Black literatures of African and African American authors set in the twentieth century share cross-cultural realities. These continental literatures have explored topics such as segregation, colonialism, post-colonial disillusionment, civil and political underrepresentation, migration, economic recession, capitalism, racism, double consciousness, and others. This panel seeks essays that explore, using a comparative lens, a new perspective of the connections between these two continental Black authors, cultures, and topics.

Submit an abstract between 200-300 words and a 100-word bio through the CFP link. View Session

The Routledge Handbook of AI and Language Learning
Call for Chapter Proposals (Updated)

Proposal Submission Deadline: Aug. 31, 2025

Editor: Weixiao Wei
Contact: wwei21@CougarNet.UH.EDU

We are pleased to announce that we have recruited some proposals for The Routledge Handbook of AI and Language Learning. To further strengthen the volume, we are now seeking additional contributions in two critical and rapidly evolving areas within the intersection of artificial intelligence and language education.

CFP: Media Futures

The Velvet Light Trap, Issue 98 (to be published Fall 2026)

Date- September 2nd to 5th, 2025

Location- Online

Discover Global Society: Call for Papers – Streaming Media: The Technology, Content, Stakeholders, and its Global Reception

Springer Nature is launching a new series of open-access journals, including the journal Discover Global Society, which was launched in 2023. Currently, Discover Global Society is indexed in DOAJ and Scopus with a CiteScore 2024 of 0.4.

“To be or not to be”—Hamlet’s timeless question of existence—resonates with a gendered undertone that continues to echo through literature and culture. This panel asks a related question: what does it mean to be (or not to be) a man, and how do literary texts help illuminate that question across genres, periods, and geographies?

Apply at https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21898

Call for Papers: Forms of Suffering: Literary Tragedy in an Age of Political Violence

This panel seeks to explore the evolving nature of literary tragedy in response to the escalating political violence witnessed across the Globe. We invite submissions that examine how contemporary literature deals with these crises and, in turn, how the tragic genre itself is undergoing transformation.

We are looking for papers that delve into various aspects of this intersection, including but not limited to:

• The representation of political violence and its human cost in contemporary tragic narratives.

ICMS 2026, Session 7572

This session seeks to examine the misuses and misapplications of the medieval within any fictional media from 1974 forward. Sometimes, accessibility to contemporary audiences requires deviation from what is known to scholarship; sometimes, narrative demands impose changes to particular interpretations of source material. Sometimes, however, things are flatly wrong. Effects on audiences differ, but it is clear that many audiences and authors use contemporary fiction as a means to understand earlier periods. This session seeks to explore what they get right, what they get less right, and why it matters to our ongoing understanding of the belief about the medieval.

ICMS 2026, Session 7564

This roundtable explores enduring medieval influences in adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien's works across various media, including films and television, table-top and video games, and other transmedial texts. Roundtable panelists will examine how Tolkien's deep engagement with medieval literature, history, and mythology continues to shape modern interpretations, from the visual aesthetics and world-building in cinematic adaptations to the narrative structures and mechanics in interactive games and other media. Through interdisciplinary perspectives, the discussion will address ways medieval motifs are preserved, altered, or reimagined in these adaptations, considering both creative intentions and audience reception.

This session is sponsored by the Mark Twain Circle of America.

American author Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1935-1910) achieved lasting fame as Mark Twain, an identity that served as both his pen name and the persona he cultivated for the public. Twain’s writings and his distinctive character have dispersed across time and space, and the resulting Twainian tradition incorporates these elements in many ways.

Call for Chapters: Critical Sociocultural Examinations of Gender Discrimination and Persecution

The history of gender discrimination and persecution is as ancient as human civilization itself, rooted in societal structures, cultural norms, and institutional practices that have perpetuated inequality. This critical examination seeks to uncover the deeply entrenched dynamics of gender-based oppression, its evolution across epochs, and the persistent struggle for equality.

See for details and submission https://www.igi-global.com/publish/call-for-papers/call-details/9088

Call for Papers [extended deadline: July 31, 2025]

2025 Multi-ConTEXT International Graduate Conference:

“Comparison and Convergence in English Studies”

Psychoanalysis in Transition: New Queer Approaches in 21st-Century France2026 NeMLA ConventionMarch 5-8, 2026, Pittsburgh, PA Since the 1970s, LGBTQ+ Francophone authors and scholars have produced an expansive critique of psychoanalytic practices and thought. Despite their differing views, Guy Hocquenghem, Michel Foucault, Monique Wittig, Didier Eribon, Sam Bourcier, and Paul B.

In light of this year’s conference theme of regeneration—with its emphasis on engagement, collaboration, and the creation of powerful new entities—this roundtable explores how the humanities might regenerate through human–AI collaboration. As generative AI becomes increasingly integrated into writing studies and classroom practices, human–AI teaming models (Gupta & Shivers-McNair; McKee & Porter; Knowles & Pedersen; Beddington et al.) have shown potential for positive outcomes in writing pedagogy. At the same time, they raise critical questions about voice (Tan et al.; Grey), the complexity of teacher labor (Ghafouri et al.), and agency issue (Yang), prompting us to reflect on what it truly means to co-generate/create with a machine.

In recent years, publishers and children’s book professionals have registered a new enthusiasm for comic and graphic narrative forms. Graphic narratives as children’s literature offer an exciting new type of text for children and youth, providing important insights into the interests and capabilities of these youngsters as readers and as potential agents of change. Curiously, children’s literature criticism has tended to ignore or, at best, marginalize comics and graphic narratives for young people. This “blind spot” in children’s literature and comics criticism, as Charles Hatfield has called it on a number of occasions, is now being addressed.

A few days before the Independence Day of India in 2023, the Special Police Unit for North-Eastern Region (SPUNER) under the Delhi police circulated a Google form to collect information on “North-Eastern People, Ladakhis & Gorkhas of Darjeeling residing in Delhi” for “better policing Safety & Security.” This incident raises serious concerns due to its discriminatory nature against these marginalized communities and poses security risks involved with the storage and ethical use of such data. This aspect of collecting information becomes even more pertinent during critical moments such as elections or the ongoing conflict between India and Pakistan in Kashmir.

Convocatoria POLIFONIA, Revista de estudios hispánicos Volumen XV, Año 2025Representaciones de la resistencia en la literatura y el cine (el mundo hispanohablante)

El consejo editorial de Polifonía se complace en hacer pública su nueva convocatoria para su decimoquinto volumen, “Representaciones de la resistencia en la literatura y el cine,” que se publicará de forma electrónica e impresa en el 2025.

Este volumen consta de dos partes: la primera aborda la resistencia en la literatura y el cine en el mundo hispanohablante (ver abajo), mientras la segunda es de tema misceláneo - es decir, abierto. 

Conference online (via Zoom): 28-29 July 2025

CFP:

          It is widely known that ideologies of racism, nationalism, and xenophobia are dangerous and spread all over the world. We want to examine these terms as much as possible, from many perspectives and variable aspects: in politics, society, psychology, culture, and many more. We also want to devote considerable attention to how the phenomena of racism, nationalism and xenophobia are represented in artistic practices: in literature, film, theatre or visual arts.​         

This in-person roundtable invites creative writing instructors to reflect on current challenges and opportunities in teaching the art and craft of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and drama.

At a time when the humanities face increasing scrutiny, creative writing courses remain spaces where students actively engage in imaginative thinking, narrative experimentation, and the articulation of personal and collective experiences. But how do we design workshops and other course structures that are inclusive, innovative, and responsive to our students' needs and voices?

Since his debut inFantastic Four #48, the Silver Surfer has become an integral part of Marvel Comic’s sprawlinguniverse. In his six-decade existence, the character has been featured in merchandise and Marvel’s transmedia properties, including cartoons, movies, video games, and podcasts. 
 
While there exists a smattering of academic research on the Silver Surfer, this edited collection welcomes differing perspectives on thischaracter. We welcome contributions from different disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives, including comics studies, film and media studies, communication, theology, literary criticism, and so on. 

This panel seeks to investigate the intersection of postmodernism and horror cinema in the 21st century, highlighting shifts in themes, the rise of new filmmakers, innovative production techniques, and the ways in which the genre has absorbed and requalified postmodernist conventions. Comparative studies among American, European, and/or non-Western cinema are encouraged.

All papers submitted to this symposium must be related to results and research in or about English language; comparative, dissemination, multidisciplinary, etc. papers will also be accepted.

The proposed topics cover a variety of lines of work, including:

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’?”