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I invite you to please consider submitting a abstract for the following panel to be hosted ASECS (American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies) at the 2026 Conference. This conference will be help April 9-11 in Philadelphia.
CAIS Fall Teaching Symposium
New Directions in Italian Language and Culture Teaching: North American Perspectives
October 25, 2025
University of Guelph and Online
The Canadian Association for Italian Studies invites proposals for a one-day conference, with in-person panels to be held at the University of Guelph and online panels via Zoom, that offers an opportunity to reflect on the current state of the evolving field of Italian language pedagogy in North America.
Seminar title: The World of World Literatures: Practices, Pedagogies, and Possibilities
Organizers: Dr. Mir Islam, Nalanda University, India. Arunav Das, University of South Carolina, USA
American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), Annual Convention 2026, Montreal, Canada
Abstract Submission Deadline: October 2, 2025. Must be submitted through the ACLA portal.
ACLA annual convention: February 26 - March 1, 2026. Montreal, Canada (In-person)
More info: https://www.acla.org/annual-meeting
Department of Liberal Arts
Indian Institute of Technology Bhilai
presents
Gendered Modalities of Remembering in South Asian literatures
A National Conference
15–16 January 2026
Call for Papers
Concept Note:
We invite chapters for a multi-disciplinary edited collection exploring heavy metal and rock bands that use concealed identities, stage personas and masks as a substantial part of their performance and aesthetic. Hidden identities are not a new phenomenon in either popular music generally or heavy metal/hard rock music more narrowly, as performers obscuring their identity through face paint, masks, and wigs goes back over half a century and encompasses bands including Kiss, Slipknot, and Gwar. New masked bands, including Sleep Token and Ghost, have recently risen to widespread popularity.
“And away above all with the body, that idée fixe of the senses!” Nietzsche has philosophy proclaim. For it is “infected with every error of logic there is, refuted, impossible even,” and “impudent enough to behave as if it actually existed.” The body has long been one of philosophy’s more persistent preoccupations as it’s impossible to define without distortion yet impossible to fully discard. From Plato’s call to transcend the body in search of truth to Descartes’ relegation of the body to mere extension, philosophy has long sought to escape or sanitize embodiment. Even phenomenology, which counters the Cartesian account, privileges the lived body of perception over the objective, material body and its historical conditions.
Veiling obscures, but also reveals. It holds symbolic and aesthetic power that spans centuries, from the medieval and Victorian periods to contemporary expressions in visual, fashion, and social media culture. Further, it frames visibility itself and shapes how identity is hidden, controlled, surveilled, or disclosed. To veil is not only to conceal, but to shape what others are allowed to see and what they are left to imagine. Veiling shrouds, but also frames; withholds, but also invites interpretation. These tensions give veiling its interpretive depth, sustaining its power to provoke, unsettle, and reframe.
Call for Book Chapters
Portrayals of the Fourth of July in American Culture and Literature:
Reimagining American Identity at USA 250
Extension: September 15, 2025
Update: due date extended to Friday, Sept. 26, 2025
Following the highly successful panels at ALA 2025, the Edith Wharton Review is planning a special issue on Edith Wharton and Popular Culture.
Dissension exists on a spectrum. It can be expressed on an individual scale—by rejecting challenges to ethical or moral beliefs—or within collectives that object to systems that harm or subjugate. Literature can be used as an act of protest and resistance, to create counter narratives that combat oppressive agendas; it can mirror the outcry of societies that wish to test the limits of oppression but lack the voice to do so. Now more than ever, it is imperative that we listen to those voices that systems continually work to silence. Authoritarianism, protest, incarceration, and revolution are interwoven themes that dominate allegorical genres such as dystopian fiction.
This seminar reflects on the relationship between law and literature, particularly on how literary forms and narratives interact with political and social legal orders. Julie Peters credits the “antidisciplinarity” of both law and literature as central to the movement that emerged in the 1980s. Bringing this conversation to the 21st century, this seminar seeks to bring fresh perspectives on this interdisciplinary approach by expanding its theoretical scope. Sub-fields like trauma studies have long reflected on the challenges and possibilities of representing and aestheticizing atrocity and suffering.
CERÆ: An Australasian Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies
invites submissions for hybrid panels at the Leeds International Medieval Conference 2026 (July 6-9) on the theme of
Premodern Timeliness and Timelessness
Time is a construct with notoriously blurry definitions and boundaries. The artificiality of time can evoke anything from comforting nostalgia to worrying anachronism. Ceræ invites papers that deal with the unfocused and unreal aspects of premodern temporality, including but not limited to:
This is a call for papers for a hybrid session at the Northeast Modern Language Association Conference in Pittsburgh, PA which will take place March 5-8, 2026. Please see this link for the CFP and to submit through the NeMLA site: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21963 .
Open to any languages, this roundtable explores how instructors are integrating AI tools in the context of translation—whether through small tasks, full assignments, or larger projects—and how these technologies can be leveraged to enhance students’ linguistic and cultural competencies. More specifically, how can AI support the development of students’ intercultural awareness, stylistic sensitivity, and translation skills? In what ways might it help students better understand grammar, vocabulary, idiomatic expressions, and register in both the source and target languages? What kinds of assignments can we design to foster a critical and effective use of AI without compromising learning outcomes or creative engagement?
9/1/25 - 9/22/25: Litmag Subs are OPEN!The theme is: The Urge
… as in the many faces of “the feminine urge” — to cave-dwell or home-make, towards tenderness or violence, giddiness or belligerence, nurturing or devouring, and so on.
We’d like to explore a full spectrum of “the female experience,” and especially showcase her inner world. What makes her tick? What’s behind the mask and under her skin? Which desires and urges are rarely spoken but always just below the surface?
The groundbreaking anthology Early American Writings (2001)edited by Carla Mulford, Angela Vietto, and Amy E. Winans, incorporated writing that represented a range of authors and texts that showcased the broad diversity of literature of the early Americas. The volume not only reflected but inspired new areas of research and teaching that have continued today. In keeping with the theme of the 2026 NeMLA conference, (Re)generation, the goal of this session will be to continue this expansive vision of the literature of the early Americas and showcase scholarship that represents innovative ways of thinking about these literatures.
Popular Culture Association 2026 (PCA 26): Atlanta, GA
April 2026
"Visual Culture’s Pasts, Presents, and Futures"
The VISUAL CULTURE area of the Popular Culture Association welcomes proposals in anticipation of its 2026 conference, which will be held in Atlanta, Georgia, April 8-11.
All are cordially invited to present their research regarding current issues of tourism, archaeology, heritage and history in English or Arabic.
The full articles of the conference will be published as the book of conference (provided with International Standard Book Number (ISBN), and according to the Governmental Approval (The Ministry)), and also will be indexed in CIVILICA (however, the book of abstracts will be published too).
You may select either Virtual Presentation or In-Person Presentation.
Conference Themes
A) Tourism (Any issue related to tourism)
Rob Nixon describes, ‘slow violence’, as “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space”, one “that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales” (2). This seminal work raised the critical question of the strategic difficulties of representing the impact of such violence, especially as it crossed national, ethnic, cultural, linguistic and even gendered borders.
This seminar investigates how repression, repetition, and unresolved rhythms shape emotional experience across Anglophone literature, heritage film, and contemporary media. It emphasizes stalled movements of feeling, looping tensions, and residues that resist closure. Such affective patterns disrupt inherited memories and unsettle formations of Englishness and other post-imperial identities. At the center of this seminar lies a guiding question: how do patterns of emotion simultaneously sustain and fracture collective identity?
Call for Abstracts for an Edited Volume
Tastes of Text: Food and Indian Literature
Editors
Dr.Auritra Munshi, Assistant Professor, Raiganj University
Dr. Surabhi Jha, ICSSR Postdoctoral Researcher, Aliah University
Concept Note
In a world that constantly urges us to scale up—to dream bigger, to grow up, to grasp the “big picture”—what does it mean to think small? This seminar turns to the miniature, not merely as an object of study but as a method of inquiry. To think with the miniature is to reconsider scale itself—not as a neutral or fixed formal property of things, but as a way of seeing and knowing, shaped by desire, enabled by technology, and embedded within power relations.
After an enriching conference in 2025, Heavy Childhoods 2026 will run under the title “Curating Future Nostalgia inHeavy Times”
Forms in Dialogue
Universität Konstanz, 11-13 Juni 2026
Note: All abstracts must be submitted through the Annual Meeting and Membership portal at https://www.xcdsystem.com/asecs/member/
You do not need to be a member to submit an abstract through the portal; however, you must be a member of ASECS to present at the conference. The panel chair cannot submit the abstract on your behalf.
Trans-scriptions: Cultural Codings and the Poetics of the Body
International Conference organized by University of Szczecin & University of Wrocław
11-13 February 2026
Institute of English Studies, University of Wrocław, Poland Hybrid On-site Conference
Date: November 8-9, 2025
Location: University of Oxford, UK
Online option available
Conference page: https://labrc.co.uk/2024/11/20/alchemy-2025/
Cost: 180 GBP (In person)
100 GBP (Online)
Prices exclude eventbrite fees
“Many have said of Alchemy, that it is for the making of gold and silver. For me such is not the aim, but to consider only what virtue and power may lie in medicines.” – Paracelsus
Conference online: 18-19 September 2025 (via Zoom)
Scientific Committee:
Professor Wojciech Owczarski – University of Gdańsk, Poland
Professor Polina Golovátina-Mora – NTNU, Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Professor Ryan Habermeyer - Salisbury University, USA
CFP:
Journal of Chinese Cinemas Special Issue CFP: Before, Besides, and Beyond the Taiwanese New Cinema
This panel invites presentations that explore “extreme geographies”—sites at the limits of habitability and at the horizon of speculation—in literary, visual, and cinematic archives of Latin America. Drawing from David J. Nemeth’s working definition (entry in Encyclopedia of Geography, 2010), we consider both material environments beyond human thresholds, such as polar zones, tropical belts, deserts, volcanic craters, deep-sea trenches, and outer space, and imagined loci including utopias/dystopias, lost islands, fantastic and counterfactual frontiers.
Telling Italy Abroad: National Narratives and the Transnational Adaptation of Italian Literature on TV
Deadline for abstract proposals (500 WORDS): August 31, 2025
Rust Belt Studies Special Issue
The Regenerative Rust Belt: Environment, EcoLogy, Ecosystems
For too long, the narrative of the Rust Belt has been one of emptiness, decay, decline, and vacancy —
and often, our stories are neglected in the national sphere or controlled by cultural outsiders.
In this issue, we will consider the following and more :
How can the humanities imagine regenerative Rust Belt futures and learn from industrial history?
How can the humanities activate the environmental movement in new ways in the Rust Belt?
How can we use art, literature, and music to teach the environmental Rust Belt in the classroom?
How can we use the humanities to reflect on ecosystems both natural and human?
Video essays are inevitably entwined with today’s content industry, which relies on engagement metrics, personal branding, and like-and-subscribe platforms to generate revenue and increase time-on-device. Perhaps for this reason, they are frequently associated with advertising or edutainment and rarely appear in journals and other scholarly venues.
Kalamazoo 2026, session #7559: Lists as Sources
Any list serves as a direct “source” for the information it contains. A grocery list tells a shopper what to buy. But it may also serve as a source in several other fields: the history of advertising, the history of culinary trends, or the history of an individual family. This panel seeks papers that consider medieval lists that serve as sources in similarly direct and tangential ways. Such lists might include inventories, mnemonics, itineraries, bede rolls, and word lists, as well as lists in literature. We especially welcome papers that take the properties of lists into account in their analyses.
This is an updated CFP for an edited collection representing contemporary “conservative cultural criticism” of books, film, TV, and other media. We are taking a broad view of what conservatism entails, but common influences cited by contributors include Russell Kirk, C. S. Lewis, Paul Elmore More, and Roger Scruton. I have 12 chapters so far on the following topics / authors:
From its origins in racialised heredity science to its violent implementation in 20th-century state policies, eugenics has shaped how modern societies imagine health, heredity, and the value of life. Literature has long played a key role in this history – at times reflecting or affirming eugenic ideals, at others exposing their violence or imagining forms of life beyond them.
Call for Papers
Biography, Autobiography, Memoir, & Personal Narrative
Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)
47th Annual Conference, February 25-28, 2026
Marriott Albuquerque
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Submissions open: September 1, 2025
Proposal submission deadline: October 31, 2025
Call for Abstracts--Seeking abstracts for articles for the forthcoming Bloomsbury Handbook to Kurt Vonnegut, which will include 25-35 brand-new essays on Vonnegut of about 5,000-6,000 words each. The book will be part of a new series with Bloomsbury Publishing UK, aimed at an audience of post-graduates and above.
Books already published in the series include volumes about Toni Morrison and F. Scott Fitzgerald, among others.
Beside You in the C19:
Elizabeth Freeman’s Legacies
The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists Biennial Conference
March 12-14, 2026, Cincinnati, OH
ACLA 2026: Marxism & Lyric
This seminar examines the lyric as a central and contested form in Marxist literary theory. Often viewed as the genre most resistant to historical materialist analysis—associated with interiority, formal autonomy, and expressive immediacy—lyric has nonetheless emerged, across multiple Marxist traditions, as a nexus for theorizing the contradictions of subjectivity, value, and mediation under capital.
Tinta regada (Spilled Ink) a multilingual publication, invites submissions for a Series on Travel Writing (Literatura de viajes).
The editors of the literary magazine of the Instituto Nuevos Horizontes welcome personal commentaries, essays, poetry, short story and other forms, in any language, up to 2,500 words.
Send questions and submissions to nuevos.horizontes.uprm@gmail.com.
CALL FOR PAPERS
MELUS 2026 | Austin, Texas
Beyond the Page: Storytelling Across Media and Borders in Precarious Times
Co-Hosted by Southern Methodist University and The University of Texas at Austin
Co-Organizers: Frederick Luis Aldama (UTexas-Austin) and Christopher González (SMU)
Conference Dates: Thursday, April 30 – Saturday, May 2, 2026
Optional outings and welcome activities will take place on Wednesday evening, April 29, and Sunday morning, May 3.
CONFERENCE THEME
In a 1918 speech at Munich University, sociologist Max Weber observed a widespread cultural loss of belief in magic and the supernatural: “the fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization, and above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world.’… the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life." Weber’s idea of disenchantment is borrowed from the Enlightenment-era playwright Fredrich Schiller's exploration of Entzauberung, the "de-divinizing" of art, literature, culture, and existence. As Richard Jenkins clarifies, Weber's disenchantment is “right at the heart of modernity,” a product of the world becoming “knowable, predictable, and manipulable by humans ...
This panel explores how Asian American literature, film, and television depict the diasporic struggle to assimilate, resist, and reconstruct identity within spaces and places in the United States. Spaces and places here refer to the urban/suburban/rural, the home, institutions, transitory spaces like highways, but also the lack of space, moments of displacement, and the absence of place. Where do we as readers and audiences find the Asian American physically? What are the affordances of such spaces and places in their construction of the Asian American individual? We welcome submissions that consider when and where Asian Americans can or cannot exist within the diasporic canon.
Addressing Ocean and Space Pollution Through the Arts: New Considerations on Indigenous Knowledges and Collaborative Practices
A conference organized by the ERC-funded research project OSPAPIK, the Centre des métiers d’art de la Polynésie française (CMAPf) and the Université de la Polynésie française (UPF, Vice-Présidence Dialogue Sciences, Cultures & Sociétés)
(For the CFP in French, please scroll down)
26-28 October 2026
Call for Papers
Digital & Analog Cultures
Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)
47th Annual Conference, February 25-28, 2026
Marriott Albuquerque
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Submissions open: September 1, 2025
Proposal submission deadline: October 31, 2025
TWO-DAY NATIONAL CONFERENCE
on
Precarity and Resistance: Bengali Muslim Experience and Contemporary India
on
15-16 November 2025
(Tentative Dates)
Organised by
Bengali Academia for Social Empowerment (BASE), Kolkata, West Bengal
in collaboration with
Department of English, Nagar College, Nagar, Murshidabad, West Bengal &
“Formats and Institutions of American Literary Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century” Editors: Philipp Löffler (Universität Heidelberg) and Alexander Starre (Freie Universität Berlin) Deadline for Abstracts: October 31, 2025 This edited collection addresses alternative modes of writing nineteenth-century literary history, spanning the evolution of the literary field from a narrow patronage system in the 1810s and 1820s to a broad and expanding commercial literary market around 1900. The framing of the volume cuts across traditional period distinctions, from the early Republic to turn-of-the-twentieth-century naturalism, as well as canonized literary movements.