Richard Linklater’s Slacker (1991) is a cult classic with a crucial role in the history of American cinema. The movie is unusual in many ways. It does not have a traditional narrative; it follows 100 characters around the UT Austin area in a way that seems completely random. There is no protagonist, no story, no thread to the individual events, yet somehow it is a completely coherent and engaging movie that sparks as many reflections as the number of scenes it has.

We are looking for chapter proposals in the form of abstracts. Topics already included are work, capitalism, Buddhism, film as a dream, narrative, episodic views of life, and absurdity. Possible topics for new chapters include:

New Literaria: An International Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Humanities

CALL FOR PAPERS

Vol. 8 No.2

Special Issue on “Popular Literature: Culture, Power, and the Politics of the Popular”

Concept Note

Call for Chapters

Matricentric Futures: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Motherhood

Edited by Dr Antonia Mackay (Oxford Brookes University)
Under contract with Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract deadline: Friday 5 June 2026
Full chapter drafts due: Friday 30 July 2027

In the last fifteen years, a new generation of African female and nonbinary authors have made major interventions in the field of African Literatures, from Akwaeke Emezi to NoViolet Bulawayo, Djaïli Amadou Amal to Kopano Matlwa. In parallel, women writers from earlier generations, such as Tsitsi Dangarembga (winner of a Windham-Campbell Literature Prize in 2021), Paulina Chiziane or Ana Paula Tavares (who were both awarded with the Camões Prize in 2021 and 2025 respectively) have received major literary distinctions, celebrating their contributions to African postcolonial literatures in particular, and literature in general.

Our Victorians, Ourselves: Rethinking Victorian Texts & Contexts

An online student conference hosted by the Undergraduate and Graduate Student Victorian Association (UGSVA)

Conference on April 28th, 2026 and Abstracts due March 31st, 2026

Keynote:

Sarah Bliss, Florida State University

“Reading the Forest with the Trees: Victorian Fiction and Periodicals”

Interactive Closing Session:

Sabarno Sinha, University of Texas at Austin

“UnConferencing (v. 1860): The Black-Out Victorian Poetry Edition”

Discourse in the Age of Political Upheaval and Artificial Intelligence

Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference at UCLA

Keynote speaker: Dr. Julia Alekseyeva, University of Pennsylvania

Submission form: https://forms.gle/ynHiRZothVVkgVdp8

If you face any difficulties in the submission process or have questions about the conference,

please email: discourseconferenceucla@gmail.com

• Submission deadline: March 13th at 11:59PM PST

New (and Old) Experiments in Translation (and Writing)

International Conference, Brock University (St. Catharines, ON, Canada) October 22nd to 24th, 2026

Organized by Dr. Nicholas Hauck, Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures, Brock University (nhauck@brocku.ca) and Dante Ognibene, Brock University

Dates: October 22, 23 and 24, 2026

Location: Brock University, St. Catharines, ON, Canada

MLA 2027: The Melville Society CFP: Melville and Hawthorne Revisited

CALL FOR BOOK CHAPTERS
Criminologies, Borders, and Humanities in North Africa
An Edited Volume for the Emerald Borders, Criminalisation and Society Series
Editor: Dr. Rachid Benharrousse*

*Tilburg Law School, Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands

Email: rachid.benharrousse@proton.me

About the Series

This volume is proposed for the Emerald Borders, Criminalisation and Society Series: an interdisciplinary and inclusive space that examines how laws, policies, and practices shape, regulate, and contest borders and the people affected by them. 

“What is Theory, and why are they saying such terrible things about it? (And who—if we indulge in paranoiac criticism—are ‘they’, anyway?) To take the second part of the question first, ‘they’ say terrible things about Theory because much of it is admittedly jargon-ridden and often appears incomprehensible. But also (and this is the uncharitable answer) because: (i) it takes considerable patience and effort to understand the ‘key’ essays, and most diatribes against Theory come from people unwilling to make that effort; and (ii) it destabilises authority over interpretation and authority is precisely what teachers (especially teachers of literary studies) seek to impose over texts, meanings, and readers.”

The theme for Volume 13 of Ceræ: An Australasian Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, as well as for our 3rd annual online Conference, is Fame and Fortune. 

We invite submissions to both the conference and the journal on this theme.

Full details can be found here: 2026 Ceræ Call For Papers – CERÆ: An Australasian Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies

The Sally Mitchell Dissertation Prize is awarded annually to the best Ph.D. dissertation, defended in the previous calendar year, that explores the British periodical press of the long nineteenth century (including magazines, newspapers, and serial publications of all kinds) as an object of study in its own right, not as a source of material for other historical topics. Winners of the prize receive a monetary award of $1,000 and a two-year membership to RSVP.

This guaranteed panel (in-person at the Modern Language Association in Los Angeles, California; January 7-10, 2027) takes a cue from the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of African American Humor Studies and seeks 250-word proposals that discuss how African American humorists eschew "just jokes" to articulate personal and collective selfhood and freedom. Please submit abstracts by Monday, March 16 to dmorgan@scu.edu. This panel is sponsored by the Screen Arts and Culture Committee.

Accepted presenters must be MLA members by April 1, 2026. 

C21 is inviting scholars and researchers to contribute book review essays for upcoming issues. We currently have a selection of titles published in 2025 available for review, spanning literary studies, film and media studies, cultural studies, and gender and sexuality studies. We invite prospective authors to submit ideas for review essays that discuss 2–3 recently published scholarly texts. For the full CFP, and to see our list of available titles, please visit: https://c21.openlibhums.org/news/923/.

Existing scholarship in Asian (North) American Literature has long examined travel narratives about Asian travelers within immigrant or diasporic paradigms: Sau-ling Wong famously establishes the Necessity/Extravagance framework in understanding transpacific mobility by early Asian American immigrants (1993), whereas Chih-ming Wang reads the autobiographical travelogues by diasporic Vietnamese American writers as “homecoming stories” (2013), and Patricia Chu interprets them as “return narratives” deploying acts of countermemory and postmemory to address racial melancholia (2019).

Special Issue: The Subject and its Estrangements

‘The wounds of the Spirit heal, and leave no scars behind.’ Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit

What makes literary collaboration unexpected, difficult, or strange? How have authors transcended barriers – national, social, ideological, religious, temporal – in the collaborative production of texts?

For the upcoming EGO conference at Oxford University, we invite students to write on the prismatic theme of “strange bedfellows”. From plagiarism of unusual sources to fraught collaboration between literary “frenemies” to allyship across religious and political lines, this theme lends itself to discussions of the way literature is shaped by the collaboration of radically different perspectives and interests.

Children and adolescents frequently appear in Doris Lessing's fiction, specifically in her African short stories. However, Lessing did not write these stories with a child audience in mind; rather, she used child and adolescent characters to dissect African colonial society in the aftermath of the break-up of the British Empire (García Navarro, 2021). We invite contributions to a co-edited collection exploring what it means to be educated and to grow up as a child in Lessing's African stories, particularly in the context of 20th-century African society ruled by white European colonists. 

We are delighted to announce the return of the Raymond Williams Society postgraduate essay competition for its 12th year. The deadline for entries is Friday 3 April 2026.

The prize for the winning entry is £250 and a year’s subscription to the Society. The winning essay will be considered for publication in the academic journal Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism (subject to peer review). The competition aims to encourage a new generation of scholars working in the tradition of cultural materialism, especially those whose research is rooted in the work of Raymond Williams.

Updated CFP: We invite three additional contributors to join the volume, replacing previously shortlisted chapter authors who were unfortunately unable to continue with the project. This presents an excellent opportunity to participate in a substantial scholarly publication that already includes confirmed contributions from researchers based in India, Palestine, Indonesia, the Netherlands, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Scholarly discussions on environmental concerns have long been Euro-American-centric. In his 2005 essay, Rob Nixon critiques literary representations of environmentalism as an “offshoot of American Studies,” which has excluded non-American and non-Western perspectives on environmental degradation from critical inquiry. Nixon highlights Nigeria’s Abacha regime’s execution of Saro-Wiwa, a writer, activist and poet, who died fighting for his Ogoni people’s farmlands and the encroachment of their fishing waters by American and European conglomerates, supported by the local despotic regime. Nixon observes that Saro-Wiwa’s writings have received little attention from ecocriticism scholars (2005).

This call invites the submission of proposals for a dossier that will be submitted for consideration to A Contracorriente: A Journal of Latin American Studies. The dossier will focus on the following theme:

Material Plots: Commodity, Capitalism, and National Imaginaries in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Latin American Culture

Call for PapersCaliban Speaks: International Conference on Recentering Indigenous Thought in the Age of Decolonialism and Technology

April 21–22, 2026 | International Islamic University Islamabad (IIUI)

1. Conference Rationale

In the contemporary intellectual landscape, postcolonial theory has illuminated important questions of empire, identity, and resistance. Yet, its limits are increasingly visible: while interrogating colonial legacies, it has too often re-centered Eurocentric epistemologies and sidelined Indigenous thought.

In the early stages of understanding the scope of the most horrifying criminal empire in American history, we are grappling with academia’s role in it. Several faculty members and institutions have been implicated. A few were genuinely innocent and ignored Epstein’s invitations, and some were willingly complicit in crimes against humanity. 

Epstein’s co-conspirators have fundamentally compromised the student-teacher relationship and the student-university relationship.