Brontë Studies is pleased to invite submissions for the 2025 iteration of the Brontë Studies Early Career Research Essay Prize. The prize aims to encourage new scholarship in the field of Brontë studies, recognise and reward outstanding achievement by new researchers, and support the professional development of the next generation of Brontë scholars.

Not Without Laughter: Tracing Humour in African American Literature Across the Ages

Many philosophers, from Aristotle to Hobbes, Freud to Schopenhauer, Spencer to Peter McGraw, have given interesting insights on matters concerning humour, comedy, and laughter. While the classical theories of humour, namely the superiority theory, the incongruity theory, and the relief theory, discuss the fundamental nature of humour, its evolved forms, such as the benign violation theory, provide a more compact version of the same. Nevertheless, humour is pervasive and can be witnessed in all aspects of life.

Critical Arts: south-north cultural and media studies 

【Special Issue】Global thinking and regional acting: From eco-aesthetics to cultural discourses of the Asian natural environment

Guest editor

Goutam Karmakar, University of Hyderabad, India; Durban University of Technology, South Africa
GoutamK@dut.ac.za

CALL FOR PAPERS

Call for Papers

An Archipelagic Turn and the “Other Asias”: Planetary Care in Literature, Politics, Culture

August 4-6, 2025

Jeju National University

South Korea

Keynote: Gayatri Spivak, Columbia University, US

The Critical Island Studies Consortium announces a conference that aims to fundamentally challenge and reconceptualize our understanding of “Asia” by privileging an archipelagic perspective

Call for Papers: Special Issue of English Studies on Digital Humanities and the English Novel

We are pleased to invite submissions for a special issue of English Studies on the intersection of digital humanities (DH) and the study of the English novel. This special issue aims to push the boundaries of how we understand the novel as a genre by leveraging computational and quantitative methods to explore form, structure, and themes in English fiction. We invite scholars from both the digital humanities and literary studies to contribute to this exciting and interdisciplinary dialogue.

Overview:

The African American Literature Permanent Section of the Midwestern Modern Language Association (MMLA) is requesting abstracts from potential panelists for this year’s in-person conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Informed by this year’s conference theme, “The Humanities is Where Hope Lives,” this section is calling for scholarly work that ties literature written by Black Americans to concepts of hope and its relationship to artistic production. Potential questions to address include, but are in no way limited to: How have representations of hope in Black American literature shifted across the centuries? What do depictions of hope look like when it has been disrupted or challenged?

In a 2023 piece in the London Review of Books,Maylin Hays asks,“In the post-marriage era, what happens to the marriage plot?” Despite being in the midst of this alleged “post-marriage era,” conversations about marriage seem to be animating public discourse more than ever—from wildly popular “trad wife” influencers on social media, to the increasing frequency of conversations about gendered household labor in marriage self-help books like Eve Rodsky’s Fair Play (2019) and Kate Mangino’s Equal Partners (2022), to the recent rise in divorce memoirs like Lyz Lenz’s This American Ex-Wife (2024).

The African Literature Permanent Section of the Midwest Modern Language Association (MMLA) requests abstracts for this year’s convention which will be held in person in Milwaukee, WI.

CFP Comics and Graphic Novels Permanent Section
Chair: Keegan Lannon, University of Illinois – Chicago.

Conference: Nov 14-16, 2025
Marquette University
Milwaukee, WI

What Does Hope Look Like?

If it is true, as the CFP for this conference notes, that “hope can be found in the Humanities,” then comics and graphic novels offer a unique glimpse into that hope by drawing on the media affordances of prose and the visual arts. Comics let us “see” hope and optimism is ways other media are unable to.

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. 

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?

CALL FOR PROPOSALS: THE SOUTHERN GOTHIC AT PCAS/ ACAS 2025

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: 

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