Our Victorians, Ourselves: Rethinking Victorian Texts & Contexts

An online student conference hosted by the Undergraduate and Graduate Student Victorian Association (UGSVA)

Conference on April 28th, 2026 and Abstracts due March 31st, 2026

Keynote:

Sarah Bliss, Florida State University

“Reading the Forest with the Trees: Victorian Fiction and Periodicals”

Interactive Closing Session:

Sabarno Sinha, University of Texas at Austin

“UnConferencing (v. 1860): The Black-Out Victorian Poetry Edition”

Discourse in the Age of Political Upheaval and Artificial Intelligence

Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference at UCLA

Keynote speaker: Dr. Julia Alekseyeva, University of Pennsylvania

Submission form: https://forms.gle/ynHiRZothVVkgVdp8

If you face any difficulties in the submission process or have questions about the conference,

please email: discourseconferenceucla@gmail.com

• Submission deadline: March 13th at 11:59PM PST

New (and Old) Experiments in Translation (and Writing)

International Conference, Brock University (St. Catharines, ON, Canada) October 22nd to 24th, 2026

Organized by Dr. Nicholas Hauck, Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures, Brock University (nhauck@brocku.ca) and Dante Ognibene, Brock University

Dates: October 22, 23 and 24, 2026

Location: Brock University, St. Catharines, ON, Canada

MLA 2027: The Melville Society CFP: Melville and Hawthorne Revisited

CALL FOR BOOK CHAPTERS
Criminologies, Borders, and Humanities in North Africa
An Edited Volume for the Emerald Borders, Criminalisation and Society Series
Editor: Dr. Rachid Benharrousse*

*Tilburg Law School, Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands

Email: rachid.benharrousse@proton.me

About the Series

This volume is proposed for the Emerald Borders, Criminalisation and Society Series: an interdisciplinary and inclusive space that examines how laws, policies, and practices shape, regulate, and contest borders and the people affected by them. 

“What is Theory, and why are they saying such terrible things about it? (And who—if we indulge in paranoiac criticism—are ‘they’, anyway?) To take the second part of the question first, ‘they’ say terrible things about Theory because much of it is admittedly jargon-ridden and often appears incomprehensible. But also (and this is the uncharitable answer) because: (i) it takes considerable patience and effort to understand the ‘key’ essays, and most diatribes against Theory come from people unwilling to make that effort; and (ii) it destabilises authority over interpretation and authority is precisely what teachers (especially teachers of literary studies) seek to impose over texts, meanings, and readers.”

The theme for Volume 13 of Ceræ: An Australasian Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, as well as for our 3rd annual online Conference, is Fame and Fortune. 

We invite submissions to both the conference and the journal on this theme.

Full details can be found here: 2026 Ceræ Call For Papers – CERÆ: An Australasian Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies

The Sally Mitchell Dissertation Prize is awarded annually to the best Ph.D. dissertation, defended in the previous calendar year, that explores the British periodical press of the long nineteenth century (including magazines, newspapers, and serial publications of all kinds) as an object of study in its own right, not as a source of material for other historical topics. Winners of the prize receive a monetary award of $1,000 and a two-year membership to RSVP.

This guaranteed panel (in-person at the Modern Language Association in Los Angeles, California; January 7-10, 2027) takes a cue from the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of African American Humor Studies and seeks 250-word proposals that discuss how African American humorists eschew "just jokes" to articulate personal and collective selfhood and freedom. Please submit abstracts by Monday, March 16 to dmorgan@scu.edu. This panel is sponsored by the Screen Arts and Culture Committee.

Accepted presenters must be MLA members by April 1, 2026. 

C21 is inviting scholars and researchers to contribute book review essays for upcoming issues. We currently have a selection of titles published in 2025 available for review, spanning literary studies, film and media studies, cultural studies, and gender and sexuality studies. We invite prospective authors to submit ideas for review essays that discuss 2–3 recently published scholarly texts. For the full CFP, and to see our list of available titles, please visit: https://c21.openlibhums.org/news/923/.

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?