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.

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 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

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

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.

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 &

Historical Fictions Research Conference, Erlangen (Germany),

19th-20th February 2026

Call for Papers

Deadline: 1st September 2025

Submission Form

47th Annual Conference, February 25-28, 2026

Marriott Albuquerque

Albuquerque, New Mexico

https://www.southwestpca.org

Submissions open: September 1, 2025

Proposal submission deadline: October 31, 2025

Call for Papers

Apocalypse, Dystopia, and Disaster in Culture

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: October 31, 2025

London Metropolitan University, in partnership with Vilnius University, invite proposals for conference papers for an international symposium “1984 and its afterlife: legacy, narratives, and the making of a community” to be held at London Metropolitan University, London, 18 – 19 December 2025. The symposium will be held in hybrid form, we are welcoming both on-site and online papers. 

This symposium will explore the historical, social and cultural reverberations of the events of 1984 in India and abroad through the analysis of literature, films and artworks engaged with them. 

            As a vital medium of resistance, literature has long served as a cultural expression of oppression, displacement, censorship, and violence, offering both testimony and critique. Resistance narratives respond to the structures of domination that are colonial, patriarchal, racial, economic, and ecological. These texts often articulate alternative modes of existence, agency, and solidarity. While resistance may take multiple forms, it remains grounded in a shared ethical impulse: to challenge authority, expose injustice, and envision transformation.

S23.Shakespeare in the Cloud(s)  Organisers: Maria Elisa Montironi, Reto WincklerDescription: Shakespeare in the cloud(s) interrogates categories of temporality and spatiality in relation to digital Shakespeares in the form of performances, editing practices, adaptations, appropriations, community building, AI-revivifications, memes and more and explores their aesthetic and political implications.

K-Pop Reader: Gender and Technology in K-pop
Edited Volume

We invite proposals for chapters in a forthcoming edited volume, Electric Bodies, Digital Souls: Gender and Technology in K-pop. This collection examines K-pop as a key site for negotiating gender and identity in the digital age, where artificial intelligence (AI), algorithmic mediation, and posthuman aesthetics are reshaping what it means to be a gendered subject.

The 97th annual SAMLA Conference is taking place Thursday, November, 6, through Saturday, November, 8, 2025, at the Wyndham Atlanta Buckhead Hotel & Conference Center in Atlanta, GA.  For more information, see https://southatlanticmla.org/.

The Trans* Research Association of Ireland (TRAI)’s 2nd Annual Symposium is the sequel to the groundbreaking first T*RAI symposium hosted at the University College Dublin in 2024. This two-day symposium will bring together international scholars, artists and activists from across, between and against disciplines, all of whom are committed to research on transness and/or Irishness, broadly conceived.

Concept Note

CALL FOR CHAPTERS:  Fear as a Political Emotion: The Rise of New Violent Orders (Nova Science Publishers).

Maximiliano E Korstanje, University of Palermo, Argentina

Adrian Scribano, CONICET, University of Buenos Aires, Argentina

Starfish are echinoderms with a unique ability called autotomy where they can regenerate lost limbs. There are times when these creatures will even sacrifice a limb to save themselves. However, whether through natural causes or detriment, we learn that loss can equal a new beginning. These new appendages are not always exact matches. Nevertheless, these misshaped, Frankensteined pieces, marred by experience, can represent a new foundation that is more powerful, vigorous, efficient, and even healthier.

A trace evokes the marks, remnants, and residues of the past. Rather than static records, trace embodies the temporal and spatial dimensions of the actions that produced them, representing intersections of movement, perception, and interaction. A trace can be the smallest and subtlest thing–a memory knot, a mark left by animals, travelers, or strangers, or can be the space between the lines of historical texts. A trajectory, on the other hand, is the path of movement that implies direction, growth, narrative, discourse, coming into an account, taking shapes, and becoming present. What is the dynamic tension between trace and trajectory? How do trace and trajectory translate and communicate with each other?

While ancient Europe regarded India as a land of material wealth and proverbial wisdom, it also saw it as a land of man-like monkeys, banyan trees, and enormous elephants. Ancient Europeans perceived Indians as wearing bright colors, eating rice and meat, and lacking wine-drinking finesse. Today, portrayals of India in prose fiction, cinema, social media, and historiography have shifted from polarized images of Europe and India to narratives depicting a “Dark” and a “Shining” India. Characters in these texts strive to be part of an economically thriving “shining” India, even as they face social, cultural, and political challenges daily.

Magics, Marvels, Metamorphoses, and Monsters: Horrors of the Medieval Past, Present, and Future (Virtual)

Co-sponsored by Monsters & the Monstrous Area of the Northeast Popular Culture Association, Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture, International Society for the Study of Medievalism

Organized by Michael A. Torregrossa, Bristol Community College, and June-Ann Greeley, Sacred Heart University

Call for Articles

Special Issue: (Re)articulating an Old Ideal: Self-Care and Self-Help in Contemporary Culture

Guest Editors: Alexandra Bacalu (University of Bucharest) & Dragoș Manea (University of Bucharest)