I’m reaching out regarding a proposed forthcoming academic volume titled Other(ed) Worlds: Transgender Representations in Lusophone and Portuguese-Based Creole Societies, which I will be editing. This volume will be part of Trans Studies, a book series published by Bloomsbury Academic and edited by Dr. Douglas Vakoch (General Editor) and Courtney Morales (Senior Acquisitions Editor).

This proposed volume will bring together interdisciplinary essays exploring transgender narratives, identities, and resistances in the Lusophone World (from Portugal and Brazil to Lusophone Africa and Asia) / regions shaped by Portuguese colonial legacies (Africa, Asia, and the Americas).

Conference at the University of Bonn, 18-20 May, 2026

The AI revolution has accelerated in recent years, propelled by the widespread use of large language models (LLMs). Today, AI systems are not only transforming technical environments but also shaping our thoughts, emotions, and everyday linguistic practices. Increasingly, AI research and industry are shifting their attention from rational problem-solving toward aspects of human life once considered the last bastions of humanity. We can contrast this approach to AI as a simulation of ‘rationality’ with the expansion of applications into the realm of the expression of emotions and other aspects of human life often seen as ‘irrational’.

We are pleased to announce that the International Conference The Prism of Festivals and Performance Studies: Open Historiographical Questions, organized within the framework of the PRIN 2022 project – Theatre of Festivals between the Local and the Global. Rethinking the Italian Stage between the 1950s and the 1970s, involving the Universities of Rome “Tor Vergata” and Parma, will take place in Rome, at the University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, on 9–10 October 2025.

All details, including the full program and the Book of Abstracts, are available on the dedicated page of the MAP – Interuniversity Research Centre for the Memory of the Performing Arts website at the following link:

Deadline: Submissions due has been extended to October 15, 2025 to invisible.culture@ur.rochester.edu. 

It feels only appropriate, given the recent UR graduate worker strike, that Issue 41 of InVisible Culture focus on the problem of labor. Amid the erosion of labor protections in academia, increasing challenges faced by immigrant workers in the US, and global labor conflicts in fields like healthcare and agriculture, this moment calls for a reconsideration of what labor is and how its value is structured.

The Music Graduate Student Organization at the University of Pittsburgh welcomes proposals for 20 minute paper presentations, performance demonstrations, or work that integrates research and practice for its 2026 conference, “Sonic Power: Speculation, Surveillance, and Strength.” We invite students, researchers, musicians, sound artists, and practitioners from diverse disciplines to consider how sound organizes power and how people reorganize power through sound. Sonic life shapes worlds, whether in the hush of archival erasure, the loudness of protest, or the sorting of listening within media infrastructures.

Call for Papers
Coming of Age, Coming Undone: Abortion, Adolescence, Teen Pregnancy, and Reproductive Justice in Global Popular Culture

Audience: Media Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, Youth Studies, Reproductive Justice, Popular Culture, Girlhood Studies, Global Health, Queer Studies

Do Humans Also Dream of Electric Sheeps?
Technoscientific, Cultural, and Cognitive Challenges of AI

International Conference – Rome, February 27-28, 2026

Organized by:

• University of Rome Tor Vergata
• Res Viva – Interuniversity Research Center on the Epistemology and History of Life Sciences
• Italian Society for the History of Science (SISS)
• With the support of CNR – Institute for the History of Philosophical and Scientific Thought in Modern Age (ISPF), Naples

Conference theme

The Center for the Advancement of Women at Mount Saint Mary’s University, Los Angeles

Collectif Research and Writing Anthology 2027 Call for Papers

Do you want to forge community and ignite your scholarship? Connect with scholars, activists, artists, and others passionate about the advancement of women? Impact a wider audience? By publishing in Collectif, Mount Saint Mary’s University’s interdisciplinary journal of research, writing, and art, you will reach 50,000 potential readers. To celebrate the issue’s release, The Center for the Advancement of Women will host a salon, where contributors can share their work and connect with the Center community.

2027 Theme and Call

CFP: Sensation Fiction and the Health Humanities

A VPFA Study Day

Loughborough University, 27 March 2026

Projecting Belief: Cinema and the Re-enchanted World

King’s College London – May 21-23 2026

Conference Organizers – Rachata Sasnanand and Benjamin Y Goff

Call for Papers:

Call for Papers: Teaching Baldwin / Baldwin as Teacher

Debates and initiatives on decolonising knowledge in Africa continue to pay significant attention to the need for increased African/indigenous content in the curriculum as well as raising awareness about biases inherent in historically dominant epistemological paradigms. However, there remains a critical gap regarding theories and theorisation as many African academics continue to rely on colonial western theories, models, concepts and paradigms for research and pedagogical purposes. This can be due to a lack of awareness of existing African-centred theories and the dearth of databases focusing on African-centred theories.

The Ninth Faulkner Studies in the UK Colloquium

The Dark House: Absalom, Absalom! at 90

May 2nd and 3rd, 2026

Online via Zoom

With keynote addresses by:

Professor Mary M. Burke

(author of Race, Politics, and Irish America: A Gothic History [Oxford UP, 2022])

and 

Dr John Michael Corrigan

Gentle Reminder: Abstract due 30 September 2025

Editors of this issue:
Salomé Honório (University of Lisbon, Portugal)
Lamiae Bouqentar (University of Toronto, Canada)

Representation matters – but to whom? And how?

This iteration of the Critical Approaches to Black Media Culture conference considers the ongoing significance of representational analysis as well as the critical possibilities enabled by the turn to resonance in Black media and cultural studies. Our theme, Representation and Resonance, invites original research into images and storytelling, circulation and flows, and reception practices.

While we especially invite papers on this topic, we are open to any and all critical inquiry into Black media culture, broadly defined. Our hope is to bring together any and all scholars interested and invested in Black media culture, regardless of discipline or method.

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: SPECIAL ANTHOLOGY OF ONE-MINUTE PLAYS / MONOLOGUES ‘REWRITING SHAKESPEARE’ (Volume 2) 

Website: Fresh Words: An International Literary Magazine - Announcements

Deadline: October 28, 2025

FRESH WORDS – An International Literary Magazine is thrilled to announce the call for submissions for Volume 2 of its acclaimed special anthology: ‘Rewriting Shakespeare’—a curated collection of bold, inventive, and contemporary one-minute plays and monologues that reimagine the timeless works of William Shakespeare.  

This special issue of Public Art Dialogue invites scholarly contributions (research articles, short essays, and artists’ projects) that examine the enduring visual, spatial, and ideological legacies of colonialism in public spaces across the Pacific world. It seeks to explore how imperial legacies forged transoceanic connections that continue to shape the public sphere through means including but not limited to monuments, architecture, civic rituals, theater, dance, street art, and performative acts.

What stories can we tell of the vanishing mediator? Is it an irreducible kernel of transition between two different configurations of the social structure, or is it only imagined retrospectively, as the transient possibility of another world? Fredric Jameson shows, paradigmatically, that the Protestant ethic functions as "the vanishing mediator" in Max Weber's historical narrative between medieval society and modern capitalism, the "catalytic agent which permits an exchange of energies between two otherwise mutually exclusive terms." Slavoj Žižek adopts the term for his conception of subjectivity, where the subject exists as the transcendental excess of its symbolic universe—as an irremediable gap and a site of transformation.

In recent decades, Black Studies has witnessed important work on the ways in which the overrepresentation of ‘man’ and the invisibilization of whiteness have functioned in service of a range of im/material violences. Our aesthetic and political investments, therefore, lie in arguments and examples that unsettle the imposed relationalities and the representational economy of what Saidiya Hartman calls the “racial calculus”, Katherine McKittrick considers as the “mathematics of unlivingness” and Christina Sharpe terms the “orthographies of the wake”.

This panel invites papers that discuss transpacific, transnational, and cross-racial relations in Asian/American literature. How can literature facilitate the “(Re)generation” of solidarities and exchanges across identities and borders? How can it offer a site of intimacy, which Lisa Lowe defines as “the implied but less visible forms of alliance, affinity, and society among variously colonized peoples beyond the metropolitan national center”? How does literature generate discourses around cross-group tension, conflict, identifications, and disidentifications? How do literary and social forms reflect and reformulate each other, within and across nations? Where do Asian American studies and Global Asian studies meet and diverge?

Ireland has often been held to be somehow exceptional, an island on the edge of Europe whose historical, social and cultural trajectories have at times led it to diverge in surprising ways from both its nearest neighbour, Great Britain, and the wider world. This perception of Irish exceptionalism has long played a role in how the island has been understood both within and beyond its borders.

Call for Papers

ETKI: Journal of Literature, Theatre and Culture Studies

ETKI: Journal of Literature, Theatre and Culture Studies invites submissions for the New issue of the journal - a general issue on literature, theatre and culture studies.

(Un)natural Stevenson

Wild transgressions across literature, ecology, science and gender

Ca’ Foscari University of Venice 

11-12 May 2026 

Aula Baratto

Organizers: Lucio De Capitani & Alessandro Cabiati