This year’s MCLLM theme invites exploration of how literature, language, and performance illuminate intersecting dimensions of justice. How are inherited forms, genres, and rhetorical strategies reactivated in contemporary struggles for equity? In what ways do linguistic, literary, and artistic practices navigate, resist, and respond to the abuse of power while imagining alternative futures? 

MCLLM welcomes proposals from a wide range of disciplines and expression forms. The list below provides a sense of the topics the organizers are interested in seeing, but it is not an all-inclusive list. Please submit a proposal that represents your interpretation of our theme! 

Targeted CFP: Routledge International Handbook of Global Asexualities and Aromanticisms

Targeted Call For Papers
Routledge International Handbook of Global Asexualities and Aromanticisms

Co-edited by: Ela Przybyło (Illinois State University) and Yo-Ling Chen (Independent Scholar)

Deadline for abstracts: November 15, 2025                    Contact email: globalacearo(at)gmail(dot)com

Call for Papers and Talks
Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm & Uppsala University, Sweden

22-23 April, 2026

Comics and Machines 

Steering Committee:

Jan Baetens, Jaqueline Berndt, Jan von Bonsdorff, Gareth Brookes, Benoît Crucifix, Björn-Olav Dozo, Anna Foka, Isabelle Gribomont, Andre Holzapfel, Per Israelson, Gaëtan Le Coarer, Ilan Manouach, Pedro Moura, Everardo Reyes, Keith Tillford, Ray Whitcher

The Mind and the Machine: Mental Disability and Technology

George Washington University (GWU) English Graduate Student Association Symposium

Friday, 20 March, 2026

This virtual symposium invites papers that explore how mental disability and technology intersect in literature, film, and media.

By mental disability, we include conditions such as mental illness, neurodivergence, emotional distress, and psychological differences as represented across cultures.

By technology, we refer broadly to scientific, digital, or mechanical systems (such as medical instruments, typewriters, social media, surveillance systems, and artificial intelligence).

The School for International Training (SIT) invites proposals from researchers and scholars to contribute to a roundtable discussion focused on the following areas: climate and the environment; development and inequality; education and social change; geopolitics and power; global health and well-being; identity and human resilience; and peace and justice.

AI and Shakespeare: A British Shakespeare Association Virtual Conference: CFP

The Mind and the Machine: Mental Disability and Technology

George Washington University (GWU) English Graduate Student Association Symposium

Friday, 20 March, 2026

This virtual symposium invites papers that explore how mental disability and technology intersect in literature, film, and media.

By mental disability, we include conditions such as mental illness, neurodivergence, emotional distress, and psychological differences as represented across cultures.

By technology, we refer broadly to scientific, digital, or mechanical systems (such as medical instruments, typewriters, social media, surveillance systems, and artificial intelligence).

Our moment is one in which information literacy is an increasingly vital skill. As misinformation invades everything from hallucinatory AI-generated online search results, to fallacious social media posts, to official statements from the highest levels of government, the ability to discern between facts, fiction, and opinion is as important as ever. Yet, as history reveals, our times are not entirely unprecedented. In particular, African Americans have long dealt with lies about who we are similarly promoted at every societal level.

The Medievalism in Popular Culture Area (including Early to Later Middle Ages, Robin Hood, Arthurian Legend, Chaucer, Norse, and other materials connected to medieval studies) accepts papers on all topics that explore either popular culture during the Middle Ages or transcribe some aspect of the Middle Ages into the popular culture of later periods. These representations can occur in any genre, including film, television, novels, graphic novels, gaming, advertising, art, etc. For this year’s conference, I would like to encourage submissions on some of the following topics:

Call for Papers for a in person panel on 21st Century Latinx Children’s Literature and Media at the 2026 Annual MELUS Conference scheduled for Thursday, April 30 - Saturday, May 2, 2026.

According to the last three U.S. Census reports, the demographic of Latinx/Hispanic children has grown. Most recently, Latinx children account for about 1 in 4 of all children in the United States.

This special issue seeks to examine Indian science fiction and speculative fiction in general, as a critical archive where postcolonial enunciations of ‘space’ are actively produced, contested and reimagined through a variety of cultural texts. Our objective is to open a conversation about the overarching genre of Indian postcolonial Science Fiction and the way it interacts with the concept of ‘space’-- literal and/or cultural.

“American Shorts 2026” will take place on October 29-31, 2026, at the School of Arts & Humanities of the University of Lisbon, Portugal.

American Shorts 2026 webpage: https://sites.google.com/view/americanshorts2026

Submission deadline: 10 June, 2026

Conference: 29-31 October, 2026

Location: Lisbon, Portugal

Call for Book Chapters

Editors:
Dr. Muhsin Yanar, Visiting Researcher, School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication, Birkbeck, University of London
Dr. Grace Halden, Reader, School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication, Birkbeck, University of London
Dr. Russell Kilbourn, Professor, Department of English and Film Studies, Wilfrid Laurier University

Sciences and Fictions: Human Futures Beyond Boundaries

We seek chapters for the forthcoming edited collection Sciences and Fictions: Human Futures Beyond Boundaries.

CFP: The Medieval Comic

MEST Symposium, Indiana University Bloomington

March 6-8

Keynote from Dr. Albrecht Classen: "Laughter on the Stage, Laughter at Court, and Laughter in Public Spaces During the Middle Ages and Early Modern Time."

The Comic is a multivalent concept, which can pull or push scholarship in many directions. It  has been at times described as a social balm, binding agent, and lubricant. This call for papers asks for submissions considering the various ways in which the Comic manifests in the medieval and medievalism, its implications, and importance.

Potential panels might consider:

The Routledge Handbook to Star Wars

Edited by Lorna Piatti-Farnell, Angelique Nairn, and Justin Matthews

The Editors invite abstract submissions for The Routledge Handbook to Star Wars. Contributions are encouraged from scholars across disciplines, including film and media studies, cultural studies, sociology, history, gender studies, literature, and related fields, as well as from those engaging with interdisciplinary approaches.

Communication skills are recognized as an integral component of professional competence in engineering education, complementing technical proficiency. English language educators play a significant role in developing communication skills among engineering students. Nevertheless, undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in English most often overlook the inclusion of courses on science communication in the curriculum. As a result, research scholars in English who aspire to take up faculty positions in the engineering institutes do not get any formal training in science communication before entering academia. This FDP aims to bridge this gap by equipping English language educators with the skills necessary to become effective science communicators.

Building Spaces of Freedom
Society for the Study of Southern Literature 2026 CFP
Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee, March 28-31, 2026

The Society for the Study of Southern Literature seeks submissions for our biennial conference, which will take place March 28-31, 2026, at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee.

Keynote Speakers: Michele Aaron (University of Warwick) and Jean-Baptiste Thoret (Université
de Poitiers)

Epistemologies and Pathways to Truth

The University of Maryland’s Graduate English Organization (GEO) invites proposals relating to the theme of “Epistemologies and Pathways to Truth” for our 19th annual graduate student conference, to be held in person on Friday, March 27, 2026 at UMD, College Park. 

12–14 March 2026

Queer Bibliography in the South:

Space, Place, Community

Athens, GA and online

Queer Bibliography invites proposals for papers considering how gender, sexuality, and textuality intersect with place in the production of queer identity.

Paper proposals are welcome on any aspect of Hardy’s life, work, and legacy for the Twenty-Seventh International Hardy Conference and Festival (Dorchester, Dorset, UK; July 25th—August 1st 2026). Significant Hardy anniversaries in 2026 include the 150th anniversary of The Hand of Ethelberta, the 140th anniversary of The Mayor of Casterbridge, the 120th anniversary of The Dynasts (Part 2), and the 110th anniversary of Selected Poems. Proposals for papers on any of these anniversary texts are especially welcome.

Papers should be planned for delivery times of a maximum of 20 minutes (approximately 2000 words).

For the occident, a surprising cultural norm in India is that of men holding hands. Seen as unconventional and in sharp contrast to the West, the phenomenon symbolic of India (in particular) and South Asia at large became a project in 2018, whereby photographer Vincent Dolman created a series depicting an organic and intimate aspect of male friendship. Appreciating such uninhibitedness in a country given to rampant homophobia and toxic masculinity, Dolman, in one of his interviews, observes how such practices hold a mirror to society and societal conventions of masculine constructions and performances. 

Duplicity/Duplicität: Betwixt intimates and strangers.

Opening Symposium of the collaborative research project Studies in Remoteness. Sensoria of Absence, Distance and Neglect.

https://userblogs.fu-berlin.de/remoteness/winter-symposium-2026/ 
https://www.nsuweb.org/circle-1-studies-in-remoteness-sensoria-of-absenc...

January 29-31 2026. 

Call for additional chapters for an edited collection (under consideration by publisher): proposals due November 16, 2025

Land of the Free, Home of the Brave?: American Children’s Literature in an Era of Heightened Censorship

In a country advocating, loudly, the rights of the individual, what about child readers? Are they granted an expansive vision of their world? What rights do children have where books are concerned?