The Mind and the Machine: Mental Disability and Technology

George Washington University (GWU) English Graduate Student Association Symposium

Friday, 20 March, 2026

This virtual symposium invites papers that explore how mental disability and technology intersect in literature, film, and media.

By mental disability, we include conditions such as mental illness, neurodivergence, emotional distress, and psychological differences as represented across cultures.

By technology, we refer broadly to scientific, digital, or mechanical systems (such as medical instruments, typewriters, social media, surveillance systems, and artificial intelligence).

The School for International Training (SIT) invites proposals from researchers and scholars to contribute to a roundtable discussion focused on the following areas: climate and the environment; development and inequality; education and social change; geopolitics and power; global health and well-being; identity and human resilience; and peace and justice.

AI and Shakespeare: A British Shakespeare Association Virtual Conference: CFP

The Mind and the Machine: Mental Disability and Technology

George Washington University (GWU) English Graduate Student Association Symposium

Friday, 20 March, 2026

This virtual symposium invites papers that explore how mental disability and technology intersect in literature, film, and media.

By mental disability, we include conditions such as mental illness, neurodivergence, emotional distress, and psychological differences as represented across cultures.

By technology, we refer broadly to scientific, digital, or mechanical systems (such as medical instruments, typewriters, social media, surveillance systems, and artificial intelligence).

Our moment is one in which information literacy is an increasingly vital skill. As misinformation invades everything from hallucinatory AI-generated online search results, to fallacious social media posts, to official statements from the highest levels of government, the ability to discern between facts, fiction, and opinion is as important as ever. Yet, as history reveals, our times are not entirely unprecedented. In particular, African Americans have long dealt with lies about who we are similarly promoted at every societal level.

Call for Papers for a in person panel on 21st Century Latinx Children’s Literature and Media at the 2026 Annual MELUS Conference scheduled for Thursday, April 30 - Saturday, May 2, 2026.

According to the last three U.S. Census reports, the demographic of Latinx/Hispanic children has grown. Most recently, Latinx children account for about 1 in 4 of all children in the United States.

This special issue seeks to examine Indian science fiction and speculative fiction in general, as a critical archive where postcolonial enunciations of ‘space’ are actively produced, contested and reimagined through a variety of cultural texts. Our objective is to open a conversation about the overarching genre of Indian postcolonial Science Fiction and the way it interacts with the concept of ‘space’-- literal and/or cultural.

Call for Book Chapters

Editors:
Dr. Muhsin Yanar, Visiting Researcher, School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication, Birkbeck, University of London
Dr. Grace Halden, Reader, School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication, Birkbeck, University of London
Dr. Russell Kilbourn, Professor, Department of English and Film Studies, Wilfrid Laurier University

Sciences and Fictions: Human Futures Beyond Boundaries

We seek chapters for the forthcoming edited collection Sciences and Fictions: Human Futures Beyond Boundaries.

The Routledge Handbook to Star Wars

Edited by Lorna Piatti-Farnell, Angelique Nairn, and Justin Matthews

The Editors invite abstract submissions for The Routledge Handbook to Star Wars. Contributions are encouraged from scholars across disciplines, including film and media studies, cultural studies, sociology, history, gender studies, literature, and related fields, as well as from those engaging with interdisciplinary approaches.

Communication skills are recognized as an integral component of professional competence in engineering education, complementing technical proficiency. English language educators play a significant role in developing communication skills among engineering students. Nevertheless, undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in English most often overlook the inclusion of courses on science communication in the curriculum. As a result, research scholars in English who aspire to take up faculty positions in the engineering institutes do not get any formal training in science communication before entering academia. This FDP aims to bridge this gap by equipping English language educators with the skills necessary to become effective science communicators.

Building Spaces of Freedom
Society for the Study of Southern Literature 2026 CFP
Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee, March 28-31, 2026

The Society for the Study of Southern Literature seeks submissions for our biennial conference, which will take place March 28-31, 2026, at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee.

Keynote Speakers: Michele Aaron (University of Warwick) and Jean-Baptiste Thoret (Université
de Poitiers)

12–14 March 2026

Queer Bibliography in the South:

Space, Place, Community

Athens, GA and online

Queer Bibliography invites proposals for papers considering how gender, sexuality, and textuality intersect with place in the production of queer identity.

Whether we acknowledge it or not, the academy exists in relation to Indigenous people, indigeneity, and structures of settler colonial power. Yet, for many disciplines across the humanities, Indigenous Studies remains marginalized and under-theorized. This symposium invites work that engages the relationality between Indigenous Studies – a discipline grounded in the knowledges, practices, politics, and lives of Indigenous peoples – and other fields, crafts, and disciplines that might see themselves as independent of the concerns of Indigenous peoples and histories. We welcome Indigenous Studies scholars as well as scholars working in connection with any of the historical concerns of Indigenous Studies.

Duplicity/Duplicität: Betwixt intimates and strangers.

Opening Symposium of the collaborative research project Studies in Remoteness. Sensoria of Absence, Distance and Neglect.

https://userblogs.fu-berlin.de/remoteness/winter-symposium-2026/ 
https://www.nsuweb.org/circle-1-studies-in-remoteness-sensoria-of-absenc...

January 29-31 2026. 

Call for additional chapters for an edited collection (under consideration by publisher): proposals due November 16, 2025

Land of the Free, Home of the Brave?: American Children’s Literature in an Era of Heightened Censorship

In a country advocating, loudly, the rights of the individual, what about child readers? Are they granted an expansive vision of their world? What rights do children have where books are concerned?

The Journal of Popular Romance Studies is calling for papers for its Special Issue “Romancing the Posthuman” focusing on romance, critical love studies and posthumanism.

The National Humanities Center (NHC) invites proposals for the Being Human Festival (US), a public humanities initiative for diverse, non-academic audiences across regions and subject areas. Events for this year’s Festival will take place April 18–May 2, 2026, and will be organized around the theme of “Between the Lines”–a space of hidden histories, shifting borders, and unspoken meanings.

Poetry’s Environments  (June 9-11 2026)

Poetry shapes and transforms experiences and attitudes toward nature and ecology, just as the natural environment maps the poetic imagination. Poetry roots itself in the environment of the breath, the voice, the hand, and the ear. It roams over pages of books and across digital, computational, performative, archival, monumental, and ephemeral landscapes. Poetry emerges and resides in institutional and ad hoc ecosystems, and it sounds and senses within and without the body of the poet, the audience, the blade of grass.

Call for Papers, Latinx Literature at CEA 2026

March 26-28, 2026 | Charlotte, NC

Hilton Charlotte University Place

The College English Association, a gathering of scholar-teachers in English studies, welcomes proposals for presentations on special topic in Latinx Literature for our 55th annual conference. Submit your proposal at www.cea-web.org

We invite submissions for Lands of the Lost: A Field Guide to Dinosaur Parks Physical, Fictional, and for the Future, an edited collection that explores extinct animal parks real, imagined, unrealized, or yet to be. Our goal is to bring together multi-disciplinary perspectives to examine parks across time and space, across fact and fiction. We seek to understand how these projects, which reconstitute and enclose long-extinct life forms, intersect with histories of science, capitalism, imperialism, environmental change, and more.

Conference:
Children’s Literature Association Annual Conference
“Won’t You Be My Neighbor”
May 28–30, 2026
Omni William Penn Hotel, Pittsburgh, PA

Roundtable Format:

This will be proposed as a roundtable.

I am looking for 4–6 participants to give short (5–10 minute) provocations or reflections that will spark an open discussion.

Organiser Contact Info:
Samira Abdur-Rahman, Assistant Professor of Literature and the Environment, The College of New Jersey (TCNJ) 

Roundtable Description:

In 2015, i-D magazine declared the year of the ‘sad girl’ (Thelandersson 2022: 157). In the decade since, portrayals of depressed, anxious, and mentally burdened women have scarcely abated, from the breakout success of Sally Rooney to the emergence of Sad Girl BookTok to Gen Z’s recent rediscovery of Lana Del Rey. Meanwhile, in the academy, subfields such as Affect Theory, Disability Studies, and Madness Studies represent growing areas of interest for increasing numbers of researchers and students.