DECIPHERING THE WORLD OF EROTICA: WHERE FANTASY MEETS MEDIA
“Sex is more exciting on the screen and between the pages than between the sheets”
- ANDY WARHOL
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FAQ changelog |
“Sex is more exciting on the screen and between the pages than between the sheets”
- ANDY WARHOL
Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies
Vol. 53 No. 2 | September 2027
Call for Papers
Critical Agrarian Humanities:
Farming and World-Making in the Anthropocene
Guest Editors
Shiuhhuah Serena Chou (Academia Sinica)
Scott Slovic (Oregon Research Institute)
Deadline for Submissions: December 31, 2026
Drawing on the arpillera as both an aesthetic practice and a critical model, this seminar explores how 21st-century Latin American women’s writing can be read through constellations, transnational and uneven archives, and relational frameworks. Rather than organizing analysis along national or canonical lines, it approaches texts as dynamic assemblages that weave together bodies, territories, affects, and political histories.
The Society of Nineteenth Century Historians, in partnership with the Pamplin College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at Augusta University, presents the 34th Annual Sachsman Symposium on the 19th Century Press, Nov. 12-14, 2026.
Creativity and Praxis:
The Politics of Aesthetics in an Age of Polycrisis
An International Interdisciplinary Symposium, 1-2 October 2026
J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice
Adelaide University
North Terrace, Adelaide, South Australia, 5000, Australia
Keynote Readings by:
J.M. Coetzee
Anna Funder
Nam Le
Other Keynotes to Be Confirmed
Technological futures are not given. They are made, and they can be made differently. EMERGE 2026: Contested Futures takes place at a moment when AI systems have become central to the organization of economic power, political control, and social sorting, while democratic institutions struggle to keep pace and ecological costs mount. Rather than treating technological change as inevitable or neutral, the conference invites critical reflection on how emerging technologies are developed, governed, narrated, and contested.
JOURNAL ISSUE
Call for Papers
Tribal Literature
Editor: Dr. Animesh Roy
Concept Note
eds. Kate Genevieve, Jessica Hurley, Juan Francisco Salazar
An anthology marking fifty years since the launch of NASA’s Voyager mission and the Golden Record, inviting outer space studies and artistic contributions to grow just, plural futures for the second space age. This volume takes the Voyager Golden Record as a catalyst for creatively rethinking planetary futures. Bringing together artists with historians of science, STS scholars, ethnographers and community practitioners engaged with outer space, the book combines critique with reparative and imaginative work.
Poetry & Poetry Studies at MAPACA 2026
November 5-7, 2026 at the Lord Baltimore Hotel, Baltimore, MD
Deadline: 6/30/2026
Dear colleagues,
We are pleased to invite you to submit your contributions to IEEE GEM 2026 – Games, Entertainment & Media Conference, which will take place in Berlin, Germany, from September 5 to 7, 2026.
IEEE GEM 2026 will be held in conjunction with ICCE-Berlin, as part of IFA – Internationale Funkausstellung Berlin, one of the world’s leading trade shows for consumer technology and electronics.
SAVE THE DATE
Alternative Endings:
A Symposium Celebrating the 30th Anniversary of Cheryl Dunye's The Watermelon Woman
October 17, 2026
Northwestern University--Downtown Campus
Chicago, Illinois
Join scholars, filmmakers, artists for a one-day symposium commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of Cheryl Dunye's groundbreaking film The Watermelon Woman.
The symposium will feature:
• A special panel showcasing previously unreleased alternative endings from the film, with commentary from invited scholars.
• A luncheon bringing together contributors to the film, panelists, and local Black women filmmakers.
Literary and Cultural Perspectives on Communities in Fiction
Guest editors
Adrián Arana-Armesto (Universidad del País Vasco)
Patricia García Santos (Universidad de Córdoba)
Call for Papers for a Special Issue of the Journal of Artistic Creation and Literary Research (JACLR)
Deadline: 15th February 2027
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
Things Left Unsaid: A Flash Fiction Anthology
Silence. Regret. The conversation that never happened.
Submission Deadline: August 20, 2026
Acceptance Notifications: August 25, 2026
Submissions: specialanthologyfreshwordsmag@gmail.com
Website: https://sites.google.com/view/freshwordsmagazine/announcements
There are things we meant to say. Words swallowed before they could land. Letters never sent, calls never returned, confessions rehearsed in the dark and abandoned by morning.
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: RAIN AND ROOTSA Nature & Earth Haiku Anthology
Fresh Words – An International Literary Magazine
Website: https://sites.google.com/view/freshwordsmagazine/announcements
Key Dates
Submission Deadline: August 15, 2026
In the wake of ecocriticism and environmental humanities, the blue humanities have emerged as a field of study that emphasizes the centrality of aquatic environments in understanding interactions between humans and nonhumans. This interdisciplinary field, which initially grew out of Anglophone literary criticism, proposes to shift our terra-centric perspective by adopting the seas and oceans as a new vantage point to rethink our understanding of both the planet and literature (Klein, 2002; Blum, 2008; Bailyn, 2005). Originally developed in the United States within the field of Oceanic studies (Blum 2010; Cohen 2010; Mentz 2009), the “Blue studies” have since expanded and become increasingly decentered and diversified.
Illness is rarely a purely private experience, yet for women it has historically been rendered invisible: sequestered within domestic walls, dismissed by medical institutions, and silenced in the cultural record. This session examines how film and literature in Spanish and Portuguese bring female sickness out of the shadows, transforming what is often hidden and isolated into a site of testimony, intimacy, and meaning.
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS — Mini Plays Review | September 2026 Issue
Theme: Echoes of the Digital Age
This issue explores how human connection, conflict, identity, and memory are being rewritten in a hyper-connected yet deeply isolated world. We are looking for sharp, short scripts that capture the friction between our physical lives and our digital existence.
Subthemes for Submission:
1. Phantom Vibrations: The psychological weight, anxiety, or obsession of waiting for a notification that never comes.
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS | The Soliloquist Journal ( https://thesoliloquistmagazine.my.canva.site/#submit )
Theme: The Architecture of Solitude
Deadline: July 10, 2026
Publication: July 15, 2026
Solitude is rarely a vast, empty space—it is built. It has walls we erect to protect our innermost selves, windows through which we watch a noisy world, drafty corners of loneliness, and sacred sanctuaries of deliberate peace.
Concept Note
Two-Day International Conference (likely to be ICSSR Sponsored) on “Loss of Indigenous Knowledge in the Age of Digital Humanities: Preservation, Power, and the Politics of Representation” (Hybrid Mode)
The Manuscript: Journal of Taylor Swift Studies (JOTSS)
Binghamton University’s Special Edition
Colloquially Speaking! Ruminations on the Possibilities of the Field: Call for Papers
Submission Deadline: August 30, 2026
Submission Website: https://orb.binghamton.edu/jotss/
Soapbox 8.0: call for papers
Ways of Structuring
peer reviewed; open to critical and artistic work.
If structures are determinate and determining, as they have come to seem through the interventions of poststructuralist theory, then ‘ways of structuring’ names a contradiction. The plurality of ‘ways’ sits in tension with the fixity of ‘structure,’ evoking the very qualities of contingency and flexibility that the concept seems to negate. For this upcoming issue, we welcome academic and artistic contributions that explore this tension.
Proposals for edited book on 21st cent. Women Poets and Resistance
We –a group of scholars and poets– are assembling a collective book on 21st century Women's Poetries, which will be submitted as an edited collection for one of the series at Palgrave Macmillan. Two of our contributors fell down and we are trying to find a couple of good proposals which can be a good fit and complete our collection.
The Southeastern Renaissance Conference (SRC) invites submissions for presentation at our 83rd Annual Meeting, which will be hosted by the University of Tennessee Knoxville and its Marco Institute, to be held from Friday, October 23 to Saturday, October 24, 2026.
The organizers will consider papers on any topic related to the Early Modern / Renaissance period.
The Historical Fictions Research Conference 2027 will take place at Amsterdam University from 4th February to 5th February.
For the 2027 conference the HFRN will engage in scholarly discussions on the topic of ‘Power and Politics in Historical Fictions’
The 2027 conference in Amsterdam will continue to critically interrogate one of HFRN’s longstanding lines of enquiry: that historical fictions are anything but a banal engagement with the past, but explicitly and implicitly shape and propel political claims, identities and agendas.
In keeping with the presidential theme of the 2026 MMLA Conference, “After the Archives,” to be held in Chicago from November 12-14, 2026, papers that incorporate and/or interrogate the archives are welcomed for this year’s panel on American Literature before 1870.
We are seeking abstracts for chapters for The Routledge Companion to the Urban Wyrd. This volume has been contracted and we have commissioned in excess of 35 chapters. We are looking for abstracts which cover particular areas including, the Anglo-Saxon origins of the wyrd, the link between the Gothic and the wyrd city, Georgian and Victorian urban anxiety, global cities, theoretical approaches to the urban wyrd, urban ruin and photography, sound and music and the city, the environment and the urban future.
Futures and Frontiers of US American Culture(s) International Conference
30 September – 2 October 2026
John-F.-Kennedy-Institut für Nordamerikastudien, Freie Universität Berlin
Keynotes: Jenny Stümer (Universität Heidelberg) | Dan Hassler-Forest (Utrecht University)
Acceptance/rejection will be communicated shortly after the extended deadline has passed.
The Forum Section invites scholars to reflect on the different ways that their research and/or pedagogy has intertwined with their lives in relation to the theme of the Volume. It is a more immediate exploration of how one’s research is shaped out of one’s personal experiences and positionalities. This section was introduced in 2023, encouraging contributors to experiment with styles outside academic writing to tease out the intricacies of pedagogy, research, and lived experience. Forum pieces can be more personal and self-reflective, and can include open ended enquiries. There are aspects of research that never make it to the research paper.
Call for Papers (CFP)18th SAAS ConferenceNegotiating Identity and Power: Resistance, Rebellion, and Resilience in U.S. Literature and Culture
Universidad de Oviedo, Spain | March 15–17, 2027
Panel Title:Speculative Ontologies: The Posthuman, the Eerie, and Cultural Memory in US Media and NarrativesPanel Chairs:
Throughout the history of political thought and cultural production, multitudes and mobs that stir up disturbance across the nation, whether revolutionary or reactionary, have frequently been portrayed by the images and metaphors of monstrosity. From the many-headed hydra which was adapted into a political discourse in the early modern age and later revisited by historians such as Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, to contemptuous terms toward the insurrectionists such as swarms or locusts described in Samuel Dolbee’s Locusts of Power, monstrosity and various of dehumanizing terms have long been employed as a signifier through which fears of insurrections are expressed.
Anglica Wratislaviensia 65.2/2027
Anglica Wratislaviensia invites scholarly submissions for its forthcoming issue, which focuses on Anglophone literary and cultural studies and related interdisciplinary fields. While the journal's scope encompasses linguistics, translation studies, and language teaching methodology, this issue welcomes contributions in literary and cultural studies specifically. We seek rigorous, critically engaged work that brings together diverse critical traditions and perspectives from around the world. Comparative and methodologically innovative contributions are particularly welcome.
Submission Guidelines
Indraprasth: An International Journal of Culture & Communication Studies, (ISSN 2278-7208), the annual journal published by the University School of Humanities and Social Sciences (USHSS) at Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University invites unpublished research papers for its upcoming issue, Volume XV (2026), titled “New Paradigms, New Epistemes: Literature and Criticality in the 21st Century.”
Mediapolis – A Journal of Cities and Culture is an interdisciplinary open access online journal, drawing a connection between culture and the built environment – understood in the broadest sense. We publish research in different forms, from research articles to Q&A interviews and readings list, and across different academic fields, including but not limited to media studies, urban studies, geography, architecture and art history as well as digital humanities.
Join a panel at the 14th annual CSULA Eagle Con! Eagle Con is an annual event devoted the power and potential of speculative and fantastic media to critique social formations, interrogate subjectivities, and constitute alternative worlds.
Keynote speaker: Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (Central Michigan University)
May 20-21st 2027, University of Zadar (Zadar, Croatia)
CALL FOR PAPERS
Critique: Journal of English Language and Literature
Submission Deadline: 31 July 2026
The Editors of Critique: Journal of English Language and Literature invite the submission of original scholarly articles for consideration in the forthcoming issue of the journal.
CONFERENCE
2026 PAMLA Conference, taking place November 12–15 at the Hyatt Regency Seattle
SESSION/PANEL ABSTRACT
Americana: Call for Submissions Deadline for submissions: Revolving submissions
Now reading through 06/20/2026 for next issue full name / name of organization: Americana contact email: editor@americanpopularculture.com
Americana invites submissions in Film Studies, Media Studies, Cultural Studies, American Studies, Women's Studies, and American history, and so on -- especially as it pertains to Americana popular culture, 1900 to present.
The British Women Writers Association (BWWA) seeks organizers for our
2028 conference and beyond, both in the United States and abroad. The
BWWA’s mission is to bring women from the margins to the center of
literary history by promoting scholarship on and the teaching of long
18th-and 19th-century British women writers in diverse global and
cultural contexts. In practice, the conference invites papers
addressing women’s writing as early as 1660 and as late as 1920,
inclusive of the work of transatlantic and Anglophone authors.
Speculative fiction covers a broad range of narrative styles and genres. The cohesive element that pulls works together under the category is that there is some “unrealistic” element, whether it’s magical, supernatural, or a futuristic/technological development: works that fall into the category stray from conventional realism in some way. For this reason, speculative fiction can be quite broad, including everything from fantasy and magical realism to horror and science fiction—from China Miéville to Margaret Atwood to Philip K. Dick.
5th Annual UC Irvine Global Asias International Conference
February 18–19, 2027
UC Irvine
Keynote Speaker:
Paul Nadal, Princeton University
Early Career Publishing Workshop:
Tina Chen, Penn State
CFP: https://sites.uci.edu/globalasias/ga27/
Proposal Form: https://bit.ly/ga27cfp/
CALL FOR PAPERS
Keynote Speaker: Prof Soumhya Venkatesan with Lydia Donohue (University of Manchester)
‘The pluralism of a postcolonial or decolonial philosophy of religion should be “on both ends” of the discipline; that is, both the phenomena and subjects considered and contemplated by the discipline should be diverse, but also the people, perspectives, and methods engaged in this project should come from diverse backgrounds—not only in terms of race, class, gender, geography, etc. but also in terms of ritual practice, training (both academic and otherwise), initiation or membership in tribes, societies, or “religious” traditions.’
—Oludamini Ogunnaike, “Expanding the Menu or Seats at the Table? Grotesque Pluralism in the (Post)Colonial Philosophy of Religion.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 89, no. 2 (2021): 734.
In-Between Wor(l)ds: Liminality, Poetry and Performance
Call for Papers – GNSD Graduate Conference, University of Minnesota
Nov. 6 - 7th, 2026 (in person)
Keynote by Adeena Karasick
Fantasy has long explored lifeworlds and paradigms outside of societal norms. Orlando, Virginia Woolf’s gender-fluid protagonist, declares, ‘I'm sick to death of this particular self. I want another.’ World myths, legends, folk tales, and fairy tales are early promoters of gender-fluidity, populated by the likes of Inanna/Ishtar; Hermaphroditus, the offspring of Hermes and Aphrodite; androgynous Dionysus; Ardhanarishvara; Ometeotl; Guanyin; cross-dressing thunder and trickster gods; heartsick seafaring maidens disguised as sailors; and the mercurial ontologies of the Fae. In this issue we will explore how gender is portrayed and explored in Fantasy.
The Bachelor’s Degree: Teaching with Reality TV in the Feminist Classroom
Call for Papers for a Special Issue in Feminist Pedagogy
An interdisciplinary space for critical reflectionThe Social Contract in Dispute: Discourse, Legitimacy and Transformation
Living in a context of intense political tensions and polarisations that threaten how society is organised and the fundamentals of democratic legitimacy, the 28th International Meeting of Research and Investigation (EIRI) is dedicated to reflecting on the social contract and its contemporary transformations.
Eco-Poetics and Environmental Artivism
A Transdisciplinary Conference
July 16-17, 2026
July 16: In person participation at Pembroke Lodge, Richmond Park (and online)
July 17: Fully online
Conference Page: https://labrc.co.uk/2026/01/21/ecopoetics2026/
Fees** (for both attendees and presenters):
£180 (In person participation)
£100 (Online participation)
**Prices exclude Eventbrite fees
Call for Presentations:
The 123rd Annual Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA) Conference will take place this November in Seattle, Washington, from November 12-15, 2026.
The 98th annual SAMLA Conference is taking place Thursday, November, 5, through Saturday, November, 7, 2026, at the Wyndham Atlanta Buckhead Hotel & Conference Center in Atlanta, GA. For more information, see https://southatlanticmla.org/.