Debates and initiatives on decolonising knowledge in Africa continue to pay significant attention to the need for increased African/indigenous content in the curriculum as well as raising awareness about biases inherent in historically dominant epistemological paradigms. However, there remains a critical gap regarding theories and theorisation as many African academics continue to rely on colonial western theories, models, concepts and paradigms for research and pedagogical purposes. This can be due to a lack of awareness of existing African-centred theories and the dearth of databases focusing on African-centred theories.

The Ninth Faulkner Studies in the UK Colloquium

The Dark House: Absalom, Absalom! at 90

May 2nd and 3rd, 2026

Online via Zoom

With keynote addresses by:

Professor Mary M. Burke

(author of Race, Politics, and Irish America: A Gothic History [Oxford UP, 2022])

and 

Dr John Michael Corrigan

Gentle Reminder: Abstract due 30 September 2025

Dominican Theology and Practice:
The Past 100 Years
Friday, February 27-Saturday, February 28, 2026
Albertus Magnus College (New Haven, CT) Call for Papers: Dominican sisters and friars, their communities, and their collaborators have made monumental contributions to theological thought and pastoral ministry in the 20th and 21st centuries. This conference seeks to explore how Dominican theology and practice has shaped contemporary theology, ministry, and social engagement over the past hundred years.

We welcome submissions for 20-minute papers that examine Dominican theology and practice. Topics might include (but are not limited to):

“Autofiction was fun,” laments Lauren Oyler, in a 2018 review for the Baffler, “while it lasted, but a self-conscious movement based on the lives and reading lists of young urban artists was never going to break new ground; nor did it give the reader a reason to jump out of bed in the morning." As a form (or a genre – as Oyler points out in an extended essay on the subject, these terms are often used interchangeably, although she favours the former), autofiction first came into being almost fifty years ago, coined on the back cover of Serge Doubrovsky’s Fils (1977) as “autobiography?

submission link: https://www.acla.org/seminar/8f71b36f-66a1-437f-bb70-25512282c0b6

By 2026, all nine volumes of The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins will be published, including the much-anticipated final volume in the series, Poetry. The 2026 international Hopkins conference will focus on the new research possibilities and provocations afforded by the texts. Hopkins 2026 will be held in historic Salem, Massachusetts (USA), at Salem State University, and will feature a Hopkins display and reception at the Burns Library, Boston College.

Topics could include:

This special issue of Public Art Dialogue invites scholarly contributions (research articles, short essays, and artists’ projects) that examine the enduring visual, spatial, and ideological legacies of colonialism in public spaces across the Pacific world. It seeks to explore how imperial legacies forged transoceanic connections that continue to shape the public sphere through means including but not limited to monuments, architecture, civic rituals, theater, dance, street art, and performative acts.

What stories can we tell of the vanishing mediator? Is it an irreducible kernel of transition between two different configurations of the social structure, or is it only imagined retrospectively, as the transient possibility of another world? Fredric Jameson shows, paradigmatically, that the Protestant ethic functions as "the vanishing mediator" in Max Weber's historical narrative between medieval society and modern capitalism, the "catalytic agent which permits an exchange of energies between two otherwise mutually exclusive terms." Slavoj Žižek adopts the term for his conception of subjectivity, where the subject exists as the transcendental excess of its symbolic universe—as an irremediable gap and a site of transformation.

This panel is interested in the close historical association between the discourse of fetishism in anti-capitalist critique, and representations of Indigenous peoples. William Pietz argues that, prior to the adoption of the fetish as an object of anthropological inquiry in the 19th century, the discourse of fetishism emerged as an offshoot of the Christian theory of idolatry. Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism, in turn, “was a vivid way of suggesting to his readers that the truth of capital was to be grasped from a perspective alien to that of bourgeois understanding, which knows capital exclusively through its own categories” (Pietz).

You are invited to submit an abstract for this panel for the Northeast Modern Language Association Convention to be held on March 5–8, 2026 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania at the Wyndham Grand Hotel Downtown.

NeMLA’s 57th Annual Convention (Virtual Session)

Conference Date: March 5-8, 2026

Abstract Submission Deadline: September 30, 2025

All presentations will be delivered via Zoom.

Session Title: Touching the World at the Speed of Light: Community and Conflict in the Global Village

In recent decades, Black Studies has witnessed important work on the ways in which the overrepresentation of ‘man’ and the invisibilization of whiteness have functioned in service of a range of im/material violences. Our aesthetic and political investments, therefore, lie in arguments and examples that unsettle the imposed relationalities and the representational economy of what Saidiya Hartman calls the “racial calculus”, Katherine McKittrick considers as the “mathematics of unlivingness” and Christina Sharpe terms the “orthographies of the wake”.

This panel invites papers that discuss transpacific, transnational, and cross-racial relations in Asian/American literature. How can literature facilitate the “(Re)generation” of solidarities and exchanges across identities and borders? How can it offer a site of intimacy, which Lisa Lowe defines as “the implied but less visible forms of alliance, affinity, and society among variously colonized peoples beyond the metropolitan national center”? How does literature generate discourses around cross-group tension, conflict, identifications, and disidentifications? How do literary and social forms reflect and reformulate each other, within and across nations? Where do Asian American studies and Global Asian studies meet and diverge?

Ireland has often been held to be somehow exceptional, an island on the edge of Europe whose historical, social and cultural trajectories have at times led it to diverge in surprising ways from both its nearest neighbour, Great Britain, and the wider world. This perception of Irish exceptionalism has long played a role in how the island has been understood both within and beyond its borders.

Popular Culture Association: British Popular Culture 

Call for Papers

The British Popular Culture area of the Popular Culture/American Culture Association (PCA/ACA) is now accepting submissions for the 2026 national conference to be held April 8-11, 2026, in Atlanta, GA at the Atlanta Marriott Marquis!

Academics at all stages in their careers, as well as independent scholars, are encouraged to apply. We particularly encourage submissions by graduate students. 

Call for Papers

ETKI: Journal of Literature, Theatre and Culture Studies

ETKI: Journal of Literature, Theatre and Culture Studies invites submissions for the New issue of the journal - a general issue on literature, theatre and culture studies.

Against Evidence Otherwise:

Bad Faith and Antiblackness in Education & Society

Under Contract with Brill Publishing 

Edited by Amir A. Gilmore, Washington State University

What is to be done in a world of near universal sense of superiority to, if not universal hatred of, Black folk?

–Lewis R. Gordon (1997, p. 1)

I know I am a Human because I am not Black. I know I am not Black because when and if I experience the kind of violence Blacks experience there is a reason.

Today, Bollywood is not merely an industry of Indian films representing the national cinema but also a global cultural phenomenon. From the singsong dance sequences on YouTube to its widespread circulation on Netflix, Amazon Prime, and regional streaming platforms, Bollywood redefines South Asian identities and how they are consumed, contested, and celebrated across the globe. Moreover, the intertwining of questions on cultural appropriation, culturalized representation, caste, gender, and diasporic negotiations emerges with renewed urgency and visibility.

(Un)natural Stevenson

Wild transgressions across literature, ecology, science and gender

Ca’ Foscari University of Venice 

11-12 May 2026 

Aula Baratto

Organizers: Lucio De Capitani & Alessandro Cabiati 

Call for Abstracts (Themed Issue 2/26 and Accompanying Workshop)
“Fan Practices of Memory and Remembrance”
Deadline for Proposals: December 1st, 2025
Workshop Date: February 27th, 2026, in Marburg/Germany

INTERNATIONAL DAVID FOSTER WALLACE CONFERENCE IN AUSTIN

June 4-6, 2026

University of Texas, Austin

CALL FOR PAPERS

#DFW26

To mark the 30th anniversary of the publication of Infinite Jest, the 2026 David Foster Wallace Conference invites papers examining Wallace’s masterwork. 

In the mid-nineteenth century, the literacy rates among women and girls were on the rise. This was due to changing attitudes toward educating girls and women and the increasing popularity and availability of reading materials aimed at girls and women. Authors such as Lydia Maria Child, Louisa May Alcott, Juliana Horatia Ewing, E.D.E.N. Southworth, L.T. Meade, and Sarah Tytler wrote works specifically for girls, from novels and short stories to periodicals and conduct manuals.

The 57th Annual Northeast Modern Language Association Convention will be held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.

Conference Dates - March 5-8, 2026

Topic - Reclaiming History: Trauma, Memory and Resilience in the Narratives from Africa

Deadline for Abstract Submission - September 30th 2025

Modality - hybrid (in-person but accepting remote presentations)

Overview -