Across the African continent and its global diasporas, trauma reverberates through histories of slavery, colonialism, racial capitalism, gendered violence, war, migration, and displacement. However, African and Afrodiasporic writers and artists have not only transformed experiences of pain into sites of creativity, survival, and healing but also reflected in their works the use of African approaches to restoration. This edited volume seeks to explore the ways in which trauma is reconstituted, managed, borne, and cured in African and Afrodiasporic literature and cultural expressions.

Designed by Jean-François Vernay, the Routledge Literary BRAIN (Brain-Related Academic Investigations of Narratives) Focus Series combines the language of literary criticism with neurocognitive and health humanities methodologies or explanatory frameworks, providing an innovative way of blending literary analysis with health humanities and neurocognitive approaches.
This exciting BRAIN series is designed to convene conversations across interdisciplinary knowledges, covering all fiction and nonfiction sub-genres such as poetry, drama, novels, short-stories, memoirs, (auto)biographies, essays, etc.

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?

Walls, barriers, barricades, borders are lines (real and imaginary) reified to divide, define, and contain, but there are also borderlands and border crossings which necessarily blur and defy arbitrary lines and lead to rethinking notions of belonging and belongings.

We are excited to share with you all on behalf of the Conference Planning Committee for the University of Connecticut First-Year Writing Program that we are holding our 21st Annual Conference on the Teaching of Writing on Thursday, April 23, and Friday, April 24, 2026, on our campus in Storrs, CT. Our theme for the upcoming conference is: “Wicked Reading for Wicked Problems." As those who have collaborated with us in the past, we are once again inviting you to help us explore ways of approaching these 'wicked problems', such as those that evade consensus, offer multiple solutions, or may even resist resolution at all.

ACCSFF ‘26

                                                                                         Call for Papers

The 2026 Academic Conference on Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy will be held Saturday and Sunday, May 30-31, 2026, in Toronto, Ontario, at York University, Canada.

This year's author GoH keynote speaker is the Nebula Award winning Premee Mohamed.

We invite proposals for papers in any area of Canadian science fiction and fantasy, including:

    -studies of individual works and authors;
    -comparative studies;
    -studies that place works in their literary and/or
     cultural contexts.

JAMS@AX26

Want to present your work at the one-and-only Anime Expo? The Journal of Anime and Manga Studies(JAMS) and Anime Expo have once-again teamed up to give you the JAMS@AX26 academic symposium, July 2-5, 2026 at the Los Angeles Convention Center. This symposium presents an incredible opportunity to connect fans of all ages directly to scholars researching and writing about the medium we all love. 

The JAMS@AX26 welcomes all papers taking a scholarly perspective on anime, manga, cosplay, and their fandoms.

Concept Note

The Faerie Queene confronts its characters and readers alike with perceptual, cognitive, and physical struggles, and the reader’s passage through Spenser’s monumental work is as arduous and seemingly unending as the journeys and quests of its knights. The parallels between the characters’ trials and the readers’ embodied experience of the poem become more pronounced when The Faerie Queene is read out loud in its entirety. In 2019, the English department at Tampere University organised its first marathon reading of Spenser’s epic romance. The 2026 iteration will be the sixth marathon reading overall, and the second to be attached to an international symposium.

One response to the official archives’ violent erasure(s) of multiethnic subjects (and the associated literatures) in the US has been scholarly investment in digital archiving. Still, the digital archives (and/or the metadata culled from them) can–and often do–reify whiteness as normative and the marginalization of other Americans. MELUS invites papers that consider how digital archiving (re)shapes and/or supports lay communities that inform the literature of the marginalized. We are particularly interested in papers that address how practices of liberatory archiving resist objectification of multiethnic subjects and/or authors. Submit titled proposals (250 words), a brief CV, and AV needs.

Seeking folks for our CFP below. Please email Dana Ahern (dtahern@usf.edu) and SJ Dillon (sjdillo@emory.edu).

Shakespeare’s works continue to inhabit what Stephen Greenblatt calls a “circulating energy system,” an ever-renewing sphere in which texts, performances, and interpretations travel across borders and epochs, sustaining the playwright’s presence in world culture. Tiffany Stern’s seminal research further reminds us that Shakespeare should be understood not as a fixed authorial entity but as an ongoing “process”—a dynamic constellation of scripts, fragmentary documents, performance traces, and editorial interventions that resist the notion of a stable text.

Memory, Myth, and Meaning: Cather in Dialogue with America 250

Willa Cather Spring Conference | Thursday, June 4 - Saturday, June 6, 2026 

This year marks the centennial of My Mortal Enemy, one of Cather’s least affirmative works and one not produced in the Cather Scholarly Edition (translation: much important work remains to be done!)  We invite papers on new approaches to My Mortal Enemy, including but not limited to the following considerations of style, form, provenance, and themes:

The Incredible Nineteenth Century: Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Fairy Tale will host its fourth annual conference via Zoom  May 1-2. This conference is completely free. We will be accepting proposals for presentations through April 4th.

CALL FOR PAPERS
Papers are invited for the 18th and 19th issues of the peer-reviewed journal of bi-annual frequency: TRIVIUM A Multi disciplinary Journal of Humanities of Chandernagore College. The scope of the journal includes humanities and social sciences, commerce and management without mathematical application.
Guidelines for Submission

Global Music History and Northern Europe in the 18th and 19th Centuries

University of Copenhagen, 15–16 May 2026

Deadline for proposals: 15 Feb. 2026

We invite proposals for papers exploring global music histories connected to Northern Europe in the long 18th and 19thcenturies.

Stories and histories of power, 24-25 Septembre 2026.

 Confirmed Keynote speaker : Peter Boxall

Based on the premise that any account is the result of a re-ordered selection in facts which is the mark of the power of the author and/or the institution or cultural group they stand for., this conference will examine factual and fictional narratives of power in the English-speaking world.

While Los Angeles has regularly been called the “City of Angels,” historian Kelly Lytle Hernández has argued that a more appropriate epithet would be the “City of Inmates,” as Los Angeles has historically been a site for innovations in imprisonment, surveilling, policing, and oppressing various communities for their race, ethnicity, class status, sexuality, and other out-group identifications. Literature and cinema have long been fertile sites for examining the ramifications of police- and prison-centric ideologies within American society and culture, particularly for a city that defined itself by cinema.

The International Vladimir Nabokov Society seeks paper proposals for presentations on the following themes for the Modern Language Association’s Annual Convention (January 7-10, 2027, Los Angeles):  

Nabokov, Freedom, and Anti-Authoritarianism

Call for ChaptersInvoking History: Power, Bodies, BDSM

Edited Volume (proposed for Routledge)

About the Volume