Bonkbusters and Soap Operas: Representing Sex, Glamour, and Melodrama on Screen 

Saturday 21st June 2025 

Falmouth University 

This freein-person symposium will be an interdisciplinary and global exploration of Bonkbusters, Soap Operas and Made-for-TV Melodramas. 

Literature and film are filled with characters whose choices shape worlds, inspire audiences, and sometimes make no sense at all. This session takes a playful yet insightful approach to the conference theme of Palimpsests: Memory and Oblivion by examining how cultural memory preserves, distorts, or over-glorifies certain fictional figures. Through witty critiques and audience participation, we’ll interrogate why some characters remain revered despite glaring flaws while others are unfairly forgotten or misunderstood. What does our collective memory choose to retain, and what are we rewriting with each new adaptation, retelling, or reinterpretation?

CALL FOR PROPOSALS: THE SOUTHERN GOTHIC AT PCAS/ ACAS 2025

MMLA 2025 Call for Papers for their Permanent Section: "English III: Literature after 1900" under the theme Optimism Against All Odds in American/English Modernism

Deadline: April 24th, 2025

For consideration: please send a brief abstract (250 words), tentative title, and bio to Sophie Nunberg at snunberg@uwm.edu by April 24th, 2025.

DETAILS: 

MMLA 2025 Animal Studies Panel

“Do Animals Hope?” 

Although many books have been written on hope for non-human animals, their collective or individual survival, this session invites proposals on hope by non-human animals, or representations of such hope. Many different approaches are welcome—literary critical, ethnographic (human or animal), environmental studies, affect studies, thought experiments. Please submit a 1-2 page abstract to Lucinda Cole (lcol@illinois.edu) by April 14, 2025.

Virtual session

Caleidoscopio invites you to submit papers for its series 2, vol. 1, no. 1: under the topic “In Media-Making:  Start-on-and-go-over-Media”

Archives, while carrying out the operation of the gaze, function like a mirror: they point to a spectral exteriority. The archive is of the order of the phantasmagorical and, by definition, they are phantasmatic. This approach points out to what Harun Farocki’s stressed as the definition of a phantom or operational image, images that are built from a non-human perspective, although they call-in human agency.

Why should humans be witnessing and/or scrutinizing images productions? Is that still a need? Are there any ethical or aesthetical motives or meanings to it?

The Academic Association for Doctoral Students & Students of English (Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń) is pleased to announce the call for papers for the online young researchers’ conference to be held on 22 May 2025 and the journal issue (Currents No 11) on the themes of adaptation and innovation within Anglophone language, culture and literature.

  ‘Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature’s inexorable imperative.’

~ H.G. Wells Mind at the End of Its Tether

Call for papers Heteroglossia 22, 2025

MSA 2025 Proposed Panel: Infrastructures of Hidden Labor

Diverse Francophonie

Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association Conference

Thursday, November 20 - Sunday, November 23

San Francisco, California  |  InterContinental Hotel San Francisco

Abstracts due May 15, 2025

Norman Klein deploys the term “social imaginary” in The History of Forgetting as a category of a built environment, the assemblage of which necessarily involves a significant erasure of a material domain. The social imaginary can also be used, however, to interrogate an individual’s belief in the continuity of self-identity. Always already in the imagined self, after all, is the rebuke of self-instigated doubt: just how much difference can a person tolerate between the “me” that others would claim to know and the cherished, even if fossilized, image one’s consciousness seems beholden to?

Call for panelists for a paper at the American Association for Chinese Studies (AACS)

67nd Annual Conference, hosted by Adelphi University, Garden City, New York on October 24-26, 2025. According to the AACS conference description: the theme of the conference is “Charting New Paradigms: China and the Chinese Diaspora in a Changing World Order” in multiple aspects of culture, diplomacy, economy, education, health, history, literature, politics, and society.

Detecting New Paradigms: The Detective Genre in Contemporary Chinese Culture

Sacred Arts 2025:
Exploring the Spiritual Dimensions of Artistic Expression and Ritual

University of Oxford (and online)

May 10-11, 2025

Conference webpage: https://labrc.co.uk/sacred-arts-2025/

In partnership with UK’s Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies Department, “Leveling Up the Classroom” is continuing with a central focus on the integration of digital technologies and media into classroom settings. The last few years has given education a great insight into its own practices. Between online classrooms during the pandemic and the rapid emergence of more powerful technologies, we educators have seen a growing need to reevaluate our classrooms, as well as work with new tech to enhance these learning environments.