Call for Papers

In the Introduction to In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination, Margaret Atwood makes a clear distinction between science fiction and speculative fiction: the former concerns events that could not happen; the latter draws on developments that could happen or that have already occurred in some historical form. The distinction was publicly contested, including in an exchange with Ursula K. Le Guin, and Atwood insists her terminology was descriptive rather than hierarchical. She places The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) within the speculative category on the grounds that nothing in the novel exceeds documented historical precedent (Atwood 5–6). This conference takes Atwood at her word.

CFP: MW/SWCCL, “Taking Care”

Midwest/Southwest Conference on Christianity and Literature

College of the Ozarks
Point Lookout, Missouri
September 25-26, 2026

Beyond Conventional Screens: New Approaches to Audiovisual Storytelling - Call for Chapter Proposals

Edited by Sotiris Petridis 

• Deadline for proposals: 01 June 2026
• Notification of Acceptance: by mid-June 2026
• Deadline for chapters: 15 November 2026

What happens when cosmopolitanism no longer promises the world but reveals its limits?

Cosmopolitanism has long been associated with mobility, openness, translation, and coexistence across difference. In Asian literary and cinematic contexts, it has often been linked to port cities, diasporic networks, colonial encounters, and transregional circulation. Yet this cosmopolitan promise has never been equally available to all.

Theme: The Other Side of the Looking Glass 

29th Southern Writers/Southern Writing Graduate Student Conference 

University of Mississippi

August 8th—9th, 2026

Call for Submissions

Supernatural South(s): The Monstrous, The Fantastic, The Grotesque, The Speculative and So On…

The Southern Writers/Southern Writing Conference (SW/SW) is an interdisciplinary conference, welcoming graduate students, creative writers, activists, and community members with interest in the U.S. or Global South from all departments and fields of study. The 29th meeting of SW/SW will be held at the University of Mississippi from August 8th-August 9th, 2026. 

UVA Wise Medieval-Renaissance Conference XXXIX (9/17-19) deadline for submissions: June 26, 2026 full name / name of organization: University of Virginia-Wise Center for Medieval-Renaissance Studies contact email: kjt9t@uvawise.edu 

Opening Sequences: The Narrative Architecture of TV Titles

This edited volume proposes the first critical anthology devoted to television title sequences as a distinct and influential mode of visual storytelling. By treating opening titles as complex aesthetic and narrative artefacts, this volume seeks to establish a new interdisciplinary space for the study of title design, inviting scholars to rethink how beginnings shape meaning, memory, and emotional architecture in serial television.

                                                                 Call for Abstracts (Circle 3)  

                                        Literature and the Arts as Sites of Resistance and Solidarities
                                                 24 July -31 July 2026, Saulkrasti, Latvia

Focus

Literature and the Arts as tools for intersubjective transformation, resistance, and the forging of solidarities.

Framing Questions

Call for Papers:

The Art of Storytelling: Archetypes in Focus A Transdisciplinary Conference

May 30-31, 2026

Conference Webpage: https://labrc.co.uk/2026/02/24/storytelling-2026/

Where:

Oxford University (and Online)

Fees:

£180 (In person participation)

£100 (Online participation)

The “modern” disentanglement of the realms of subject and object, culture and nature, as Bruno Latour insightfully observes in We Have Never Been Modern (1993), is most evident in the former colonies of the Global South like the Bengal Delta since the entire colonial project in these locations depended on the colonizers’ privileged access to native human bodies and the non-human nature.

Extended deadline for Re-thinking Trauma: Cinema, Performance, and Mediation International Conference

Ekphrasis Center for Transdisciplinary, Liberal Arts and Creative Technologies Research Department of Theatre and Film, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania September 2–4, 2026

DEADLINE EXTENDED: May 1st, 2026

CFP: The Midwest Modern Language Association (MMLA)

2026 MMLA Convention—12-14 November 2026—Chicago, IL

Convention Dates: November 12-14, 2026
Convention Location: voco Chicago Downtown-Riverwalk (350 W. Wolf Point Plaza Building 1, Chicago, IL 60654)

2026 Convention Theme: “After the Archive.”

Convention Panel: Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies Permanent Section

Theme: After the Archive: Archival Recovery, BIPOC Pedagogical Labor, and Lived Resistance

Call for Presenters: The Veterans Studies standing session examines all facets of military life and the veteran experience as exhibited in literature, theater, film, and poetry, written about or by military veterans. Of particular interest is work on the transition from military to civilian life, and the resulting cultural, social, and personal impact of this transition. 

Traditional cultures and nationalism in Asia

Description

FEMSPEC, an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal dedicated to challenging gender through speculative means in any genre, seeks submissions for cover art.

Are you a visual artist?  Does your work engage with representations of the feminine or speculative?  If so, please consider submitting your artwork to FEMSPEC to be considered as cover art!

FEMSPEC publishes two issues per year and uses voluntary submissions of visual art as cover art for each issue.

It is NOT necessary to subscribe to the journal to submit art for consideration.  If your piece is selected to be used as cover art, you will receive a free print copy of that issue.

Archives are not neutral: they tell stories about who counts, whose experiences are remembered, and whose are erased. For centuries, racial hierarchies have shaped the preservation of knowledge, leaving silences where Black, Indigenous, and other marginalized voices should be. The Antiracism Permanent Section of the MMLA invites submissions that move beyond critique, asking how we can reimagine, rebuild, and transform the archive to reflect justice, equity, and shared humanity.We are especially interested in work that explores:

CONFERENCE

2026 PAMLA Conference, taking place November 12–15 at the Hyatt Regency Seattle

SESSION/PANEL ABSTRACT

Research group “Translation and Language Studies” (Faculty of Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities, Kaunas University of Technology) is organising an international conference on linguistics, discourse, media, communication, translation, cultural literacy and impact on society “Intermediality in Communication: Translation, Media, Discourse” held in Kaunas, Lithuania.

The scope of the conference includes 8 thematic sections with their own set of topics:

Linguistics. This section aims to examine the current directions in linguistic research, particularly focusing on how language interacts with different forms of media. 

Many notable comic book scholars highlight Alan Moore as one of the most ambitious writers in mainstream American and British comics. Along with writers like Grant Morrison and artists like Dave McKean, Moore was part of the so-called “British Invasion” of the American comic book industry in the 1980s, and artists of this period are credited as bringing an air of credibility as well as transforming the artistic standards of the medium. Greg Carpenter, for instance, likens the work of these artists to “Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson, elevating the English language into a vehicle for poetic drama.

Call for proposals: no-stage PressCritical Ballet Studies 

no-stage press invites submissions for its inaugural publication, dedicated to critical ballet studies. We seek academic articles, critical essays, and interviews that interrogate the histories, aesthetics, and power structures embedded in ballet and ballet-adjacent forms.

The theme for this year’s MMLA conference explores the relational dynamics inherent in an archive. Since Derrida’s Archive Fever, the role of the archive has been conceived as a site for both the storage and construction of memory. What is selected and how it is framed by the archival materials works both to capture memory and history and shape how something or someone should be remembered. In keeping with this theme, the permanent section for comics and graphic novels is interested in research that interrogates the intersection of comic studies and the archive.

British literature of the 1800s has a close relationship to archival forms and practices. With a boom in bureaucratic record-keeping, extensive imperial documentation, meticulous medical and legal case histories, and the development of libraries and institutional archives, Victorian literary texts frequently include, copy, or contest letters, ledgers, case files, diaries, and serialized records. By engaging with and appropriating formal aspects of “the archive,” Victorian literature often blurred the boundaries between history and literature, fact and fiction, what is real and what is constructed. But who was keeping records? And of whom?

The 123rd Annual Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA) Conference will take place this November in Seattle, Washington, from November 12-15.

This session seeks papers that explore forms of play in American fiction from 1945 to the present. There are many conceptual genealogies of play within fields such as psychoanalytic theory, Marxist theory, structuralist and poststructuralist theory, affect theory, critical race theory, queer theory, and video game theory.