“WE ARE THE ECOSEXUALS. The Earth is our lover.”  — Beth Stephens & Annie Sprinkle, The Ecosex Manifesto

The Graduate Students of the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University are proud to announce our biennial conference, to be held on April 17–18, 2026. We are pleased to host keynote speaker Heather Davis (The New School). 

Thoreau Annual Gathering, July 8-12, 2026

Ralph Waldo Emerson Society

“Give Me Health and a Day”: Emerson and Health, Illness, and Unity

Call for Papers

Ege University
20th Cultural Studies Symposium
“AI & Cultural Production”
6–8 May 2026 | Faculty of Letters, Izmir, Türkiye

Artificial Intelligence has distinctly shifted from being a technological tool to a shaping factor in present-day cultural practices. Ranging from AI-related literature, music, and visual arts to AI-enabled storytelling, translation, and co-creative practices, AI confronts traditional concepts of authorship, creativity, agency, and responsibility. Furthermore, AI raises critical moral and political considerations with respect to power, bias, labour, and representation.

A Two-dayInternational Conference 

Plates of Memory, Palates of Change: Memory, Identity, Community, and Millennial Transformations

28–29 March 2026

Call For Papers

The purpose of this issue is to understand the experiences and practices of people living in different geographical contexts. If someone believes that Christianity caused conflict and wars throughout history, this issue suggests that understanding each other's experiences and practices can promote harmony, especially in Asian and Western contexts. The integration of diverse thoughts benefits the well-being of the world. This issue will not only provide a platform to engage with such religious harmony but also serve as a valuable resource for researchers in understanding different experiences and practices.

American Literature Association

May 20-23, 2026

Palmer House, Chicago, IL 

The Richard Wright Society announces two sessions on Wright to take place at the 37th Annual American Literature Association Conference.

Rethinking Richard Wright’s Depiction and Analysis of Gender and Sexuality

Motherhood Unbound: Global Pathways of Motherhood Across Cultures and Disciplines

Call for Papers for the International Conference on “Reading Disruptions, Mapping Alterities: of Australian Trans-Tendings, and India in an Age of Reimagined Plurilaterals” to be held on 03.02.26-04.02.26

We are seeking chapter proposals for The Routledge Companion to the Posthuman in Literature and Culture. This new interdisciplinary volume seeks to foreground the representation of the posthuman: as a figure that often appears within certain genres (eg New Weird Fiction, Solarpunk, Autofiction), as an image deployed by specific authors and filmmakers (eg Nnedi Okorafor, Kazuo Ishiguro, Alex Garland), as a discourse that supports the proliferation of “studies” within academia (eg Animal Studies, Surveillance Studies, Affect Studies), and as a growing presence in college classrooms around the world.

Update: This year's keynote speaker is Camille Owens. Owens is assistant professor of English at McGill University. Her research focuses on the intersection of race, ableism, and childhood in the nineteenth-century United States. Her book, Like Children: Black Prodigy and the Measure of the Human in America (NYU Press, 2024), was 2025 Choice Outstanding Academic Title and received an honourable mention from the MLA in the William Sanders Scarborough Prize competition.

"There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses." —Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality

The inconclusive debates, the conflict of opinion, that this seminar aims to initiate and proliferate are about how body, culture, and plurality – three expansive and yet profound concepts – constellate, collapse and collide in varying registers that are both founded and unpredictable. The frames of our studies across disciplines are left in motion; the figures of understanding about how culture and the body and the bodies of culture in relation to plurality struggle to stay entrenched, occupy and distract us.

CCLA – Fantastical Constellation Working Group Call for Proposals

CCLA Annual Conference / Colloque annuel de l’ACLC

The Fantastical Constellation Working Group invites proposals for a panel or round table topic, “Entangled Futures: Interstitial Fantasies from the Periphery,” as part of the Canadian Comparative Literature Association Annual Conference, 8-10 June 2026, hosted by the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at McGill University in Montréal.

SILENCE &—

What is silence? Might it be a gaping void or a buzzy medium—the absence

CFP for chapter contributions to book edited by the “VR as Empathy Machine: Media, Migration and theHumanitarian Predicament” Research Group at Utrecht University 

Book Title: Beyond the Empathy Machine: Critical Perspectives on Virtual Reality

The Cultural Studies Cell

Department of English and Cultural Studies

CHRIST (Deemed to be University) Bangalore

in collaboration with

Department of English 

Panihati Mahavidyalya

Organizes

A Symposium on 

Raymond Williams’ Keywords at 50

Dates: February 12-14, 2026

In the sociology of knowledge, some scholars argue that human memory can only function within a collective context (Halbwachs, 1968/2018). Others place the search for knowledge within the discipline of genealogy (Foucault, 2022; Mendoza, 2024). Qualitative research, on the other hand, is where sociology and philosophy intersect (Silverman, 2020; Adorno, 2022; Adorno, 1976). Genealogy, in the context of this volume, refers to the ancestry or history of a discipline, profession, or people (Haley, 1976/2021; Martin, 2016; Nietzsche, 1887/2022).  The advent of the Fourth Industrial Revolution has brought about change and continuity in qualitative research (Jung, 2019; Mosweu, 2025).

“Childhood in the Meantime: Interrupting Temporalities of Youth”

American Studies Association, Chicago, Oct. 22-25, 2026

The Children and Youth Studies Caucus seek panelists for a session entitled “Childhood in the Meantime: Interrupting Temporalities of Youth” for the American Studies Association 2026 meeting. We seek papers that consider the multiple temporalities that children are expected to inhabit: normative developmental timelines, trajectories oriented toward futures that adhere to the state-sanctioned scripts for proper adult citizenship, and culturally-accepted deviations of “sideways growth” that can ultimately be assimilated into dominant narratives of childhood presents and futures.

Queer and minor audiovisual practices increasingly challenge the assumption that any form of visibility offers a reliable route to recognition or to political and evidentiary clarity. This panel asks how, rather than treating visibility or audibility as stable states, we might attend to the ways vocal fabulations, relational and spatial practices of telling, and imaginative or speculative interventions unsettle the evidentiary burdens traditionally placed on marginalized histories. In other words, we are interested in forms that make presence felt without fully disclosing it, and in the tensions that emerge when bodies, voices, images, and testimonies exceed the representational frames built to contain them.

The historical relationship between Muslims and Christians dates back to the seventh century C.E., when Islam began to spread throughout the Middle East, Africa, and the Indian subcontinent; by the early eighth century, parts of Europe were under Muslim control. Consequently, this Special Issue seeks to understand Christian–Muslim interactions over the centuries. Recent studies of Syriac texts reveal early interactions between Christians and Muslims, the beginning of centuries of Christian–Muslim dialogues, debates, and perspectives that continue into the present day.

CALL FOR PAPERS

The First Transdisciplinary Forum on Art, Culture, History, and Theory

May 2026, Online 

The Global Forum on Art, Culture, History, and Theory (ACHT) hosted by Kaarnamaa Institute of Art and Visual Culture invites submissions.  

Call for Proposals for Vol. 4, Issue 1–Jackson & Animality [deadline extended: Feb. 1, 2026]

The Washington Irving Society (washingtonirvingsociety.org) invites papers discussing innovative ways to teach and/or research Washington Irving and his texts, for the American Literature Association Conference in Chicago, May 20-23, 2026. We welcome papers offering new insight into “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” and also encourage insightful studies into other Irving texts. Please send an abstract of approximately 250 words plus a brief bio to Dr.

INTERNATIONAL PSYCHOHISTORICAL ASSOCIATION’S 49th ANNUAL CONFERENCE

 MAY 29-31, 2026, VIRTUALLY ON ZOOM

THEME: Breaking Cycles of Violence: Psychohistorical Perspectives on Individual and Collective Healing

What Is This Conference About?

How do we break the cycles of violence — within ourselves, our families, and our societies — that perpetuate suffering across generations? What can psychohistory contribute to understanding and transforming these deep patterns? The 2026 IPhA Annual Conference invites scholars, clinicians, educators, and activists to explore these vital questions from both individual and collective perspectives.