Have you marked your calendar for Atla Annual 2026? As announced in November, Atla signed a three-year agreement to co-locate the annual conference with the SBL/AAR Annual Meetings. This year, Atla Annual will take place November 20 through 23, 2026, in Denver, Colorado. 

Like the previous four iterations of the conference, Atla Annual 2026 will be a hybrid event. Regardless of your plan to join us in person or online, we hope you will consider submitting a conference proposal.

To investigate how various disciplines respond to Barbara Kingsolver’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Demon Copperhead, editors Megan Krupa and Thomas Alan Holmes solicit chapter proposals for an edited collection of scholarly essays. Set in southwest Virginia during the opioid crisis, Kingsolver’s novel converses with Dickens’ David Copperfield, providing commentary about relevant social influences ranging from the global economy and international extractive industries to domestic social services, sports fandom, education, and family structure.

Animal Studies Panel, MMLA ("After the Archive") Chicago November 12-14 Sea Creatures, Then and Now“When the abyss stares back, it demands recognition.” Stacy Alaimo’s newest book—The Abyss Stares Back: Encounters With Deep-Sea Life—challenges us to explore encounters with marine life, intimacies partly enabled by science but offering opportunities for literature and art. This panel seeks papers on any aspect of creaturely marine life and its myriad relationships with human existence. Although traditional AV will not be available for this panel, participants are both allowed and encouraged to share a QR code through which audience members may access their presentations.

National Seminar on “Brihattar Bharat” (Greater India): Connecting the Asian Countries”

25 and 26 May 2026

Department of Philosophy DDU Gorakhpur University, Gorakhpur,

in collaboration with

Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies (MAKAIAS), Kolkata

ABOUT THE SEMINAR

Please consider submitting abstracts for a guaranteed stream of panels on Early American Environments to be held at next year’s Society of Early Americanists conference (March 18-20, 2027, Chicago; https://www.societyofearlyamericanists.org/conferences/upcoming). We are interested in scholarship that considers questions of environment and ecology in the early Americas, broadly defined to include the transatlantic, Caribbean, and Pacific worlds. How are concerns such as climate change, extractivism, and environmental justice or methodologies such as ecocriticism shaping our reading of early American texts and materials?

Scholars are encouraged to contribute articles about the Grateful Dead and reviews of Grateful Dead-and-related performances and media for consideration for publication in the field’s refereed journal, Grateful Dead Studies. Accepted pieces from the current submission cycle will be published in volume 8 (2027 / 2028) of the journal.

Article submission deadline: 1 August 2026

Review submission deadline: 1 September 2026

Grateful Dead Studies is also seeking qualified reviewers interested in supporting the peer review process. Please reach out if you would like to help scholarly discourse about the Grateful Dead thrive.

The Charles Olson Society will sponsor panels at the Re-Viewing Black Mountain College Conference, to take place in Asheville, North Carolina, October 2-4. 2026 marks the Centenary of poet Robert Creeley’s birth, and the Charles Olson Society will welcome abstracts pertaining to any aspect of Creeley’s life and work. Creeley was a central poet in the development of Black Mountain Poetry, and along with his life-long friend and companion in verse, Charles Olson, Creeley greatly influenced the development of American poetics after World War II. As he said, “I write to realize the world as one has come to live in it, thus to give testament. I write to move in words, a human delight. I write when no other act is possible.”

One of the fundamental limitations of English literature before 1800 is that in order to study this literature it must have survived to us in some form: it must have been preserved, intentionally or accidentally, in whole or in part, and usually in some form of archive. This call seeks papers that reflect on or account for the impact of this archival presence in premodern studies. How has or does the need for our texts to have been archived impact the field, whether broadly or through its effect on the understanding of a particular text, author, or genre? How does reading “after the archive” in this subfield differ from similar readings in other subfields, or from readings that do not consider the significance of the archive?

Invitation to Publish 

in ACTA IASSYENSIA COMPARATIONIS no. 37 (2026)

Thematic issue:CITIES IN LITERATURE  / LA VILLE DANS LA LITTÉRATURE/ ORAŞUL ÎN LITERATURĂ

The deadline for the submission of articles and book reviews (in Romanian, English, French, German, Spanish or Italian) is September 01, 2026.

The final decision of the AIC Editorial Board will be passed on before December 15, 2026.

Corrections (if required) and comments by the authors expected between December 15, 2026 and January 15, 2027.

 Lyric / Narrative: Crossings, Tensions, Reconfigurations

Sixth Biennial Conference of the International Network for the Study of Lyric (INSL) University of Liège, Interdisciplinary Center for Applied Poetics (UR Traverses), June 1-3, 2027 Languages: French, English German

RAILIMAGE Conference, 1-3 April 2027, Turku, Finland

Call for Papers

Imagining Railways from 1900 to the Present: Places, People, Infrastructures, Texts

The project ‘Twentieth-Century Railway Imaginations: Building the Mobility and Infrastructural Humanities’ (RAILIMAGE) invites scholars from all backgrounds to submit paper proposals for its 2027 conference. We also warmly encourage early-career researchers to apply.

African writers such as Chris Abani, Teju Cole, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, NoViolet Bulawayo, Biyanvanga Wainaina, Dinaw Mengestu and many others are committed to reimagining the concept of “home” and “what it means to be African?” in the era of mass globalization and “new” diasporic belonging.

The inaugural Edinburgh Bibliographical Seminar and Workshop (EBSW) seeks proposals on the theme of ‘Catalogues and Registers as Evidence in the History of Mathematics, Science, and Technology’. The event will occur at the University of Edinburgh from 20 July to 24 July, 2026, the week after the joint meeting of the History of Science Society and the European Society for the History of Science.

Call for Papers: Autumn 2026: Biophilia: The Shape of the Future
Coreopsis

A Multidisciplinary Journal of the Mythic Arts

This journal accepts papers from many disciplines and is welcoming of all faiths and philosophies. We publish about 5 papers per issue that have been peer-reviewed according to academic standards. Final submissions should be 3000 to 10,000 words. 

If you have a finished paper ready for submission, send it directly to coreopsisjournalofmyththeatre@gmail.com

Call for Papers

Biography, Autobiography, Memoir, and Personal Narrative

Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)

2026 SWPACA Summer Salon

June 25-27, 2026

Virtual Conference

https://swpaca.org/

Submissions open on March 30, 2026

Proposal submission deadline: April 27, 2026

The 21st century has been defined by large-scale global change driven by migration, exile, border reconfigurations, political upheaval, and shifting power dynamics – all of which have profoundly shaped debates surrounding human rights, identity, culture, and belonging. Furthermore, as digital platforms collapse geographic distance and intensify new forms of surveillance, nationalism, and exclusion, diasporic subjects must navigate complex landscapes of memory, language, race, gender, and political belonging.

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the players come with their own requests (“Write me a prologue”, Botttom asks), in a hilarious example of group-working. In Hamlet, as the Prince of Denmark gets ready to take action, one of his first decisions is to appoint himself as co-writer of The Murder of Gonzago: “You could, for a need, study a speech of some dozen or sixteen lines which I would set down and insert in’t, could you not?” (2.2.5.528-30). Both examples show the nuts and bolts of early modern stage practice, in which co-writing was commonplace. 

ROUNDTABLE: Writing Communities in and Beyond the Classroom (PAMLA, Seattle, Nov 12-15, 2026)

Deadline for Proposals: May 15

This roundtable revisits writing as a fundamentally social, collaborative, and democratic act at a time when many writers and students experience it as isolated, pressured, and increasingly mediated by technology. Beyond offering emotional and peer support, writing communities in classrooms, online and social spaces, and professional and informal networks shape how writers see themselves, understand their audience, engage in metacognitive practices, and take creative and intellectual risks.

Call for Papers Ecofeminist Drama: Theatre, Performance, and Ecological Futures

Edited by Douglas A. Vakoch and Işıl Şahin Gülter
Under review with the University of Illinois Press

~Call for FULL Chapters:
Update: The manuscript is nearly finished however some planned chapters have fallen through. Replacement chapter needed in short order. Please review the details below and contact me with any questions and with your proposed chapter: maureen.fadem@gmail.com 
The Routledge Companion to Toni Morrison
Editor: Maureen E. Ruprecht (Fadem), CUNY 
This is a call for chapters for The Routledge Companion to Toni Morrison, a new companion volume intended for a scholarly audience, as support for newer Morrison scholars approaching their research, as well as graduate students working on Morrison. 

Global Cinema Symposium

Organized by the Harry W. Bass Jr. School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology

 
Nov. 13-14, 2026

In-person at the University of Texas at Dallas

Keynote Speakers:

Professor Katarzyna Marciniak, Occidental College

Professor Meta Mazaj, University of Pennsylvania

Call for Papers

Abstract

This session invites papers exploring the role of affect and emotion in contemporary world literature. Recent developments in affect theory—particularly the work of Sara Ahmed and Lauren Berlant—have emphasized how emotions circulate across individuals, communities, and cultural contexts. Literary texts offer a powerful site for examining how affect shapes narratives of identity, belonging, and social transformation within global and transnational frameworks.

The everlasting debates surrounding the relationship between literature and film as distinct mediums of artistic expression have long fascinated both philosophy and critical theory. While proponents of cinema argue that cinema is superior to other forms of artistic expression, especially literature, in the sense that it has a unique ability to engage emotions, convey abstract concepts in tangible settings, and challenge, what Gilles Deleuze might call, human “sensory-motor” perception through cinematic techniques, others might disagree by saying that cinema is inferior to literature due to its passive nature and over-reliance on immediate sensory experience rather than intellectual abstraction, which is one of the major characteristics of literature.

[please note the updated conference date and timeline]

National Video Games: Cultures, Industries, Communities
international conference

4–6 December 2026
University of Warsaw, Poland