Call for Papers

Taylor Swift & Swiftie Studies 

Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)

46th Annual Conference, February 19-22, 2025

Marriott Albuquerque

Albuquerque, New Mexico

https://www.southwestpca.org

Proposal submission deadline: October 31, 2024

Hostile Environments and Hospitable Praxes

Literary and Cultural Responses to Racial and Migratory Politics

University of Kent

23 – 24 June 2025

‘Laws try to rationalise the border regime which fundamentally ignores the humanity of those who move. Knowing this, let’s take as our root and starting position the reality that no human is illegal.’ —Leah Cowan, Border Nation: A Story of Migration

Call for Papers: Special Issue of Amerikastudien/American Studies. A Quarterly

“The Cultural Politics of 1776: Rethinking an American Moment”

Guest Editors: Alexandra Hartmann (Paderborn University)
and Antonia Purk (University of Erfurt)

Deadline for abstracts: November 20, 2024
Deadline for full papers: March 31, 2025
Publication: 2026

Call for Submissions: The RAACES Review, Volume 3, Issue 1 (2025).

For our third publication (2025), our focus is international solidarity and we invite academic and creative pieces about racial empowerment,  racism, racialization, Indigeneity, and anticolonial practice in any field. We welcome submissions from students (undergraduate and graduate) -- especially international students; staff; faculty of all levels; and community members. We are particularly interested in:

                “To be neurodivergent is to reclaim the pathologizing aspects of a long-term cognitive diagnosis and to reclaim one’s neuro-status as a possible position from which to claim resources, representation and recognition” (Stenning and Bertisldottir Rosqvist 1535).

*This is a hybrid interdisciplinary conference funded by the Humanities Research Centre at the University of Warwick, accompanied by potential publication opportunities.*

In A Dying Colonialism (1959), Frantz Fanon, one of the most significant thinkers on decolonisation, writes firmly:

‘There is not occupation of territory, on the one hand, and independence of persons on the other. It is the country as a whole, its history, its daily pulsation that are contested, disfigured, in the hope of a final destruction’ (p. 65).

Divination, Witchcraft & the Occult *SPECIAL TOPIC*

Popular Culture Association Conference

16-19 April 2025

New Orleans, Louisiana, US

The broad interest in divination, witchcraft, and the occult has been part of popular culture for centuries. Scholars’ discomfort with the topic is often palpable: they tend to focus on intersections that feel more legitimate, e.g. legal ramifications (laws against occult practice, witch trials etc), or archival documents, or simply sticking to fictional accounts.

Spaces and Contexts for Teaching African Literature

A Roundtable for the African Literature Association Annual conference

Nairobi, June 25-28, 2025

Call for Papers

The Department of English at Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India, invites submissions for the upcoming issue on Literature and the Posthuman of its journal, Research and Criticism. 

The Conference for Young Adult Literature Louisiana (CYALL) is accepting proposals for papers, slide presentations, lightning talks, and 20x20 sessions. The conference is a forum to discuss, demonstrate, and champion learning strategies in teaching young adult literature. College faculty, graduate students, librarians, authors, K-12 educators, and scholars are invited to submit proposals for papers and presentations on all aspects of YA literature and media.

The deadline for submitting a proposal is February 15, 2025 

The conference will be held on April 11, 2025 and will be onsite.

Communities and the discourses they foster play a crucial role in shaping how games are both designed and experienced. Salen and Zimmerman (2004) describe how games are cultural artefacts engaged with dynamic exchanges of meaning with their surrounding cultural contexts. These open cultural contexts influence can transform both games and their environments. Consalvo (2007) expands this understanding by discussing how videogame paratexts, such as guides and fan-created content, serve as vital pedagogical tools that shape how players approach and engage with games.

There is no denying that contemporary audiences have an insatiable appetite for killers: myth, legend, and reality. The soaring success, and continued demand, for fictions and nonfictions that document the dealings of serial killers and murders provide ample evidence for this. We are fascinated by their narratives and by their psychologies, and it is perhaps this need or want to understand the killer’s thinking that, in part, makes them so attractive to read and view. However, delineation between fiction and nonfiction continues to be a greyscale area. There are no longer certainties in crime fiction, nor in true crime writing, when it comes to the factual and the fictive.

Panel at ASLE (Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment) 2025: Collective Atmospheres
July 8-11, 2025
University of Maryland, College Park

The Folklore Area of the Popular Culture Association is considering proposals for sessions organized around a theme, special panels, and/or individual papers related to Folklore Studies for the 2025 Popular Culture Association Conference by November 30, 2024. The conference will be held in New Orleans, Louisiana (April 16-19).

Sessions are typically scheduled in 1½ hour slots, with four papers per standard session. Presentations should not exceed 15 minutes. As always, proposals addressing any topic related to folklore or folklore studies are welcome, including but not limited to the following: