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This NeMLA panel invites proposals exploring the social, cultural, and political uses of regionalist aesthetics throughout the 20th cnetury.
Throughout the nineteenth, twentieth and into the twenty-first century, authoritarianism has proven to be an enduring leadership style in Latin American and has manifested in diverse forms, including the uprisings of regional caudillos, the ascendency of personalist rulers, the formation of solemn cults of personality, the imposition of military dictatorships, the establishment of single-party States, the totalitarian perpetuation of the state of exception, the cultural promotion of ethnonationalism, and the installation of illiberal technocracies, among others.
From brainwashed assassins to complicated anti-heroes to villains on a redemption arc, comic books, films, television, and novels frequently present readers with complicated antagonists-turned-superheroes, many of which become beloved characters. Through varied processes of regeneration, former antagonists remake themselves into superheroes in fascinating and often unexpected ways.
Children’s Rights &/in Popular Culture (panel/roundtable for NEPCA conference taking place virtually Oct 9-11 2025)
How are children’s rights represented in current popular culture (e.g., videogames, board games, graphic novels, film, TV, social media, music, toys etc.)? In what ways does pop culture today curtail children’s rights (e.g., cellphone apps, tracking devices, surveillance equipment)? How do children themselves define their rights, notions of justice, law and order in their interactions with popular culture (e.g., toys, games, art, fashion, hobbies, social media etc.)?
We seek panelists for Northeast MLA 2026, "The Name of the Witch."
Conference Details
57th NeMLA Annual Convention, March 5 - 8, 2026, Pittsburgh, PA. Visit https://www.nemla.org/convention/future.html for more details.
Modality
Panel / In Person Only: The session will be held fully in person at the hotel. No remote presentations will be included.
Submissions and Deadline
Philosophy and Literature: A Problematic Relationship
Global South is a phrase often heard in the academic parlance to categorise a group of nations which have been broadly classified in economic terms by the United Nations Trade and Development (UNCTAD) based on certain defining characteristics (socio-economic and political factors). The countries or continents which come under this category are Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia (excluding Australia and New Zealand). However, to classify economic grounds poses severe questions about factors contributing to the dissemination of this inequality. This unevenness as one suspects can be a major reason for armed conflicts often leading to tensions and permanent war zones.
Updating Ecocriticism: Perspectives from Gen Z
Eds. Başak Ağın, Z. Gizem Yılmaz, and Lenka Filipova
The 57th annual NeMLA Convention is taking place Thursday, March 5, through Sunday, March 8, 2026, at the Wyndham Grand Pittsburgh Downtown in Pittsburgh, PA. For more information, see https://www.nemla.org/.
CFP: Lexicon for Animacy
In Nick Bantock's Griffin and Sabine, Sabine Strohem and Griffin Moss have never met--not really. They have, though, shared an extraordinary epistolary correspondence. And through this correspondence, Griffin wonders how he can feel so close to someone through letters, only, "How can I miss you this badly when we've never met?" (39).
This session explores how postcolonial and diasporic literatures grapple with memory, trauma, and cultural haunting. Rather than thinking of identity as fixed or linear, selfhood is complex and palimpsestic due to colonial violence, migration, and historical erasure. This session invites papers that analyze how characters or narratives navigate misremembering, inherited trauma, or overwritten histories to reclaim belonging and agency. Topics may include narrative voice, transgenerational memory, silence, storytelling, and archival gaps in multiethnic and immigrant literatures. This session welcomes interdisciplinary approaches and encourages work on Asian American, Black, Indigenous, and other diasporic communities.
De Gruyter Publishers hereby invite scholars to submit manuscripts for the new series
TOWARDS A GLOBAL UNDERSTANDING OF CULTURAL WORK
Series Editors:
Carlos Garrido Castellano, University College Cork, Ireland/University of Johannesburg, South Africa
Minna Valjakka, University of Helsinki, Finland
Modality: in-person only
Across cultures and histories, women have journeyed through visible and invisible migrations: geographic, emotional, spiritual, intellectual. This panel invites explorations of how these journeys and thresholds: both outer and inner, shape the evolution of selfhood. From the classroom to the kitchen, from the mother’s memory to the daughter's voice, from exile to homemaking, we seek narratives that dwell in moments and spaces of unfolding and becoming. These are stories of transition and tension, of belonging and othering, of rupture and reconciliation.
This session explores the intersection between fascism and literature, particularly theatre, to ask how theatrical works, as well as other forms of poetry and art, can become a space for anti-authoritarian interruption.How do we break the cyclical myth with which fascism enchants the masses?
Conference Location: NeMLA 2026 March 5-8, Pittsburgh, PA (virtual option available)
The 2025 Northeast Popular Culture Association (NEPCA) will host its annual conference this fall as a virtual conference from Thursday, October 9th, to Saturday, October 11th, 2025.
This area probes North American and international intersections between sports, society, and culture. Among the topics welcomed are those probing:
In her essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Hortense Spillers articulates the enduring violence of racial enslavement through the concept of the “hieroglyphics of the flesh” (67). This term marks how the captive body, stripped of legal and social personhood, became inscribed with meaning through the violence of racial differentiation. This transformation rendered the Black body not only a surface upon which terror was written but also a metaphysical site from which alternative modes of being might be imagined. In attending to the duality of skin and flesh, Spillers distinguishes between Black skin as legible and social, and Black flesh as ungendered, unsovereign, and open—both wounded and full of radical potential.
Queer-Class Relations Conference
Call for Proposals
April 17-18, 2026
CUNY Graduate Center, New York City
CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center will host a Queer-Class Relations conference April 17-18, 2026. Proposals are due by September 1, 2025. Successful applicants will be required to register by November 15, 2025.
This NeMLA session critically discusses the novels of Sally Rooney. We will ask: is Rooney's oeuvre a critique, a snapshot, a suggestion, or a warning about a way forward for fiction, the novel form, feminism, and contemporary culture?
View full CFP here: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21883
Modality:
In Person Only: The session will be held fully in person at the hotel. No remote presentations will be included.
Questions/Comments:
Contact Kimberlyjcoates@gmail.com
What does it mean to experience national belonging through emotion? This session brings together papers that consider the layered connections among feeling, identity, and cultural memory as they unfold across literature and media. In periods marked by rupture or transformation, emotion often anchors or unsettles the stories through which nations come to know themselves. Heritage dramas steeped in nostalgia, literary depictions of estrangement, and audiovisual forms of cultural longing all point to this dynamic. National identity, in these works, emerges not as a fixed concept but as a lived and felt experience.
Call for Papers
REACT 2025: Research and Educational Advancements in Culture and Technology
Vienna, October 20–21, 2025
Venue: University of Applied Arts Vienna
More info & submissions: culttech.at/react
This year’s conference theme and location offer timely opportunities for creative engagement with the post-industrial city and (re)generations of the so-called “Rust Belt.” This session will enable participants to read/present and discuss original creative short-form work crafting and exploring narratives, concepts, identities, images, locations, perspectives, and/or experiences of the Rust Belt, a term coined in the 1980s to describe the decline of industries (particularly large-scale blue-collar production and manufacturing) and resultant economic decline and decay.
The Minotaur and the Labyrinth from multidisciplinary perspectives, specifically on how the symbol of the Minotaur and the Labyrinth has been used from antiquity to now. How has the Minotaur been used, or abused, throughout time? How has the mythology surrounding it been used to generate or regenerate cultural structures? Referencing Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s Monster Culture, what does the Minotaur reveal about the cultures he exists within?
Poetics of Embedded Narratives and Images in the Literature and Arts of the English-speaking World: Moving Borders
Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour (July 2-3, 2026)
Organisers: Françoise Buisson, Fabienne Gaspari and Arnaud Schmitt
(ALTER, UR 7504)
Since its tangential emergence in Said’s Orientalism in 1978, the term Occidentalism accrued multiple significations. Most notably, the term is argued to stage a counter- or reverse-discourse of Orientalism, operating on analogous dichotomic and oppositional paradigms. Most notable, in this context, is Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit’s Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies, which labels Occidentalism as “dehumanizing picture of the West painted by its enemies” (5). This panel queries if we can conceive East-West relations differently, apart from the Orientalist logic that inheres in studies of Occidentalism.
Link: https://heiup.uni-heidelberg.de/journals/apocalyptica/cfpsi
Apocalyptica is an international, interdisciplinary, open-access, double-blind peer-reviewed academic journal published by the Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies (CAPAS) at Heidelberg University.
Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) is already recasting numerous aspects of human life. By all accounts, AI has an intense and manifold impact on society, incorporating both positive and negative traits. This session aims to explore how the gendered lens of AI is creating disruptions both for the academic field and the society at large. This panel invites educators, scholars, and researchers to critically investigate the consequences of gendered biases projected through AI stratification. Papers which explore the conference theme (Knowledge) and connect to knowledge production through the gendered lens of AI are especially welcome.
Call for Papers: Short Fiction Theory and Practice
Special Issue: ‘Uniquely Canadian Cultural Narratives’
Guest edited by Zsuzsanna Lénárt-Muszka, University of Debrecen, Hungary
View the full call here>>
https://www.intellectbooks.com/short-fiction-in-theory-practice
Please submit a 300-word abstract for an edited collection, tentatively titled, Entanglements: Place-Based Literatures for Ecological Liberation.
Please read the CFP below for details about the collection. We are expanding our search to include diverse geographies including South America, African countries, the Caribbean, the Middle East, Pacific Islands, and South East Asian countries. In addition to a “place” framework, we welcome diverse theoretical approaches and lenses including ones that apply Marxism, feminism, postcolonialism, New Materialism, indigeneity, critical race, nonhumanism, among others.