The Doris Lessing Society, an allied organization of the MLA, invites proposals for the two 2026 MLA sessions; for details of the Calls, see below:

                                               Calls for Paper for the 2026 MLA Convention (01/08--01/11/2026)

1       Doris Lessing the Storyteller: Literature and Social Change

The goal is to explore the ways in which Lessing uses fiction for social transformation through the elaboration and dissemination of knowledge, e.g., self-education, constructing knowledge, questioning moral/political values, and the relationship to language.

Deadline for submissions: Sunday, 23 March 2025

Call for Papers

The ATHE Theory & Criticism Focus Group seeks papers for its annual Graduate Student Essay Contest.

The contest presents an exciting opportunity for an emergent theatre and performance studies scholar. It introduces the winning writer to the ATHE conference and provides them with a venue in which to showcase their work. 

The contest prizes are intended to support the development of the student’s academic work, ease financial challenges related to conference attendance, and connect the student with appropriate scholarly resources for the paper’s development and impact. 

The winning scholar will receive: 

ACQL General Call for Papers: 2025 ONLINE Conference 

Founded in 1975 in the wake of Canada’s official ratification of multiculturalism, the Association for Canadian and Québec Literatures has, over more than 45 years, emerged as Canada’s premier association for showcasing multilingual and transnational research in Canadian and Québec literatures. 

This year, ACQL will host its annual conference ONLINE between Friday, May 23rd and Sunday, May 25th.

We invite potential participants to submit NEW proposals in English or in French on research, teaching, and professional matters of relevance to current or prospective members. 

We are thrilled to announce an open call for submissions for 'Voices Unbound', a new poetry anthology that seeks to celebrate the diverse, vibrant, and transformative power of poetry. Whether you are an emerging voice or an established poet, we invite you to share your work and contribute to this collective tapestry of human experience.

 Website: https://sites.google.com/view/freshwordsmagazine/home

In his Poetics, Aristotle famously distinguishes poetry from history, claiming that “the distinction between historian and poet is not in the one writing prose and the other verse…it consists really in this, that the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be.” Yet despite their different intentions, history has continued to remain a subject of drama from Aristotle’s time until the present day, often serving to enact the tension between truth and believability in order to highlight the often porous boundary between fact and fiction. This session will explore the depiction of historical subjects on the stage in theatrical works originating from any time period.

This panel, "Of Monsters and Mothers: Challenging Representations and Theories of Maternity in Literature," seeks to explore how literature complicates, subverts, and redefines conventional understandings of motherhood. From monstrous maternal figures to radical reimaginings of care, the maternal body has long been a contested site of power, anxiety, and transformation in literary texts. We invite interdisciplinary perspectives that engage with literature across historical periods and genres, drawing from feminist, psychoanalytic, postcolonial, disability, and queer theories to interrogate the intersections of motherhood, agency, and monstrosity.

Sponsored by the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, the University of Virginia’s College at Wise Medieval-Renaissance Conference promotes scholarly discussion in all disciplines of Medieval and Renaissance studies.

Seeking chapters about Asian films featuring transgender themes as part of a global survey for The Handbook of Trans Cinema. We already have over 50 confirmed chapters by prominent scholars exploring trans films from 6 continents, including chapters devoted to Bangladesh, China, Hong Kong, India, Iran, Japan, Pakistan, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam. We welcome the following high-priority chapters on Asian films: 

In her artist statement for Along the River of Spacetime (2020), a virtual reality “activation” of Anishinaabe star knowledge, scholar, artist, and video game designer Elizabeth LaPensée (Irish, Métis, Anishinaabe) described the ways in which Anishinaabe cosmologies anticipated a series of experiments carried out by CERN's Large Hadron Collider, the world's most advanced particle accelerator.

This panel seeks presentations on uses of generative AI in the college classroom, with a particular focus on approaches that combine theory and practice. Especially welcome are presentations that are built around transferable skills and activities/assignments in different disciplines including writing and literature.

The panel will take place during the MMLA's annual convention from November 14-16 on the campus of Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. For more informationa about the organization and the conference, see: https://www.luc.edu/mmla/convention/futureconventionplans/

This panel explores how fire and fossil fuels shape modernity and modernisms, focusing on literature, art, and culture beyond 1850. Papers may explore intersections of:

• Environmental and energy humanities 
• Extractivism, petroculture, infrastructure
• Anthropocene, Pyrocene, energy unconscious 
• Fire, fire suppression, thermal politics 
• Aesthetics, identity, materiality

Please submit 250-word abstracts to Jennie Sekanics at jennie-sekanics@uiowa.edu or Harry Stecopoulos at harilaos-stecopoulos@uiowa.edu. 

While revising Between the Acts in 1940, Virginia Woolf edited her drafts to reinforce the disruptive wartime shifts in food culture triggered by the Second World War: the novel notes a particular wariness for rationed beef and mutton, references the interwar freedom of easily obtaining bacon and oil, and suggests the indulgence of sugar consumption. The modernist moment saw a variety of such shifts in the alimentary, from increased industrialization and food processing to a more gastronomic turn to the realities of wartime food rationing that Woolf and others chart.

Language, Literature, and Interdisciplinary Studies (LLIDS), an open-access peer-reviewed academic e-journal, invites original and unpublished, interdisciplinary, research papers and book reviews from various interrelated disciplines including, but not limited to, literature, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, history, sociology, law, ecology, environmental science, and economics.

Cinema’s First Epics in Focus:

Silent Epic Film from Literary Adaptation to Contemporary Epic Narratives