|
a service provided by www.english.upenn.edu |
FAQ changelog |
all recent posts
2nd Call for Chapter Proposals
for Essay Collection
How Scripted TV Series Portray Social Media’s Power to Shape Culture
Announcing
The 2026 First Book Institute
May 31-June 6, 2026
Hosted by the Center for American Literary Studies (CALS) at Pennsylvania State University
Co-Directors
Priscilla Wald, R. Florence Brinkley Distinguished Professor of English, Duke University, and Co-Editor of American Literature
Sean X. Goudie, Director of the Center for American Literary Studies and Past Winner of the MLA Prize for a First Book
Call for Presentations for the Annual Meeting of the Popular Culture Association
We invite presentations about War after 1945, covering any of the following general topics with special attention to popular culture:
Korea, Vietnam, Gulf War, Iraq, Afghanistan; Cold War and Global War on Terrorism; military interventions and peacekeeping missions involving Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and Europe. We particularly welcome papers that look at pop culture in light of the 25th anniversary of 9/11.
Presentations may focus on writers and artists: original fiction, poetry, memoirs, drama, art, music, film, and television.
Panel Title:
Transnational Black Childhood and Practices of Maronnage
Conference:
Rutgers University-Camden, Childhood Studies Department
“The Transnational Child Strikes Back: Transnational Desires and Childhoods of Empire ”
June 11-13th, 2026
Camden NJ
Organiser Contact Info:
Samira Abdur-Rahman, The College of New Jersey, abdurras@tcnj.edu
Panel Description:
GC Secular journal invites submissions of original fiction and non-fiction for its first edition devoted to World Cinema. The aim of this issue is to open a space for writing that responds to cinema across languages, regions, and cultures, and to highlight how film travels, transforms, and shapes public imagination. We welcome analytical, creative, and research-oriented work that engages with cinema as an artform, a cultural memory, and a global conversation.
About the Theme
This special panel to be held in the Area for Esotericism, Occultism, and Magic of the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association seeks 15-20 minute conference presentations from all disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives examining any and all aspects of the emerging trend of “reality shifting” in relation to popular culture, particularly that of Generation Z.
DEADLINE EXTENDED!
Call for Papers
ALFRED HITCHCOCK
Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)
47th Annual Conference, February 25-28, 2026
Marriott Albuquerque
Albuquerque, New Mexico
NEW Submission Deadline: November 14, 2025
The Generational Studies area of the Popular Culture Association welcomes proposals for papers on any and every topic related to America’s generations including: Baby Boomers, Generation Jones, Generation X, Xennials, Millennials (Gen Y), and iGen (Gen Z). If your paper is accepted, you will be presenting at the 2026 Popular Culture Association national conference, held at the Marriott Marquis in Atlanta, April 8-1.
We invite submissions from individuals and organized panels (3 or 4 persons), focusing on topics related to:
The Journalism & Media Culture area of the Popular Culture Association requests proposals on diverse topics, including journalism and media-related issues and subjects that can be local, regional, national, and/or international and can deal with historical or contemporary times. If your paper is accepted, you will be presenting at the 2026 Popular Culture Association national conference, held at the Marriott Marquis in Atlanta, April 8-1.
Sessions are scheduled in 1½ hour slots, typically with four papers or speakers that do not exceed 15 minutes each. We can also accept proposals for special panels and for sessions organized around a journalism/media-related theme.
CALL FOR PAPERS
for a joint symposium to be hosted by the
Catharine Maria Sedgwick Society and Lydia Maria Child Society
Williamsburg, Virginia
June 24-27, 2026
(Deadline for proposals: February 5, 2026)
The Catharine Maria Sedgwick Society and the Lydia Maria Child Society invite proposals for a joint symposium to be held on the campus of the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, June 24-27, 2026.
Feeling haunted by that unfinished conference proposal? We've got just the Halloween treat for you: a two-week extension -- now accepted through November 14!
Mathematics and engineering are often confined to academic settings, yet they form the foundation of life and popular culture alike. When we examine engineering marvels in movies, books, and other media, we uncover rich symbolism and deeper meanings that reveal how these disciplines shape our understanding of the world.
Panels are now forming on topics related to all aspects of mathematics and engineering and their intersection with popular culture. Possible topics may include (but are not limited to):
Call for Papers—DEADLINE EXTENDED!
Myth and Fairy Tales Area
Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)
47th Annual Conference, February 25-28, 2026
Marriott Albuquerque
Albuquerque, New Mexico
EXTENDED proposal submission deadline: November 14, 2025
Mystery / Detective Fiction Area
Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)
47th Annual Conference, February 25-28, 2026
Marriott Albuquerque
Albuquerque, New Mexico
EXTENDED proposal submission deadline: November 14, 2025
Poems Invited for dec 2025 Issue of Taj Mahal Review 48th Issue
Memory, Myth, and Meaning: Cather in Dialogue with America 250
Willa Cather Spring Conference | Thursday, June 4 - Saturday, June 6, 2026
This year marks the centennial of My Mortal Enemy, one of Cather’s least affirmative works and one not produced in the Cather Scholarly Edition (translation: much important work remains to be done!) We invite papers on new approaches to My Mortal Enemy, including but not limited to the following considerations of style, form, provenance, and themes:
Deadline for proposals has been extended to 15 November 2025!
This edited volume extends the project initiated by the Korean Studies 2025 special section “Feminist Korean Studies,” which deployed feminist critique across digital media, popular culture, legal discourse, public health, neoliberalism, and postcoloniality. Building on that foundation, the volume invites interdisciplinary, interregional, and bilingual feminist scholarship to address pressing global and regional developments: the rise of right-wing authoritarianism, intensified anti-feminist backlash in South Korea, and the persistent marginalization of feminist discourse in Anglophone Korean Studies.
Call for papers – International PhD and early-career symposium
Seeing the Other Empire: British Travel Writing and Imperial Rivalry in Europe and the Near East, 1783–1914
University of Strasbourg, 24 April 2026
Organisers: Arman Martirosyan and Suheyla-Hacer Sahin
Research group SEARCH (UR 2325)
In 2025, broad legislative and cultural backlash is focused on eliminating even the idea of trans people from public space. When public space is inaccessible, online communities have, for more than the past twenty years, been a place where trans people can still find one another, self-represent, and build their own publics. Now the walled world of the app economy, organized personal attacks, discriminatory social media algorithms, ID verification laws, and government intervention are changing the internet too. At such a moment, understanding the ways that trans people navigate their digital worlds is more important than ever.
Conference at the University of Amsterdam
Monday, 15 June 2026
Description:
In honor of Jack London's 150th birthday anniversary in 2026, paper submissions are invited for the Jack London Society panels at the American Literature Association 37th Annual Conference, May 20-23, 2026,Palmer House 17 East Monroe Street, Chicago, IL. Papers may address any aspect of Jack London studies. Send a 250-to-300 word abstract for a twenty-minute presentation to Kenneth K. Brandt at kbrandt@scad.edu by January 26, 2026. Include a brief biographical sketch and any AV equipment needs.
The English department at Duke University is thrilled to host the 11th annual Post45 Graduate Symposium on February 20-21, 2026.
The Post45 Graduate Symposium seeks graduate-level works-in-progress related to post-1945 media, arts, literature, textual or visual objects, digital platforms, politics, and culture. We welcome submissions that expand our conception of objects and meaning-making post-1945 or place them in comparative, transnational, or hemispheric frames. We especially welcome contributions that foreground the importance of race, gender, class, and sexuality to post-45 studies.
DEADLINE EXTENDED!
Call for Papers
“War & Culture”
Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)
47th Annual Conference, February 25-28, 2026
Marriott Albuquerque
Albuquerque, New Mexico
NEW Submission Deadline: November 14, 2025
DEADLINE EXTENDED!
Call for Papers
“Horror (Literary & Cinematic)”
Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)
47th Annual Conference, February 25-28, 2026
Marriott Albuquerque
Albuquerque, New Mexico
NEW Submission Deadline: November 14, 2025
*****Deadline extension till 1 December 2025*****
(In)Secure Fictions: South Asia and 9/11
The esoteric, occult, and magical roots of deep ecology have become increasingly interconnected with the growing popularity of witchcraft practices, neopagan worldviews, and explicitly spiritual climate activism and environmentalism. These developments include specific foci on particular ecological concerns and crises, but such trends are equally exemplified by transdisciplinary dialogues in which holistic scientific perspectives intersect with diverse systems of belief. This special panel seeks 15-20 conference presentations to explore these connections and their influence on, reception by, and expression through popular culture in any and all of its manifestations.
DEADLINE EXTENDED!
Call for Papers
Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)
Annual Conference
47th Annual Conference, February 25-28, 2026
Marriott Albuquerque
Albuquerque, New Mexico
NEW Submission Deadline: November 14, 2025
The extraordinary success of K-Pop Demon Hunters (2025) as the most-watched original title in the history of Netflix (with over 325 million views) invites the reconsideration of a surprisingly vast and multivalent “mega-trope” that has proliferated throughout popular culture in numerous variations for centuries. Its deep roots in folklore and mythology remain to be further explored, mapped, and connected with its various historical expressions throughout indigenous worldviews, Classical cultures and civilizations into Late Antiquity and ultimately through the global Middle Ages and straight through into the interactions of Western, East/Asian, and diverse global civilizations of the contemporary period. While this mega-trope is here identified
DEADLINE EXTENDED!
Call for Papers
ESOTERICISM, OCCULTISM, AND MAGIC
Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)
47th Annual Conference, February 25-28, 2026
Marriott Albuquerque
Albuquerque, New Mexico
NEW submission deadline: November 14, 2025
Call for Papers
Medievalisms Area
Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)
47th Annual Conference, February 25-28, 2026
Marriott Albuquerque
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Submissions open: September 1, 2025
Proposal submission deadline: November 14, 2025
Call for Papers
Taylor Swift & Swiftie Studies
Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)
47th Annual Conference, February 25-28, 2026
Marriott Albuquerque
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Proposal submission deadline: November 14, 2025.
Utopian Impulses in the 2020sAn Interdisciplinary Graduate Student ConferenceUniversity of Cincinnati - Friday, February 6th, 2026 Among its political and technological predicaments, America’s 2020s have been a time of steady upheaval, crisis, and change. As we continue to wrestle our way through the agendas, regimes, and big-data systems of this historical moment as teachers, students, and researchers, we recall the utopian thinking of More and Marx, which reminds us “to keep from being blinded by what seems normal — to help us see that what is natural is constructed, not inevitable” (Elbow, p. 83).
Call for Papers Extended!
SPORTS & POPULAR CULTURE
Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)
47th Annual Conference, February 25-28, 2026
Marriott Albuquerque
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Submissions open: September 1, 2025
Proposal submission deadline extended: November 14, 2025
Shakespeare is one of the inventors of the category of the human as many modern and contemporary cultures know it. Even his most monstrous and otherworldly creations have a detectable human side. The critical tradition of Shakespeare has already established that these characters are to be read as reflections of certain psychological aspects and repressed characteristics of the main characters of his plays, as allegorical representations of emotions, principles or beliefs, as codification of ethnic and sexual differences, etc. Thanks to this tradition, focusing on the human side of these characters has become the norm. It happens almost intuitively as soon as a critic or scholar starts their analysis of these characters.
Online, international, interdisciplinary conference titled:
The Hidden Faces of Violence: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Abuse, Trauma, and Resistance
Dates of Conference: November 28-29, 2025
WRITING THE MIDWEST: A Symposium of Scholars and Creative Writers
The Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature (SSML)
May 28-29, 2026. Kellogg Hotel and Convention Center, East Lansing, Michigan
About SSML and The Writing the Midwest Symposium: The Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature (SSML), founded in 1971, exists to support the study and dissemination of work in Midwestern literature, art, film, and scholarly study.
What happens when the present becomes historical to itself and the contemporary turns into a categorizable literary-historical formation? Is that even possible, that is: can the contemporary ever become historical (to) itself? This special issue seeks to examine the conditions that would allow us to understand the contemporary as a distinct literary period which began in the 1990s—with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the rise of neoliberalism, and the growing sense that postmodern irony had outlived itself—and has now arguably come to an end. Not coincidentally, this was a period of almost uncontested, unipolar US political hegemony on a global scale.
Come join academics and working professionals at the Atlanta Marriott Marquis, April 8-11 2026!
We are considering proposals for sessions organized around a theme, special panels, and/or individual papers. Sessions are scheduled in 1½ hour slots, typically with four papers or speakers per standard session. Presentations should not exceed 15 minutes. Working professionals, scholars, educators, and graduate students are all encouraged to submit.
Proposals within animation studies in relation to popular culture are welcomed. Possible themes for papers/panels include but are not restricted to:
Focus- Intra-European colonial histories/linguistic nationalism, the Nordic colonial legacies and the Sámi/de-centering dominant narratives of North-South polarity. Further to explore points of convergence between the North-South, South- South, paving way for transversal exchanges.
Framing Question– To what extent can multilingual interactions in the Nordic regions disrupt linguistic hierarchies rooted in colonial legacies and reshape dominant language ideologies? How do these disruptions inter-act with the multilingual societies elsewhere such as South Asia, South Africa, Chile and Colombia, and processes of vernacularisation set in motion with respect to colonisation in some cases.
General Issue | Rolling Submissions
The Critical Gender Studies Journal / Revista Crítica de Estudios de Género invites submissions for its upcoming general issue. We welcome original research articles, theoretical essays, creative interventions, and reviews that explore the multifaceted dimensions of gender and sexuality across diverse contexts and disciplines.
CALL FOR PAPERS ANNOUNCEMENT:
__________________
Migration and the Early Modern Spanish Empire
June 10th–12th, 2026
Maynooth, Co. Kildare, Ireland
__________________
Confirmed Keynote Speakers:
Thomas O’Connor
Professor
(History)
Maynooth University
Mayte Green-Mercado
Associate Professor
(History)
Creative Editor
FEMSPEC, an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal dedicated to challenging gender through speculative means in any genre, seeks a volunteer editorial collective member starting for 26.1 no later than January 1.
Duties include:
Attending collective meetings on a regular basis (now Friday 10:30 AM EST)
Receiving creative submissions to screen and coordinate peer-review
Seeking creative submissions and reviewers through professional channels and personal networks, and by distribution of brochures at appropriate conferences and to Creative Writing programs
The Flannery O’Connor Society
The Society for the Study of Southern Literature
March 28th-31st, 2026
Fisk University
Nashville, TN
The Flannery O’Connor Society invites abstracts (of about 300 words) to be submitted for participation in an open topics panel on Flannery O’Connor’s life and work at the biannual conference of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature.
“Teaching Annie Baker”
Comparative Drama Conference
Madison, WI, July 9-11, 2026
Deadline: December 12, 2025
Call for Papers
Global Indigeneities and Life Narratives: Special Issue of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly
A Special Issue of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly
Guest Editor: J. Kēhaulani Kauanui,
Eric and Wendy Schmidt Professor of Indigenous Studies and Anthropology, Princeton University
Submit: 400-word abstracts to kauanui@princeton.edu by December 1, 2025
https://manoa.hawaii.edu/cbr/publications-productions/biography/calls-fo...
“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”
George Orwell, 1984
Call for Papers: Film International: Journal of World Cinema
Special Issue series: Diasporic Cinemas
View the full call here>>
https://www.intellectbooks.com/film-international-journal-of-world-cinema#call-for-papers
Series overview
Call for Papers: The Willa Cather Foundation seeks proposals for 1-2 panels at the 37th annual conference of the American Literature Association, held at the Palmer House in Chicago from May 20-23, 2026.
Topics could include (but are by no means limited to) race and ethnicity, indigeneity, settler colonialism, Queer histories, labor and leisure, Cather and other writers, teaching Cather, urban/rural spaces, philosophy and religion, approaches to Cather’s letters, ecological issues, and material culture.
While proposals on any topic pertaining to Cather’s life and writing are welcome, 2026 marks the centennial of the publication of My Mortal Enemy, so papers on that novel would be of particular interest.
We are excited to announce a new interdisciplinary seminar series for postgraduate students and early career researchers on the Long Middle Ages, a period covering the Late Antique, Medieval, and Early Modern Periods. This series aims to bring together scholars working across this period to establish new connectivity and inclusivity between these disciplines, and to provide a more relaxed space for new and emerging researchers to present and test out ideas.
Special Issue
Shopping Fictions: Representing Shops and Shopping in British Literature and Culture