In her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston artistically chooses distinctive forenames and nicknames for her characters, reflecting the uniqueness and diversity of African American culture. Names like Tea Cake, Bootsie, Alphabet, or Sop-de-Bottom are informal name choices that also highlight the difference between the proper white naming conventions and the relaxed naming choices of African Americans in the South.

We invite paper proposals for the Cultural Studies Panel of the Anglistics International Conference 2025, dedicated to exploring how Anglophone cinema and television reflect, negotiate, and transform cultural identities and social realities.

This panel welcomes contributions that examine film and television as dynamic sites of cultural production and contestation. We are particularly interested in how visual media engage with issues such as race, gender, class, sexuality, migration, colonialism, globalization, and environmental crisis, drawing from interdisciplinary and intersectional approaches.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

Recent manuscript studies increasingly examine physical damage to medieval documents as intentional acts. Erasure often functioned as censorship, silencing content deemed transgressive. Conversely, damage has also been interpreted as ritualistic worship, where marks on texts or artefacts express devotion rather than destruction. This session explores erasure both as censorship and as devotional practice, investigating how such traces can be read as deliberate, symbolic interventions. By considering these forms, the session sheds light on the complex interactions between materiality, authority, and spirituality within the medieval archive.

Please note that this is a virtual session. 

2025 Dress and Body Association Conference

CALL FOR PAPERS

The Dress and Body Association invites submissions for the organization’s sixth annual conference, which will be held on November 1-2, 2025. Consistent with our long-term goals for inclusivity and sustainability, all activities will be 100% online.

Join our Google Group to learn about opportunities and converse with members of the DBA year-round! Email to request membership: dress.body.assoc@gmail.com.

Comfort and Joy: Locating Hope in Dress and the Body

Recent years have seen an upsurge of narratives from the Global South that engage in the representation of various African cosmologies. In contrast with Western traditions, these narratives are contributing to an epistemological shift from “the study of African religion as object [to] the study of African religion as subject” (Olupona 2013: xix). 

This book will explore how religion and the sacred emerge from within the structure and narrative of The Legend of Zelda series, one of the most influential and enduring franchises in video game history. Zelda has greatly impacted multiple generations of players, and has an extremely loyal and dedicated fanbse.

Games have long used medievalist or medieval-adjacent settings to engage with audiences. Scholars have noted the various connections to be made between popular perceptions of the medieval in games and historical and textual realities of the medieval world. While games may not always make it a priority to accurately portray medieval (or pseudo-medieval) life, there are still important parallels and intertextual references that games use to harken back to the medieval world—whatever version of that that reality they choose to use as a basis, at least. Just like games construct a faux reality for their players, so too have the popular conceptions of the medieval world been carefully constructed through literature and popular culture.

The concept of orphanhood may reveal a liminal yet productive state between figures, identities, homes, cultures and languages, exposing fertile spaces for crafting (re)generative views of self and other through literary texts. As characters, orphans may become queered figures, pointing back to the vulnerable state of childhood itself; as protagonists, orphans have also been connected to the concept of the hero (Rose-Emily Rothenberg), the role of the laborer, and the emotional “regeneration” of adults (Claudia Nelson).

Call For Submission: Interdisciplinary Research on Globalisation, Climate and Sustainability

Publisher: Deshbandhu College, University Of Delhi

Deadline For submission: 15th July 2025 (11.59 PM IST)

Deshbandhu Journal Of Social Sciences

ISSN: 2583-7974 (Online)

Deshbandhu Journal Of Social Sciences

Theme: Globalisation, Climate and Sustainability: Changing Perspectives and Hypotheses 

“December 2025 Issue”

Call for Papers

Equinox: Volume I: Fables & Firelight
Published by La Société Étoilée 

Submission Deadline: August 31, 2025

In its inaugural issue, Equinox invites submissions on the theme of fables and firelight—that is, the stories we gather around, the myths that shape us, and the flickering interplay between tradition, memory, and imagination. We welcome work that explores folklore, mythology, ancestral knowledge, symbolic systems, oral traditions, and the cultural rituals of storytelling across time. But we also invite broader interpretations: How do stories act as shelter? When do they burn or illuminate? What truths lie within the fantastic?

2026 NeMLA Annual Convention

March 5-8, 2026

Wyndham Grand Hotel, Pittsburgh, PA

Call for Papers for in-person panel:

On the eve of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the formation of the United States of America, this panel seeks papers that examine US national identity as it is represented in textual form.  Specifically, we seek papers that analyze literary texts—novels, stories, poems, and plays—that speak to the characteristics of American identity and ultimately offer an answer to the question, “What does it mean to be ‘American’?”

Comparative Woman Journal – Volume 4, Issue 1 (2025)

CALL FOR PAPERS

Comparative Woman is an online journal affiliated with LSU’s Department of Comparative Literature that explores topics related to comparative literature and women/gender studies through art and academic essays.Comparative Woman Journal is inviting papers for Volume 4, Issue 1 (2025) on Aesthetic Education: From Sensibility to Critical Engagement.

THEME

Aesthetic Education: From Sensibility to Critical Engagement

SUB-THEMES (including but not limited to):

Call for Papers

2025 Multi-ConTEXT International Graduate Conference:

“Comparison and Convergence in English Studies”

Digital Projections and Screened Identities in US American Culture Virtual Conference | September 4–5, 2025