Please Join Salem State University and Bridgewater State University for the 6th annual Master's in English Regional Conference: New England (MERC)

The conference will take place on February 28th, 2026 in person at Salem State University. Directions will be uploaded on our website in the coming weeks. Accepting works in literary studies, critical theory, English education & teaching, creative writing, professional writing, communication, TESOL & Linguistics, as well as rhetoric & composition

Since the 1990s, comics and graphic narratives have emerged as an emphatic media form for exploring the embodied experiences of disability and identity (e.g., Alaniz, Chute, Czerwiec, Dolmage, and Refaie). To date, much scholarship has focused on Anglophone or Euro-American paradigms, leaving significant gaps in our understanding of how disability intersects with race, gender, class, and colonial histories in graphic narratives from diverse contexts. To bridge the gap, this seminar brings together international scholars from multiple disciplines (e.g., comics narratology and 4EA cognition, graphic medicine, posthumanist studies, history, and visual studies) to discuss both established and emerging works, especially those from the Global South.

We invite short abstracts (100-200 words) in response to our call for contributions for an edited volume, ‘The Medieval in Museums’. Please send abstracts by 5pm GMT on Monday 3 November to Fran Allfrey (University of York) and Maia Blumberg (QMUL) fran.allfrey@york.ac.uk ; m.blumberg@qmul.ac.uk. Please be in touch with us to discuss your idea more informally should you wish.

[AAAS 2026] Asian American Literature and the Law

Asian American literature has emerged as a critical site of representation and resistance within the context of over 150 years of exclusionary legal policies targeting Asian communities in the United States. Beginning with the Page Act of 1875 and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, federal legislation systematically constructed Asians as perpetual foreigners, legally ineligible for citizenship and fundamentally “unassimilable.” These exclusionary frameworks extended beyond immigration to encompass alien land laws, antimiscegenation statutes, and labor restrictions that relegated Asian Americans to legal and social marginality.

“When seeking knowledge of a work of art or an art form, it never proves useful to take the receiver into account”: thus begins Walter Benjamin’s foundational essay on the study of translation. This seminar proceeds against Benjamin’s injunction, paring translation studies with recent inquiries into reading practice and readerly attention to ask how modernist writers use translation to modulate readerly difficulty. How do modernist translators adjust difficulty both to safeguard and to enhance the reader’s imagination of an original text from which they are withheld? Do moments of difficulty in translated modernist texts – whether Victorian archaisms in C.K.

In a recent article (2021), Sue-Im Lee observes a rising phenomenon in Asian American formal criticism: the proliferation of aesthetic concepts such as “opaque, transparent, fragmented, linear, nonlinear, discordant, or lyrical” (690).

Call for Papers for the 15th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Music, Sound, Art and Design (EvoMUSART) · Please distribute · Apologies for cross-posting
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The 15th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Music, Sound, Art and Design (EvoMUSART) will take place on 8–10 April 2026, in Toulouse, France, as part of the evo* event.

South Atlantic Review Special Issue

In The Time of Man and Beyond:

Rethinking Elizabeth Madox Roberts for the 21st Century

Proposals due November 21, 2025

Guest Editors:

James Stamant, Agnes Scott College

Amanda M. Capelli, New York University

Goretti Benca, Marist College

CFP: Naming and Classifying

in the Long Eighteenth Century

Call for Abstracts for Edited Volume

Urban Waters in South Asian Literary Cultures

The 2026 CLA Online Research Conference, co-sponsored by the Children's Literature Assembly of NCTE and the Mary Frances Early College of Education at the University of Georgia, will be held on Friday, February 20th, 2026. The theme of the conference is Care, Advocacy, and Children's Literature Research in Theory and Praxis.

The conference will feature research presentations, a journal editor session, and a keynote talk from Dr. Jonda McNair, Charlotte S. Huck Endowed Professor of Children’s Literature, The Ohio State University.

Editors of this issue:
Salomé Honório (University of Lisbon, Portugal)
Lamiae Bouqentar (University of Toronto, Canada)

Representation matters – but to whom? And how?

This iteration of the Critical Approaches to Black Media Culture conference considers the ongoing significance of representational analysis as well as the critical possibilities enabled by the turn to resonance in Black media and cultural studies. Our theme, Representation and Resonance, invites original research into images and storytelling, circulation and flows, and reception practices.

While we especially invite papers on this topic, we are open to any and all critical inquiry into Black media culture, broadly defined. Our hope is to bring together any and all scholars interested and invested in Black media culture, regardless of discipline or method.

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: SPECIAL ANTHOLOGY OF ONE-MINUTE PLAYS / MONOLOGUES ‘REWRITING SHAKESPEARE’ (Volume 2) 

Website: Fresh Words: An International Literary Magazine - Announcements

Deadline: October 28, 2025

FRESH WORDS – An International Literary Magazine is thrilled to announce the call for submissions for Volume 2 of its acclaimed special anthology: ‘Rewriting Shakespeare’—a curated collection of bold, inventive, and contemporary one-minute plays and monologues that reimagine the timeless works of William Shakespeare.  

Through their intricately textured scenes and characters, the ten plays of August Wilson’s American Century Cycle chart the epic historical contours and idiomatic genius of Black American life across the entire twentieth century. Despite his plans for continued literary production after the Cycle’s completion, Wilson died shortly after the final play (Radio Golf)’s world premiere in 2005. 

Two decades hence, and now in the second quarter of the twenty-first century, Wilson’s presence and prescience in American culture are not only enduring but expanding:

As environmental crises intensify, ecocriticism has emerged as a vital interdisciplinary lens for examining how literature and media represent, challenge, and reimagine human relationships with the natural world. Invested in the idea that, in such times, the center cannot [and should not] hold, this seminar explores how queer ecocritical approaches reveal the de-centering cultural, ethical, and political possibilities embedded in apocalyptic environmental narratives in both literary texts and visual media.

Seminar title: Transgender Storytelling: Accounts of Oppositional Being and Becoming

Seminar link: https://www.acla.org/seminar/c997c5c5-09fd-4307-ba24-29af11d554d6 

Organizers: Clarke Crockett and Ezekiel Greenwood, Florida State University, USA

American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), Annual Convention 2026, Montreal, Canada

Abstract Submission Deadline: October 2, 2025. Must be submitted through the ACLA portal. 

For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me.   

-Vladimir Nabokov, The Eye 

The Cornell Medieval Studies Program is pleased to announce the 36th annual Medieval Studies Student Colloquium (MSSC) in person at Cornell University’s A.D. White House on Saturday February 21, 2026. This year’s theme is “Mirror Worlds.”  

 This VIRTUAL panel invites papers on “Dismantling the Neocolonial Maritime Archive:  Indigenous Oceanic Epistemologies” for NeMLA 57th Annual Convention to be held on March 5-8, 2026.

The panel addresses how West Asian, South Asian, and Gulf literatures regenerate the power of oceanic precarity that propels newer modes of decolonial resistance and resilience to interrogate and distrust the rigid structures that propagate epistemic violence and archival control. 

NeMLA’s 57th Annual Convention (Virtual Session)

Conference Date: March 5-8, 2026

Abstract Submission Deadline: September 30, 2025

All presentations will be delivered via Zoom.

Session Title: Touching the World at the Speed of Light: Community and Conflict in the Global Village

Howells Society CFPs for ALA 2026 (Chicago)

The W.D. Howells Society will host two panels at the American Literature Association’s 37th annual conference, which will meet at the Palmer House in Chicago, May 20-23, 2026 (Wednesday through Saturday of Memorial Day weekend). 

PANEL 1: HOWELLS & MEDIA

PCA True Crime CFP 2026 

Abstract Submission Deadline: November 30th, 2025 

PCA/ACA will be held from April 8-11th, 2026 in Atlanta, GA 

True Crime typically focuses on investigative journalism used to present a mystery or attempt to understand the psychology of a crime/perpetrator. It may include narratives of a case, victimology, forensics, or analysis of evidence, although each case is different. Much of True Crime focuses on serial killers/killings, although subsets of the genre may delve into topics such as kidnappings, cults, wrongful convictions, advocacy, white-collar crimes, trial proceedings, prevention of crime, survivor stories, or sensationalism/entertainment. 

Call for Book Chapters

Proposed for Routledge/ Asian Studies Association of Australia (ASAA) South Asian Series

Seeking submissions for a co-edited collection entitled:

Matrifocal Narratives in Indian Fiction

Co-Editors: Sushree Routray, Rashmi Gaur, and Rahul K. Gairola

Jürgen Habermas suggested that it is through communicative action, that is reasoned and open discourse, that we transmit, change, and recreate cultural knowledge, and that in so-doing we can achieve mutual understanding. 

Communicative action and communicative rationality are self-reflexive dialogues through which we can learn from others, question dominant paradigms, and advocate for cultural change.