why should humans be witnessing and/or scrutinizing images productions? Is that still a need? Are there any ethical or aesthetical motives or meanings to it?
The Academic Association for Doctoral Students & Students of English (Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń) is pleased to announce the call for papers for the 11th issue of Currents, on the themes of adaptation and innovation within Anglophone language, culture and literature.
‘Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature’s inexorable imperative.’~ H.G. Wells Mind at the End of Its Tether
The Academic Association for Doctoral Students & Students of English (Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń) is pleased to announce the call for papers for the online young researchers’ conference to be held on 22 May 2025 and the journal issue (Currents No 11) on the themes of adaptation and innovation within Anglophone language, culture and literature.
‘Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature’s inexorable imperative.’
~ H.G. Wells Mind at the End of Its Tether