Visual culture constitutes an interdisciplinary area flexible enough to facilitate discussion across the arts, media, and communication. Visual culture, broadly defined, exists at the intersection of the visual and the cultural. Distinct from film, television, animation, video game, media, literature and the arts, we study the cultures in which such media circulate. Yet common interests connect visual studies with material culture, digital culture, and media studies, among others, suggesting fertile opportunities for collaboration and crossover. 

The Department of English and IQAC, Ramananda Centenary College, are pleased to announce the International Conference 'Margins of the Anthropocene: Waste, Bodies, and Decolonial Futures' to be held on 2–3 September 2026. The conference brings together scholars, artists, filmmakers, activists, and community practitioners to examine how ecological crises are experienced through waste, caste, labour, toxicity, disability, indigeneity, and more-than-human relations while imagining decolonial ecological futures.

The Marilynne Robinson Society will be hosting a panel at the annual American Literature Association Conference (May 26-29, 2027; Boston, MA).  The panel will focus on a wide variety of topics connected to Robinson’s essays and novels.

Please submit a 350-word proposal and short bio to haein.park@biola.edu by December 1, 2026.

Conference Dates: 23-24 October, 2026

Format: Online (via Zoom)

International, interdisciplinary conference titled:

Healing Narratives: Exploring Humanity in Medicine and Healthcare

In the realm of medicine and healthcare, narratives- whether spoken, written, visual, or performed- serve among others as powerful tools to humanize clinical experiences, challenge biomedical paradigms as well as foster empathy and understanding. These stories reveal the complex interplay between biological, psychological, social, cultural, and spiritual dimensions of health, illuminating the ways in which healing is intertwined with human dignity, identity, and societal values.

Article Collection: Writing in A Cage: Creativity Under Structural, Political, Religious Constraints

Journal: Cogent Arts & Humanities

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Article Collection Guest Advisor: Dr. Natalia Morzhenkova, Huaqiao University (China)

Natalia.morzhenkova@gmail.com

Manuscript Submission Deadline: April 9, 2027

PCA/ACA Fat Studies 2027 Call for Papers/Presentations/Panels

Deadline: 10.31.26

PCA Fat Studies Area Call for Papers

Attention all Fat Studies academics, activists, and artists: Please join other Fat Studies scholars for the 2027 PCA/ACA National Conference in Boston, Massachusetts from March 24-27, 2027. Presenters must become members of the Popular Culture Association. Find more information on the conference and organization at https://sites.google.com/view/2026pcaconference/home.

AIYA: Artificial Intelligence and Young Adult Studies [working title]

Edited by Sidney I. Dobrin and Kenneth B. Kidd, University of Florida

Deadline for proposals: November 1, 2026

CALL FOR CHAPTER PROPOSALS

Love and Its Reversals in Peninsular and Latin American Literature (Panel –  Virtual Only)

NeMLA 2027 — 58th Annual Convention
March 6–9, 2027 | Newport, Rhode Island
Virtual Only

Love has long occupied a central place in Peninsular and Latin American literature, but literary representations of love also expose its reversals, contradictions, and darker dimensions. This panel explores representations of love and its reversals—including desire, rejection, violence, hate, and eroticism—with particular attention to questions of gender, subjectivity, power, and social norms.

Seminar Title:
Based on a True Story: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Retelling What Really Happened

Organizers:
Dr. Priscilla Charrat Nelson, Providence College
Dr. Claire Rodan, University of Maryland

Paper submissions are currently open.

CALL FOR PAPERS: The Post-apocalypse in Cinema and Television (edited book)

Edited by Christina Lee (Curtin University)

I am soliciting contributions for a scholarly, edited book that will explore representations of the post-apocalypse on-screen, specifically in cinema and television. While the “apocalypse” denotes a cataclysmic finale, what is left in its wake is an equally provocative thought experiment. To borrow from the seminal work of James Berger: what comes “after the end”?

Primary Area / Secondary AreaGlobal Anglophone ModalityIn Person Only: The session will be held fully in person at the hotel. No remote presentations will be included. Chair(s)Roma Lucarelli (University of Minnesota Twin Cities) Abstract

To decompose is to live too, I know, I know… (Beckett, Molloy)

This panel invites papers that offer provocative insights into the Korean concept of han (한/恨) across a wide range of cultural forms and genres. Echoing this year's conference theme, this panel asks: how might we recapture the magic of, and reinstill a sense of wonder and joy in, Asian Americanist work on han? Over the past decade, if not longer, han has arguably become one of the most revisited concepts among Korean American writers, artists, and thinkers. If these overlapping prisms of political, cultural, and academic representation have taught us anything, it is that han, at its best, is conceptually elusive.

We may imagine the act of hospitality benign: to open a door, to welcome another across a threshold, or to make an offer to a guest. Rooted in such acts, however, is an ethics of how we engage with another, whether friend or stranger. Acts of hospitality contain their own contradictions, as to serve as host is to hold power, to set terms, to guard thresholds and entry points. For this year’s SAMLA conference, we invite papers, panels, and creative works that consider the many meanings and complications of hospitality—as practice, metaphor, ethics, affect, and structure.

Call for Papers

The Winter's Tale: From Page to Stage

IASEMS Tempera Seminar 2027

University of Padova, Department of Language and Literary Studies

7-9 June 2027

As artificial intelligence rapidly reshapes cultural, educational, and creative institutions, the field of Black theatre confronts a familiar set of questions in a newly technological register: Who creates knowledge, who benefits from it, who gets remembered, and whose labor remains obscured? Public conversations about AI often proceed as though these technologies have arrived without history, entering an empty landscape awaiting innovation. Yet Black theatre has long grappled with questions of representation, embodiment, archives, intellectual inheritance, collective memory, labor, and futurity.

Sappho’s Mirror: Images of Female Desire in Literature, Music & the Visual Arts 

This seminar explores representations of female desire in music, literature and the visual arts. How have the complex poetics of female desire—the desire to have something, or escape something, or punish, or know—been represented over time? What strategies have been employed to subvert literary conventions defined predominantly by male perspectives on home, love, war, victory and loss? How have female characters navigated the interplay between things done overtly and thought covertly to reveal the inner web of desires, fears and conflicts that constitute a female poetics of love and longing?

This is a virtual session.

ACLA 2027 Virtual Symposium: What We Are Going to Become?: Dysphoria Mundi, Weird , Excess

Contact Information

Elif Sendur, es1037@scarletmail. rutgers.edu

es1037@scarletmail.rutgers.edu

URL

https://www.acla.org/seminar/476406f6-1280-48ea-a968-33ae461c37d5

Announcement Type

Conference

Subject Fields

Call for Papers: 19th International Connotations Symposium

Irony: Dramatic and Otherwise

Tübingen, Germany, 25-28 July 2027

Call for Abstracts!

’00s Alternative and Philosophy: Every Thought in its Right Place

Edited by Joshua Heter and Richard Greene

This MLA just-in-time panel explores the evolving status of non-binariness in trans studies and beyond. Following Marquis Bey’s Nonbinary Life, we ask: Is non-binariness an emancipatory narrative? What are its critical potentialities and limitations? Send 150-200 word abstracts + bio to m.stekl@colostate.edu by 8/21. (The MLA will take place in Los Angeles from 7 to 10 January 2027.)

Conference Call for Papers

The Star Wars 50 Years academic conference will be held by the University of Leicester and the Leverhulme Centre for Humanity and Space at Space Park Leicester on 21-22 May 2027 in anticipation of the 50th anniversary of the original release of the film on 25 May 1977 in the U.S. We are now inviting proposals for conference presentations.

Conference Organisers:

Call for Papers: Dime Novels and Juvenile Series Books, PCA 2027

The PCA Dime Novels and Juvenile Series Books Area is accepting proposals for presentations at the next PCA/ACA annual conference, to be held in Boston, MA from March 24-27, 2027. See the PCA website for more information on the conference and submission guidelines.

Despite possessing intersecting histories and languages, Latin American studies and Latinx studies have historically been treated as separate fields of study. This panel seeks to spark a dialogue between fields by exploring themes of transhemispheric and archipelagic solidarity in Latinx and Latin American literature and media. Throughout the past and present century, how have Latinx and Latin American media—literature, film, art, or other forms—constructed expressions of community in dialogue with each other? How do works from Latin America reverberate in Latinx cultural productions, and how do Latinx cultural productions influence Latin American media?