Embodied Ecologies and Sacred Landscapes: Interpreting Indian Knowledge Tradition on Island Spaces (ISOIS 2026)

December 14-15, 2026

Concept Note:

Indian knowledge traditions have long imagined land, water, and life-worlds as sacred, relational, and more-than-human, weaving together rituals, narratives, cosmologies, and practices of care that exceed modern disciplinary boundaries. Island spaces—whether riverine sandbars, coastal archipelagos, sacred groves on hill-islands, or temple-tanks experienced as spiritual islands—offer particularly rich terrains for exploring embodied ecologies, ritualised forms of dwelling, and ecological memory.

The E. E. Cummings Society and the Society’s journal, Spring, invite abstracts for 20-minute papers for the 54th annual Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900, Feb. 18-20, 2027, at the University of Louisville (https://events.louisville.edu/conferences/list-conferences/louisville-conference-literature-and-culture).

In 1996, Carl Sagan warned us of a time when people would lose their ability to question, “when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few . . . when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.” Maybe Mr Sagan was somewhat pessimistic when writing The Demon-Haunted World. But then again, in times of conspiracy theories, Ancient Aliens, Antivaxxers, and Holocaust Deniers, the Age of Information appears just as capable of spreading dangerous frauds and charlatans as it is of disseminating reliable scholarship.

Public Humanities is a new international open access, cross-disciplinary, peer-reviewed journal at the intersection of humanities scholarship and public life. The journal invites proposals for themed issues that pose urgent questions on contemporary public issues that require rigorous and relevant humanities knowledge. 

The journal invites submissions to its upcoming Themed Issue ‘The How-To Issue’, which will be edited by Jeffrey R. Wilson. 

The deadline for submissions is 1 January 2025. 

Call for Papers
NeMLA’s 58th Annual Convention – “Empowering Communities”
March 6–9, 2027 | Salve Regina University, Newport, Rhode Island (Hybrid Conference)

Panel Title: Tracing Female Body, Art & Economy in the Global South

Primary Area / Secondary Area: Women’s and Gender Studies / Interdisciplinary Humanities
Modality: Hybrid
Chair: Maryam Raza (University of Auckland, New Zealand)

English Studies in the Twenty-First Century: Language, Literature, Digital Innovation, and Cultural Transformations

  Subthemes

Creativity and Praxis:

The Politics of Aesthetics in an Age of Polycrisis

An International Interdisciplinary Symposium, 1-2 October 2026

J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice

Adelaide University

North Terrace, Adelaide, South Australia, 5000, Australia

Keynote Readings and Lectures by: 

J.M. Coetzee 

Anna Funder

Nam Le

Amy Villarejo

CfP: Death and Desire in Devotional Literature

International Congress on Medieval Studies 2027, Kalamazoo MI May 13-15, 2027

International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo13-15 May 2027

Special Session (Hybrid)

2026 marks multiple milestones for the legacy of legendary Afrofuturist author Octavia E. Butler: fifty years since the publication of her first novel, Patternmaster (1976), and the twentieth anniversary of her passing, on February 24, 2006. It also marks the announcement of a film version of one of her most famous and most prophetic works, Parable of the Sower (1993), as well as the surprise republishing of her disavowed novel, Survivor (1978), for the first time since the 1980s. These anniversaries arrive at a moment when Butler’s work continues to gain public attention for its prescience and political relevance, and as she continues to amass scholarly attention across scholarly disciplines.

We are excited to announce that the Long Middle Ages, a seminar series for postgraduate students and early career researchers working on the Late Antique, Medieval, and Early Modern Periods, will be returning for a second series in Autumn 2026!

We welcome submissions of 30 minute papers from postgraduates and early career researchers working in any discipline and on any topic related to the late antique, medieval and early modern periods. Papers will be followed by time for questions and further discussion.

Seminars will commence in October 2026 and run on a fortnightly basis until mid-December.

Call for Papers | Society of Early Americanists

American Literature Association | “The American Novel: Forms, Genres, and Traditions”

November 5–7, 2026 | Santa Fe, NM

The Novel in/and Early America

For this upcoming ALA Symposium, the SEA invites papers and presentations that deal with any aspect of “The American Novel: Forms, Genres, and Traditions” prior to (approximately) 1830. Topics might include (but are not limited to):

This CfP contains two individual sessions grouped under the rubric 'Rethinking Ecotheory' for the 62nd International Congress on Medieval Studies. Please see information for both sessions and separate links to apply below! Both sessions are sponsored by Medieval Ecocriticisms. Abstracts for both sessions are due by September 15th, 2026. Please contact the organizers Hunter (hap48@cornell.edu) and Basil (basil.price@oneonta.edu) with any questions.

Overview

Contemporary philosophy and modern aesthetics have long stressed the potential of cinema to engage itself in the act of thinking and philosophical reflections through the presentation and assembly of moving images and sound. This presumed capacity to think and philosophize is realized by its spectators, who engage with the visual, auditory, and textual elements interwoven in films, resulting in a fusion that sparks novel thoughts and philosophical insights.

Despite the international prominence of Stanisław Lem and, more recently, Andrzej Sapkowski's The Witcher, Polish science fiction and speculative literature remain strikingly underrepresented in English-language scholarship. Existing criticism tends to orbit a small number of canonical figures and a handful of frequently revisited texts, leaving a rich, historically complex tradition, spanning censorship-era political allegory, post-1989 transformation, contemporary literary crossover, and a distinct national cinema largely unexamined outside of Polish-language scholarship.

“From America Sent”: Reading Henry Miller Today

International Conference, Sorbonne Université, Paris, 18–21 May 2027

Call for papers

Joint sponsors: Sorbonne Université (VALE UR 4085), Université Paris Nanterre (CREA UR 370), Henry Miller Memorial Library (Big Sur, California)

Organizers: Emma Frigo (Universités Grenoble Alpes and Paris Nanterre), Clément Oudart (Sorbonne Université), Michael Paduano (Independent scholar), Benoît Tadié (Université Paris Nanterre), Magnus Torén (Henry Miller Memorial Library)

The College Language Association Journal invites submissions for a special issue inspired by Adam J. Banks’s 2016 CLA Journal essay, “Dominant Genre Emeritus: Why It Is Time to Retire the Academic Essay.” In that essay, Banks challenges writing teachers to reconsider the privileged position of the academic essay and to imagine alternative forms of composing, meaning-making, and knowledge production.

The International Journal of Young Adult Literature is accepting proposals for a guest-edited special section for our 2027 issue (Volume 8). We particularly encourage researchers working beyond Anglo-American young adult literature and/or working outside of the UK and US to submit proposals.

Proposals should be sent to ijyal@roehampton.ac.uk by 31 July 2026. 

This panel seeks to explore the precariousness of media, from its physical integrity and digital ephemerality to the complications of human-machine interaction and the elided histories of players, users, fans, and tech developers. With the current encroachment of generative AI in the workplace, media production, information circulation, fan reception, real estate, and the environment, it becomes urgent to question how precariousness underlies the development, deployment, and dissipation of past media.

Transatlantic Connections and the ‘Special Relationship[s]’: BAAS Postgraduate Symposium, 2026

V&A East Storehouse, London

9th November

In 1946, Winston Churchill declared the need for a “special relationship between the British Commonwealth and Empire and the United States” in order to maintain world diplomacy, citing our shared language and cultural values as connecting the two countries. Although this ‘special relationship’ has continually been called into question by scholars, there is undoubtedly a channel of cultural and political exchange between the US and the UK, as well as with other countries, which has become even more urgent for discussion in recent years.

Call for Papers - Enthymema Special Issue (December 2027)

Matter, Materials, and (Un)Natural Resources in Science Fiction

Guest editors: Marco Malvestio (University of Padova) and Valentina Romanzi (University of Verona)

Building upon scholarly discussions of royal rule and power, this session seeks papers that examine how prose and verse Brut chronicles engage with the mechanisms of rule, including law, institutional politics, warfare, diplomacy, and peacemaking. We particularly welcome studies that ground these representations in historical contexts: Layamon's portrayal of rulers against the backdrop of the deteriorating Angevin dynasty or the prose Brut’s kings read through the lens of the Wars of the Roses and the loss of English territories in France.

I seek proposals for brief scholarly essays (3500-5000 words) that provide an overview of a chosen aspect of motherhood in the American imagination for a volume under contract with a new Bloomsbury series called Exploring the American Imagination: Ideals, Values, and Myths in Popular Culture. 

These overview essays should cite a number of popular culture texts to provide an overview of the tensions and contradictions as well as the foundational beliefs inherent in various aspects of American motherhood. Essays should cover multiple genres (film, fiction, television, graphic novels, music) and a broad time period. These are overviews or research starters rather than narrow analyses.

This creative session invites scholars, writers, and hybrid practitioner-theorists to explore liminal dialogue as a form of literary creation in which unlikely, displaced, or structurally incompatible voices are brought into conversation. Drawing on the centrality of dialogue in literary and dramatic traditions, this panel reimagines conversational form as a site of constraint-based experimentation, where meaning emerges through the collision of discourses that would not ordinarily coexist. Rather than focusing on artificial intelligence as a technological subject, this session treats AI-assisted generation as a formal device for producing estranged adjacency between voices, genres, and epistemologies.