Sapphic Echoes: Representations of Female Love and Desire in Literature and the Visual Arts
Sapphic Echoes: Representations of Female Love and Desire in Literature and the Visual Arts
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Sapphic Echoes: Representations of Female Love and Desire in Literature and the Visual Arts
Humanists love to hate the state, perhaps now more than ever. Negativity toward the state is de rigueur in the humanities and Trump's version of the white supremacist fascist state in many ways manifests critical theory’s darkest visions. But as democratic institutions in the US and around the world come under increasing attack, as civil servants are fired and authoritarianism rises, it is time to take stock of the limits of state negativity. How can we imagine and theorize the state outside the dark horizon that looms ever more heavily upon us?
C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists
2026 Conference | 12–14 March 2026 | Cincinnati, Ohio
“To Give Them All A Welcome To Our Shores”:
Immigrant Voices and Advocates in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals
organized by the Margaret Fuller Society
Modernism upturned the critical as well as the artistic conventions, spanning the
period from the last quarter of the 19th century in France and from 1890 in Great Britain and
Germany to the start of the Second World War. The feeling that a new start ought to be made,
in politics and society as much as in art, was accentuated by the War and its immediate
aftermath. In the opening phase of the modern movement the centre was Europe. Partly as a
result of the political disorder and the discarding of Modernism by the Bolshevik regime in
the Soviet Union, it tended to move westward; and America’s social and technological
modernity also matched the art’s novelty. We are still influenced by modernism, and
Editors: Arpan Mitra (Ph.D. Research Scholar, St. Xavier’s University) and Dr. Bidisha Kantha (Assistant Professor of English, Xavier Law School, St. Xavier’s University, Kolkata)
Publisher: DeGruyter Brill has expressed initial interest in this collection
Every recipe has an origin story. Much like a legendary superhero, cunning villain, or even the kernel of an idea behind a compelling pop culture conference paper or book chapter, each dish carries a narrative infused with creativity, nostalgia, or transformation. Reflecting this spirit, we ask you: what recipe mirrors your own unique PopCRN origin story?
Symposium Date: September 25, 2025
Symposium Location: McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario
Deadline for Abstracts: August 1, 2025
Notification of Decisions by: August 15, 2025
Black literatures of African and African American authors set in the twentieth century share cross-cultural realities. These continental literatures have explored topics such as segregation, colonialism, post-colonial disillusionment, civil and political underrepresentation, migration, economic recession, capitalism, racism, double consciousness, and others. This panel seeks essays that explore, using a comparative lens, a new perspective of the connections between these two continental Black authors, cultures, and topics.
Submit an abstract between 200-300 words and a 100-word bio through the CFP link. View Session
The proliferation of technologies such doorbell cameras, 24/7 livestreams, and smart home devices such as Google Nest have shifted the activity of surveillance from one of top-down omnipotent observation to personalized amateur recording, often produced by the same people who are captured by the camera. Images from these techniques of observation have a reach that far extends their nominal usage for home security, as these videos are publicly distributed on platforms such as YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, and Facebook. The construction of the activity of surveillance as something accomplishable by any amateur asks us to consider what remains constant from other historical situations visual observation and what has changed in the early 21st century.
The history of literature is also the history of the evolution of the technologies used to produce, distribute, and consume it. The appearance of new technologies and media affecting traditional understandings of reading and of the object “book” is welcomed by some as the sign of literature’s inherent vitality and innovation, and perceived by others as a threat. Kathleen Fitzpatrick argues that the anxieties generated by the emergence of new digital technologies since the postwar era are rooted in the conception of the book as a symbol of a vestigial order of which literary critics and scholars consider themselves masters and protectors.
We seek panelists for Northeast MLA 2026, "Respuestas ciudadanas a las crisis en la España del siglo XXI"
Conference Details
57th NeMLA Annual Convention, March 5 - 8, 2026, Pittsburgh, PA. Visit https://www.nemla.org/convention/future.html for more details.
Modality
In Person Only: The session will be held fully in person at the hotel. No remote presentations will be included.
Submissions and Deadline
The Routledge Handbook of AI and Language Learning
Call for Chapter Proposals (Updated)
Proposal Submission Deadline: Aug. 31, 2025
Editor: Weixiao Wei
Contact: wwei21@CougarNet.UH.EDU
We are pleased to announce that we have recruited some proposals for The Routledge Handbook of AI and Language Learning. To further strengthen the volume, we are now seeking additional contributions in two critical and rapidly evolving areas within the intersection of artificial intelligence and language education.
Call for Book Chapters
Portrayals of the Fourth of July in American Culture and Literature:
Reimagining American Identity at USA 250
Zines and STS: The Remix
CFP: Media Futures
The Velvet Light Trap, Issue 98 (to be published Fall 2026)
Globally, we are experiencing a moment of heightened anxiety surrounding work and discussions about sex, eroticism, bodies/pleasures, identity, and desire, among many other topics. Indeed, scholars and researchers focused on the erotic often grapple with the label and association of “dirty work,” described as “occupational tasks and jobs that were ‘physically, socially or morally’ tainted” (224). Coined by Everette Hughes (1962), this term has been applied to research on sex and sexuality, as well as other subjects that may provoke controversy. Louisa Allen (2019) utilized the term “dirty work” to address the frustrations involved in publishing images of penises in scholarship related to sex education.
Date- September 2nd to 5th, 2025
Location- Online
Call for Papers
Twenty-fourth Claflin University Conference on English and Language Arts Pedagogy in Secondary and Postsecondary Institutions (In-person on the campus of Claflin University) *
October 29-30, 2025
THEME: CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE TEACHING IN HIGHER EDUCATION AND SECONDARY SCHOOLS
Wednesday, October 29, 2025, 9:15 AM—6:15 PM Concurrent sessions
4 PM EST Plenary Session 1: “Culturally responsive teaching in higher education and secondary schools”
Discover Global Society: Call for Papers – Streaming Media: The Technology, Content, Stakeholders, and its Global Reception
Springer Nature is launching a new series of open-access journals, including the journal Discover Global Society, which was launched in 2023. Currently, Discover Global Society is indexed in DOAJ and Scopus with a CiteScore 2024 of 0.4.
Plí invites submissions for its 37th volume:Gender, Sexuality, Feminisms and Women’s Studies in the History of Philosophy
Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy invites submissions for its thirty-eighth issue, which will explore how questions of gender and sexuality (and, more broadly, Women’s Studies and Feminisms) intersect with the History of Philosophy. We welcome original research articles that engage with any philosophical and literary period or tradition, as long as they advance our understanding of the historical entanglements between intellectual thought and lived, gendered experience.
AATSEEL 2026: New Orleans, LA - February 19-22 (Sheraton New Orleans)
When taking stock of the figures that dominated late Soviet popular culture, one would be remiss not to mention Cheburashka, Vinni-Pukh, and the Bremen Town Musicians alongside the likes of Alla Pugacheva and Viktor Tsoi. Animation represented a massive undertaking in the Soviet Union, with state funded animation studios found across republics. Both viewers and scholars alike have been drawn to Soviet animation’s diversity in style and ability to address what scholars such as Larissa Tumanov have termed a “dual audience” of children and adults, often concealing more subversive messages behind an innocent storyline.
“To be or not to be”—Hamlet’s timeless question of existence—resonates with a gendered undertone that continues to echo through literature and culture. This panel asks a related question: what does it mean to be (or not to be) a man, and how do literary texts help illuminate that question across genres, periods, and geographies?
Photography / Intensity / Measure
Call for Book Chapters
Romance-epics and chivalric romances not only shed light on the societies (local, regional, and global) in which they were produced, they also inform us of those who kept them at the forefront of their national backbone. These texts are sites of religious performance in which devotional prayers and rituals, as well as discussions of spiritual matters (like conversion and apostasy) are brought to the forefront. This session aims to consider how these poets understood and presented the performance of their faith – and of the non-Catholic faiths – that their subjects (and perhaps they themselves) encountered.
The political theorist Carl Schmitt has left us a rich, yet complicated legacy. He is one of the most studied legal minds of 20th-century Europe, but debates continue to rage about both his personal and political affiliations. Although many have delved into the past to explore Schmitt's life, few have paused to evaluate Schmitt's own relationship with the past.
South Atlantic Modern Language Association conference, November 6 - 8, 2025, Atlanta, GA.
Call for Papers: Forms of Suffering: Literary Tragedy in an Age of Political Violence
This panel seeks to explore the evolving nature of literary tragedy in response to the escalating political violence witnessed across the Globe. We invite submissions that examine how contemporary literature deals with these crises and, in turn, how the tragic genre itself is undergoing transformation.
We are looking for papers that delve into various aspects of this intersection, including but not limited to:
The representation of political violence and its human cost in contemporary tragic narratives.
Witch Studies and Translation Studies are both relatively young fields within the western academic canon. Practical and theoretical connections exist between them: for example, the ritualization of praxis, the cultural embeddedness of (re)generative act, and the tensions present within the sequence of intention, act, and consequence. The modern witch may mark time with celebrations within the Wheel of the Year, protect her home and her body with amulets and incantations, or treat her loved ones with herbal remedies. This roundtable conceptualizes witchcraft as a set of personal practices and acts, separate from organized deity worship, structured coven associations, and other markers of formal practice.
ICMS 2026, Session 7572
This session seeks to examine the misuses and misapplications of the medieval within any fictional media from 1974 forward. Sometimes, accessibility to contemporary audiences requires deviation from what is known to scholarship; sometimes, narrative demands impose changes to particular interpretations of source material. Sometimes, however, things are flatly wrong. Effects on audiences differ, but it is clear that many audiences and authors use contemporary fiction as a means to understand earlier periods. This session seeks to explore what they get right, what they get less right, and why it matters to our ongoing understanding of the belief about the medieval.