|
a service provided by www.english.upenn.edu |
FAQ changelog |
all recent posts
American Conference for Irish Studies Mid-Atlantic and New England Regional Conference
November 6th and 7th 2026
Seton Hall University, South Orange, NJ
Please send abstracts of 250 words to Elizabeth.Redwine@shu.edu by August 28th, 2026.
“Not a Monoculture”: Ideas of Irishness
This CFP seeks submissions for a Just-in-Time session proposed for the 2027 MLA conference. If accepted, this panel will analyze the recent slew of literary and genre fiction about "trad wives." Caro Claire Burke's Yesteryear, Saratoga Sch
Special Issue: The State of LGBTQ Fiction (Humanities)
Guest Editor: Joseph M. Ortiz, University of Texas at El Paso
“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.
In India, the displacement of Adivasis, tribals, poor, farmers, forest-dwelling and land-based people, and other marginalized communities for development and infrastructure projects like dams, railways, power projects, and bridge construction, or for capitalist accumulation like mining, resource extraction, tourism, and industry, is a common occurrence. The trajectory of such displacement has a long history, starting in the colonial period and being aggravated in the postcolonial period under the Nehruvian model of development. Although such projects are implemented for the sake of the ‘greater common good’ for all, only a few elites enjoy the benefit of these projects, depriving millions of displaced, marginalized people (Roy 1999).
"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”
In bell hooks’ Belonging: A Culture of Place (2009), she posits that “many folks feel no sense of place” (1). She continues by explaining her personal experience with this spatiality, noting that, “Like many of my contemporaries I have yearned to find my place in this world, to have a sense of homecoming, a sense of being wedded to a place” (2). To that end, a commonality shared between all humans is a searching for a place in which we belong, and this is particularly evident in literature that is produced during times of major societal events.
The Global Asias Initiative (GAI) and Institute for Korean Studies (IKS) at the Pennsylvania State University (PSU), in partnership with UC-Irvine’s Center for Critical Korean Studies (CCKS), are conducting a mentoring project designed to foster a network of scholars working on Korean and Korean diasporic topics under the conceptual rubric of Global Asias. The goal of this project is to build a community of early-career scholars who are working at the intersections of Korean studies and Global Asias approaches; and to encourage intellectual exchange, collaboration, and the development of new critical approaches to Korean studies, Korean American studies, and Korean diaspora studies.
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.
Marianne Moore 2027, hosted by the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge, will follow the highly successful formats of previous Moore conferences (Penn State 2003, Houston 2015, Buffalo 2020, Stanford 2025) with a schedule of panels, round tables and Q&As for a single audience over two and a half days. Exactly 100 years after Moore herself visited Cambridge, the purpose of the conference is to bring together an international and various group of readers with a strong predilection for thinking and writing about poetry, and put them to work newly and again on this singular, difficult, and discriminating poet. The schedule will take shape around readings between Marianne Moore and other writers.
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.
About the volume
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.
Call for Papers“I overstand you, you understand”: Joyce and the Nightmare of Interpretation
Conference Dates:
4–5 February 2027
Deadline for Abstracts:
9 November 2026
Successful Applicants Will Be Notified By:
30 November 2026
Keynote speakers:
Sara Sullam, University of Milan
Kris Peeters, University of Antwerp
Organisers:
Franca Ruggieri,
Fabio Luppi,
Enrico Terrinoni,
Serenella Zanotti
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.
Changeling Country: Neurodivergence, Disability and the Irish Imaginary
An edited volume proposed for Vernon Press, Irish Studies series Editor: Tess Ezzy — Director, Neurodivergent Creative Methods Lab; PhD candidate, University of New England
Beecroft argues in The Cambridge Companion to the Novel that, if we understand the novel as storytelling in any narrative form indigenous to a particular culture or people, then we must acknowledge the existence of multiple novels, each with distinct temporal and spatial origins. He maintains that storytelling traditions are embedded in every society, and that many of these traditions have complemented, intersected with, or diverged from Western narrative forms (46–48). However, the narrative form canonized as the “novel” in the Western literary tradition has a specific historical and aesthetic origin in ancient Greece.
This roundtable considers the role of “unfinished” texts—in the broadest possible sense—in early modern English literature and life writing.
In keeping with Katherine Philips’s reputation as an exemplary practitioner of friendship and curator of connections, this panel invites papers that put Philips’s work in conversation with writers outside the Society of Friendship, outside coterie poetry, outside the English context, or even outside the early modern period altogether.
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.
6/26/26 - 8/31/26: Subs are OPEN for our big 10th Issue: A Day In The Life.
… um, like The Beatles’ song?
YES!
We’re interested in the ways in which art like this exists in the world — with such wildly different fragments and contrasting energies not just coming together but overflowing with a vivid, mad, inventive creativity! (We do like this song.)
So, do we want poems and artworks about this song, or pieces about The Beatles? NO!
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?
When Henry James described the Victorian multi-plot novel as “large loose baggy monsters,” he didn’t have twentieth and twenty-first century horror in mind, but the echoing effects of the Gothic on writers like Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Charles Reade, and others. These writers drew on the multiplied plots and perspectives of the Gothic to represent how social worlds were constructed and constrained.
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/
International Conference at Le Mans University, France
in association with The Philip Roth Society
and The National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
April 7-8, 2027
Roth Unbound: Transcultural signposts from Goodbye Columbus to Nemesis
Roots and Routes in Philip Roth’s Works
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.
[Panel, Virtual]
Oceanography & the Blue Humanities: Literary Geographies of Islands and Water Bodies
December 09-12, 2026
Concept Note:
NeMLA 2027 annual convention - Newport, RI (March 6-9 2027)
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
Historical fiction is generally associated with the novel (see Green [2011] and Young [2018]). Yet the historical short story was significant before WWI: “from 1901 to 1914, over 1200 works of historical fiction were issued, of which nearly a quarter were short-story collections” (Cox and Adrian 1994, xiv). We may wonder if and how the genre has been impacted by the renewed interest in the past and history in fiction over the past 30 years.
Location and Date: May 20-23, 2027 University of Houston
In-person and Virtual: This panel will meet in-person
Intimately Disconnected
4-5 December 2026 (Friday and Saturday)
The University of Sydney
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
Call For Papers for Italian Ecofeminism and Literature
Deadline for Submissions: August 1, 2026
Notification date: September 1, 2026
Full name / Name of organization: Nicole C. (Civitano) Dittmer, PhD
Contact email: ncdittmer@gmail.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.
Social Lens (ISSN: 3078-3941 (Online), 3078-3933 (Print) is an international, peer-reviewed, open-access scholarly journal committed to advancing innovative, interdisciplinary, and evidence-based research across the broad spectrum of the social sciences. The journal provides a global platform for researchers, academicians, practitioners, and policymakers to disseminate original research that contributes to contemporary academic discourse and informs policy and practice.
Themes of Interest
Submissions are welcomed in, but are not limited to, the following areas:
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
Indian comics, cartoons and graphic novels occupy a unique and dynamic space within the country's literary, visual, and cultural traditions of storytelling, especially among children. Earlier, cartooning was a Western monopoly, when Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, Tom and Jerry were household names, which was later challenged by Japan’s Doraemon, Shin Chan, Kochikame, and Pokemon. India, until 1990, was a new but promising market, where most children preferred comics like Chacha Chaudhary, Tenali Raman, Akbar-Birbal, and Nagraj, as cable TV was not within reach of common people.
Public understanding of American cultures—peoples, neighborhoods, languages, foods, histories, arts, religions—has always been vulnerable to myth and misinformation, in particular from the far right. Collectively the humanities work to establish an ever-more accurate/inclusive lens on culture, but the (re)mainstreaming of far-right voices has dangerously distorted the diverse American story.
Call for Chapters
CFP: Handbook of the Cultural Legacy of 9/11. (under contract with Springer)
Edited by:
Marc A. Ouellette, Old Dominion University, (mouellet@odu.edu) and Peter Pericles Trifonas, University of Toronto
Comics and Graphic Narratives
PAMLA 2026, Seattle, November 12-15
https://www.pamla.org/pamla2026/
Extended deadline: 30 June 2026
UVA Wise Medieval-Renaissance Conference XXXIX
Undergraduate Sessions
The University of Virginia’s College at Wise
September 17-19, 2026
Keynote Address:
“Arthur's Great Death in Malory and its Afterlives”
Karen Cherewatuk, Saint Olaf College
Contributions on varied dimensions of Literature and the Wilderness are invited for Volume XIV of Critical Imprints (ISSN: 2319-4774), the annual peer-reviewed journal of the Department of English, Loreto College, Kolkata.
CALL FOR PAPERS FRAME 40.1 “(Be)Longing”
CFP: 3rd International Interdisciplinary Conference of the Department of English, University of Zululand
28-30 September 2026
Re-imagining Language, Writing, and Literature in English in a Fast-Changing World
Haryanvi Dalit theatre occupies a highly marginalised position within the broader landscape of Indian theatre. It may aptly be described as “the marginalised among the marginalised,” as it has remained largely excluded from both mainstream theatre studies and Dalit cultural historiography. Haryanvi Dalit Swang theatre was active long before the Dalit Panther Movement, but it received little attention due to its lack of publication and translation into English. This book seeks to recover, document, and critically examine the neglected legacy of Haryanvi Swang, with particular emphasis on its Dalit traditions and practitioners, thereby contributing to a more inclusive understanding of Indian theatrical heritage.
Call for Papers and Creative Submissions
Deadline: November 27, 2026
The Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Journal of Florida Literature publishes articles, book reviews, notes, fiction, poetry, and other creative work in the spirit of or regarding the life and work of Rawlings, her circle, and other authors and artists inspired by Florida.
The journal welcomes submissions from various approaches focusing on Rawlings and Florida in broader contexts, including these topics:
This panel invites theoretical and pedagogical explorations of experiential approaches to teaching environmental studies in higher education through the frameworks of new materialism, transcorporeality, affect theory, and embodied pedagogy. Aligning with NeMLA 2027’s theme, “Empowering Communities,” the panel examines how environmental learning can move beyond hierarchical and text-centered models toward collaborative, community-oriented, and experiential forms of knowledge production.