The ground falling from beneath your feet, the cliff’s edge barely holding you aloft, the free fall in open air. Cinematic representations of falling and nearly plummeting from great heights have long been around as an arbiter of suspense and a literal visualization of the classic “cliffhanger,” with origins to such a visual tracing back to the silent film era and actor Harold Lloyd dangling from the hands of a clock in Safety Last! (1923) Falling and dizzying heights have been featured over the years in a variety of forms and often successfully serve as a device to drive the plot forward or signify its climax. We see examples of villains and heroes alike battling on skyscrapers in DC and Marvel universe adaptations.

Unwrapping Christmas Through Arts-Based Research: A Transdisciplinary Conference

Proposal Submission Deadline: November 9, 2025

Conference Dates: December 8-9, 2025
Location: online

Fees: £100 (non-members)

Call for Papers

Call for Papers

Food and Culture

Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)

47th Annual Conference, February 25-28, 2026

Marriott Albuquerque

Albuquerque, New Mexico

http://www.southwestpca.org

Proposal submission deadline: October 31, 2025

Special issue of Comunicazioni Sociali: Journal of Media, Performing Arts and Cultural Studies

Embodied Rhythms. Interdisciplinary Takes on the Perception of Rhythm in Reality, Arts, Cinematic and Immersive Experience

Edited by Adriano D’Aloia, Ruggero Eugeni, and Maria Alessandra Umiltà

In recent years, the study of rhythm has regained centrality across multiple disciplinary fields — from film and media theory to cognitive neuroscience, from aesthetics to performance studies. This special issue aims to explore rhythm as an embodied and perceptual structure that organizes audiovisual experience in both cinematic and immersive environments.

The English department at Duke University is thrilled to host the 11th annual Post45 Graduate Symposium on February 20-21, 2026.

The Post45 Graduate Symposium seeks graduate-level works-in-progress related to post-1945 media, arts, literature, textual or visual objects, digital platforms, politics, and culture. We welcome submissions that expand our conception of objects and meaning-making post-1945 or place them in comparative, transnational, or hemispheric frames. We especially welcome contributions that foreground the importance of race, gender, class, and sexuality to post-45 studies. 

2nd Call for Chapter Proposals
for Essay Collection

How Scripted TV Series Portray Social Media’s Power to Shape Culture

Call for Presentations for the Annual Meeting of the Popular Culture Association

We invite presentations about War after 1945, covering any of the following general topics with special attention to popular culture:

Korea, Vietnam, Gulf War, Iraq, Afghanistan; Cold War and Global War on Terrorism; military interventions and peacekeeping missions involving Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and Europe. We particularly welcome papers that look at pop culture in light of the 25th anniversary of 9/11.

Presentations may focus on writers and artists: original fiction, poetry, memoirs, drama, art, music, film, and television.

GC Secular journal invites submissions of original fiction and non-fiction for its first edition devoted to World Cinema. The aim of this issue is to open a space for writing that responds to cinema across languages, regions, and cultures, and to highlight how film travels, transforms, and shapes public imagination. We welcome analytical, creative, and research-oriented work that engages with cinema as an artform, a cultural memory, and a global conversation.

About the Theme

DEADLINE EXTENDED!

Call for Papers

ALFRED HITCHCOCK

Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)

47th Annual Conference, February 25-28, 2026

Marriott Albuquerque

Albuquerque, New Mexico

https://www.southwestpca.org

NEW Submission Deadline: November 14, 2025

The Journalism & Media Culture area of the Popular Culture Association requests proposals on diverse topics, including journalism and media-related issues and subjects that can be local, regional, national, and/or international and can deal with historical or contemporary times. If your paper is accepted, you will be presenting at the 2026 Popular Culture Association national conference, held at the Marriott Marquis in Atlanta, April 8-1.

Sessions are scheduled in 1½ hour slots, typically with four papers or speakers that do not exceed 15 minutes each. We can also accept proposals for special panels and for sessions organized around a journalism/media-related theme. 

Call for Papers—DEADLINE EXTENDED!

Myth and Fairy Tales Area

Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)

47th Annual Conference, February 25-28, 2026

Marriott Albuquerque

Albuquerque, New Mexico

https://www.swpaca.org

EXTENDED proposal submission deadline: November 14, 2025

 Poems Invited for dec 2025 Issue of Taj Mahal Review 48th Issue

Deadline for proposals has been extended to 15 November 2025!

Call for papers – International PhD and early-career symposium 

Seeing the Other Empire: British Travel Writing and Imperial Rivalry in Europe and the Near East, 1783–1914

University of Strasbourg, 24 April 2026

Organisers: Arman Martirosyan and Suheyla-Hacer Sahin

Research group SEARCH (UR 2325)

Conference at the University of Amsterdam

Monday, 15 June 2026

Description:

The English department at Duke University is thrilled to host the 11th annual Post45 Graduate Symposium on February 20-21, 2026.

The Post45 Graduate Symposium seeks graduate-level works-in-progress related to post-1945 media, arts, literature, textual or visual objects, digital platforms, politics, and culture. We welcome submissions that expand our conception of objects and meaning-making post-1945 or place them in comparative, transnational, or hemispheric frames. We especially welcome contributions that foreground the importance of race, gender, class, and sexuality to post-45 studies. 

DEADLINE EXTENDED!

Call for Papers

“Horror (Literary & Cinematic)”

Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)

47th Annual Conference, February 25-28, 2026

Marriott Albuquerque

Albuquerque, New Mexico

https://www.southwestpca.org

NEW Submission Deadline: November 14, 2025

The esoteric, occult, and magical roots of deep ecology have become increasingly interconnected with the growing popularity of witchcraft practices, neopagan worldviews, and explicitly spiritual climate activism and environmentalism.  These developments include specific foci on particular ecological concerns and crises, but such trends are equally exemplified by transdisciplinary dialogues in which holistic scientific perspectives intersect with diverse systems of belief. This special panel seeks 15-20 conference presentations to explore these connections and their influence on, reception by, and expression through popular culture in any and all of its manifestations.  

The extraordinary success of K-Pop Demon Hunters (2025) as the most-watched original title in the history of Netflix (with over 325 million views) invites the reconsideration of a surprisingly vast and multivalent “mega-trope” that has proliferated throughout popular culture in numerous variations for centuries.  Its deep roots in folklore and mythology remain to be further explored, mapped, and connected with its various historical expressions throughout indigenous worldviews, Classical cultures and civilizations into Late Antiquity and ultimately through the global Middle Ages and straight through into the interactions of Western, East/Asian, and diverse global civilizations of the contemporary period.  While this mega-trope is here identified

Call for Papers

Medievalisms Area

Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)

47th Annual Conference, February 25-28, 2026

Marriott Albuquerque

Albuquerque, New Mexico

https://www.southwestpca.org

Submissions open: September 1, 2025

Proposal submission deadline: November 14, 2025

Utopian Impulses in the 2020sAn Interdisciplinary Graduate Student ConferenceUniversity of Cincinnati - Friday, February 6th, 2026 Among its political and technological predicaments, America’s 2020s have been a time of steady upheaval, crisis, and change. As we continue to wrestle our way through the agendas, regimes, and big-data systems of this historical moment as teachers, students, and researchers, we recall the utopian thinking of More and Marx, which reminds us “to keep from being blinded by what seems normal — to help us see that what is natural is constructed, not inevitable” (Elbow, p. 83).

Shakespeare is one of the inventors of the category of the human as many modern and contemporary cultures know it. Even his most monstrous and otherworldly creations have a detectable human side. The critical tradition of Shakespeare has already established that these characters are to be read as reflections of certain psychological aspects and repressed characteristics of the main characters of his plays, as allegorical representations of emotions, principles or beliefs, as codification of ethnic and sexual differences, etc. Thanks to this tradition, focusing on the human side of these characters has become the norm. It happens almost intuitively as soon as a critic or scholar starts their analysis of these characters.

WRITING THE MIDWEST: A Symposium of Scholars and Creative Writers

The Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature (SSML)

May 28-29, 2026. Kellogg Hotel and Convention Center, East Lansing, Michigan

About SSML and The Writing the Midwest Symposium: The Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature (SSML), founded in 1971, exists to support the study and dissemination of work in Midwestern literature, art, film, and scholarly study. 

Come join academics and working professionals at the Atlanta Marriott Marquis, April 8-11 2026!

We are considering proposals for sessions organized around a theme, special panels, and/or individual papers.  Sessions are scheduled in 1½ hour slots, typically with four papers or speakers per standard session.  Presentations should not exceed 15 minutes. Working professionals, scholars, educators, and graduate students are all encouraged to submit.

Proposals within animation studies in relation to popular culture are welcomed. Possible themes for papers/panels include but are not restricted to: