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.

The Saul Bellow Society will host one session at the American Literature Association’s 37th Annual Conference at the Palmer House Hilton, Chicago, on May 20-23, 2026.  Proposals for papers on Saul Bellow and Chicago are particularly welcome but may address any aspect of Saul Bellow’s work or life, including comparisons with other authors. 

Proposals for presentations should include a title, your name and affiliation, e-mail address, and a short abstract.  The Saul Bellow Society welcomes proposals from established and newer scholars, including graduate students. 

Call for Abstracts: 12th World Conference on Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences, and Education

Dates: May 18 - 19, 2026

Venue: ARCOTEL Wimberger Wien, Neubaugürte, 34-36, 1070, Vienna, Austria

CPD Accreditation

As a Certified CPD Accredited Provider (Provider Number #785414), this conference offers 18 CPD credit hours, providing attendees with valuable recognition for their professional development. Verification is available at https://thecpdregister.com/view/eurasia-conferences-816429.

Call for Panelists – Rachel Carson Center Conference 2026 (“Beyond Dualism—Thinking Creatively Across Worlds”)

In an era of climate crisis and ecological anxiety, the boundaries between humans, nature, and technology are becoming increasingly blurred.
This panel—Sensing and Repair—invites researchers and practitioners to explore how art, science, and education can work together to restore our connections with the living world.

The long nineteenth century was a period marked by industrial revolution, scattered religious beliefs and technological advancements. The Gothic tradition recorded these significant changes through a language of monstrosity, excess, and horror as the Industrial Revolution gained momentum, coal and steam power expanded, and as soon as the British Empire increased its extractive demands on colonized ecologies and laboring bodies. This edited volume proposes a new way of looking at Gothic figures such as vampires, parasites, doubles, and consuming machines in order to examine how such tropes adumbrated the anxieties, ethics, and violences of environmental extraction.

The University of Iowa

Department of English

Graduate Student Conference 2026

Elaborating Labor 

Conference date: Friday, April 10, 2026 

Location: Richey Ballroom, Iowa Memorial Union, University of Iowa 

Abstract due date: Wednesday, December 31, 2025

Please email abstracts to c3conf@uiowa.edu 

Call for Submissions: Race in Fantasy- for The British Fantasy Society Journal (Summer 2026) ‘Race’—that socially constructed and contentious term and concept—has long been a part of Fantasy. As a way of narrativizing alterity, Fantasy excels (one could argue that it is its sine qua non), but like all other cultural forms it has been prone to the best and worst excesses of this. Although the largesse of Fantasy—its broad, catholic imaginary—embraces a rich spectrum of species, ethnicities, ontologies, and lifeworlds, it has been prone to all the cultural myopias, prejudices, peccadilloes, and stereotyping as any other genre. Exoticism, Orientalism, and Essentialism are only some of its many crimes.

Todd Gitlin pointed out in 1983 that ‘‘The three networks now underwrite more original movies than the studios combined” (in Stone, 2017: 616). The made-for-TV movie was a vast cultural phenomenon, commanding huge viewing figures and global, syndicated reach. Many of the most memorable and culturally resonant of these  were horror films. Despite this, the made-for-TV film, especially horror, remains largely under-explored in academic writing. If, as Pirie states, ‘Our fears are among the most revealing things about us’ (1994: 224), then what might these hugely popular films suggest about the society that produced them?

Issue 105 of the Virginia Woolf Miscellany Special Topic:

Panoramic Woolf (Fall 2026)

Guest Editors: Oliver Case, Evelyn Malinowski, Teresa Prudente

Please submit article proposals of approximately 300 words by 1st December 2025

Final article drafts (no more than 2500 words including Works Cited) will be due by 15 May 2026

Please send submissions to: panoramicwoolf@gmail.com

Call for Submissions – The Soliloquist Winter 2026 Issue 
Theme: Beneath the Surface 

Winter is a season of stillness—but beneath the frost, roots are reaching, rivers are flowing, and stories are gathering strength.  

For our Winter 2026 issue, The Soliloquist invites poets and writers to explore what lies hidden: the unspoken truths, buried memories, secret longings, submerged identities, and quiet rebellions that shape who we are. We seek work that dives below the obvious, the curated, the polished—into the depths where vulnerability, resilience, and revelation intertwine.  

Call for Papers

The Society for the Study of Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS)

American Literature Association

37th Annual Conference

May 20-23, 2026

Palmer House

17 East Monroe Street

Chicago, IL 60603

Panel: Where There’s Life: Reading Liberated Futures in Multiethnic Literature

The Lasting of the Mohicans: The Leather-stocking novels and legacy

Commemorating the 200-year anniversary of James Fenimore Cooper’s second Leather-stocking novel, The Last of the Mohicans (1826) and its enduring legacy across media and culture, the JFC Society invites proposals that explore topics related to Cooper’s popular novel and/or its influence and legacy. We particularly (but not exclusively) welcome proposals that focus on The Last of the Mohicans and its iconic figures, however proposals that explore the Leather-stocking novels individually or in series, their influence, adaptations, place in the national imaginary, and/or other related concerns or themes.

Chair: TBA

Networks in transatlantic transfers and migrations (19th-21st centuries)

Call for Papers

International symposium

21-22 May 2026

University of Southern Brittany – Lorient (France)

The Atlantic Ocean holds a significant place in the history of human mobility, be it forced (in the case of the slave trade for example) or voluntary, as the successive waves of colonists and then migrants who settled in America show.

Then, within the framework of Migration studies, this two-day conference will focus on population movements between the continents which edge the Atlantic Ocean: Europe, America and Africa.

Call for PapersCyber-Intimacies: Queer and Feminist Interventions in Global Cyber Politics

Edited by Amy Lind, Stephen Bryant, and Prateek Srivastava

Abstract Submission Deadline: December 15th, 2025

In recent years, diverse fields related to literature and science studies, such as the medical humanities, critical neurodiversity studies, and the study of the haptic, have been re-evaluating the human body, its histories, and the impact of those histories today. At the same time, fields such as feminist theory, critical race theory, trans studies, and disability studies have deployed embodied perspectives to re-evaluate how we understand history and historical narratives.

Call for Papers:

Conventions and Subversions in Sino-Western Theatrical Settings

Edited by Kelly Kar Yue CHAN, Chi Sum Garfield LAU and Chi Chun CHAN

We are soliciting chapter proposals for an edited volume that contains 8-10 chapters of research articles which represent the efforts from both members of the academia and practitioners of theatre to sustain the tradition of Sino-Western theatrics, while demonstrating the evolving aspects of contemporary performances under the inexorable trends of digitalization and globalization.

Call for Book Chapters: “Japa-ing” to Freedom or/and Slavery
Back in 2001, Simon Gikandi in “Globalization and the Claims of Postcoloniality” discussed the unfortunate case of two dead Guinean boys whose bodies were found in the cargo hold of a plane, stowed away in the bowels of slave ships. The unnamed boys were desperate to go to Europe. The on-going mass exodus of young people from Nigeria (called “japa”) can be read as a contemporary re-enactment of the ideas that drove those Guinea boys to “choose” a deadly migration journey.

Music Area

Popular Culture Association

Annual Conference

Atlanta, GA

April 8-11, 2026

The Music Area in the Popular Culture Association invites submissions from individuals or organized panels (3 or preferably 4 persons) focusing on any topic relating to any genre of music. Topics can include but are not limited to individual artists, albums, CDs, genres, scenes, trends, periods, performances, critics, magazines, music and art, music on radio, television, and on stage and in academia. Abstracts on any topic of music will be considered.

Fleeting Moments and Wonderful Weirdness in Welty

Panel at Society for the Study of Southern Literature Conference (March 28-31, 2026 at Fisk University in Nashville, TN)

Chaired by Laura Wilson

Welty's Dissident Spaces

Panel at Conference of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature (March 28-31, 2026 at Fisk University in Nashville, TN)

Co-coordinated by Sarah Gilbreath Ford, Mae Miller Claxton, & Rebecca L. Harrison

Call for Papers
Beauty and the Sublime in Gestation and Coming into Being:
Art and the Aesthetics of Pregnancy and Birth
2026 Virtual Symposium of the Society for the Study of Pregnancy and Birth 
June 4-5, 2026​
Co-Keynote Speakers: Lauren Bice, DNP, CRNA and Sheila Lintott, PhD  The Society for the Study of Pregnancy and Birth (SSPRB) is pleased to announce the Call for Papers for its second international virtual symposium, Beauty and the Sublime in Gestation and Coming into Being: Art and the Aesthetics of Pregnancy and Birth, a virtual event that will take place online across two half day sessions on June 4th and June 5th, 2026 (to facilitate participation across time zones).

Lisez l'appel à propositions en français sur le site du CLC: https://www.ualberta.ca/en/literatures-in-canada/2026-conference/index.html

ALECC and CLC 2026 20th Anniversary Conference: Cross-Pollinations

16-20 June, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta

We are now accepting research articles, scholarly papers, creative writing, artwork, photography, and reviews for our 2025 issue of

1890: A Journal of Undergraduate Research.

1890 provides undergraduate students the opportunity to demonstrate their interests and abilities in various disciplines by accepting works of research, creative writing, poetry, reviews, and art.

GENDER AND SOUTH ASIAN VISUAL CULTURES IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY Deadline for 250-word proposals: November 2, 2025 Association for Art History Annual Conference, April 2026Cambridge, UK This panel aims to explore the relationships between women and visual culture in twentieth century South Asia, challenging the oppressive structures that inform postcolonial subjectivities and engaging with practices that inaugurate new visual grammars.