How is everyone doing?

At a routine meeting of the Editorial Board of this journal in March 2026, this innocuous question erupted into disquiet, tension, unease. Speaking from vastly different parts of the world, there was an unmistakable sense of a planet slipping beyond available comprehension and unplugging us from work and life routines. As wars in the Middle East expand and fires spread from apartment blocks reduced to rubble to bombed oil refineries and shipping corridors, profound geopolitical, personal, even psychic rifts leave us grasping for the language and feel of the moment, the falling apart of things, the zeitgeist of an endangered now.

Cuteness is a twenty-first-century sensation—from the global expansion of Sanrio fandom to the rise of social capital around Labubu and Jellycat, from K-Pop stars (real or animated) to cute animals like the quokka and Fennec fox. This issue explores a “cuteness turn” found in many public realms around the world. The adoration of attractive or cheerful objects associated with childishness and youthfulness is part of the human experience. However, this issue does not examine cuteness as a transcultural aesthetic or psychological condition, but we focus on its larger political implications. Throughout history and around the world, this “universal” sentiment has often been manipulated for commercial and ideological purposes.

Call for Papers

The 2026 Multi-ConTEXT International Graduate Conference

“Interweaving Voices and Worlds:
English Studies in Transformative Contexts”

Historically, researching and teaching the different art forms took place in a well-sealed vacuum: for example, using literary theory to decipher one of the great texts, visual and compositional analysis to examine a sublime painting, or montage splicing to perceive the nuances of film. However, it is becoming more difficult to recognize the borders that separate cinema, literature, and the visual arts. Factors including the rise of globalized societies and the emergence of new technology have forced us to reconsider medium specificity and our relationship with creative expressions and works of art.

American Conference for Irish Studies Mid-Atlantic and New England Regional Conference 

November 6th and 7th 2026

Seton Hall University, South Orange, NJ 

CFP Proposal Extension:

The Call for Papers deadline for the Mid-Atlantic and New England American Conference for Irish Studies at Seton Hall University has been extended until September 15th, 2026. We encourage both established scholars and those new to the field to submit abstracts. We welcome graduate student abstracts and will hold an undergraduate poster session. Interested undergraduates should submit their poster ideas as an abstract. 

Keynote:

“I must be mad!” cries Elizabeth Costello at the close of J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals (1999). An author and animal advocate, Costello cannot reconcile how the atrocities of factory farming that keep her awake at night do not likewise haunt her peers. When picking up the character again over two decades later in The Pole and Other Stories (2023), Coetzee presents Costello in the grips of early dementia, which has brought her into even greater communion with the suffering of animals. As she discloses to her son, “I can’t put the image out of my mind, John.

"What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career."

— T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”

CALL FOR PAPERS

In giving visible form to the “crisis of cartographic reason” (Farinelli 2009), the notion of border has become a central concept of the contemporary spatial turn (Guglielmi, Pala 2011), for disciplines such as geography (Winders, Johnson, Schein 2016), cultural anthropology (Wilson 2023), philosophy (Cooper, Tinning 2019), literary theory (Youngs 2019), and political studies (Konrad, Amilhat Szary 2023), emerging as an autonomous field of study.

About the Book

Indian Cultural Heritage: Perspectives is an edited volume that invites interdisciplinary scholarship on the diverse and dynamic dimensions of India's cultural heritage. The volume welcomes original contributions exploring tangible and intangible heritage, indigenous knowledge systems, languages, literature, folklore, performing arts, architecture, material culture, cultural memory, museums, heritage conservation, digital heritage, and contemporary issues of identity, sustainability, and cultural preservation. By bringing together diverse academic perspectives, the volume seeks to advance critical understanding of India's rich cultural traditions and their continuing significance in a rapidly changing world.

The aim of this book series is to examine the history of institutions around the world through the lens of gender. Of interest
are institutions established with the specific purpose of regulating gender and sexuality (e.g. the Magdalen
asylums, Magdalen hospitals, penitentiaries, refuges, mother and baby institutions) as well as those with more general
purposes where gender has had an important role in their operation and function (e.g. prisons, workhouses, lunatic
asylums), including both religious and private organisations. The series supports the increasing interest in these
institutions internationally, both in academia and in the treatment of ‘historical’ abuse.

Nineteenth-century British literature frequently interrogates the boundaries of community dynamics, examining not only what the individual contributes to a collective and what it means to belong, but how communal engagement fundamentally reshapes the individual. 

Consistent with the NeMLA 2027 theme, "Empowering Communities," this panel explores a vital dual imperative within the nineteenth-century British novel: the structural tension between individuals whose actions serve to empower their communities, and communities that conversely function to shield and empower otherwise fragile individuals.

This roundtable considers the role of “unfinished” texts—in the broadest possible sense—in early modern English literature and life writing. 

The 1st Annual Virtual Conference of The Joseph Conrad Society of America

CONRAD NOW!  Joseph Conrad’s Global Crosscurrents

6 - 8  N O V E M B E R  /  2 0 2 6

The Joseph Conrad Society of America (JCSA) invites proposals for our inaugural Annual Virtual Conference, to be hosted on an integrated web-based Zoom platform from 06 to 08 November 2026. The title, CONRAD NOW! speaks to the present state of Conrad scholarship, but also to the ways in which earlier critical debates on that author have shaped his place not only in literary reflection but, as suggested by our subtitle, with respect to the world’s changing cultural landscapes.

Maybe no one has ever looked at a pile of papers with unbridled joy, but in a time of university-subsidized LLMs, instructors are more likely view a stack of papers with a mix of dread and horror. How many made up quotations will I have to check? How many fake citations? How many versions of “it’s not ___, it’s ___” can I read before my soul leaves my body?

Reading Chaucer outside the Anglophone World: Receptions, Translations, and Traditions
Date: March 12–13, 2027
Venue: National Taiwan University, Taiwan

Conference website: https://readingchaucer.com/

In her resolute commitment to telling stories about Black life without the white gaze, Toni Morrison articulated a model of community empowerment grounded in local knowledge, intra-communal collaboration, and the self-reflexive narration of Black worlds. While Morrison remains one of the most visible public advocates of this aesthetic and ethical orientation, practices of Black worldmaking across African and diasporic literatures have long exceeded mere response to anti-Blackness. Even under conditions structured by racial violence, coloniality, displacement, and social rupture, Black communities have continually generated modes of life, relation, memory, and imagination that assert the possibility of worlds otherwise.

Oceanography & the Blue Humanities: Literary Geographies of Islands and Water Bodies

December 09-12, 2026 

Concept Note:

The Winter's Tale: From Page to Stage

 IASEMS Tempera Seminar 2027

 University of Padova, Dipartimento di Studi Linguistici e Letterari

 7-9 June 2027

Location and Date: May 20-23, 2027 University of Houston 

In-person and Virtual: This panel will meet in-person

UMBRELLAS FOR FISH

An International Journal of Absurd & Existential Drama

We are now accepting submissions for our September 2026 Issue.

Submission Deadline: August 25, 2026Website: https://ufjournal.wixsite.com/umbrellas-for-fish/submissions

Email: ufjournal@aol.com

This roundtable discusses the convergence of literary expression and digital activism as means of empowering a community. The shift of passive representation to active agency in the 21st century can be common in the digital space where the local knowledge is stored and disseminated. We discuss how marginalized groups, namely Dalit writers and activists, have used digital humanities to evade authoritarian gatekeepers and develop transnational solidarities. This session welcomes people to talk about how online spaces can be seen as a form of regenerative space where the testimonios of Dalit can be heard, transforming the world into a supportive space of collective action and literary insurgency.

Digital Social Sciences (ISSN: 3078-4980 (Online), 3078-4972 (Print) is an international, peer-reviewed, open-access journal dedicated to advancing interdisciplinary research on the transformative impact of digital technologies on society. The journal provides a global platform for scholars, researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to examine the opportunities, challenges, and implications of digital transformation across the social sciences.

The Editorial Board invites original, unpublished, and high-quality manuscripts for Volume 3, Issue 2 (2026).

Themes of Interest

Call for Chapters

Comics and Graphic Narratives

PAMLA 2026, Seattle, November 12-15

https://www.pamla.org/pamla2026/

Extended deadline: 30 June 2026