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This sessions welcomes 300-word abstracts that actively engage the ways that Black-girl centered literature (novel, poetry, media, etc.) reimagines modes of resistance, resilience, and world-making through historical and modern definitions of freedom and emancipation.
On Sean Bonney: Poetic Radicalism at the Turn of the Third Millennium
A two-day international conference to take place at
Université Paris Cité
10th and 11th of December, 2026
Organising committee:
Bastien Goursaud (Université de Picardie – Jules Verne)
Andrew Hodgson (Université Paris Cité)
Abigail Lang (Université Paris Cité)
Elise Legal (Université Paris 8)
Sean Mark (Université Catholique de Lille)
Non-guaranteed panel at MLA 2027 co-sponsored by the Children’s Literature Association and the MLA forum on Science and Literature. This panel seeks papers on how children’s and young adult literature has engaged the natural sciences across historical and contemporary contexts, including plants, animals, evolution, and the scientific study of the natural world. We invite papers exploring the diverse ways literature for children and young adults mediates knowledge of the natural world, sometimes to instruct, sometimes to inspire wonder, sometimes to question the very authority of empirical observation. How does a text balance the excitement of botanical, zoological, or ecological discovery with the weight of explanation?
This panel explores the promises and provocations of monstrous and ghostly figures in feminist and queer speculative fiction, focusing on gendered human and nonhuman bodies. We are particularly interested in how monsters articulate socially ingrained fears and anxieties about women, queer communities, and the nonhuman world, as well as the desires and apprehensions they evoke toward the impossible, the fantastic, or the supernatural. Contributors might consider how these monstrous imaginings shape, challenge, or expand the category of “us,” offering critical insights into who is included, who is excluded, and on what grounds.
Critical essays are invited for an edited collection on the Historical Horror novel in the twenty-first century. This volume will focus on the intersection of women, history and the horror novel. It will explore representations of gender, sexuality and power in historical horror novels.
Horror and history have been intertwined since the publication of the first Gothic novel, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, in 1764. The past is a useful landscape for the horror novel, as it allows both a distancing—horror is imagined to happen on other shores or in other times—as well as a closer exploration of the horrors to be found at home.
This panel invites 250-word abstracts on creative and aesthetic expressions of emancipation emerging from refugee, diasporic, and forcibly dispossessed contexts across the Global South, examining resistance, agency, and world‑making within displacement and humanitarian regimes.
The emergence and growing predominance of artificial intelligence have fundamentally reshaped how we understand knowledge, creativity, labour, and subjectivity. As AI models increasingly participate in writing, visual creation, research, and cultural production, long-standing assumptions within the Arts & Humanities (such as authorship, interpretation, agency, and even human experience) are being unsettled. Yet this disruption, rather than signaling the eclipse of the Humanities, intensifies their relevance. As algorithmic systems appropriate tasks once considered uniquely human, they reinvite considering some of the foundational questions of the Humanities: What constitutes a human? Where does meaning reside?
The Editorial Team of The Scattered Pelican, the graduate journal of the Comparative Literature program at Western University, is currently seeking peer reviewers for the upcoming issue of the journal.
About the Journal
Why is close reading a particularly valuable learning strategy/professional practice at the current moment? This MLA seminar (a guaranteed session) seeks participants interested in thinking and talking through aspects of close reading with an eye towards producing pieces of public writing (e.g. an OpEd, think piece, lyric essay, call to action, etc. published in a newspaper, magazine, or periodical, in print or online). Topics for exploration may include, but are not limited to:
The Journal of the Wooden O (JWO) is a peer-reviewed academic publication focusing on Shakespeare studies. The editors invite papers on topics related to Shakespeare, including Shakespearean texts, Shakespeare in performance, the adaptation of Shakespeare works (film, fiction, and visual and performing arts), Elizabethan and Jacobean culture and history, and Shakespeare’s contemporaries.
University of Toronto Quarterly (UTQ) is currently seeking submissions. Established in 1931, UTQ publishes innovative and exemplary scholarship from all areas in the humanities. As an interdisciplinary journal, UTQ favours articles that appeal to a scholarly readership beyond the specialists of a given discipline or field.
CFP: Chinese Poetry: Institution and Life
Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association (RMMLA) Annual Convention
Conference Dates: October 8-10, 2026
Location: Marriott Courtyard in Ogden, Utah
Session 1 The Institutions of Chinese Poetry
This in-person panel invites 250-word abstracts that examine women’s narratives, (self)representations, and forms of agency within resistance movements across film and digital platforms.
Related topics are welcome to be discussed.
Call for papers for a Special Issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities
Khôra
(preliminary title)
Editors: Nicholas Birns and Marina Christodoulou
For a pdf of the full Call see: https://www.academia.edu/164922361/CFP_for_a_Special_Issue_of_Angelaki_Khôra
Call for Papers: International Journal of Education Through Art
Special Issue: ‘Reimagining Place and Place-Based Art Education’
View the full call here>>
https://www.intellectbooks.com/international-journal-of-education-through-art#call-for-papers
Guest Editors:
Seminar for Modernist Studies Association Conference
How text appears on the page has been of periodic interest to poets for centuries. This interest grew in late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century poets as shown by the work of Stephane Mallarmé and by artistic movements such as Dada. Concrete poetry, a style of poetry mostly from Germany and Brazil in the 1950’s (Thomas) adhered to this interest. Other types of experimental poetry have worked on the liminal edges between text and image, where the appearance of the text supersedes its content, as in more recent work by Susan Howe. Generally speaking, as Greg Thomas argues, this poetry is “concerned with complicating or undermining linguistic sense” (Thomas 4) in its turn to the visual.
Rabindranath Tagore and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, two of the greatest thinkers of the world had, between them, a kinship and appreciation of profound depth and mutuality. Both stood for universal humanism and emancipation of the dispossessed though their paths were seminally divergent.
Multilingualism, Cultural Diversity, and Intercultural Communication for Sustainable Development
Scope of the Book
Call for Proposals
Fan Studies Network North America Conference 2026 (virtual)
October 22-25, 2026
THE BOUNDARIES OF FAN STUDIES AND FANDOM
Call for Papers:
Panel Title: Composition beyond Walls: Writing and Arguing for/in Spaces beyond the Classroom
Location: MLA National Conference, Los Angeles, California
Date: January 7-10, 2027
Panel Hosts: Dr. Jeff Birkenstein and Dr. Sharon Mitchler, Centralia College (Centralia, Washington)
Proposal Deadline: March 22, 2026
The Challenge
Hi all,
See the below CFP for a panel on Pacific early American literature for next year’s MLA. Please circulate to anyone you think might be interested!
CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS
35th International Conference Virginia Woolf
Open Forum “Virginia Woolf: Sound and Rhythm in Translation”
Conspiracy Theories in the Wake of Disaster
Matthew N. Hannah
Associate Professor
Department of Communication Arts
University of Wisconsin—Madison
Zachary Loeb
Assistant Professor
Department of History
Purdue University
This cfp is for a proposed seminar at MLA 2027, to be held in Los Angeles from 7 to 10 January 2027. This seminar explores classrooms as sites of care and repair through trauma-informed and inclusive pedagogies and institutional courage, engaging embodiment, memory, and affect as approaches to trauma and learning. Submit a 200-word abstract and bio.
Deadline for submissions: Friday, March 20, 2026
Submit your abstract via email to:
Aimee Pozorski, Central Connecticut State University (pozorskia@ccsu.edu ) Aili Pettersson Peeker, University of California, Santa Barbara (aili@writing.ucsb.edu )
Vulnerability has become a key term in contemporary critical theory, ethics, trauma studies, gender studies, disability studies, postcolonial studies, and affect theory. But fiction has long engaged with vulnerability – not necessarily as weakness or exposure, but as a condition of relationality, openness, resistance, and change. From tragic protagonists to marginalized bodies and precarious subjectivities, literary texts have repeatedly returned to fragility, dependency, and risk.
Paraphrasing Linda Hutcheon, the neo-Victorians have a habit of adapting just about everything – and in just about every possible direction. The stories of Victorian poems, novels, plays, operas, paintings, songs, dances, and tableaux vivants are constantly being adapted from one medium to another and then back again not only on film, television, radio, and digital or social media, but also theme parks, historical enactments, and virtual reality experiments. In this meeting, we would like to explore the interactions and connections between the different ways contemporary culture engages with the traces of the Victorian past as well as how these different genres or expressions interact.
AICED-27
THE 27th ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OF THE ENGLISH DEPARTMENT,
UNIVERSITY OF BUCHAREST
5-6 June 2026
CALL FOR PAPERS
Representations of
Crime in Literature and the Arts
University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures
7-13 Pitar Moș Street, Bucharest, Romania
Beyond Human: Unruly Senses of Being, Knowing, and Feeling Existence
UCSD Literature Department Graduate Student Conference
University of California, San Diego
In-Person, May 15-16, 2026
National Video Games: Cultures, Industries, Communities
international conference
10–12 September 2026
University of Warsaw, Poland
The end of history was cancelled years ago, and national ideas have been on the rise ever since. Game scholars, too, have been studying the relationships between national cultures, video games and game industries for about a decade. We now have a wealth of material about the game cultures of numerous different countries across the world; there are also publications that examine the national categorization of games itself.
Beyond Conventional Screens: New Approaches to Audiovisual Storytelling - Call for Chapter Proposals
Edited by Sotiris Petridis
The Function of Beauty: A Transdisciplinary Conferenc
“Beauty is not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart.”
— Khalil Gibran
Conference Dates: Thursday April 22-23, 2026
Location: Online
Abstract Submission Deadline: March 22, 2026
Fee: £100
Conference Webpage: https://labrc.co.uk/2026/01/26/function-of-beauty/
PAMLA 2026 Seattle: “Our Ruling Classes: Class, Power, Conflict” - https://www.pamla.org/pamla2026/
The 123rd Annual PAMLA Conference will be held November 12–15, 2026, at the Hyatt Regency Seattle,
808 Howell St., Seattle, Washington 98101.
Call for papers: Mythical Archipelagos: Islands, Narratives, and Imaginaries Across Cultures and Media
International Interdisciplinary Seminar
University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (Spain)
14–15 May 2026 | Hybrid format
The seminar explores islands as mythical, symbolic, and narrative spaces across cultures and media. We welcome interdisciplinary contributions from island studies, environmental humanities, anthropology, cultural studies, linguistics, media studies, and related fields.
Abstract deadline: 30 March 2026
Full CFP and details:
Guest Editors:
Prof. Om Prakash Dwivedi, Director, Faculty of Humanities and Liberal Arts, Chandigarh University Uttar Pradesh, India
Dr. Aditya Anshu, Chair, Department of Social Science, Faculty of International Relations, Abu Dhabi University, U.A.E.
Dr. Madhurima Nayak, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Humanities and Liberal Arts, Chandigarh University Uttar Pradesh, India
National Identities (Taylor and Francis), Scopus Q1
Concept Note
FEMSPEC, an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal dedicated to challenging gender through speculative means in any genre, seeks volunteers to fill the following roles:
PRODUCTION EDITOR
Duties include:
Collating and formatting content for each new issue of the journal. Liaising with the journal's editor and other volunteer collective members to make changes to the issue's content and layout until the end of each issue's production period.
FEMSPEC, an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal dedicated to challenging gender through speculative means in any genre, seeks volunteers to fill the following roles:
Website Editor
Duties include:
Updating FEMSPEC's website at the collective's request - this could include updating biographies of collective members, altering the website's layout, adding or removing content from various pages in the website, and updating the website with information about the current issue of the journal
This online panel seeks proposals that examine how humor, irony, and formal games use linguistic misbehavior to create new emotional landscapes, construct gendered subjectivities, and challenge traditional hierarchies across global literatures.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
Please send a 250-word abstract and a brief bio to Dr. Haihong Yang (hyang@udel.edu) by March 15th.
Chapters for The Handbook of Ecofeminism
deadline for submissions: March 7, 2026
full name / name of organization: Nicole C. Dittmer, PhD
contact email: ncdittmer@gmail.com
In 1974, Françoise d’Eaubonne coined the term ecofeminism in Le féminisme ou la mort, foregrounding the intertwined domination of women and nature and calling for the liberation of both from systems of exploitation. Since its emergence, ecofeminism has inspired scholars and activists across disciplines and global contexts.
The 2026 International Postgraduate Comparative Literature Conference (IPCLC 2026), hosted by the Master of Arts in Literary and Cultural Studies (MALCS) at The University of Hong Kong (HKU), brings together postgraduate students and emerging scholars from Hong Kong and beyond for a day of cross-cultural conversation. Taking place in person at HKU on May 26, 2026, the conference offers a supportive forum for sharing work in progress, building scholarly networks, and testing new comparative methods across literary, cultural, and media studies. Featuring themed panels, a keynote lecture, and Best Paper Award(s), IPCLC 2026 invites participants to consider how comparison can sharpen our understanding of urgent questions in the humanities.
The Journal of Popular Romance Studies is calling for papers for its special issue on Sport Romance.
Call for Papers
Philip K. Dick at 100: Fiction, Philosophy, and Cultural Afterlives
Edited Volume (Centenary Collection)
Editors:
Assoc.Prof.Dr. Ercan Gürova
Ankara University, Turkey
Prof. dr Mladen Jakovljević
University of Priština in Kosovska Mitrovica, Serbia
“Under consideration for publication by a reputable international academic publisher.”
If literature has long played a central role in defining what it means to be human, posthumanist thought urges us to reconsider that definition in the face of unprecedented technological, ecological, and cultural transformations. Rather than announcing the ‘end’ of the human, posthumanism interrogates the category itself, foregrounding humanity’s entanglements with other species, material environments, and technological systems. In doing so, it challenges human exceptionalism and exposes the historical contingency and political implications of the ‘human’ as a normative construct.
CALL FOR PAPERS
Edited Volume
Island Studies in South Asia: Gender, Culture and Islandness
At its third edition, in 2026 the Entanglements summer school is centered on Postcolonial Horrors and aims to explore horror as an aesthetic, political, and epistemological symbol through which postcolonial literatures stage the traumatic memories of colonization, identity tensions, diasporic movements, and the re-emergence of the spectral within global modernities. The goal is to interpret horror not only as a genre, but as a critical and deconstructive tool capable of destabilizing ethnocentric categories of subjectivity, body, sovereignty, and knowledge.
We're excited to announce that the DIY Methods Conference is back for another year! Pitches are due by April 20th, 2026. Please don't hesitate to email us (annepasek@trentu.ca and trentwintermeier@utexas.edu) if you have any questions.
Translating Resistance:
Literary Activism in Conflict and Solidarity
Funded in part by The International Association for Translation and Intercultural Studies (IATIS) Regional Workshop Fund
Scholars, researchers, and practitioners are invited to submit papers for this two-day workshop, hosted by Binghamton University (SUNY), to be held in New York on October 3–4, 2026.
Call for Paper
The Politics of Ableism: Gender, Sexuality, and Disability in Literature and Media
Edited by Habib Tekin & Nizara Hazarika
Call for book chapters
Call for Papers
In the Introduction to In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination, Margaret Atwood makes a clear distinction between science fiction and speculative fiction: the former concerns events that could not happen; the latter draws on developments that could happen or that have already occurred in some historical form. The distinction was publicly contested, including in an exchange with Ursula K. Le Guin, and Atwood insists her terminology was descriptive rather than hierarchical. She places The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) within the speculative category on the grounds that nothing in the novel exceeds documented historical precedent (Atwood 5–6). This conference takes Atwood at her word.
Theme: Intimate Empires
Call for Contributions - New Voices in Postcolonial Studies Magazine