By the time he passed away at the age of 90, British filmmaker Peter Watkins had cemented his legacy as one of the preeminent media scholars of the late-20th and early 21st centuries. Over the course of eight decades, Watkins’ oeuvre represented unrelenting interventions in an industry that was repeatedly acquiescing to the profit motive. Among the themes explored in the director’s work are war (The War Game) and revolution (La Commune). Within these films, his most common approach was the pseudo-documentary. This format helped Watkins combat what he viewed as the passivity that was the dominant mode of discourse in media.

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

THE W. FRANKLIN EVANS REVIEW
Inaugural Fall 2026 Issue

Theme: Leadership, Legacy, and Transformation

The W. Franklin Evans Honors College at Voorhees University invites undergraduate and graduate students from colleges and universities worldwide to submit original work for the inaugural Fall 2026 issue of The W. Franklin Evans Review: A Peer-Reviewed, Refereed Journal of Student Leadership, Scholarship, and Creative Expression.

The journal provides an international platform for emerging scholars, leaders, writers, artists, and creators whose work examines leadership, service, innovation, identity, resilience, ethical decision-making, legacy, and positive social transformation.

The 12th International Conference on Languages, Linguistics, Translation and Literature is organized by different universities and research centers.

The conference will be dedicated to current issues of linguistics, languages, dialects, literature and translation.

All are cordially invited to present their research regarding current issues of linguistics, languages, dialects, literature and translation in English, Arabic or Persian.

Call for Papers

ALFRED HITCHCOCK

Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)

48th Annual Conference, February 17-20, 2027

Marriott Albuquerque

Albuquerque, New Mexico

https://swpaca.org

Submissions open: September 1, 2026

Proposal submission deadline: October 31, 2026

Overview

MVSA 2027 

Detection: Exploring, Innovating Locating, Uncovering

(April 1-3, 2027, Minneapolis, MN)

Dystopian literature is replete with examples of both individuals who resist and communities of resilience and resistance which model values and activities that stand in contrast to and in spite of the dystopian settings of the story. This panel seeks to bring together critical investigations of dystopian literature which attempt to bring to the fore lessons that can be learned to help us (re)imagine just communities amidst a world of political, economic and ecological decline and regression.

Mode of Presentation: Hybrid: The session will be held in-person but a few remote presentations may be included.

Medieval and Early Modern People and their Things

People perceive the world and their place in it through interacting with objects. Through these subject-object relationships, people experience the potential of materials, both naturally sourced and manmade, as physical resources that can be perceived. A number of concerns arise with the use of these materials amidst acts of meaning-making. How do people use subject-object relationships in negotiating their treatment of objects to define their world views? To innovate new ways of engaging with and replicating the world around them? And how does that process continue to influence how we create future realities for ourselves and others?

While Indigenous literary studies has grown substantially over the past several decades, comparative approaches that place Indigenous texts, traditions, and intellectual frameworks in conversation with one another remain relatively rare. Too often, Indigenous texts are incorporated into comparative, world, or global literary frameworks without meaningful engagement with Indigenous studies scholarship, or are read primarily through the organizing categories of nation, region, empire, or postcoloniality. This seminar seeks to create a space for comparative Indigenous literary inquiry that centers Indigenous texts, epistemologies, and methods on their own terms.

How do we study reading practices of the modernist era? After the development of what Richard Altick (1957) famously called the “democracy of print” in the nineteenth century, and the move toward mass literacy in the Anglophone world, how did  the act of reading and readership get transformed? Virginia Woolf’s 1926 essay, “How Should One Read a Book?” called reading the “most arduous and exhausting of occupations” and made the case for a discerning reader who would give the writer the “benefit of every doubt.” While the modernist era championed close reading with the evolution of New Criticism and I.A.

Sensory Aesthetics Beyond the Five Senses Paradigm

Call for Submissions for 15-20 minute presentations--virtual conference session at the American Comparative Literature Association, May 15-16, 2027

Movie Monstrosities: Framing Interracial Desire and Difference Across the Global Contexts is under contract with an established and reputable academic publisher.  We are seeking 2 additional chapters by 11/1/26.  Contributors are encouraged to send an email proposal asap to monstrositystudies@gmail.com

Below is a full description of the book:

This panel, Sounding Resistance: African American Voices and Affective Communities, examines how African American cultural production constructs forms of resistance through voice, affect, and relationality. Bringing together approaches from Black studies, feminist theory, and affect theory, the session investigates how literature and contemporary narrative media articulate alternative modes of community formation under conditions of racialized power structures. Rather than treating representation as a static reflection of social realities, the panel foregrounds the dynamic and embodied dimensions of Black expressive culture.

This seminar is interested in non-anthropocentric or even anti-anthropocentric understandings of gender-sexuality arrived at through transdisciplinary conversations between feminist theory, queer studies, the philosophy of biology, multispecies ethnography and environmental humanities. It posits that such understandings can emerge as accurate and effective translation practices across the material-semiotic continuum of multispecies worldmaking. In addition, it argues for aesthetic and affective valuations of multispecies desires, intimacies and sociosexual infrastructures.

La Roche University in Pittsburgh, PA, is pleased to announce its conference on Artificial Intelligence and Faith, to be held on campus November 6, 2026. The conference will feature keynote speaker Dr. Noreen Herzfeld, Professor Emerita and Director of the Program in Benedictine Spirituality and the Environment at Saint John's School of Theology and Seminary, and Senior Research Associate at the Institute for Philosophical and Religious Studies (ZRS) in Koper, Slovenia. Dr.

Buddhadev Bose, the Bengali poet, critic, and academic, set out to write his ideas behind introducing comparative literature in India. He posits comparative literature as a discipline of non-specialization, “an eclectic study.” It is a “corrective to the excess of esoterism which now prevails in academic circles.” Although Comparative Literature “needs the knowledge of languages,” it is “not a language school.” Bose’s idea of comparatism as a method was centred on translation. Although the initial impulse was to study Indian classical and native languages alongside other literatures, one of the most important outcomes of the comparative method was the conceptualization of the idea of Indian literature.

April 2-3, 2027
University of North Carolina at Greensboro

The UNCG Videogaming and Esports Studies (VES) program, with support from UNCG’s 
ARCADE (Applied Research in Computer Arts, Digitization, and Esports), invites proposals for
our third annual game studies conference!

This year’s theme explores navigation as a capacious term — how do we navigate or not 
navigate in a game (walking, running, jumping, climbing, warping, fast traveling, etc.), what 
choices do we have regarding navigation, and what affordances do games offer for navigation?

Comparative Legal Imaginaries

The Victorians Institute Journal (VIJ) is now accepting submissions for Volume 54. The VIJ is an award-winning scholarly journal of Victorian and Edwardian literary and cultural studies. We publish a variety of pieces, including articles, reviews, and rare texts. For further details, visit https://vijournal.org/.

Article submissions should be between 7K-9K words, and are welcome to address any aspect of Victorian and Edwardian literature, art, and culture. If you would like to submit a review for consideration, contact us directly through our email: victoriansinstitutejournal@gmail.com.

This seminar examines performance as a multilayered concept that is continually reshaped through travel and other mobilities. Performance, in this context, can be understood in its broadest sense as a dynamic practice through which identities, relationships, meanings, and experiences are negotiated and transformed. By bringing performance and mobilities into conversation as mutually illuminating frameworks, the seminar seeks to explore how their intersection creates new critical possibilities. 

CFP: IRCL Special Issue on Energy Perspectives on Children’s and YA Literature  

Have you ever paused to consider the energy infrastructure supporting the adventures of Anne in Lucy Mongomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908)? As an avid walker, Anne probably has a relatively low carbon footprint. Over a century later, in Maja Lunde’s The End of the Ocean (2017), struggles over energy development has become a central literary topic, underscoring the message of the UN Secretary General António Guterres, who at COP 30 urged that “The fossil fuel age is ending. Clean energy is rising. Let us make the transition fair, fast, and final" (United Nations, 2025).   

***Please use this link to submit your proposal: https://www.acla.org/seminar/e8248863-9bba-4144-b079-9c355f34a4f7***

American Literature Association

May 26-29, 2027

Boston, MA

Oceanic Thoreau

CALL FOR PAPERS

Disposable Bodies and the Aesthetics of War: Representations of Vulnerability, Violence, and Resistance in Literature and Culture

Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai. Philologia

3/2027

Guest Editors:

Dr. Andrea Roxana Bellot

Associate Professor, Department of English and German Studies

Rovira i Virgili University (URV), Tarragona, Spain

andrearoxana.bellot@urv.cat