“Culture,” notes Raymond Williams, “is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language” (87). Its etymological root in cultivation—the tending and propagation of life—signals a resistance to being contained. Classroom pedagogy encompasses various elements into it—mythology, rituals, religion, tradition; movies, songs, literature; fashion, food, art—classifying it as ‘a whole way of life.’ Yet, culture surpasses being merely a way of life; it represents a way of understanding life and saturating existence with meaning. In the 19th Century, Matthew Arnold viewed culture as a framework supporting liberal humanist ideology, which aimed to prescribe a universal definition of excellence.

The Lives and Memory of Objects

Editors Marta Caraion, Arleen Ionescu, Mirta Kupferminc and Simona Mitroiu

Call for Papers

Bloomsbury Cultural Histories Series

A Cultural History of Countercultures in the Long-Nineteenth Century

Volume Editors:

Rhi Johnson (Indiana University Bloomington)

Gabrielle Miller (Baylor University)

Although the term “counterculture” is a recent development, tracing back only to the 1970s, cultural

movements and ideals that reject established social values and practices, or that oppose traditional,

Conference Dates: 23-24 October 2026

Format: Online (via ZOOM)

International, interdisciplinary conference titled:

Healing Narratives: Exploring Humanity in Medicine and Healthcare

Journal Submissions: Indiana English deadline for submissions: May 30, 2027 full name / name of organization: Indiana English (Indiana College English Association) contact email: zimmerlys@uindy.edu 

Call for Papers

The Silences of the Lyric

« The best communion men have is in silence »

Thoreau, Walden

In-Person Seminar at American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) in Houston, TX, May 20-23, 2027.

Dreaming Our Futures, the 3rd Annual Trans* Association of Ireland Symposium, will take place at Mary Immaculate College, Limerick on November 20 and 21st 2026.

Our keynote speaker is poet and activist-scholar, Dr Nat Raha. Dr Raha’s work focuses on transfeminism, LGBTQ+ genders and sexualities, practices and collectives of care and social reproduction, racial capitalism and decolonization, and critical theory. Her work spans across poetry, print cultures, art, politics, liberation movements and hi(r)story. She is the co-author of Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds (2024) with Mijke van der Drift. 

The symposium will be free to attend virtually and in-person. 

The Tenth Faulkner Studies in the UK Colloquium

The Time Has Come: William Faulkner, James Baldwin, and American Modernity

May 1st and 2nd, 2027

Online via Zoom

With keynote addresses by

Professor Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman

(author of Millennial Style: The Politics of Experiment in Contemporary African Diasporic Culture [2024])

and

Professor Douglas Field

(author of Walking in the Dark: James Baldwin, My Father, and Me [2024])

The American Literature Association will hold a symposium on “Music and the American Literary Imagination” in Nashville, TN (January 28-30, 2027), and the Robert Frost Society seeks proposals for papers on Frost and music. Topics might include 

-new readings of Frost poems explicitly about music

-Frost’s interest in musical notation, meter, intonation, voice, pitch, timbre

-Frost's uses of musical forms

-Frost’s poems about thrushes, ovenbirds, brooks, and other musicians of the nonhuman world 

-Frost’s references to (e.g. metaphors drawing on) music, sound, or voice

-Frost and sound studies, recitation, performance, audio recordings

-musical settings of or responses to Frost’s poems

Penn State will host the Global Asias 8 Conference in spring 2027. Sponsored by the Global Asias Initiative (GAI) and the Department of Asian Studies, GA8 complements the work of the award-winning journal Verge: Studies in Global Asias and the Global Asias: Method, Architecture, Praxis book series. By bringing into relation work in Asian studies, Asian American studies, and Asian diaspora studies, these Global Asias projects cover Asia and its diasporas, East to West, across and around the Pacific, from a variety of humanistic perspectives—anthropology, art history, literature, history, sociology, and political science—to develop comparative analyses that recognize Asia’s place(s) in the development of global culture and history.

Texas Association for Asian American Diaspora Studies (TAAADS) contact email: taaadscollab@gmail.com 

The Call for Papers for the Texas Association for Asian American Diaspora Studies (TAAADS) 2027 conference, taking place February 19-20 2027 at the University of Texas, Austin, is now live!

The full CFP is available at https://tinyurl.com/TAAADS-2027.

By the time he passed away at the age of 90, British filmmaker Peter Watkins had cemented his legacy as one of the preeminent media scholars of the late-20th and early 21st centuries. Over the course of eight decades, Watkins’ oeuvre represented unrelenting interventions in an industry that was repeatedly acquiescing to the profit motive. Among the themes explored in the director’s work are war (The War Game) and revolution (La Commune). Within these films, his most common approach was the pseudo-documentary. This format helped Watkins combat what he viewed as the passivity that was the dominant mode of discourse in media.

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

THE W. FRANKLIN EVANS REVIEW
Inaugural Fall 2026 Issue

Theme: Leadership, Legacy, and Transformation

The W. Franklin Evans Honors College at Voorhees University invites undergraduate and graduate students from colleges and universities worldwide to submit original work for the inaugural Fall 2026 issue of The W. Franklin Evans Review: A Peer-Reviewed, Refereed Journal of Student Leadership, Scholarship, and Creative Expression.

The journal provides an international platform for emerging scholars, leaders, writers, artists, and creators whose work examines leadership, service, innovation, identity, resilience, ethical decision-making, legacy, and positive social transformation.

The 12th International Conference on Languages, Linguistics, Translation and Literature is organized by different universities and research centers.

The conference will be dedicated to current issues of linguistics, languages, dialects, literature and translation.

All are cordially invited to present their research regarding current issues of linguistics, languages, dialects, literature and translation in English, Arabic or Persian.

Call for Papers

ALFRED HITCHCOCK

Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)

48th Annual Conference, February 17-20, 2027

Marriott Albuquerque

Albuquerque, New Mexico

https://swpaca.org

Submissions open: September 1, 2026

Proposal submission deadline: October 31, 2026

Overview

MVSA 2027 

Detection: Exploring, Innovating Locating, Uncovering

(April 1-3, 2027, Minneapolis, MN)

Dystopian literature is replete with examples of both individuals who resist and communities of resilience and resistance which model values and activities that stand in contrast to and in spite of the dystopian settings of the story. This panel seeks to bring together critical investigations of dystopian literature which attempt to bring to the fore lessons that can be learned to help us (re)imagine just communities amidst a world of political, economic and ecological decline and regression.

Mode of Presentation: Hybrid: The session will be held in-person but a few remote presentations may be included.

Medieval and Early Modern People and their Things

People perceive the world and their place in it through interacting with objects. Through these subject-object relationships, people experience the potential of materials, both naturally sourced and manmade, as physical resources that can be perceived. A number of concerns arise with the use of these materials amidst acts of meaning-making. How do people use subject-object relationships in negotiating their treatment of objects to define their world views? To innovate new ways of engaging with and replicating the world around them? And how does that process continue to influence how we create future realities for ourselves and others?

While Indigenous literary studies has grown substantially over the past several decades, comparative approaches that place Indigenous texts, traditions, and intellectual frameworks in conversation with one another remain relatively rare. Too often, Indigenous texts are incorporated into comparative, world, or global literary frameworks without meaningful engagement with Indigenous studies scholarship, or are read primarily through the organizing categories of nation, region, empire, or postcoloniality. This seminar seeks to create a space for comparative Indigenous literary inquiry that centers Indigenous texts, epistemologies, and methods on their own terms.

How do we study reading practices of the modernist era? After the development of what Richard Altick (1957) famously called the “democracy of print” in the nineteenth century, and the move toward mass literacy in the Anglophone world, how did  the act of reading and readership get transformed? Virginia Woolf’s 1926 essay, “How Should One Read a Book?” called reading the “most arduous and exhausting of occupations” and made the case for a discerning reader who would give the writer the “benefit of every doubt.” While the modernist era championed close reading with the evolution of New Criticism and I.A.

“That is the exploration that awaits you. Not mapping stars and studying nebulae, but charting the unknown possibilities of existence.”
– Q to Jean-Luc Picard. From Star Trek – The Next Generation, “All Good Things” (Season 7, Episode 25)

AACS 2027: Archipelagic Sovereignties

In June 2027, we invite you to join us on Gadigal Country at the University of Sydney for the Australian Association for Caribbean Studies (AACS) conference, organised by the Discipline of English and Writing and the United States Studies Centre (USSC), and held from the 10th to the 12th of June, 2027. AACS conferences are interdisciplinary, and papers on all topics relating to the Caribbean are considered, including from the natural sciences.

For 2027, we invite presenters to explore archipelagic sovereignties.