Through an interdisciplinary approach drawing from rhetorical, gender, and literary studies, this panel explores how immigrant and diasporic communities, who are often socially marginalized in the West, create hospitality for each other. In particular, food sites and practices make belonging possible in otherwise displaced circumstances. For example, Michelle Zauner’s memoir Crying in H Mart (2021) shows how ethnic grocery stores and restaurants are material spaces in which cultural memory is archived especially across generations. Similarly, Chithra Banerjee Divakaruni’s novel The Mistress of Spices (1997) showcases how food stores can offer healing and sanctuary for a community.

Modern Language Association sessio Los Angeles 

Staging Endings:Cultural Representations of Ageing, End of Life, and Care

This is a final call for papers for the Journal of Beat Studies' 14th volume, welcoming new and renewed contributions on any Beat Generation or Beat Generation-adjacent relevant subject (including the New York School, Black Mountain College, San Francisco Renaissance, Umbra Writers Workshop, etc.). The journal is interested in essays that reconsider familiar figures, recover overlooked ones, and explore the connections as well as any frictions between these overlapping scenes and their legacies.

The interdisciplinary field of Interactive Digital Narratives (IDNs) combines immersive technologies with the timeless art of storytelling. IDN offers transformative ways to engage audiences, preserve cultural heritage and address social and educational challenges. From branching narratives in video games, to immersive virtual reality experiences and interactive installations, IDNs push the boundaries of how stories can be created and experienced.

This roundtable seeks to put in conversation Blue Humanities from around the world, exploring how literature, cultural texts, and film can inform, reveal, or create new ideological perspectives on water. Informed by Blue Humanities, as well as a global movement to protect water’s right to flow and be free from pollution (Ecuador Constitution of 2008: Rights of Nature, Policy Brief: Water rights in Chile, Canada Water Act of 1985, among others), this timely roundtable connects directly with NeMLA’s 58th Annual Convention theme of Empowering Communities. As the theme specifies, cultural knowledge serves as a source of empowerment, and literature, cultural texts, and film are primary ways that cultural knowledge is shared amongst communities.

While the Gothic has long been associated with monsters, haunted houses, unstable hierarchies, and hidden knowledge, the servant's specific connections to the genre's core dynamics of space, affect, and plot have been critically undertheorized. Yet Gothic narratives fundamentally depend upon servant figures to produce narrative tension, mediate hidden knowledge, and expose the instability of domestic, social, and political order. This panel therefore positions the Gothic servant not as a supplementary character but as a central Gothic mechanism and epistemological problem worthy of scholarly attention and analysis.

The Ralph Waldo Emerson Society invites proposals for a panel on “Emerson and Poetry” at the American Literature Association’s 38th Annual Conference, to be held May 26–29, 2027, in Boston at the Westin Copley Place, 10 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA 02116.In “Circles” (1841), Emerson describes “the poet” as a representative seer who breaks the reader’s “whole chain of habits” while opening up new possibilities.

Consuming US Popular Culture: Media Aesthetics, Ethics and Literacy

Virtual Conference | 27–28 November 2026

Postcolonial thinking has often been defined by questions of cosmopolitan and pluralist living in the decolonizing world: through figurations of exile and unrootedness (Edward Said, Eqbal Ahmad), poetics of identity, hybridity, and relation (Frantz Fanon, Homi Bhabha, and Édouard Glissant), intimacies across racial and colonial differences (Lisa Lowe, Leela Gandhi, Rahul Rao), or the territorial and planetary entrapments of multiculturalism and globalization (Rey Chow, Sylvia Wynter, Gayatri Spivak). We ask, how do postcolonial and subaltern subjects excluded by global elites make claims of cosmopolitan (non/)belonging?

 Society for Reformation Research (SRR) welcomes 20 minute papers across the disciplines for our four Virtual Sessions at the 62nd Medieval Congress May 13-15, 2027. Focus on the Long Reformation (medieval roots to current iterations).

Sessions are:

CALL FOR BOOK CHAPTERS:

Indian Knowledge Systems:

Foundations, Frameworks, and Continuity

Concept Note

Bengal as a cultural, social, and analytical territorial space carries a series of nuances that bear, directly and indirectly, on the processes of identity formation. While these processes may be read as organic phenomena in pre-colonial and undivided Bengal, they became a prominent aspect of colonial and national identity politics in post-Partition Bengal. This volume explores the spectrum of such processes as they unfold across the transition from the pre-colonial to the post-colonial cultural and political history of Bengal, from the eighteenth century to the present.

As human rights institutions and legal frameworks are discredited, defunded, dismantled, and openly ignored across multiple national contexts, the question of what literature has to do with rights returns with new urgency. This moment demands new ways of thinking about these problems. This seminar responds by turning to the many literary traditions from the Global South and postcolonial contexts in which writers have narrated human rights and personhood on their own cultural terms and grounds.

The National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions' Journal of Collective Bargaining in the Academy, is an open-access, peer-reviewed, online periodical advancing research and scholarly thought related to collective bargaining and other issues in higher education, and making relevant and pragmatic peer-reviewed research readily accessible.

We invite submissions to participate in two free events organized and coordinated by the ‘Senses and Society’ Thematic Group (TG07) of the International Sociological Association and hosted by the Sociology Department of National University of Singapore (NUS). A vibrant and multicultural city like Singapore offers a highly suitable location for a conference and graduate workshop that seeks to engage with new and exciting scholarship on sensory approaches to embodied practices, urban experience, tourism, heritage, mobilities, food cultures, and more.

Over the past two decades, the environmental humanities have profoundly reshaped our understanding of oceans, rivers, and other aquatic environments. Simultaneously, Gothic studies have increasingly turned toward maritime spaces, revealing the sea not merely as a sublime backdrop but as a haunted archive where colonial violence, environmental catastrophe, and spectral histories continually return. This seminar proposes a dialogue between Blue Humanities and the Gothic by examining how oceans, rivers, and littoral zones emerge as spaces of haunting in world literature.

56TH ANNUAL COLLEGE ENGLISH ASSOCIATION CONFERENCE
CEA 2027/GATEWAYS
WESTIN HOTEL/ST. LOUIS, MO.
APRIL1-3,2027

CONFERENCE THEME:GATEWAYS
PAPERS ON GENERAL TOPICS ALSO WELCOMED

For its 2027 annual conference,the College English Association (CEA) invites proposals for papers and panels that explore the theme of “Gateways” and their significance in literature, criticism, and pedagogy.

While the purpose-built playhouses of early modern London – such as the Globe, Rose, and Blackfriars – dominate histories of early modern performance, theatrical activity frequently spilled out into non-dedicated, non-purpose-built sites. Command performances often took place at the royal court or on country estates, while the evidence for London playing companies on tour compiled by projects such as Records of Early English Drama (REED) has unveiled a rich regional theatre history in guildhalls, chapels, inn yards, open streets, and even the deck of an East India Company ship. Performance in early modern England was profoundly adaptable.

In the introduction to the Fourth Edition of The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Valerie Smith emphasize the imitativeness of literature—Black literature, specifically. To them, literature begets newer literature. At the same time, readers have traced formal patterns of repetition and imitation in Black literature across centuries, dating back to the antebellum.

The Art of Chaos

A Transdisciplinary Conference

Conference Dates: December 2-3, 2026
Location: Online
Proposal Deadline: November 1, 2026
Conference Fee: £100

Conference Webpage: https://labrc.co.uk/2026/08/13/the-art-of-chaos/

" In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order."
— C.G. Jung

In recent decades, the scientific search for extraterrestrial life has undergone a significant conceptual transformation. Earlier astrobiological research largely focused on identifying environments similar to those on Earth—particularly the presence of water and organic molecules—as indicators that life might exist elsewhere in the universe. Increasingly, however, scientists recognize that truly alien life may not resemble terrestrial biology at all. Rather than searching only for “life as we know it,” astrobiologists now explore the possibility that organisms could arise from unfamiliar biochemical systems, rely on alternative solvents, or take forms that challenge our current definitions of life.This shift has important cultural implications.

Gender and Fragmentation in the Fin de Siècle 

Nineteenth Century Gender Studies Special Issue – Summer 2027

Guest Edited by Emily Waller Singeisen and Ryan Carroll

As part of the 54th annual Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture, the Charles Olson Society invites papers on the theme of “Black Mountain Poetry and the Arts.” Working amidst the rich, interdisciplinary atmosphere of Black Mountain College and The Black Mountain Review, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, and many others developed their conceptions of projectivist poetics in tandem with colleagues in painting, music, and dance. As multimedia events like the first “Happening,” which featured poetry by Olson, readings by M.C.

In his book, Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species (2016), Neel Ahuja’s theory of “the body as a transitional theater of imperial warfare” explores how the control of human and nonhuman bodies proliferated the expansion of empire over the 19th century to the present. Despite the growing hegemony of biomedical control, there have always been and continue to be significant moments of resistance and agency in which marginalized (colonized/Indigenous) communities have challenged or reformulated/redefined the concepts of body, disease, and health.