The Society for the Study of American Poetry invites proposals for a roundtable to be held at the 37th annual American Literature Association conference in Chicago, IL, May 20-23, 2026. 

Roundtable: “Teaching American Poetry Now”

This roundtable invites participants to reflect on the challenges, possibilities, and urgencies of teaching American poetry in the current moment. Across institutions, student populations, and media environments, instructors are rethinking how—and why—we teach American poetry now.

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

CFP | Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins Society (PEHS) session 

American Literature Association Annual Conference, Chicago, IL, May 20-23, 2026

Hopkins’s America, Then & Now

ECOS DEL INTERIOR: POTENCIALIDADES ESTÉTICAS Y POLÍTICAS DE LO AFECTIVO EN LA LITERATURA  

Edificio A, Facultad de Filología de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 11 y 12 de mayo de 2026

Legacies of Performance: Inheriting Pasts & Imagining Futures

Graduate Student Symposium

Sponsored by the Department of Theater and Dance

University of California, Santa Barbara

April 18, 2026

“Every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own threatens to disappear irretrievably.” – Walter Benjamin, 1942

“I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.” – Audre Lorde, 1978

Since Benedict Anderson’s 1983 theorization of imagined communities, the historical alliance between the novel and the nation has been a key problematic of literary studies. And yet, in the post–Cold War decades, the centrality of the nation and its ideological weight seemed to wane. The rise of neoliberalism produced an ideology of free circulation of capital and goods, which heralded a new era of weakening national borders and enhanced cultural exchanges. In literary studies, this period saw the rise of a new critical field, world literature (Moretti, Damrosch), and the theorization of a World Republic of Letters (Casanova), which held a similarly borderless aspiration.

A Two-Day International Conference on Civilizational Literature Texts, Traditions, and Transcultural Dialogues across Civilizations

 Dates: 13 and 14th March, 2026

Venue: Dharwad, Karnataka, India

Mode: Hybrid

Organized by Dharwad Katte, in collaboration with Adikavi Sri Maharishi Valmiki University, Raichur, Janata Shikshana Samity, Dharwad and Peter Lang.

                                                                           Concept Note

Journal of Medieval Worlds

Call for Submissions

CFP: Special Issue on Appalachian Animal Studies

To be published in Spring 2027, co-edited by Drs. Kathryn Kirkpatrick and Jessica Cory

Whether it’s the relationships we have with our animal companions, the meat we (may not) eat, or the countless more-than-human species with whom we share this region, animals are important to our lives and to Appalachian spaces.

Scholarly book reviews sought for new book titled Madness and the Sea: A Literary History. To e published by Palgravve on March 26, 2026. Scholars with interests in the fields of Blue Humanities, Maritime literature, madness in literature and medical humanities and with links to review sites are welcome to contact me to arrange review copies.

Neither ‘queer’ nor ‘beginnings’ are easy to pin down. Queerness is infamous for its ability to slip away from definition; it encompasses – but is not reducible to – sexuality, gender, race, ability, class, politics, and more. Beginnings, too, wriggle from our grasp. Choose a beginning for any historical event, movement, or narrative and there is always something which precedes it. Are beginnings focused into an inciting event, or do they reside in the feelings which precipitate such events? Who gets to decide?

Wallace Stevens’s poetry abounds with animals, from the bucks and firecat of “Earthy Anecdote” to the “gold-feathered bird” of “Of Mere Being.” This session invites papers on Stevens’s animals and animal imagery across his oeuvre. How do animals in Stevens’s poems reflect or complicate his sense of human perception, subjectivity, and the environment? In what ways do they trouble distinctions between the human and the nonhuman, the domestic and the wild, the material and the symbolic?

Proposals might consider individual poems or sequences, the wider bestiary of The Collected Poems, or Stevens’s animals in relation to earlier, contemporaneous, or later writers.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

Journal of American Studies of Turkey (JAST) 

2026 Fall Issue: Science Fiction and the American Imagination 

Guest Editor: Firuze Güzel, Ege University, Izmir, Türkiye

Deadline for Full-Text Submissions: July 15, 2026

The forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present.

— Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844)

Lose your mind and come to your senses.

— Frederich (Fritz) Perls, Gestalt Therapy Verbatim (1969)

CFP Journal of the European Association for Studies of Australia

Special Issue: Minding the Present. Bodies, Places, Matter in and between Australia and Europe

Deadline for proposals: 15 March 2026

Taking its cue from a very vibrant conference held in Padova (Italy) in September 2025, the Journal of the European Association for Studies of Australia is seeking articles that examine the shaping experiences, identities, and perceptions of the present as a catalyst to urgent action both in Australia—with a special alertness to the very rooted cultures of Indigenous Australia—and in the complex relations between Europe and Australia.  

Call for Papers: 

I am pleased to share a call for chapter proposals for an edited collection currently in development titled Black Feminist Practices and AI in the Composition Classroom: Memoir, Pedagogy, and Futures. This volume invites scholars, teachers, and practitioners to explore how Black Feminist rhetorical traditions can guide ethical, humanizing, and culturally responsive uses of artificial intelligence in writing instruction.

CFP | Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins Society (PEHS) session 

American Literature Association Annual Conference, Chicago, IL, May 20-23, 2026

Hopkins’s America, Then & Now

CFP “A Vision for Liberating Our Democracy” Conference, February 27–28, 2026

The conference builds on a growing body of research that examines the theological, cultural, and political intersections of democracy, citizenship, and power. Participants will investigate how worldviews and faith traditions have informed concepts of governance, belonging, and personhood from the founding era to the present. The conference will highlight not only the Haudenosaunee Influence on American Democracy but also the historic and present contributions to Democratic thought by Black, Indigenous, and Latine communities, contributions which are often forgotten and ignored.

Featured Speakers

Elmira 2026: The Tenth International Conference on the State of Mark Twain Studies

Conference Theme: Irreverence, Rebellion, and Resilience

We are pleased to invite participants to a four-day intensive book reading workshop on Antonio Gramsci (online), focused on questions of hegemony, culture, subaltern politics, and political struggle. This workshop brings together students, scholars, researchers, activists, and readers for a sustained and collective engagement with Gramsci’s writings. Written largely under conditions of imprisonment and censorship, Gramsci’s work challenges us to think about power not only as domination, but as consent, culture, and everyday common sense.

The last few years have seen the publication of a number of fantasy novels for young people written by authors from the postcolonial diaspora, including Tomi Adeyemi’s Legacy of Orisha trilogy, Jordan Ifueko’s Raybearer series, Nnedi Okarofor’s The Nsibidi Scripts series and Roshani Chokshi’s The Gilded Wolves series. Additionally, there are YA fantasy series that deal with hierarchies and inequities resulting from colonization and settler colonialism, such as Naomi Novik’s Scholomance series and Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves duology.

Abstract 

The “end of the world” names a methodological problem before it names an apocalypse: how do humanities scholars and artist-researchers think, make, and teach when climate disruption, extinction, extractive infrastructures, forced displacement, and slow violence reformat what counts as evidence, what counts as futurity, and what counts as responsibility? This conference convenes research and practice across film, theatre, performance, and allied arts to ask how (post)Anthropocene conditions are not only represented but produced, felt, and negotiated through aesthetic forms, production systems, embodied publics, and more-than-human milieus. 

(Extended Deadline)

MEMORY

University of Virginia Department of English Graduate Symposium

March 27 & 28, 2026

Dates: Thursday 25 June - Friday 26 June 2026
Venue: Jesus College, University of Cambridge