Black Study, in Comparison
In-Person Seminar at American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) in Houston, TX, May 20-23, 2027.
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In-Person Seminar at American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) in Houston, TX, May 20-23, 2027.
Buddhadev Bose, the Bengali poet, critic, and academic, set out to write his ideas behind introducing comparative literature in India. He posits comparative literature as a discipline of non-specialization, “an eclectic study.” It is a “corrective to the excess of esoterism which now prevails in academic circles.” Although Comparative Literature “needs the knowledge of languages,” it is “not a language school.” Bose’s idea of comparatism as a method was centred on translation. Although the initial impulse was to study Indian classical and native languages alongside other literatures, one of the most important outcomes of the comparative method was the conceptualization of the idea of Indian literature.
Call for Contributors: Paid Research & Analysis Writing (Remote, Freelance)
The Pivot Academic — an independent research and analysis platform based in Hong Kong — invites undergraduate and postgraduate students, recent graduates, and independent scholars to join our global contributor network.
WHO WE ARE
The Pivot Academic is a decentralized intellectual hub founded by a team of European scholars. We publish rigorous, evidence-based analysis on the forces reshaping our world, and we connect independent researchers with a global audience. No institutional affiliation or prior publication record is required — what matters is the rigor of your argument, the originality of your perspective, and the integrity of your evidence.
April 2-3, 2027
University of North Carolina at Greensboro
The UNCG Videogaming and Esports Studies (VES) program, with support from UNCG’s
ARCADE (Applied Research in Computer Arts, Digitization, and Esports), invites proposals for
our third annual game studies conference!
This year’s theme explores navigation as a capacious term — how do we navigate or not
navigate in a game (walking, running, jumping, climbing, warping, fast traveling, etc.), what
choices do we have regarding navigation, and what affordances do games offer for navigation?
Comparative Legal Imaginaries
Call for Proposals: Special Issue on Pauline E. Hopkins for New England Quarterly
The Victorians Institute Journal (VIJ) is now accepting submissions for Volume 54. The VIJ is an award-winning scholarly journal of Victorian and Edwardian literary and cultural studies. We publish a variety of pieces, including articles, reviews, and rare texts. For further details, visit https://vijournal.org/.
Article submissions should be between 7K-9K words, and are welcome to address any aspect of Victorian and Edwardian literature, art, and culture. If you would like to submit a review for consideration, contact us directly through our email: victoriansinstitutejournal@gmail.com.
The special issue of our open access, Q2 journal explores how contemporary literary, artistic and cultural practices engage with, interrogate, and imagine decolonial ecologies. While decolonial ecology is best understood as a constellation of different ideas, schools, and disciplines, Malcom Ferdinand’s insistence on the politicization of ecology offers a useful point of departure. In his book, Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World (2019; English trans. 2022), Ferdinand identifies a “double fracture” in modernity:the colonial fracture, which produces hierarchies among people, and the environmental fracture, which separates humans from nature, treating the latter as an object of exploitation.
This seminar examines performance as a multilayered concept that is continually reshaped through travel and other mobilities. Performance, in this context, can be understood in its broadest sense as a dynamic practice through which identities, relationships, meanings, and experiences are negotiated and transformed. By bringing performance and mobilities into conversation as mutually illuminating frameworks, the seminar seeks to explore how their intersection creates new critical possibilities.
CFP: IRCL Special Issue on Energy Perspectives on Children’s and YA Literature
Have you ever paused to consider the energy infrastructure supporting the adventures of Anne in Lucy Mongomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908)? As an avid walker, Anne probably has a relatively low carbon footprint. Over a century later, in Maja Lunde’s The End of the Ocean (2017), struggles over energy development has become a central literary topic, underscoring the message of the UN Secretary General António Guterres, who at COP 30 urged that “The fossil fuel age is ending. Clean energy is rising. Let us make the transition fair, fast, and final" (United Nations, 2025).
Co(n)texts: Journal of Language, Literature and CultureVolume 1, Issue 1: Reimagining the Humanities: New Directions in Language, Literature and Culture
Submission Deadline: 31 October 2026
The inaugural issue of Co(n)texts: Journal of Language, Literature and Culture, a peer-reviewed, open-access journal of the Department of English, Central University of Punjab, Bathinda, seeks to explore emerging directions in humanities scholarship. We invite original and unpublished research that rethinks established paradigms, engages with contemporary theoretical debates, and offers innovative perspectives on language, literature, culture, and their intersections.
***Please use this link to submit your proposal: https://www.acla.org/seminar/e8248863-9bba-4144-b079-9c355f34a4f7***
American Literature Association
May 26-29, 2027
Boston, MA
Roundtable on James Finley’s Abolition and the Rise of US Environmentalism
The Thoreau Society seeks papers for a roundtable on James Finley’s recently released Abolition and the Rise of US Environmentalism: The Literature and Politics of Free Soil (University of North Carolina Press, 2026). Papers may respond to or extend Finley’s book in part or in whole, and may include topics such as:
-Abolition and environmentalism
-The Free-Soil movement
-Settler colonization and abolition
-Racial capitalism
-Abolition then and now
American Literature Association
May 26-29, 2027
Boston, MA
Oceanic Thoreau
Journal of Medieval Worlds Call for Submissions
CALL FOR PAPERS
Disposable Bodies and the Aesthetics of War: Representations of Vulnerability, Violence, and Resistance in Literature and Culture
Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai. Philologia
3/2027
Guest Editors:
Dr. Andrea Roxana Bellot
Associate Professor, Department of English and German Studies
Rovira i Virgili University (URV), Tarragona, Spain
Environmental racism predates its own name. The term entered public discourse in 1982, but the conditions behind it, namely exposure to hazard and unequal claim to safety, go back to slavery itself. Historian Carl Zimring traces this to a basic split in American thought: white meant clean, Black meant dirty. That split decided who did the dirtiest, most dangerous work, and who lived closest to pollution, for generations. In 1968, Memphis sanitation workers went on strike over exactly that: unsafe, degrading labour shaped by the same racial split. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis while there in support of the very strike. That split still operates today.
India's civilizational ethos is deeply rooted in its multilingual and multicultural fabric, where translation has enabled the circulation of ideas, texts, and knowledge across regions and traditions. Etymologically understood as "carrying across," translation in the 21st century extends beyond linguistic transfer to become a critical and interpretive practice.
Call for papers
Stories of Collective Authorship in Architecture
Read Full Website:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/special-issue/335748/stories-of-collective...
Asia in the Caribbean
Virtual seminar at the
American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting
May 15, 16 2027
Rethinking Cultural Mediation in Global Media
NeMLA 2027 – Panel
How does culture change as it travels across languages, media, technologies, and national borders? What roles do translators, audiences, institutions, platforms, and emerging technologies play in shaping how cultural meanings are represented, circulated, and received?
Apologies for crossposting!
Call for New JCMS Editor(s)
Editor(s), JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies
The Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) seeks a new Editor or Co-Editors and a new institutional home for its scholarly publication, commensurate with the 5-year term of the Editor(s), for its scholarly publication, JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies.
Review the full Call for Editor(s) and apply by Friday, September 18, 2026: https://www.cmstudies.org/general/custom.asp?page=JCMSCallNewEditor
American, British and Canadian Studies
Special Issue
After the Human, Before the Machine: Rethinking Creativity, Reading and Interpretation in Contemporary Anglophone Culture
December 2026
Deadline extension: 5 October 2026
Guest Editors
Dr. Merritt Moseley, University of North Carolina, Asheville (moseley@unca.edu)
Dr. Alexandra Mitrea, Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu (alexandra.mitrea@ulbsibiu.ro)
This panel aims to explore the political, social, and economic significance of community in the works of John Steinbeck. Steinbeck’s works reflect a deep concern over the sicknesses of the United States—racism, economic inequality, and political upheaval to name a few—that were causing its people to be increasingly more isolated from one another. As Charles Johnson notes, “homelessness and loneliness… shape and direct the speech and actions of every character and situation that Steinbeck presents.” In both his fiction and non-fiction narratives, Steinbeck laments the wounds left by social and economic systems whose persistence hinges upon isolation and discord.
Biennial Conference of the Southeastern American Studies Association (SASA)
March 18-20, 2027. Montgomery, Alabama
62nd International Conference on Medieval Studies, May 13-15, 2027
Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo
Organizers: Logan Spencer (Binghamton Univ.), Taryn DeLeon Mendiola (Boston
College)
Sponsor: Society for Queer Medieval Studies (SQMS)
This session explores how women's bodies function as contested archives of trauma, sites of testimony that dominant social, legal and political structures have often silenced or delegitimised. Drawing on feminist trauma theory, postcolonial critique and affect studies, it examines bodily memory as a form of somatic knowledge that exceeds conventional language and probes the tension between trauma's structural unspeakability and the ethical urgency of testimony and witnessing.
Call for Chapters
Body-Worn Cameras and the Visual Politics of Violence: Embodied Witnessing
Edited by Lewis Rarm (Victoria University of Wellington) and Federico Selvini (IULM University)
In March 1827, Freedom’s Journal, the first Black newspaper in the United States, famously declared, “We wish to plead our own cause. Too long have others spoken for us.” Across the two centuries that followed, Black newspapers, magazines, and periodicals have served as crucial sites through which Black women articulated political demands, crafted literary identities, challenged racial and gender hierarchies, cultivated communities, and imagined new social futures.
Abstract This panel explores Love as a counter‑epistemology that challenges technocratic definitions of intelligence. Drawing on Marguerite Porete’s Mirror of Simple Souls and contemporary critiques of AI, the session examines Love—grounded in the heart—as a heart‑intelligent mode of knowing that resists domination and rehumanizes communities. The panel invites interdisciplinary work on affective intelligence, mystical epistemology, communal subjectivity, heart‑brain research, and alternative modes of cognition.
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 2027 national conference to be held Mar 24-27, 2027, in Boston, MA at the Boston Marriott Copley Plaza.
Academics at all stages in their careers, as well as independent scholars, are encouraged to apply. We particularly encourage submissions by graduate students.
Currently accepting paper proposals for in-person panel -- Deadline 9/15
Submit proposals through ICMS site: Call for Sessions (confex.com)
The special issue of our open access, Q2 journal explores how contemporary literary, artistic and cultural practices engage with, interrogate, and imagine decolonial ecologies. While decolonial ecology is best understood as a constellation of different ideas, schools, and disciplines, Malcom Ferdinand’s insistence on the politicization of ecology offers a useful point of departure. In his book, Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World (2019; English trans. 2022), Ferdinand identifies a “double fracture” in modernity:the colonial fracture, which produces hierarchies among people, and the environmental fracture, which separates humans from nature, treating the latter as an object of exploitation.
Poetic Responses to Prisons and Policing (SAMLA Panel #19707) - DEADLINE EXTENDED
James Baldwin Review
American Literature Association 2027
Calls for Papers
CFP 1:
Baldwin’s Late Style
In “Thoughts on Late Style,” Edward Said describes how an artist’s late works
cannot be reconciled or resolved, since their irresolution and fragmentariness are constitutive, neither ornamental nor symbolic of something else. The late works are about ‘lost totality’, and it is in this sense that they are catastrophic.
We are all part of the body politic, and a wound to one is a wound to us all. In this spirit, we invite essays that excavate the less visible impact of ICE’s local mobilizations on Midwestern communities, the imprint on our bodies and spaces—not just on our streets, but in the quiet of our kitchens. Like the diversity of Midwestern landscapes, these essays will illuminate the varied physical, intellectual, spiritual, and artistic responses that arise from the violence of the state against its own people. Essays should be between 750 to 3000 words in length. Along with essays, we will consider poetry, photography, and graphic non-fiction.
This seminar seeks to read the concept of “kayfabe” alongside extant concepts in queer theory and criticism. The word “kayfabe” is quite young by linguists’ standards, and bears unclear etymology: coined by professional wrestling executives as an industry code word for manufactured narrative, the first printed reference to “kayfabe” occurs in 1988 wrestling newsletter, and its true linguistic origins remain obscure. Within professional wrestling, “kayfabe” refers to both “the tacit agreement between professional wrestlers and their fans to pretend that overtly staged wrestling events, stories, characters, etc. are genuine,” and “the playacting involved in maintaining kayfabe” (Merriam-Webster).
Imagining Difference in Early Modern London
Elm Bank, Coventry University
22-23 March 2027
Keynote speakers: Chloë Houston and Nandini Das
CfP deadline: 1 October 2026
As a tribute to the recent passing of the prolific and excessively underrated Ted Kotcheff, this seminar will strive to offer a retracing and reevaluation of the director’s phenomenal career. It is stranger than his variegated filmography that there is a total absence of any academic book critically engaging with his works.
The special issue of our open access, Q2 journal explores how contemporary literary, artistic and cultural practices engage with, interrogate, and imagine decolonial ecologies. While decolonial ecology is best understood as a constellation of different ideas, schools, and disciplines, Malcom Ferdinand’s insistence on the politicization of ecology offers a useful point of departure. In his book, Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World (2019; English trans. 2022), Ferdinand identifies a “double fracture” in modernity:the colonial fracture, which produces hierarchies among people, and the environmental fracture, which separates humans from nature, treating the latter as an object of exploitation.
CALL FOR PAPERS | ACLA 2027 Virtual Seminar
Seminar Title: Comparative Literature and Commodity Worlds of Mainland Southeast Asia
Co-organizers: Nanthanoot Udomlamun (Kasetsart University) & Chi P. Pham (Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences)
Dates: May 15–16, 2027 (Virtual Sessions)
Co-organizers Nanthanoot Udomlamun and Chi P. Pham invite paper proposals for their seminar at the ACLA 2027 Annual Meeting.
CR: The New Centennial Review Special Issue CFP
“Spirituality, Technology, and Artificial Intelligence”
Dear all,
I am pleased to announce the call for papers for the Philosophy of Religion unit at the 2027 American Academy of Religion, Western Region conference, which will be held at The Graduate Theological Union & Pacific School of Religion, Berkeley, California, March 19-21. We welcome all papers engaging this year’s conference theme, “Moving Beyond Boundaries and Silos Toward Interconnection and Collaboration,” as well as topics of general interest in the Philosophy of Religion.
The CFP is attached, so is the requisite proposal form. For further information see the American Academy of Religion Western Regional’s website.
PCA True Crime CFP 2027
PCA/ACA will be held from March 24-27th, 2027 in Boston, MA
CR: The New Centennial Review Special Issue CFP
“Spirituality, Technology, and Artificial Intelligence”
The Aesthetics of Mythmaking: Narrative, Culture, and Power
Editors-in-chief: Alyse Kaweng Fan and Thales Reis Alecrim
Deadline for abstracts: October 31, 2026
This special issue explores how contemporary literary, artistic and cultural practices engage with, interrogate, and imagine decolonial ecologies. While decolonial ecology is best understood as a constellation of different ideas, schools, and disciplines, Malcom Ferdinand’s insistence on the politicization of ecology offers a useful point of departure. In his book, Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World (2019; English trans. 2022), Ferdinand identifies a “double fracture” in modernity:the colonial fracture, which produces hierarchies among people, and the environmental fracture, which separates humans from nature, treating the latter as an object of exploitation.
“Culture,” notes Raymond Williams, “is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language” (87). Its etymological root in cultivation—the tending and propagation of life—signals a resistance to being contained. Classroom pedagogy encompasses various elements into it—mythology, rituals, religion, tradition; movies, songs, literature; fashion, food, art—classifying it as ‘a whole way of life.’ Yet, culture outstrips being merely a way of life; it represents a method of understanding life and saturating existence with meaning.