“What is Theory, and why are they saying such terrible things about it? (And who—if we indulge in paranoiac criticism—are ‘they’, anyway?) To take the second part of the question first, ‘they’ say terrible things about Theory because much of it is admittedly jargon-ridden and often appears incomprehensible. But also (and this is the uncharitable answer) because: (i) it takes considerable patience and effort to understand the ‘key’ essays, and most diatribes against Theory come from people unwilling to make that effort; and (ii) it destabilises authority over interpretation and authority is precisely what teachers (especially teachers of literary studies) seek to impose over texts, meanings, and readers.”

The theme for Volume 13 of Ceræ: An Australasian Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, as well as for our 3rd annual online Conference, is Fame and Fortune. 

We invite submissions to both the conference and the journal on this theme.

Full details can be found here: 2026 Ceræ Call For Papers – CERÆ: An Australasian Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies

The Sally Mitchell Dissertation Prize is awarded annually to the best Ph.D. dissertation, defended in the previous calendar year, that explores the British periodical press of the long nineteenth century (including magazines, newspapers, and serial publications of all kinds) as an object of study in its own right, not as a source of material for other historical topics. Winners of the prize receive a monetary award of $1,000 and a two-year membership to RSVP.

This guaranteed panel (in-person at the Modern Language Association in Los Angeles, California; January 7-10, 2027) takes a cue from the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of African American Humor Studies and seeks 250-word proposals that discuss how African American humorists eschew "just jokes" to articulate personal and collective selfhood and freedom. Please submit abstracts by Monday, March 16 to dmorgan@scu.edu. This panel is sponsored by the Screen Arts and Culture Committee.

Accepted presenters must be MLA members by April 1, 2026. 

C21 is inviting scholars and researchers to contribute book review essays for upcoming issues. We currently have a selection of titles published in 2025 available for review, spanning literary studies, film and media studies, cultural studies, and gender and sexuality studies. We invite prospective authors to submit ideas for review essays that discuss 2–3 recently published scholarly texts. For the full CFP, and to see our list of available titles, please visit: https://c21.openlibhums.org/news/923/.

Existing scholarship in Asian (North) American Literature has long examined travel narratives about Asian travelers within immigrant or diasporic paradigms: Sau-ling Wong famously establishes the Necessity/Extravagance framework in understanding transpacific mobility by early Asian American immigrants (1993), whereas Chih-ming Wang reads the autobiographical travelogues by diasporic Vietnamese American writers as “homecoming stories” (2013), and Patricia Chu interprets them as “return narratives” deploying acts of countermemory and postmemory to address racial melancholia (2019).

This year, the Center for 21st Century Studies aims to activate “Slow Care”—a practice that places deliberate attention on the beings, things, and sites, which together foster long-term visions of collective life across generations and communities of humans and non-humans, as well as ever-evolving technologies and ecologies. In line with this theme, the Digital Cultures Collaboratory are excited to announce the 4th event in its annual online symposium series, organised around the theme of “Time & Digital Relations.” 

2nd CISMA 2026: International Conference on Technology and Corpora in Discourse, Translation and Interpreting

Khazar University, in collaboration with Shanghai International Studies University (SISU), is pleased to announce the 2nd CISMA 2026 International Conference on Technology and Corpora in Discourse, Translation and Interpreting, which will be held on April 30, 2026, at Khazar University, Baku, Azerbaijan.

This special section of Whatever: A Transdisciplinary Journal of Queer Theories and Studies will function as a critical retrospective on Robert Eggers’s 2015 film The Witch. While much has been written on the film in relation to feminist theory, this special section seeks to excavate the queer possibilities of Eggers’s now iconic film. Taking a broad view of queer theory, we imagine queerness as that which challenges binaries and hierarchies. In this way, The Witch might be understood as queer in terms of the challenges it poses to heteronormative, patriarchal structures, as well as through its dismantling of the boundaries between self and other, human and animal, nature and culture.

Twelfth International Iris Murdoch Conference CFP University of Chichester, 14-16 August 2026: First Call for Papers The Twelfth International Conference on Iris Murdoch studies will take place at the University of Chichester in 2026. The conference will showcase ongoing, and published, Murdoch scholarship with a particular focus on ‘Influences and Inspirations’. Panels should not be confined by this focus, however, and all researchers currently working on Murdoch’s fiction, philosophy, theology, personal journals, letters and poetry – and/or the political and cultural significance of any of these ¬– are invited to submit proposals.

War leaves lasting marks not only on people and communities, but also on the natural world that witnesses, and endures, its violence. Long after the fighting has stopped, landscapes shaped by destruction remain living archives, bearing the aftereffects of conflict: damaged forests, polluted rivers and seas, and disrupted ecosystems that continue to hold its traces. These ‘trauma ecologies’ pass on the legacy of war from one generation to the next, forming what we call ‘environmental postmemory.’

Since September of 2025 the English Department at Carnegie Mellon University has housed a new publication called The Pittsburgh Review of Books (or PRoB), available at http://www.pghrev.com We are particularly interested in pieces by scholars that analyze or contextualize breaking news - be it political, cultural, or social events - that can be published quickly. 

Edited by author and Public Humanities Special Faculty Ed Simon, PRoB is a home for engaged, creative, and interdisciplinary cultural criticism and analysis across the humanities. The tone of the publication is similar to other para-academic publications intended for both specialists and a general audience. 

~Call for FULL Chapter:

Update: The manuscript is nearly finished however a planned chapter has fallen through. Replacement chapter needed immediately. Please review the details below and contact me: maureen.fadem@gmail.com

This is a call for chapters for The Routledge Research Companion to Toni Morrison, a new companion volume intended for a scholarly audience, as support for newer Morrison scholars approaching their research, as well as graduate students working on Morrison.

I am proposing two "Just In Time" sessions at the MLA Convention (January, Los Angeles) on reparations for empire. They are prompted by the passing of UN Resolution A/80/L.48 at the end of March. JIT session proposals can't be submitted until September, and I believe we hear in early November if the session is accepted and added to the convention program, or not. Also, you need to be a member of MLA to present.

Black Performing Arts: Sound, Movement, Image, Text

Submission Deadline: October 31, 2026

The Black Performing Arts Area provides a scholarly forum to share research pertaining to Black performance across expressive forms.  Broadly defined, the area focuses on all forms of performing and visual arts, including all musical genres, theatrical performance and performance art, performance elements in visual art, and connections between different Black expressive forms.  In all these contexts we are interested in investigating where aesthetic technique and embodiment merge across Black diasporic expressivity.

Human Creativity in the AI Era: New Horizons for Literature, Translation, and Linguistics

Faculty of Alsun – Fayoum University – Egypt

26–27 October 2026

Hybrid Conference (In-person & Online)

Conference Theme

Explore Shakespeare in a variety of media beyond traditional stage productions, including film, television, anime, manga, and recent novelizations of the plays. We have previously had papers on the following topics and invite new ideas all the time.

International, interdisciplinary conference titled:

Healing Narratives: Exploring Humanity in Medicine and Healthcare

In the realm of medicine and healthcare, narratives- whether spoken, written, visual, or performed- serve among others as powerful tools to humanize clinical experiences, challenge biomedical paradigms as well as foster empathy and understanding. These stories reveal the complex interplay between biological, psychological, social, cultural, and spiritual dimensions of health, illuminating the ways in which healing is intertwined with human dignity, identity, and societal values.

We are currently inviting abstracts for an upcoming Special Issue on “Reparation in Sinophone Literatures”. We are delighted that this issue will be guest-edited by Dr Tammy Lai-Ming Ho, Editor-in-Chief of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Honorary Researcher at the Richard Charles Lee Canada-Hong Kong Library at the University of Toronto, and former Senior Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Centre for Cultural Practices of Reparation (CURE), Saarland University.

The deadline for abstracts for this Special Issue is 15 October 2026, while full papers are expected by 28 February 2027.

Call for Papers

SAMLA 2026 Panel: Adapting Alice: Alice in Wonderland in the 21st Century Imagination 

SAMLA 98 (Thursday, November 5 - Saturday, November 7, 2026): Call for Abstracts

Link for Submissions: https://samla.ballastacademic.com/Home/S/19713 

What strategies can paper ephemera teach us in the digital age? This panel invites conversations by writing instructors, educators, poets, and artists exploring the work that happens at/within the margins of writing. Both literally and figuratively, we take an expansive scope to the term “margins,” imagining not only the writing that appears on the space of the printed page, but writing that would normally be scrapped, discarded, remixed, or ephemeralized. This can include digital ephemera, such as “disappearing” messages in Instagram or other communication services. At another angle: margins can also mean the liminality of writing, the furthermost edges of what’s often standard and visible.

This panel invites papers that offer provocative insights into the Korean concept of han (한/恨) across a wide range of cultural forms and genres. Echoing this year's conference theme, this panel asks: how might we recapture the magic of, and reinstill a sense of wonder and joy in, Asian Americanist work on han? Over the past decade, if not longer, han has arguably become one of the most revisited concepts among Korean American writers, artists, and thinkers. If these overlapping prisms of political, cultural, and academic representation have taught us anything, it is that han, at its best, is conceptually elusive.

We may imagine the act of hospitality benign: to open a door, to welcome another across a threshold, or to make an offer to a guest. Rooted in such acts, however, is an ethics of how we engage with another, whether friend or stranger. Acts of hospitality contain their own contradictions, as to serve as host is to hold power, to set terms, to guard thresholds and entry points. For this year’s SAMLA conference, we invite papers, panels, and creative works that consider the many meanings and complications of hospitality—as practice, metaphor, ethics, affect, and structure.

Call for Papers

The Winter's Tale: From Page to Stage

IASEMS Tempera Seminar 2027

University of Padova, Department of Language and Literary Studies

7-9 June 2027