Call for Papers: Historical Fiction in / and the Anthropocene

One-Day Online Workshop of the Historical Fictions Research Network

29 November 2025 (online in Zoom) ca 8 am to 5 pm (GMT)

15 min talks

The Historical Fictions Research Network, an interdisciplinary and international network of scholars examining historical fictions, i.e. narratives of the past in a variety of popular media, is happy to organise its third one-day winter workshop on the topic of “Historical Fiction in / and the Anthropocene”.

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).

Throughout the past century, many theoretical approaches have put the indexical properties of the photographic image at the center of documentary's claims to the real. In today’s discussions of social media platforms, arguments about fakery, falsity, and deception abound across genres, from political deep fakes to more “innocuous” lifestyle influencing. Remarked on are the ways platforms such as Instagram and TikTok offer mesh-ups, montages, appropriated footage, nostalgic clips, and media plucked from their original contexts.

We are pleased to announce the 5th Hawaiʻi International Conference on English Language and Literature Studies (HICELLS 2026), which will be held at the Univrsity of Hawaii at Hilo on March 13 - 14, 2026. This year's conference theme is "Teaching and Learning English Language and Literature in a Changing World: Global Trends and Transformative Practices," aims to explore the emerging global trends in English language teaching and literary studies, including curriculum innovation, assessment practices, digital integration, and multilingual education.

Date and location: 23-25 June 2026, Royal Irish Academy, Dublin

Keynote speakers: Sarah Werner, independent book historian; Renske Hoff, University of Utrecht; Aditi Nafde, Newcastle University

Description: Re-mediating the Early Book: Pasts and Futures (REBPAF) is a Marie Curie Doctoral Training Network coordinated by the University of Galway, which focuses on the ways in which 15th- and 16th-century book producers (scribes, printers, entrepreneurs) negotiated the dynamic relations between the manuscript and the printed book and adapted to the evolving challenges of the market. It also explores the continuing relevance of these cultural and economic negotiations to the modern world.

Telangana Journal of Higher Education (TJHE)

Call for Papers

Volume 1 Issue 2 (July-December 2025)

6 de noviembre 2025. Formato online

II Jornadas Intermediales Intercátedras

Organizadas por las Cátedras de Literatura en las Artes Audiovisuales y Performáticas y de Pensamiento Audiovisual

Versión en inglés abajo

Theory Today [USC] is organizing a two-day theory workshop with one of the preeminent and prolific theorists of our time, Prof. Todd McGowan.  The workshop will take place on March 12-13, 2026, at the University of Southern California (Los Angeles), and will have the following schedule:

………………………………………………

Day 1 : March 12, 2026

Session 1 | McGowan: Foundations of Thinking [10 am to 1 pm]

-          Workshop session focused on reading and discussing primary texts, including Hegel, Kant, Marx, and Lacan.

Call for Chapters: Religion, Conversion and Cultural Memory in
Indo-Caribbean Women’s Writing

Edited by:
Prof. Nandini C. Sen, University of Delhi
Sahin Shah, University of Delhi

Contact emails:
nandinicsen@bharati.du.ac.in | sahin.shah@gargi.du.ac.in

With the recent and highly acclaimed AMC adaptation of Interview with the Vampire and AMC’s broader acquisition of Anne Rice’s literary corpus, The Vampire Chronicles have found renewed cultural relevance. As Season 3 enters production, we invite reexaminations of the legacy and transformation of Rice’s vampiric work across media, genres, and generations.

Lonesome Dove at 40: McMurtry, Mythmaking, and the Reimagining of the American Southwest

A Larry McMurtry Symposium

November 14–15, 2025 Southern Methodist University | Dallas, Texas Co-Sponsored by SMU English’s Narrative Now Initative and the Clements Center for Southwest Studies

Organizers:

Dr. Christopher González
English, SMU
[ctgonzalez@smu.edu]

Dr. Ariel Ron
History, SMU
[aron@mail.smu.edu]

Abel Fenwick
English, U of Arkansas
[fenwick@uark.edu]

Rooted in the ancient tradition of fabula, the concept of fabulation (or fonction fabulatrice) was perhaps most explicitly introduced to the modern philosophical lexicon by Henri Bergson, who described it as a “special faculty of voluntary hallucination.” It was later revisited by Gilles Deleuze, both with and without Félix Guattari, as a “speech act, an act of speech” that transgresses the boundary between the personal and the political, producing “collective utterances.”

The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association invites submissions for a Fall 2025 issue on the theme of “Health in/of the Humanities.”

“We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.” So reads an inscription on the tomb of the fictional author Kilgore Trout in Kurt Vonnegut’s 1973 novel Breakfast of Champions. While darkly serio-comic, the novel’s exploration of how “ideas or the lack of them can cause disease” raises genuine questions about the relationship between the humanities and health that inform the theme of the fall 2025 issue of the peer-reviewed Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association.

The song lyric occupies little space in academia, where it is less studied, less appreciated, and perceived as less-than other kinds of writing. Despite music’s ubiquitous cultural presence, the song lyric—as creative work—suffers from what renown songwriter Jimmy Webb calls a “status problem”: songwriters do not enjoy the same standing as writers of other kinds of traditionally studied literature. The most common way that song lyrics have earned scholarly attention is by conflating the form with the poem. Goldstein’s (1969) The Poetry of Rock is one of the first books to attend to lyrics as poetry.

In 2025 alone, public arts and humanities organizations have faced constant and systemic threats to their funding, their missions, and their ongoing goals to provide communities with access to the arts. The Trump administration's demolition of funding to the National Endowment for the Humanities immediately harmed the ongoing projects of organizations across the country, while imperiling most of the state humanities councils across the country. More recently, the rescindment of National Endowment for the Arts grants affected the publishing missions of nonprofit, independent publishers like Graywolf and Milkweed, while also shredding the community outreach efforts of public arts, literary arts, and literacy programs across the nation.

This edited volume seeks to collect scholarship on the treatment of political themes and world-building in the Star Wars franchise since Disney acquired Lucasfilm in 2012. Scholars have thoroughly explored political topics in George Lucas’s works, but have paid less attention to how Star Wars projects under Disney have continued, changed, or challenged the franchise’s approach to politics. To advance the scholarship on this subject, we welcome proposals from a variety of disciplines and perspectives, including literary criticism, cultural history, political science, film studies, and fandom studies. 

Possible / Suggested Topics:

Dear friends, colleagues, and students, 

We are excited to announce the Call for Papers for the third issue of the NEW BENJAMIN STUDIES yearbook, centred around the theme “Walter Benjamin in Times of Crisis”.

The editorial collective of NBS is pleased to welcome Anna Migliorini (Florence) and Ana María Miranda Mora (Utrecht) as guest editors for the issue. 

Latinx Visions 2.0

ONE PLANET—MANY WORLDS

CALL FOR PAPERS

ONLINE CONFERENCE

November 3-7, 2025

Co-Organizers: Matthew David Goodwin, Cathryn Merla-Watson, Taryne Jade Taylor

State of the Nation Film and TV in Britain: Representations of the Social, Political, and Cultural Landscape.

How might we illustrate, explore, and begin to define the ‘state of the nation’ film and television text? This edited collection, in collaboration with Intellect, invites consideration of these questions. We are particularly keen for considerations of contemporary nominees such as Adolescence (2025) and Mr Bates vs The Post Office (2024).

The editors invite abstracts for a forthcoming edited volume entitled Disney: A Companion, which will offer a comprehensive critical exploration of The Walt Disney Company’s cultural, historical, aesthetic, political, and industrial significance. The Companion is intended for the Peter Lang Genre Fiction and Film Companion series (https://www.peterlang.com/series/gffc), and aims to bring together a wide range of interdisciplinary perspectives that interrogate Disney’s enduring legacy and its evolving role in global media and culture.

A great number of Gothic fiction productions explicitly address themes such as gender roles and reproduction from diverse perspectives, which at times hold opposing viewpoints on certain aspects of these topics. The ability to gestate is often considered one of the key indicators of sexual difference. However, the subject of gestation and child-upbringing is not usually addressed in Gothic fiction, aside from iconic examples such as Rosemary’s Baby (1968). As Russ (2007: 25) has stated, these processes are often not described in many texts. Frequently, the women in these stories are either young and childless or middle-aged, with their children already grown and secure (ibid.).

The affordances of speculative fiction to provide not only specific examples, but also schemas, for alternate ways of knowing and being are well known. Suvin identified the novum as the central feature of science fiction, a feature which made it possible to consider humanity not generally nor as "fixed and supernaturally determined", but rather in terms of "which [human]? in what kind of world?: and why such a [human] in such a kind of world? (10).

CFP: Proposals Requested for Modernism in British & World Literature: A (Re)consideration (updated)

Deadline for submissions:

October 1, 2025

Note on Updated Proposal:

This CFP is now live on the Journal of Postcolonial Writing website.

Blue Humanities and the Indian Ocean: South Asian Literary and Cultural Representations