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Bonkbusters and Soap Operas: Representing Sex, Glamour, and Melodrama on Screen
Saturday 21st June 2025
Falmouth University
This freein-person symposium will be an interdisciplinary and global exploration of Bonkbusters, Soap Operas and Made-for-TV Melodramas.
We are currently seeking contributions from the humanities and social sciences for a scientific network that explores ephemerality in both its material forms and theoretical conceptualizations. This interdisciplinary network aims to bring into dialogue various questions about ephemerality, specifically examining how different fleeting forms of expression are implicated in the continual making and unmaking of proximities, both human and non-human, producing “a matter of temporary intensities and pacts amongst people” and other entities (Vélez-Serna, 14).
Literature and film are filled with characters whose choices shape worlds, inspire audiences, and sometimes make no sense at all. This session takes a playful yet insightful approach to the conference theme of Palimpsests: Memory and Oblivion by examining how cultural memory preserves, distorts, or over-glorifies certain fictional figures. Through witty critiques and audience participation, we’ll interrogate why some characters remain revered despite glaring flaws while others are unfairly forgotten or misunderstood. What does our collective memory choose to retain, and what are we rewriting with each new adaptation, retelling, or reinterpretation?
The Superhero Project: 9th Global Meeting
THE MULTIVERSAL SUPERHERO
Friday 5th to Sunday 7th September 2025
The View Hotel, Eastbourne, East Sussex, United Kingdom
“Anyone can wear the mask. You can wear the mask. If you didn’t know that before, I hope you do now. Cuz I’m Spider-Man. And I’m not the only one. Not by a long shot”. – Miles Morales, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
CALL FOR PROPOSALS: THE SOUTHERN GOTHIC AT PCAS/ ACAS 2025
This prospective Panel-Session at the Modern Language Association (MLA) 2026 Convention will Focus on Decipherment of Multiple-Births in Literature, with Themes such as Bonding and Resemblance. I Invite Scholarship through Lenses such as Literary-Criticism, Genetics, Psychoanalysis, etc. Please Submit an Abstract of 250-300 Words to padmini.sukumaran@gmail.com.
MMLA 2025 Call for Papers for their Permanent Section: "English III: Literature after 1900" under the theme Optimism Against All Odds in American/English Modernism
Deadline: April 24th, 2025
For consideration: please send a brief abstract (250 words), tentative title, and bio to Sophie Nunberg at snunberg@uwm.edu by April 24th, 2025.
DETAILS:
The 122nd annual conference of the Pacific Ancient & Modern Languages Association (PAMLA) will be held in San Francisco at the InterContinental Hotel San Francisco, from Thursday, November 20, to Sunday, November 23, 2025.
Cultural History
MMLA 2025 Animal Studies Panel
“Do Animals Hope?”
Although many books have been written on hope for non-human animals, their collective or individual survival, this session invites proposals on hope by non-human animals, or representations of such hope. Many different approaches are welcome—literary critical, ethnographic (human or animal), environmental studies, affect studies, thought experiments. Please submit a 1-2 page abstract to Lucinda Cole (lcol@illinois.edu) by April 14, 2025.
Virtual session
All photography takes place somewhere, but only some photography makes that place the focal point. From its conception, photographers have used the medium to document places, ranging from specific sites to regional and national landscapes, with the aim to educate, archive, preserve, and critique. Photographs of home and the local allow for reflections on belonging, community, and personal identity, whereas images taken elsewhere, perhaps in foreign lands, suggest an anthropological drive to capture (the essence of) the unfamiliar.
Caleidoscopio invites you to submit papers for its series 2, vol. 1, no. 1: under the topic “In Media-Making: Start-on-and-go-over-Media”
Archives, while carrying out the operation of the gaze, function like a mirror: they point to a spectral exteriority. The archive is of the order of the phantasmagorical and, by definition, they are phantasmatic. This approach points out to what Harun Farocki’s stressed as the definition of a phantom or operational image, images that are built from a non-human perspective, although they call-in human agency.
Why should humans be witnessing and/or scrutinizing images productions? Is that still a need? Are there any ethical or aesthetical motives or meanings to it?
The Academic Association for Doctoral Students & Students of English (Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń) is pleased to announce the call for papers for the 11th issue of Currents, on the themes of adaptation and innovation within Anglophone language, culture and literature.
‘Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature’s inexorable imperative.’~ H.G. Wells Mind at the End of Its Tether
The Academic Association for Doctoral Students & Students of English (Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń) is pleased to announce the call for papers for the online young researchers’ conference to be held on 22 May 2025 and the journal issue (Currents No 11) on the themes of adaptation and innovation within Anglophone language, culture and literature.
‘Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature’s inexorable imperative.’
~ H.G. Wells Mind at the End of Its Tether
PAMLA 2025 Annual Conference
We invite paper proposals for an accpetd panel titled “Queer Temporalities, Memory, and Resistance in Asia,” to be held at the 2025 Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA) Convention in San Francisco (November 20–23, 2025), complementing the broader conference theme of “Palimpsests: Memory and Oblivion.”
This panel explores how non-normative experiences of embodiment, temporality, spatiality, and memory practices intersect with acts of resistance across diverse Asian contexts. We invite submissions that examine these themes across Asia and its diasporas.
Call for papers Heteroglossia 22, 2025
Call for papers Heteroglossia 21 (2025)
MSA 2025 Proposed Panel: Infrastructures of Hidden Labor
The Journal of Children in Popular Culture is an open-access, online, international, interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal that provides a forum for scholars and professionals to interrogate representations of the child in popular culture. JOCPC facilitates an international dialogue among scholars and professionals through vigorous discussion of the intersections between the child, the conception of childhood, children's material culture, children and politics, the child body, and any other interactions with the child in the context of popular culture.
Diverse Francophonie
Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association Conference
Thursday, November 20 - Sunday, November 23
San Francisco, California | InterContinental Hotel San Francisco
Abstracts due May 15, 2025
PAMLA Undergraduate Forum
Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association Conference
Thursday, November 20 - Sunday, November 23
San Francisco, California | InterContinental Hotel San Francisco
Abstracts due May 15, 2025
Norman Klein deploys the term “social imaginary” in The History of Forgetting as a category of a built environment, the assemblage of which necessarily involves a significant erasure of a material domain. The social imaginary can also be used, however, to interrogate an individual’s belief in the continuity of self-identity. Always already in the imagined self, after all, is the rebuke of self-instigated doubt: just how much difference can a person tolerate between the “me” that others would claim to know and the cherished, even if fossilized, image one’s consciousness seems beholden to?
The American Studies Program at the University of Bucharest
invites proposals for its annual student conference on the topic
Perspectives on the Media in American Culture and Society
to be held in person and online
on May 17, 2025.
In-person panels will be held in Martin Luther King Hall
1st floor, 7-13 Pitar Moș St., Sector 1, Bucharest.
Call for panelists for a paper at the American Association for Chinese Studies (AACS)
67nd Annual Conference, hosted by Adelphi University, Garden City, New York on October 24-26, 2025. According to the AACS conference description: the theme of the conference is “Charting New Paradigms: China and the Chinese Diaspora in a Changing World Order” in multiple aspects of culture, diplomacy, economy, education, health, history, literature, politics, and society.
Detecting New Paradigms: The Detective Genre in Contemporary Chinese Culture
This prospective Panel-Session at the Modern Language Association (MLA) 2026 Convention will Focus on Decipherment of Multiple-Births in Literature, with Themes such as Bonding and Resemblance. I Invite Scholarship through Lenses such as Literary-Criticism, Genetics, Psychoanalysis, etc. Please Submit an Abstract of 250-300 Words to padmini.sukumaran@gmail.com.
Sacred Arts 2025:
Exploring the Spiritual Dimensions of Artistic Expression and Ritual
University of Oxford (and online)
May 10-11, 2025
Conference webpage: https://labrc.co.uk/sacred-arts-2025/
Note: this conference has a hybrid format (both virtual and in-person sessions). This session will be virtual.
In partnership with UK’s Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies Department, “Leveling Up the Classroom” is continuing with a central focus on the integration of digital technologies and media into classroom settings. The last few years has given education a great insight into its own practices. Between online classrooms during the pandemic and the rapid emergence of more powerful technologies, we educators have seen a growing need to reevaluate our classrooms, as well as work with new tech to enhance these learning environments.
MLA 2026 Convention (Toronto), non-guaranteed roundtable
In her artist statement for Along the River of Spacetime (2020), a virtual reality “activation” of Anishinaabe star knowledge, scholar, artist, and video game designer Elizabeth LaPensée (Irish, Métis, Anishinaabe) described the ways in which Anishinaabe cosmologies anticipated a series of experiments carried out by CERN's Large Hadron Collider, the world's most advanced particle accelerator.
In keeping with this year’s MMLA conference theme, “The Humanities is Where Hope Lives,” this permanent session is seeking proposals, which discuss how we “make our case” for Early Modern English. How do we explain to our audiences – both in our classrooms and in public settings – on what interests us and motivates our scholarly activities? How do we demonstrate impact and encourage further participation? Where does the study of Early Modern English align with other organizations and initiatives designed to promote the humanities in public life? What has worked for us? What hasn’t?