This panel explores the promises and provocations of monstrous and ghostly figures in feminist and queer speculative fiction, focusing on gendered human and nonhuman bodies. We are particularly interested in how monsters articulate socially ingrained fears and anxieties about women, queer communities, and the nonhuman world, as well as the desires and apprehensions they evoke toward the impossible, the fantastic, or the supernatural. Contributors might consider how these monstrous imaginings shape, challenge, or expand the category of “us,” offering critical insights into who is included, who is excluded, and on what grounds.

 This panel invites 250-word abstracts on creative and aesthetic expressions of emancipation emerging from refugee, diasporic, and forcibly dispossessed contexts across the Global South, examining resistance, agency, and world‑making within displacement and humanitarian regimes.

The Editorial Team of The Scattered Pelican, the graduate journal of the Comparative Literature program at Western University, is currently seeking peer reviewers for the upcoming issue of the journal.

About the Journal

The Journal of the Wooden O (JWO) is a peer-reviewed academic publication focusing on Shakespeare studies. The editors invite papers on topics related to Shakespeare, including Shakespearean texts, Shakespeare in performance, the adaptation of Shakespeare works (film, fiction, and visual and performing arts), Elizabethan and Jacobean culture and history, and Shakespeare’s contemporaries.

CFP: Chinese Poetry: Institution and Life
Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association (RMMLA) Annual Convention
Conference Dates: October 8-10, 2026
Location: Marriott Courtyard in Ogden, Utah

Session 1 The Institutions of Chinese Poetry

Call for papers for a Special Issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities

Khôra

(preliminary title)

Editors: Nicholas Birns and Marina Christodoulou

For a pdf of the full Call see: https://www.academia.edu/164922361/CFP_for_a_Special_Issue_of_Angelaki_Khôra

Seminar for Modernist Studies Association Conference

How text appears on the page has been of periodic interest to poets for centuries. This interest grew in late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century poets as shown by the work of Stephane Mallarmé and by artistic movements such as Dada. Concrete poetry, a style of poetry mostly from Germany and Brazil in the 1950’s (Thomas) adhered to this interest. Other types of experimental poetry have worked on the liminal edges between text and image, where the appearance of the text supersedes its content, as in more recent work by Susan Howe. Generally speaking, as Greg Thomas argues, this poetry is “concerned with complicating or undermining linguistic sense” (Thomas 4) in its turn to the visual.

Multilingualism, Cultural Diversity, and Intercultural Communication for Sustainable Development

Scope of the Book

Call for Papers:

Panel Title: Composition beyond Walls: Writing and Arguing for/in Spaces beyond the Classroom
Location: MLA National Conference, Los Angeles, California
Date: January 7-10, 2027

Panel Hosts: Dr. Jeff Birkenstein and Dr. Sharon Mitchler, Centralia College (Centralia, Washington)

Proposal Deadline: March 22, 2026

The Challenge

CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS 

35th International Conference Virginia Woolf 

Open Forum “Virginia Woolf: Sound and Rhythm in Translation” 

This cfp is for a proposed seminar at MLA 2027, to be held in Los Angeles from 7 to 10 January 2027. This seminar explores classrooms as sites of care and repair through trauma-informed and inclusive pedagogies and institutional courage, engaging embodiment, memory, and affect as approaches to trauma and learning. Submit a 200-word abstract and bio.

Deadline for submissions: Friday, March 20, 2026

Submit your abstract via email to:

Aimee Pozorski, Central Connecticut State University (pozorskia@ccsu.edu ) Aili Pettersson Peeker, University of California, Santa Barbara (aili@writing.ucsb.edu )  

Paraphrasing Linda Hutcheon, the neo-Victorians have a habit of adapting just about everything – and in just about every possible direction. The stories of Victorian poems, novels, plays, operas, paintings, songs, dances, and tableaux vivants are constantly being adapted from one medium to another and then back again not only on film, television, radio, and digital or social media, but also theme parks, historical enactments, and virtual reality experiments. In this meeting, we would like to explore the interactions and connections between the different ways contemporary culture engages with the traces of the Victorian past as well as how these different genres or expressions interact.

Beyond Human: Unruly Senses of Being, Knowing, and Feeling Existence

UCSD Literature Department Graduate Student Conference  

University of California, San Diego 

In-Person, May 15-16, 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

The Function of Beauty: A Transdisciplinary Conferenc

“Beauty is not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart.”
— Khalil Gibran

Conference Dates: Thursday April 22-23, 2026
Location: Online
Abstract Submission Deadline: March 22, 2026
Fee: £100
Conference Webpage: https://labrc.co.uk/2026/01/26/function-of-beauty/

Call for papers: Mythical Archipelagos: Islands, Narratives, and Imaginaries Across Cultures and Media

International Interdisciplinary Seminar

University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (Spain)

14–15 May 2026 | Hybrid format

The seminar explores islands as mythical, symbolic, and narrative spaces across cultures and media. We welcome interdisciplinary contributions from island studies, environmental humanities, anthropology, cultural studies, linguistics, media studies, and related fields.

Abstract deadline: 30 March 2026

Full CFP and details:

FEMSPEC, an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal dedicated to challenging gender through speculative means in any genre, seeks volunteers to fill the following roles:

PRODUCTION EDITOR

Duties include:

Collating and formatting content for each new issue of the journal.  Liaising with the journal's editor and other volunteer collective members to make changes to the issue's content and layout until the end of each issue's production period.

This online panel seeks proposals that examine how humor, irony, and formal games use linguistic misbehavior to create new emotional landscapes, construct gendered subjectivities, and challenge traditional hierarchies across global literatures.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Puns, irony, or broken syntax and a gendered “I”
• Mis-translation and playfulness in translation
• Mixing languages and subjectivity
• Post-colonial parody
• Joy as defiance
• Humor in crisis
• Games based on works of literature

Please send a 250-word abstract and a brief bio to Dr. Haihong Yang (hyang@udel.edu) by March 15th. 

The 2026 International Postgraduate Comparative Literature Conference (IPCLC 2026), hosted by the Master of Arts in Literary and Cultural Studies (MALCS) at The University of Hong Kong (HKU), brings together postgraduate students and emerging scholars from Hong Kong and beyond for a day of cross-cultural conversation. Taking place in person at HKU on May 26, 2026, the conference offers a supportive forum for sharing work in progress, building scholarly networks, and testing new comparative methods across literary, cultural, and media studies. Featuring themed panels, a keynote lecture, and Best Paper Award(s), IPCLC 2026 invites participants to consider how comparison can sharpen our understanding of urgent questions in the humanities.

Call for Papers

Philip K. Dick at 100: Fiction, Philosophy, and Cultural Afterlives

Edited Volume (Centenary Collection)

Editors:
Assoc.Prof.Dr. Ercan Gürova
Ankara University, Turkey

Prof. dr Mladen Jakovljević
University of Priština in Kosovska Mitrovica, Serbia

“Under consideration for publication by a reputable international academic publisher.”

CALL FOR PAPERS

Edited Volume

Island Studies in South Asia: Gender, Culture and Islandness

We're excited to announce that the DIY Methods Conference is back for another year! Pitches are due by April 20th, 2026. Please don't hesitate to email us (annepasek@trentu.ca and trentwintermeier@utexas.edu) if you have any questions.

Call for Paper

The Politics of Ableism: Gender, Sexuality, and Disability in Literature and Media

Edited by Habib Tekin & Nizara Hazarika

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.