“The monster is born only at this metaphoric crossroads, as an embodiment of a certain cultural moment—of a time, a feeling, and a place. The monster's body quite literally incorporates fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy (ataractic or incendiary), giving them life and an uncanny independence. The monstrous body is pure culture.” 

• Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).”

Join us for 2027’s Dis/Junctions, a hybrid, graduate-run conference held March 4-5. The conference will feature both in-person and virtual panels and events. In-person programming will be hosted on the University of California, Riverside campus.

In recent decades, South Korean popular culture, commonly referred to as the Hallyu Wave, has taken the world by storm. Whether through K-Pop, K-dramas, or Korean cinema, this cultural phenomenon has eSountered a phase of “compressed modernity” (Kyung-Sup 1999, 2010), wherein the world appears smaller as Korean popular culture makes significant inroads not only across East Asia but also in countries such as the United States, Brazil, Argentina, various African nations, Europe, and South Asia.

Over the past three decades, fan studies have developed sophisticated accounts of participatory culture, collective intelligence, affective engagement, and transformative practices (Jenkins 2006; Booth 2015; Hills 2017). At the same time, scholarship has increasingly addressed the investigative dimensions of audience participation. Mittell’s concept of “forensic fandom” (2009), for example, highlights practices of close reading, clue collection, speculation, and collaborative interpretation in response to complex narrative worlds. Fans thus become active investigators who uncover hidden meanings, solve mysteries, and assemble fragmented information across media texts. More recently, such investigative practices have expanded beyond fictional worlds.

Dear Colleagues, and friends

We are holding the conference 'Late Bowie: Legacy, Mortality and the Archival Impulse' at Kingston university, in our state of the art Visconti recording studio, Kingston Hill, on Nov 5th and 6th of this year.

We have a really exciting programme with some great speakers and guests. These include Harriet Reed (Project Lead, Bowie Archive, V&A Storehouse East; Clare Watt (Bowie fellow, V&A); Peter Carpenter (author of Bowieland: Walking in the Footsteps of David [Octopus Books, 2025]); British film and TV producer Kevin Loader and Jonathan Barnbrook, graphic designer of Bowie;s albums from Heathen (2002) to Blackstar (2016).

International Conference on

Environmental Precarity and Planetary Aesthetics: Voices, Epistemologies, and Geopolitics of the Global South

25 & 26 February 2027

Organised by the Department of English, Bodoland University, Kokrajhar, India

Concept note

Renewed call for chapter proposals

Off the Stage: Performance Practices in Postcolonial India

(forthcoming in 2027)

The editor is pleased to issue a renewed call for chapter proposals for the edited volume Off the Stage: Performance Practices in Postcolonial India, scheduled for publication in 2027 by an internationally renowned UK-based publishing house. This renewed call has become necessary owing to a few last-minute withdrawals and the non-submission of some previously committed chapters.  

DEADLINE EXTENDED TO OCTOBER 11, 2026

NeMLA 

March 6-9, 2027

Newport, RI 

Submit paper proposals here: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22354

Call for Papers

Imagining Italy: Transatlantic Encounters, Diaspora, and Cultural Belonging

Date: June 24-27, 2027

Location: University of Macerata

Abstracts & Proposals Due: Friday, February 26, 2027

Notifications Sent Out by Monday, March 8, 2027

Submittable Link:

PSi#32, İstanbul, Türkiye, Call for Proposals

(Turkish version follows below.)

Performance Studies international #32

Call for Papers

15–19 September 2027

İstanbul, Türkiye

Performance Studies international (PSi), in collaboration with Performistanbul in İstanbul, Türkiye, invites responses to the call for proposals for the PSi#32 Conference in 2027.

Conference Theme: MEYDAN

Call for Papers: British Literature, pre-1600 at CEA 2027

Apr. 1-3, 2027 | St. Louis, Missouri

The Westin St. Louis Hotel
https://cea-web.org/the-conference-hotel

The College English Association, a gathering of scholar-teachers in English studies, welcomes proposals for presentations on British Literature, pre-1660 for our 57th annual conference. Submit your proposal at www.cea-web.org

The Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University is thrilled to host the 12th annual Post45 Graduate Symposium on March 4-6, 2027.

The Post45 Graduate Symposium seeks graduate-level works-in-progress related to post-1945 media, arts, literature, textual or visual objects, digital platforms, politics, and culture. We welcome submissions that expand our conception of objects and meaning-making post-1945 or place them in comparative, transnational, or hemispheric frames. We especially welcome contributions that foreground the importance of race, gender, class, and sexuality to post-45 studies. 

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS  THE DOOR OPENS AT MIDNIGHT  An International Anthology of Three-Page Plays

Email all submission to:dramaanthologyfreshwords@gmail.com 

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

At 11:59, it is an ordinary night.

At midnight, the door opens.

Who is standing outside?

Every year, the Association holds it annual conference, usually a two-day affair, as well as a graduate student workshop, usually held the day before the annual conference. The 2027 annual meeting will be held at the University of California, Berkeley from May 27-28.

Discipline

Overview

GAMES AND COMMUNITIES – PLAYERS, FANS, GAMERS
Sixth International Video Games Studies Conference (SVI 2027)

8-9 April 2027, University of Zadar, Croatia

Keynote Speaker: Tom Apperley

In January 2026, murals of faceless female silhouettes in yoga poses were scratched around the genital area in the Indian city of Gwalior. The figures depicted no identifiable women; they were attacked anyway. In 2024, sexually explicit AI-generated deepfakes of Taylor Swift circulated widely online, demonstrating a very different but related form of image violation. Across a scratched public wall and a fabricated digital image, the same question emerges: what happens when an image of a woman becomes the surface upon which sexualisation, humiliation or punishment is performed? This special issue asks where, if anywhere, a woman’s image can be assumed to be safe.

We are inviting contributors to our project on World Philosophy and Humor. This work aims to explore the philosophical dimensions of humor, examining its nature, function, ethical implications, and cultural significance. We are now especially interested in adding contributors for book chapters on Islamic and ancient philsoophies.

Contributions could engage with any of the following themes:

1. The Nature of Humor: What is humor, and how can it be defined? Philosophical inquiries into the essence of humor, including its relationship to comedy, wit, irony, and satire.

CFP: Red Reading the Modern Novel

Society for Novel Studies (Vancouver, BC; 13-16 May 2027)

The organizer seeks papers that apply Red Reading to twentieth- and twenty-first century novels. The literary canon has been expanded brilliantly in the last few decades, and literary critical approaches have shifted away from modes of corrosive critique. There remains however, a dearth of work grounded in Indigenous epistemologies and critical approaches. As an initial response to this gap, this panel seeks to test Red Reading’s utility for studies of the novel.

This seminar invites papers that explore the concepts of ekphrasis, the mise en abyme, and metaphorical mirrors in literature, music, and the visual arts. How are mirrors used by artists as deliberate tools to represent something else? How are metaphorical mirrors used to compare different types of reflections across mediums? How are mirrors used to suggest that the aesthetic “surface” is a distraction, and true clarity lies in understanding what the observer or listener wants to see or hear? Papers focused on one medium or interdisciplinaryapproaches from the Ancient, Medieval, Modern, and Postmodern periods are welcome.

The Claude McKay Society (CMKS) plans to convene one or two panels at the American Literature Association 38th Annual Conference at the Westin Copley Place, Boston, May 26-29, 2027. CMKS seeks proposals on any aspect of McKay’s writing. The conference registration is $200, $125 for graduate students, independent scholars, and retired faculty (the ALA requires no membership fee). Contact Gary Holcomb, holcomb@ohio.edu by January 1st, 2027. Send a title, abstract, and brief biographical information.

Dislocated Bodies: Noises, Opacities, and Irreverences

Guest editors:  Alicia Fernández Gallego-Casilda, Julio Ferrandis Buzón and Constanza Ternicier Espinosa (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)

Call for Book Chapters: The Handbook of Witchcraft and Sorcery

Volume Editors:

Assoc. Prof. Cenk Tan (Pamukkale University, Türkiye)

Assoc. Prof. Milena Škobo (Sinergija University, Serbia)

Assoc. Prof. Nazan Yıldız Çiçekçi (Karadeniz Technical University, Türkiye)

Assoc. Prof. Oya Bayıltmış Öğütcü (Adıyaman University, Türkiye)

Submission Deadline for Abstracts:  February 1, 2027

International Conference, 16-18 August, 2027, Vaxjö, Sweden

Nostalgia has become one of the defining cultural affects of the twenty-first century. It permeates politics, popular culture, social media, environmental discourse, memory practices, heritage industries, and everyday life. While nostalgia is often discussed as a feeling directed towards a lost past, it is always encountered through acts of mediation. Memories, desires, identities, and imagined pasts are shaped, transformed, communicated, circulated, and shared through media technologies, aesthetic forms, communicative practices, and intermedial relations.

April 1-3, 2027 | St. Louis, Missouri

The Westin St. Louis Hotel

https://cea-web.org/the-conference-hotel

The College English Association, a gathering of scholar-teachers in English studies, welcomes proposals for presentations on Latinx Literature for our 57th annual conference. Submit your proposal at www.cea-web.org