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Call for Papers
Tolkien in Popular Culture
Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)
2026 SWPACA Summer Salon
June 25-27, 2026
Virtual Conference
Submissions open on March 30, 2026
Proposal submission deadline: April 27, 2026
FEMSPEC, an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal dedicated to challenging gender through speculative means in any genre, seeks submissions for cover art.
Are you a visual artist? Does your work engage with representations of the feminine or speculative? If so, please consider submitting your artwork to FEMSPEC to be considered as cover art!
FEMSPEC publishes two issues per year and uses voluntary submissions of visual art as cover art for each issue.
It is NOT necessary to subscribe to the journal to submit art for consideration. If your piece is selected to be used as cover art, you will receive a free print copy of that issue.
CALL FOR PAPERS
Eco-Bordering and Green Nationalism: Spatial Transformations in the South Asian Diaspora
Guest Editors:
Dr. Mansi Bose, Assistant Professor, Chandigarh University, India
&
Dr. Pratyusha Pramanik, Assistant Professor, Chandigarh University, India
Rationale
Archives are not neutral: they tell stories about who counts, whose experiences are remembered, and whose are erased. For centuries, racial hierarchies have shaped the preservation of knowledge, leaving silences where Black, Indigenous, and other marginalized voices should be. The Antiracism Permanent Section of the MMLA invites submissions that move beyond critique, asking how we can reimagine, rebuild, and transform the archive to reflect justice, equity, and shared humanity.We are especially interested in work that explores:
Panel: Ecocriticism (standing session) co-sponsored by ASLE
PROPOSAL SUBMISSION DEADLINE: Fri May 15, 2026
Submission link: https://pamla.ballastacademic.com/Home/S/20111.
Conference: Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA)
Conference Theme: "Our Ruling Classes: Culture, Power, Conflict”
CONFERENCE
2026 PAMLA Conference, taking place November 12–15 at the Hyatt Regency Seattle
SESSION/PANEL ABSTRACT
Since the international success of Aterrados and Cuando acecha la maldad, both directed by Demián Rugna, Argentine horror cinema has gained renewed global visibility and critical attention. This resurgence has sparked increasing scholarly interest in the field, positioning Argentine horror as a key site for the exploration of national anxieties, aesthetic innovation, and transnational circulation.
Research group “Translation and Language Studies” (Faculty of Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities, Kaunas University of Technology) is organising an international conference on linguistics, discourse, media, communication, translation, cultural literacy and impact on society “Intermediality in Communication: Translation, Media, Discourse” held in Kaunas, Lithuania.
The scope of the conference includes 8 thematic sections with their own set of topics:
Linguistics. This section aims to examine the current directions in linguistic research, particularly focusing on how language interacts with different forms of media.
MMLA 2026 Convention Theme: "After the Archive" (https://mmla.memberclicks.net/call-for-papers)Meeting Dates: 12-14 November 2026Meeting Location: voco Chicago Downtown (350 W Wolf Point Plaza)
Presentation Length: 15 Minutes (7-8 Double-Spaced Pages)
Submission Materials: 250-Word Abstract and CV
Submission Deadline: April 25, 2026
Many notable comic book scholars highlight Alan Moore as one of the most ambitious writers in mainstream American and British comics. Along with writers like Grant Morrison and artists like Dave McKean, Moore was part of the so-called “British Invasion” of the American comic book industry in the 1980s, and artists of this period are credited as bringing an air of credibility as well as transforming the artistic standards of the medium. Greg Carpenter, for instance, likens the work of these artists to “Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson, elevating the English language into a vehicle for poetic drama.
Call for Papers
“U.S. Drama, Theatre and Performance at the Festival mondial du théâtre de Nancy, 1963-1983”
One-day symposium
Université de Lorraine in Nancy, France
Date: Friday, March 26, 2027
Call for proposals: no-stage PressCritical Ballet Studies
no-stage press invites submissions for its inaugural publication, dedicated to critical ballet studies. We seek academic articles, critical essays, and interviews that interrogate the histories, aesthetics, and power structures embedded in ballet and ballet-adjacent forms.
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.
The theme for this year’s MMLA conference explores the relational dynamics inherent in an archive. Since Derrida’s Archive Fever, the role of the archive has been conceived as a site for both the storage and construction of memory. What is selected and how it is framed by the archival materials works both to capture memory and history and shape how something or someone should be remembered. In keeping with this theme, the permanent section for comics and graphic novels is interested in research that interrogates the intersection of comic studies and the archive.
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.
British literature of the 1800s has a close relationship to archival forms and practices. With a boom in bureaucratic record-keeping, extensive imperial documentation, meticulous medical and legal case histories, and the development of libraries and institutional archives, Victorian literary texts frequently include, copy, or contest letters, ledgers, case files, diaries, and serialized records. By engaging with and appropriating formal aspects of “the archive,” Victorian literature often blurred the boundaries between history and literature, fact and fiction, what is real and what is constructed. But who was keeping records? And of whom?
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.
The 123rd Annual Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA) Conference will take place this November in Seattle, Washington, from November 12-15.
This session seeks papers that explore forms of play in American fiction from 1945 to the present. There are many conceptual genealogies of play within fields such as psychoanalytic theory, Marxist theory, structuralist and poststructuralist theory, affect theory, critical race theory, queer theory, and video game theory.
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
Call for Papers
PAMLA 2026 Special Session: Seattle
Spanish and Portuguese (Peninsular)
This special session invites papers that explore the rich and multifaceted landscape of Spanish and Portuguese literature, film, and cultural studies within the Iberian Peninsula. We welcome presentations that engage with a broad spectrum of topics, particularly those that foreground the experiences of historically marginalized communities, including (but not limited to) Romani/Gypsy and Afro-Hispanic populations.
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?
Reading in the Digital Age: R. E. Sterling Havens Writing and Reading Symposium
Call for Papers – Opens April 6, 2026
Deadline for submissions: May 25, 2026
Sponsored by: R. E. Sterling Havens Writing and Reading Symposium, September 19, 2026
Writing and Reasoning Program, Department of English
Southern Methodist University
Dallas, Texas 75205
Reading in the Digital Age
Reading is one of the oldest academic practices, and certainly one of the most rapidly changing.
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.
Conference Dates: June 1–2, 2026
Location: North Carolina A&T State University
Proposal Submission Deadline: April 23, 2026
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.”
Who Is This For? The Access Illusion of XR
Immersive Impact Review — Issue 2 Call for Submissions
Open Date: 4/1/26
Closing Date: 5/15/26
The Immersive Impact Review invites submissions for its second issue around the theme of “Who Is This For? The Access Illusion of XR.” The Review is an open-access publication dedicated to advancing knowledge at the intersection of immersive technologies and social good. It is published by the Immersive Experience Alliance with funding from Agog.
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?
IMAGINATION, MEDIATION, & MANIFESTATION
Inaugural Graphic Medicine Europe Conference X Cross Comix
9-12 September 2026
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam & De Doelen Rotterdam
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.
CALL FOR FINAL CHAPTERS TO COMPLETE COLLECTION
We are now looking for chapters specifically on the work of Madeleine Miller, Pat Barker, and Jennifer Saint. Please see the full CFP below. Please send all abstracts (no more than 500 words) and short biographies to the editors by Friday 8th May 2026. The editors are: Isabelle Berrow (isabelle.berrow1@yorksj.ac.uk) Zoe Enstone (Z.Enstone@yorksj.ac.uk) and Anne-Marie Evans (A.Evans@yorksj.ac.uk)
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
Workshop and Special Issue of Atlantic Studies: Global Currents
Title: “Seeds of Empire, Roots of Change: Botany and the Atlantic World.”
Location: Saint Louis University Campus, Madrid, Spain (March 11–12, 2027)
Organizers: Atlantic Studies: Global Currents, The Center for Iberian Historical Studies, and Saint Louis University, Madrid.
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.
Call for Papers
SHONDALAND
Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)
2026 SWPACA Summer Salon
June 25-27, 2026
Virtual Conference
Submissions open on March 30, 2026
Proposal submission deadline: April 27, 2026
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.
CALL FOR PAPERS
Eco-Bordering and Green Nationalism: Spatial Transformations in the South Asian Diaspora
Guest Editors:
Dr. Mansi Bose, Assistant Professor, Chandigarh University, India
&
Dr. Pratyusha Pramanik, Assistant Professor, Chandigarh University, India
Rationale
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.
This call seeks proposals for 18-minute talks to be presented at the annual meeting of the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA) in Seattle, Nov. 12-15, 2026.
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
The Spanish and Portuguese (Latin American) session is open to all papers exploring some aspects of Latin American Spanish and Portuguese literature and cultures. It is a dynamic forum for scholarly exchange, collaboration, and engagement with these interconnected regions' rich cultural heritage and diverse perspectives.
We are particularly interested in papers that touch on:
• Contemporary Literature and Culture
• Cultural Studies
• History and Culture
• Literature, Arts, and other Media
• Visual and Performing Arts
• The conference theme, "Our Ruling Classes"
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
Submissions open on March 30, 2026
Proposal submission deadline: April 27, 2026
Wildcat–the 2023 biographical film about Flannery O’Connor–is notable for its unconventional style. Rather than narrating the author’s life in a linear, straightforward fashion, the film fuses scenes from O’Connor’s fiction with events in the author’s life and the musings of her imagination. As a result, the film feels fragmented and somewhat difficult to categorize–both in terms of genre and the ultimate connection between the facts of O’Connor’s life and the purpose of her fiction. Instead, the viewer feels the influence of the author’s inner conflicts in relation to a variety of issues: Her Catholic upbringing, bodily difference and disability, and humanity’s capacity for redemption.
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.
Time, Memory and Forgetting in the Western
Two-Day Symposium | 10–11 September 2026 | University of Essex, UK
Deadline for submissions: 30th April 2026
To submit: 250 word outlines for all submission types via email to richard.parker@uc.cl
“There will come a time when you believe everything is finished; that will be the beginning.”— Louis L’Amour, Lonely on the Mountain.
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.
Futuring Poetic Inquiry: A Return and Renewal10th International Symposium for Poetic Inquiry (ISPI)
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
October 8-12, 2026 Proposal Submissions Due May 11, 2026To submit a proposal: Please visit the ISPI website for more information and to submit a proposal: ISPI website
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.
DEADLINE EXTENDED
“There is more savagery, more brutality, in the pages of Wuthering Heights than in any novel of the nineteenth century, and, for good measure, more beauty too, more poetry, and, what is more unusual, a complete lack of sexual emotion…” Daphne du Maurier.
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 ABSTRACTS
Book project: Sinners Reader: The Blues, Black Horror, and the Jim Crow South Editor, DuEwa M. Frazier (editor of Introduction to Afrofuturism: A Mixtape in Black Literature & Arts)