Call for Papers

Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)

2025 SWPACA Summer Salon

June 26-28, 2025

Virtual Conference

https://swpaca.org/

Submissions open on March 25, 2025

Proposal submission deadline: April 15, 2025

In his Poetics, Aristotle famously distinguishes poetry from history, claiming that “the distinction between historian and poet is not in the one writing prose and the other verse…it consists really in this, that the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be.” Yet despite their different intentions, history has continued to remain a subject of drama from Aristotle’s time until the present day, often serving to enact the tension between truth and believability in order to highlight the often porous boundary between fact and fiction. This session will explore the depiction of historical subjects on the stage in theatrical works originating from any time period.

This panel, "Of Monsters and Mothers: Challenging Representations and Theories of Maternity in Literature," seeks to explore how literature complicates, subverts, and redefines conventional understandings of motherhood. From monstrous maternal figures to radical reimaginings of care, the maternal body has long been a contested site of power, anxiety, and transformation in literary texts. We invite interdisciplinary perspectives that engage with literature across historical periods and genres, drawing from feminist, psychoanalytic, postcolonial, disability, and queer theories to interrogate the intersections of motherhood, agency, and monstrosity.

Sponsored by the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, the University of Virginia’s College at Wise Medieval-Renaissance Conference promotes scholarly discussion in all disciplines of Medieval and Renaissance studies.

“Make you to ravel all this matter out” (Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3.4)

Within early modern studies, there has been a growing interest in the intersections between text, materiality, and performance, both in and beyond the commercial theatres. The Revels Office, an international research group comprised of early career academics, has always been fascinated by the relationship between textual, visual and material cultures and the material realities of theatre and performance.

While revising Between the Acts in 1940, Virginia Woolf edited her drafts to reinforce the disruptive wartime shifts in food culture triggered by the Second World War: the novel notes a particular wariness for rationed beef and mutton, references the interwar freedom of easily obtaining bacon and oil, and suggests the indulgence of sugar consumption. The modernist moment saw a variety of such shifts in the alimentary, from increased industrialization and food processing to a more gastronomic turn to the realities of wartime food rationing that Woolf and others chart.

Language, Literature, and Interdisciplinary Studies (LLIDS), an open-access peer-reviewed academic e-journal, invites original and unpublished, interdisciplinary, research papers and book reviews from various interrelated disciplines including, but not limited to, literature, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, history, sociology, law, ecology, environmental science, and economics.

ReFocus: The International Directors Series: David Cronenberg

Edinburgh University Press

Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg is widely regarded as one of the finest proprietors of the body-horror genre. Cronenberg’s filmography traverses the realm of the corporeal beyond its bare form, testing the limits of what a body can do. His films explore the intricate relations between the market, science, and desire. Cronenberg also examines disease and illness, situating their grotesque ramifications in the soma and the psyche, while many other later film narratives diverge from Cronenberg’s earlier focus on body horror to exhibit a wide spectrum of directorial capabilities.

Article Collection “Human & Beyond: Exploring Our More-Than-Human World”.

Collection's Advisors: Professor Peggy Karpouzou and Dr. Nikoleta Zampaki

Publisher: Routledge Open Research

The study of life-forms’ interplays has much to contribute to the survey of alternative post-anthropocentric narratives. This is no more pressing while the disastrous phenomena afflicted on Earth’s ecosystems continues to threaten all life-forms’ existence.

Book Series: "Posthumanities and Citizenship Futures" at Rowman & Littlefield

Series Editor: Professor Peggy Karpouzou and Series co-Editor: Dr. Nikoleta Zampaki

Book Series: “Brill Research Perspectives in Critical Theory”

Series Editor: Professor Peggy Karpouzou

The Book of Acts contains elements of human actions and inactions that depict the beginning of a
new religious dispensation – Christianity that sought to redefine the nexus between the nascent
Christian faith, ethnicity, and identity. Identity is a hallmark of many religious groups manifest in
their practices that become a cultural identity of the group. This did not leave out ethnic issues in
the nascent group called Christianity. Early Christianity is construed as a "Jewish ethno-religious
identity into a Christian identity that was unattached to a particular geopolitical and ethno-cultural
identity” (Bennema 2015). This identity was formulated and emerged through conflict with

MLA 2026, Toronto, Prose and poetics of aging in migration literature

I would like to organize a panel on aging in migration literature to provide a forum where participants can discuss current trends in and concerns about the representation of aging and older persons across various genres of migration writing as well as think about future possibilities. I am particularly interested in aesthetic representations of aging in irregular migration, asylum, and refugee narratives in addition to the portrayals of aging parents and relatives who are impacted by younger generations’ migration.

This interdisciplinary panel at the RMMLA 2025 seeks to examine the complex intersections of colonial power, medical practice, and literary representation and welcomes proposals of 250 words on topics that address the following questions. How does literature engage with colonial medical interventions, their successes, failures, and lasting impacts on colonized populations? What does medical fiction and film tell us about the tension between Indigenous healing practices and Western medicine, the role of medical “experimentation” in colonial contexts, and the literary afterlives of colonial medical disasters?