In the definition given by Podnieks, matrifocal literatures are written and narrated by mothers in the first-person or limited third-person voice, rendering maternal identity and experience from subjective perspectives. Such narratives (re)value the significance and meaning of maternal figures in cultural, social, and national arenas, and often contest or negotiate traditional ideologies of the “good” mother as self-sacrificing, nurturing, and sexless with her antithesis, the “bad” mother. In the last few years, we have seen the rise of matrifocal writings published to break taboos about previously silenced reproductive experiences, create a sense of community, support, and care, and, overall, empower people.

UVA Wise Medieval-Renaissance Conference XXXIX (9/17-19) deadline for submissions: June 26, 2026 full name / name of organization: University of Virginia-Wise Center for Medieval-Renaissance Studies contact email: kjt9t@uvawise.edu 

Today's ecological problems demand not only ecological awareness but also a fundamental rethinking of the human-nature relationship with the more-than-human world. Increased climatic change, species extinction, ecological degradation, and planetary instability. Challenge anthropocentric assumptions where humans are seen as separate from, superior to, or sole interpreters of nature.

Theme:                 Pentecostal Theology: A Discipline of the Future? Perspectives, Tensions, and Horizons

Date:                     October 30–31, 2026

Location:              Virtual (Zoom)

Time:                    09:00–17:30 EST

Languages:          Spanish and English

Host Institution:

In the Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan redefines the domestic space and the feminine laborassociated with it as a dynamic space where Chinese-American women reshape their identities, preserve their cultures, and share their stories of traumas. bell hooks’ assertion that “homeplace" was the one site where one could freely confront the issue of humanization” provides a productive framework for understanding how kitchens and acts of cooking become spaces of healing, survival, and female agency in women’s writing. By doing these, they try to assert a form of power, and agency that subverts the traditional notion of the domestic space(as an inferior space that is away from history), and the feminine labor associated with it.

Translating Emotions in Medieval Europe: Modes, Models, and Cultural Strategies

In recent decades, the upsurge of emotion studies within the field of Medieval Studies has contributed to reshaping its borders, revealing that medieval affectivity is a dynamic cultural construct that invites cross-cultural and comparative approaches. At the same time, translation in the Middle Ages was rarely a literal, word-for-word process; rather, it functioned as an act of cultural adaptation, political appropriation, and linguistic innovation.

NeMLA

58th Annual Convention, Newport, RI March 6-9 2027

CALL FOR PAPERS

Jokes in Dark Times: Humor, Crisis, and the Postdigital Public Sphere

Panel Chair: Ana León-Távora

Virtual session

The Graduate Journal of Food Studies invites submissions for a special issue exploring the theme Food as Joy.

Food is and will always be a source of pleasure, celebration, creativity, and connection. This issue seeks contributions that examine the intersections, tensions, and possibilities of food as a source of joy. We welcome interdisciplinary perspectives and encourage submissions that engage with food's social, cultural, political, environmental, and emotional dimensions.

International Conference

Université de Montréal

February 5-7, 2027

                                                                                         Call for Papers

                           Geo-Medical Syndemics: Earthquakes, Geotrauma, and Mental Health in the Planetary Imagination

Proposed panel for the Association for Asian Studies conference, AAS to be held in Boston in March 2027.

The “Inter-American Mobility” conference will take place at the Inter-American Research Center of the University of Szeged, Hungary, on November 6–7, 2026. Inter-American mobilities encompass a wide range of movements, from geographical migration to the circulation of cultural productions and ideas, following both material and conceptual routes: People, objects, capital, cultural artifacts, and ideas are produced and (re)used by communities in changing contexts. The conference will explore how these diverse forms of mobility have shaped Inter-American relations from the era of exploration to the present day.

Between the Arts, the 36th annual international conference on Virginia Woolf, invites contributions across the fields of academic and artistic research that emphasize artistic expression, and draws on the inspiration of the Bloomsbury group, Woolf’s circle of artists, writers, critics, and public intellectuals.

As Jacques Derrida asks in Of Hospitality, “Must we ask the foreigner to understand us, to speak our language, in all the senses of this term, in all its possible extensions, before being able… to welcome him into our country?” (15). Derrida’s question is rooted in the conception of the foreigner as the cultural, and important to this panel, the spatial other. Coming up on America’s 250th anniversary, this question is particularly fruitful when considering the environment of the United States; historically (i.e. Indigenous land theft and mistreatment, slavery, capitalist implementation) and contemporarily (i.e.

Call for Papers & Proposals:
2026 Youth Symposium: Youth Agency and Activism in an Age of Precarity

The Intersection of Research, Civil Society, and Young People

The University of Tokyo Komaba Campus, Tokyo, Japan

September 7-8, 2026 (Hybrid)

Organized by
East Asia Young Scholars Association (EAYSA)

Concept Note

Queer Theory in the Age of Global Asias: An International Conference December 11-12, 2026 University of Hong Kong In the last two decades, queer theory has shifted from theoretical focuses on shame, performativity, and identification to questions of transnationalism, diaspora, queer liberalism, homonormativity, and homonationalism. Simultaneously, when US-based queer theorists (Eng, Ferguson, Gopinath, Munoz, etc.) devised new models such as queer of color critique and queer diaspora to name the alternative subjectivities and telos of modernity beyond queer liberalism, the AsiaPacifiQueer (APQ) network based in Australia collaborated with queer scholars in Asia to organize the First International Conference of Asian Queer Studies in Bangkok in July 2005.

Call for papers

Undisciplined Anthropologies II: Beyond Borders

American University of Rome, Italy

Department of Cultures and Societies, University of Palermo, Italy

International Conference

25th, 26th September 2026

The conference will take place in Rome

American University of Rome

The Aurelia Auditorium

Via Pietro Roselli, 4

Roma 00153

Deadline for abstracts: September 1st, 2026

“Unruly Realism: Conventions and Contestations in 19th-Century American Realist Fiction”

Workshop at the University of Erfurt – November 26 - 27, 2026

Co-organized by Ilka Saal (Erfurt) and Antonia Purk (Mannheim)

Resources for American Literary Study (Penn State UP), a peer-reviewed journal of archival and bibliographical scholarship in American literature, invites submissions for our upcoming 2027 issues. Covering all periods and genres of American literature, RALS welcomes both traditional and digital approaches to archival and bibliographical analysis. We also welcome proposals for our "Prospects" series in which scholars forecast future developments (and identify scholarly gaps) in the study of major authors.

Instructions for submissions may be found @ http://www.psupress.org/Journals/jnls_rals.html. 

Centre for Science, Technology, and Society Studies at the Czech Academy of Sciences invites prospective participants to submit abstracts for presentation at the international research symposium Novelty and Inequalities in Science, to be held in Prague, Czechia, on October 8-9, 2026.

Novelty and Inequalities in Science

International Research Symposium on Recognizing and Rewarding Novelty in Science

October 8-9, 2026 Prague, Czechia

Submit abstract of 150-300 words or find more information here:

https://stss.flu.cas.cz/novelty2026

Call for Abstracts

When we think of the Central Valley, that strange opaque space between Los Angeles and San Francisco, we often think of heat, smog, and sometimes fruits and vegetables. What we don’t think about, however, is the immense literary scene of writers from the Central Valley and/or writing about the Central Valley. From Manuel Muñoz, to Gary Soto, to Juan Felipe Herrera, to Lee Herrick, to Marisol Baca, to David Dominguez, to many others, the Central Valley literary community is capacious and deserves attention. As such, this panel session invites papers that discuss the literary community of the Central Valley.

This panel at the SAMLA 97 conference (Nov. 5-7, 2026) examines hospitality as a critical framework within postcolonial studies, attending to the ways literary and cultural texts negotiate welcome, refusal, obligation, and exposure in the aftermath of empire. Within empire studies, hospitality emerges as a fraught ethical and aesthetic relation shaped by colonial histories, uneven mobility, and asymmetrical power. We consider how such texts register these dynamics across postcolonial contexts. Readings across genres and media—including novels, graphic novels, life writing, film, poetry, and theory—deploy hospitality as a vital lens for understanding postcolonial subjectivity, relationality, and the ongoing legacies of colonial governance.

MLA 2027 - Just-in-Time Session Proposal

Conference Date: January 7 to 10, 2027. 
Location: (Los Angeles, CA)
Submission Deadline: (August 17th, 2026)

TITLE: Many Stories, One History: Re-examining the Diverse Coalition of the American Revolution

Transnational Feminisms have emerged out of the need for women’s groups to address oppression that crosses national borders and to build solidarities rooted in an exploration of the articulation between the local and the global. These forms of feminisms examine the ways in which women’s groups transcend location beyond national boundaries to address their political and ideological struggles, exploring the interrelationships between discrete factors such as caste, class, ethnicity, sexuality, ability, age, and multiple other positionalities and contexts of inequalities as they overlap and are shaped by neoliberal economic and political forces, patriarchies and various other systems of stratification.

The Cultural Translation and Mobility: Processes, Spaces, Objects Working Group invites proposals for a panel titled “Planetary thinking at the intersections of cultural translation and mobility“ as part of the Canadian Association of Cultural Studies Biennial Conference (hybrid), November 5-7, 2026, hosted  by the Cultural Studies Department, Trent University, Canada.