Concept Note & CFP on

Crisis and Hope in Contemporary South Asia

Crisis can be understood as any event or a series of events that disrupts, destabilizes, and threatens the everyday individual, social, and political order, leading to moments of transition and transformation that are often challenging to comprehend. The past few decades have witnessed an unprecedented accruement of crises on a planetary scale manifesting as economic and environmental exploitation, geopolitical conflicts, pandemics and public health emergencies, and financial and economic turmoil, making the world an increasingly volatile and uncertain space.

ASANOR biannual conference 2026
June 4-6, Kristiansand, Norway CONSTITUTING THE US IN THE 21ST CENTURY
Proposal deadline: October 15, 2025

https://asanor.org/2026-conference/

The 2026 American Studies Association of Norway Conference looks back to its early years for inspiration. The very first themed ASANOR seminar was titled “The Bicentennial of the US Constitution.” Many years later we return to this document, not only to revisit its cultural and historical significance but also to ask what it means to invoke the Constitution now, in a time of intensifying democratic crisis and rising illiberalism.

Call for Proposals: Edited volume on screenwriter, actor, director, and comedienne Elaine May

SCREEN STORYTELLERS

The Works of Elaine May

Edited by Jonathan Winchell

This edited volume on the works of Elaine May will be a book in the SCREEN STORYTELLERS series published by Bloomsbury Academic. Seeking 250-word abstracts for previously unpublished chapters on Elaine May’s work as a screenwriter and comedy writer. Final chapters will be 3,000-3,500 words, written for an audience of student readers.

RSA 2026

San Francisco - February 19–21, 2026

Reimagining Disability through “Disability Intimacy”

Relatable! Exploring Difference & Relationality in Creative Writing Studies (CFP)

Proposal Deadline: September 5th, 2025

Conference Dates: November 7th & 8th, 2025

The Creative Writing Studies Organization is now accepting proposals for our online fall conference, to be held the weekend of November 7, 2025. In holding our conference virtually in alternating years, we hope to continue building Creative Writing Studies scholarship across borders and time zones while maintaining the felt benefits of in-person gatherings. This year, the CWSC seeks proposals that help us expand and refine our understandings of relationality. 

2025 marks the 35th year since the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Though ADA advances have often been celebrated in mainstream media and the rights they support taken as secured, it has come under attack through rollbacks since 2016, and most recently by removing DEIA initiatives within the Department of Education. At the same time, national and international discourse community efforts through conferences and other open forums have grown more diffuse.  With this in mind, this conference, “New Directions in Disability Studies,” will reflect on where disability studies has come from and what it will be in the future.  

Over the past decade, as the opioid epidemic turned into an even deadlier fentanyl epidemic, many colleges developed and implemented collegiate recovery programs “designed to provide an educational opportunity alongside other recovery supports to ensure that students do not have to sacrifice one for the other” (ARHE, 2024). As Nichols et al. (2025) relate, “Descriptive and observational research suggests that CRPs tend to reach the most at-risk students.”

SUSANNE K. LANGER: Artistic Angles, Philosophical Circles, Poetic Dots, and Technical LinesVienna University of Technology, Austria. 26–29 May 2026. Call opens: 1 September 2025Deadline: 1 October 2025 Organized in collaboration with the Research Unit Architecture Theory and Philosophy of Technics ATTP at the Vienna University of Technology and the IVC Institute Vienna Circle at the University of Vienna, this conference illuminates the history and relevance of Susanne K.

CALL FOR BOOK CHAPTERS

Contested Bodies: Corporeality in Contemporary India
Edited by Dr. Shivshankar Rajmohan. & Dr. Sushant Kishore
Department of English, School of Social Sciences and Languages, Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore, TN, India

The E. E. Cummings Society and the Society’s journal, Spring, invite abstracts for 20-minute papers for the 53rd annual Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900, Feb. 19-21, 2026, at the University of Louisville (https://artsandsciences.louisville.edu/news-events/conferences/louisville-conference-literature-and-culture).

Rhetorical Society of America Conference

May 21-24, 2026

Portland, OR

“An Unassailable and Monumental Dignity”: Baldwin’s Rhetoric of Struggle

In 1963, speaking to a group of Oakland high school students about organizing for rights, suffrage, and economic change James Baldwin remarked that, “The measure of one’s dignity depends on one’s estimate of one’s self.” Dignity, for Baldwin, was born of independence, and forged through struggle against an oppressive social structure. 

CALL FOR PAPERS

13th International George Moore Conference

May 5-7, 2026

at

         Atlantic Technological University, Mayo

&

Moore Hall

George Moore:  Landscape and Memory

“A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.” 

Dear Colleagues,

Please consider submitting a paper proposal to the panel, "Boccaccio and Boccaccian Medievalisms: Representatives of Gender in Storytelling" for the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The dates of the conference are May 14-16, 2026. The deadline to submit a paper proposal is September 15. This panel will be in person and is organized by Italian Studies@Kalamazoo.

Description

In Sarah Orne Jewett’s 1886 short story “A White Heron”, young protagonist Sylvia is approached by an itinerant hunter and asked to expose the location of the white heron’s nest. The threat to health, growth, and integrity here is complex, both for Sylvia and the heron, as well as the hunter. The central concept of the nest, as a space simultaneously protected and vulnerable, mundane and coveted, nourishing and abused, is an influential object and space in the narrative.

‘Theory Today’ working group [USC] is organizing an Online theory workshop on the theme of contemporary fascism with one of the most insightful thinkers on the topic―Alberto Toscano. The workshop will take place on October 17, 2025 via Zoom, and will have the following schedule:

………………………………………………

October 17, 2025

Session 1 | Toscano: Contours of Contemporary Fascism [10 am to 1 pm PST]

-          Workshop session focused on reading and discussing primary texts, including Marx, Badiou, Negri, et al.

As Toni Morrison notes in Playing in the Dark, the construction of Africanist ideologies that misread and/or misrepresent Black identities is as American as apple pie. The white gaze has historically and contemporaneously controlled what is known and unknown about African Americans, just as the ingestion of Africanist ideologies has shaped how many people of the African diaspora see themselves. However, the cultural productions of African American people have frequently not only asserted the heterogeneity of African American communities, contesting Africanist collectivization, but have also affirmed ways of knowing beyond the cultural and systemic erasure of Black personhood and agency.

Established in 2018 and revealed in 2020, TALLER ELECTRIC MARRONAGE (EM) began when a group of Black/Latina, queer, writers, and artists decided to plot points across their escape matrix. Inspired by the petit marronage of our ancestors, we steal away on the electric platform, share our journeys and offer what we find along the way. EM now invites submissions pertaining to the key theme: “In the time of war.”

Academia in Crisis: How Feminist Rhetorical Scholars Respond

Summer 2026 Special Issue of Peitho 

Editors: Patty Wilde, Erin Costello Wecker, and Justine Trinh

“What hurts? And how do we go on living while it hurts?”

–mimi khúc

Writing about extinction is an aporetic coming together of our current geological reality and imagination that borders on speculation. It is an act that opens up the ecological, the ontological, and simultaneously interrogates the disappearance of humans from the planetary scene. The space of imagination imagining its own annihilation is a precarious zone for the writer, one that also discharges a kind of nervousness for the reader. The crisis facing us now is how to disentangle extinction as a kind of placelessness, as empty space beyond time. How do we, as a species on the edge of the Sixth Mass Extinction, make sense of Rosi Braidotti’s statement, “‘We’ are in this together, but We are not one and the same”?

Dalit and Adivasi Ecologies:

Representations in Literature and Culture

Dear colleagues,

We are excited to invite chapter proposals for a forthcoming edited collection tentatively titled Precarious Pedagogies: Teaching Praxis of the New Majority. As the title suggests, this collection will center the voices of writing instructors working off the tenure track in a variety of precarious positions, though we also invite submissions from writing program administrators and tenured/tenure-track faculty who can speak to the programmatic and institutional impacts of contingent instruction. The collection is under contract with the WAC Clearinghouse for inclusion in the Precarity and Contingency book series, due out in 2027.

This panel examines the ways contemporary US American literature, film, and television texts engage with mass incarceration and even anticipate recent expansions of the US prison-industrial complex, including the rapid proliferation of ICE detention centers and the resurgence of historical carceral symbols, such as the proposed reopening of Alcatraz. As the US continues to grapple with mass incarceration, militarized policing, and the criminalization of migration, writers and creators have responded with powerful cultural texts that illuminate the racialized, gendered, and profit-driven machineries of confinement. Significantly, these texts often refuse to treat today’s carceral regime as new or exceptional.

This will be a session of the Northeast Modern Language Association Conference in Pittsburgh, PA. March 5-8, 2026.

https://www.nemla.org/convention.html | https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21790

Modality: Hybrid: The session will be held in-person but a few remote presentations may be included.

Material Poetics: Drafting, Duration, Form

One-day conference at Stewart House, Russell Square.

Event date: November 5, 2025.

The conference is jointly supported by Techne and the Poetics Research Centre, Royal Holloway, University of London.

Keynote speakers: Professor Cole Swensen and Professor Jeanne Heuving