The aim of this book series is to examine the history of institutions around the world through the lens of gender. Of interest
are institutions established with the specific purpose of regulating gender and sexuality (e.g. the Magdalen
asylums, Magdalen hospitals, penitentiaries, refuges, mother and baby institutions) as well as those with more general
purposes where gender has had an important role in their operation and function (e.g. prisons, workhouses, lunatic
asylums), including both religious and private organisations. The series supports the increasing interest in these
institutions internationally, both in academia and in the treatment of ‘historical’ abuse.

Nineteenth-century British literature frequently interrogates the boundaries of community dynamics, examining not only what the individual contributes to a collective and what it means to belong, but how communal engagement fundamentally reshapes the individual. 

Consistent with the NeMLA 2027 theme, "Empowering Communities," this panel explores a vital dual imperative within the nineteenth-century British novel: the structural tension between individuals whose actions serve to empower their communities, and communities that conversely function to shield and empower otherwise fragile individuals.

This roundtable considers the role of “unfinished” texts—in the broadest possible sense—in early modern English literature and life writing. 

The 1st Annual Virtual Conference of The Joseph Conrad Society of America

CONRAD NOW!  Joseph Conrad’s Global Crosscurrents

6 - 8  N O V E M B E R  /  2 0 2 6

The Joseph Conrad Society of America (JCSA) invites proposals for our inaugural Annual Virtual Conference, to be hosted on an integrated web-based Zoom platform from 06 to 08 November 2026. The title, CONRAD NOW! speaks to the present state of Conrad scholarship, but also to the ways in which earlier critical debates on that author have shaped his place not only in literary reflection but, as suggested by our subtitle, with respect to the world’s changing cultural landscapes.

Maybe no one has ever looked at a pile of papers with unbridled joy, but in a time of university-subsidized LLMs, instructors are more likely view a stack of papers with a mix of dread and horror. How many made up quotations will I have to check? How many fake citations? How many versions of “it’s not ___, it’s ___” can I read before my soul leaves my body?

Reading Chaucer outside the Anglophone World: Receptions, Translations, and Traditions
Date: March 12–13, 2027
Venue: National Taiwan University, Taiwan

Conference website: https://readingchaucer.com/

In her resolute commitment to telling stories about Black life without the white gaze, Toni Morrison articulated a model of community empowerment grounded in local knowledge, intra-communal collaboration, and the self-reflexive narration of Black worlds. While Morrison remains one of the most visible public advocates of this aesthetic and ethical orientation, practices of Black worldmaking across African and diasporic literatures have long exceeded mere response to anti-Blackness. Even under conditions structured by racial violence, coloniality, displacement, and social rupture, Black communities have continually generated modes of life, relation, memory, and imagination that assert the possibility of worlds otherwise.

Oceanography & the Blue Humanities: Literary Geographies of Islands and Water Bodies

December 09-12, 2026 

Concept Note:

The Winter's Tale: From Page to Stage

 IASEMS Tempera Seminar 2027

 University of Padova, Dipartimento di Studi Linguistici e Letterari

 7-9 June 2027

Location and Date: May 20-23, 2027 University of Houston 

In-person and Virtual: This panel will meet in-person

UMBRELLAS FOR FISH

An International Journal of Absurd & Existential Drama

We are now accepting submissions for our September 2026 Issue.

Submission Deadline: August 25, 2026Website: https://ufjournal.wixsite.com/umbrellas-for-fish/submissions

Email: ufjournal@aol.com

This roundtable discusses the convergence of literary expression and digital activism as means of empowering a community. The shift of passive representation to active agency in the 21st century can be common in the digital space where the local knowledge is stored and disseminated. We discuss how marginalized groups, namely Dalit writers and activists, have used digital humanities to evade authoritarian gatekeepers and develop transnational solidarities. This session welcomes people to talk about how online spaces can be seen as a form of regenerative space where the testimonios of Dalit can be heard, transforming the world into a supportive space of collective action and literary insurgency.

Digital Social Sciences (ISSN: 3078-4980 (Online), 3078-4972 (Print) is an international, peer-reviewed, open-access journal dedicated to advancing interdisciplinary research on the transformative impact of digital technologies on society. The journal provides a global platform for scholars, researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to examine the opportunities, challenges, and implications of digital transformation across the social sciences.

The Editorial Board invites original, unpublished, and high-quality manuscripts for Volume 3, Issue 2 (2026).

Themes of Interest

Call for Chapters

Comics and Graphic Narratives

PAMLA 2026, Seattle, November 12-15

https://www.pamla.org/pamla2026/

Extended deadline: 30 June 2026

Contributions on varied dimensions of Literature and the Wilderness are invited for Volume XIV of Critical Imprints (ISSN: 2319-4774), the annual peer-reviewed journal of the Department of English, Loreto College, Kolkata.

CFP: 3rd International Interdisciplinary Conference of the Department of English, University of Zululand

28-30 September 2026

Re-imagining Language, Writing, and Literature in English in a Fast-Changing World   

This panel invites theoretical and pedagogical explorations of experiential approaches to teaching environmental studies in higher education through the frameworks of new materialism, transcorporeality, affect theory, and embodied pedagogy. Aligning with NeMLA 2027’s theme, “Empowering Communities,” the panel examines how environmental learning can move beyond hierarchical and text-centered models toward collaborative, community-oriented, and experiential forms of knowledge production.

Rome and Capri, 21–28 June, 2027

F. Scott Fitzgerald visited Italy on two distinct occasions: first in the spring of 1921 during his and Zelda’s long-deferred honeymoon trip, and again from late 1924 to early 1925 during his unsuccessful attempt to economize. While the Fitzgeralds made brief stops in Venice, San Remo, Portofino, Savona, Pisa, Fiesole, Florence, and Naples, it was in the two host sites of this conference—Rome and Capri—that he spent the most time. It was here that he found inspiration for some of his most celebrated works, as well as several others that remain underexplored.

In the definition given by Podnieks, matrifocal literatures are written and narrated by mothers in the first-person or limited third-person voice, rendering maternal identity and experience from subjective perspectives. Such narratives (re)value the significance and meaning of maternal figures in cultural, social, and national arenas, and often contest or negotiate traditional ideologies of the “good” mother as self-sacrificing, nurturing, and sexless with her antithesis, the “bad” mother. In the last few years, we have seen the rise of matrifocal writings published to break taboos about previously silenced reproductive experiences, create a sense of community, support, and care, and, overall, empower people.

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 

Today's ecological problems demand not only ecological awareness but also a fundamental rethinking of the human-nature relationship with the more-than-human world. Increased climatic change, species extinction, ecological degradation, and planetary instability. Challenge anthropocentric assumptions where humans are seen as separate from, superior to, or sole interpreters of nature.

Theme:                 Pentecostal Theology: A Discipline of the Future? Perspectives, Tensions, and Horizons

Date:                     October 30–31, 2026

Location:              Virtual (Zoom)

Time:                    09:00–17:30 EST

Languages:          Spanish and English

Host Institution:

Black Aesthetics and the Affordances of Photography

International Conference, Amerika-Institut, LMU München

Philologicum, 9-11 June 2027

Thinking through and with the concept of Black Aesthetics this conference addresses the Affordances of Social Justice Photography in order to consider the medium’s possibilities toward placemaking, activism, and social justice as well as the varied agencies inherent in photographic images and in different processes of looking.