ALA 2026: Politics in American Fiction

ALA Annual Conference (May 20-23, Chicago, IL)

Proposed Panel (in-person) at International Seminar on Cultures of Body, Bodies of Culture: Thinking Plurality Today, organised by the Department of English, University of North Bengal.

 International Journal of Humanities, Art and Social Studies (IJHAS)

ISSN : 1832-624N 2974-5962 (Print)

https://flyccs.com/jounals/IJHASS/Home.html

*** December Issue*** 

Submission System 

Scope

… Ond þis geþeaht ic sylle eallum wyrhtum, þæt anra gehwylc cræft his geornlice begange, forþam se þe cræft his forlæt, he byþ forlæten fram þam cræfte. Swa hwæðer þu sy, swa mæsseprest, swa munuc, swa ceorl, swa kempa, bega oþþe behwyrf þe sylfne on þisum, ond beo þæt þu eart; forþam micel hynð ond sceamu hyt is menn nellan wesan þæt þæt he ys ond þæt he wesan sceal. 

DATE: Feb. 25-27

Humanities Education and Research Association

Theme: “The Essential Humanities in Practice and Perseverance” (Virtual Conference)

In keeping with HERA’s mission to promote the study of the humanities across a wide range of disciplines and interdisciplinary studies, we invite proposals for the 2026 conference. Submissions are encouraged from educators at all levels (including undergraduate and graduate students) and from anyone with an interest in the arts and humanities. Proposals for papers, panels, or workshops must be submitted through the conference web portals.

Sacred Arts 2026:
Exploring the Spiritual Dimensions of Artistic Expression and Ritual
Conference webpage: https://labrc.co.uk/2025/12/11/sacred-arts-2026/

University of Oxford
and online

May 16-17, 2026

Registration fees (for both attendees and presenters):

African and Caribbean Theatre and Performance Working Group

IFTR 2026 World Congress 6-10 July 2026 

The University of Melbourne

Melbourne, Australia

Keywords: African, Caribbean, African Diaspora, Theatre, Performance Studies

Working Group Theme: 

“What Theatre Does” – African and Caribbean Perspectives on Performance, History, and Identity

We are seeking chapter proposals for The Routledge Companion to the Posthuman in Literature and Culture. This new interdisciplinary volume seeks to foreground the representation of the posthuman: as a figure that often appears within certain genres (eg New Weird Fiction, Solarpunk, Autofiction), as an image deployed by specific authors and filmmakers (eg Nnedi Okorafor, Kazuo Ishiguro, Alex Garland), as a discourse that supports the proliferation of “studies” within academia (eg Animal Studies, Surveillance Studies, Affect Studies), and as a growing presence in college classrooms around the world.

The Romantic Literature Student Society of the Jagiellonian University under the patronage of the Enlightenment and Romantic Literature Department of JU is pleased to extend the invitation to take part in the Romantics in Relation to Science and Technology Undergraduate and Graduate Student Conference. The conference will take place in Krakow on the 26th and 27th of March, 2026 (foreign speakers will have the opportunity to present online).

Narrating Conflict:

Ethics, Identity, and the Stories We Tell

4/2026

Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai Philologia

philologia.studia@ubbcluj.ro

Guest editors

Amelia Precup (Babeș-Bolyai University) amelia.precup@ubbcluj.ro

The 2026 Benedict College International Multidisciplinary Conference (2026 BCIMC)
Thursday and Friday, April 23-24, 2026, at 9:00 AM-5:00 PM

Sponsored by the School of Communication, Arts, and Social Sciences (CASS)

CONFERENCE WEBSITE
https://benedict.edu/bciimc

CONFERENCE FORMAT
Hybrid
In-Person and Virtual

CONFERENCE VENUE
Benedict College
Dr. David H. Swinton Campus Center 
1616 Oak Street
Columbia, SC 29204

CONFERENCE THEME
The Age of Artificial Intelligence Across Academic Disciplines

Call for Papers 2026

For the inaugural 2026 meeting of our research group, Race, Ethnicity, and Identity in the Bible and the Ancient Mediterranean, we invite papers that explore how ancient identities were forged, reshaped, or contested in contexts of conflict, tension, and instability. Our theme for this year is Contested Identities in the Bible and the Ancient Mediterranean: Identity Formation in Contexts of Struggle and Conflict.

This panel explores the intersections of literature, sociability, and the history of emotions in the Hispanic world during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Following Raymond Williams’s notion of “structures of feeling” and Barbara Rosenwein’s concept of “emotional communities,” as well as more recent work in affect theory (Ahmed 2004), we consider emotions not as private, psychological states but as cultural and social practices. Recent scholarship has also stressed the dual nature of emotion concepts—oscillating between natural and normative kinds (Scarantino 2025)—and their role in shaping both political discourses and collective identities.

 “I, I wear a plastic suit / Plastic is my food / Perhaps, I’m plastic too,” sang the iconic Yugoslav New Wave band Idoli in their 1981 song “Plastika” (“Plastics”). These lyrics captured a 1980s moment in which Yugoslav production, import, and consumption of plastics reached their peak. Yet the groundwork for it had been laid in the preceding decades, since plastics production had begun shortly after the Second World War and rapidly permeated all aspects of everyday life (see Filipović 2023). Importantly, Yugoslavia’s trajectory differed from that of the Eastern Bloc.

The Shirley Jackson Society invites scholars at all stages of their careers to submit to our panels for the American Literature Association’s 37th Annual Conference in Chicago, May 20-23, 2026.

For “Shirley Jackson in an Age of Anxiety,” we invite papers that explore how Jackson’s texts speak to, reflect, or anticipate our current age of political instability, social fragmentation, economic uncertainty, and concerted attacks on human rights. Topics of interest include cultural and historical trauma, social conformity and marginalization, surveillance and paranoia, the uncanny in everyday life, prejudice, mob mentality, the dismantling of the American Dream, and mental illness as a cultural phenomenon.

Call for Papers

Following the success of the I International Conference on Gender Studies & Intermedial Narratives (UCM, 2024), this new edition seeks to go further, deeper, and bolder. If last year we worked around the idea of intermediality, this year we want to explore its most visceral and material dimension: how gender is inscribed on, through, and as bodies—and how bodies themselves become texts, interfaces, archives, and narrative machines.We begin with a simple premise: every text is a body, and every body is a text.

This is a Call for Papers for a special issue titled, "Mapping the Diverse Horizons of Oral History in India: Theory, Method, Practice." The central idea of the special issue is to map the multiple directions in which oral history is evolving within India today and to highlight its significance in understanding lives, histories, and identities that often remain outside conventional archives. The issue will be published in collaboration with The Oral History Review [ https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/uohr20  Scopus, Q1].

We invite interested individuals to send us an abstract based on the following themes, but not limited to:

NATIONAL SEMINAR ONDigital Futures and Beyond: Emerging Paradigms in English Studies

27 December 2025

Organised by
Department of English, Hill-Top Degree College, Mohana, Gajapati, Odisha
Venue: Seminar Hall, Hill-Top Degree College
Website:www.hilltopdegreecollegemohana.edu.in

 Invitation

Perennially understudied, Eurasia – as both a geographical and conceptual constellation – opens up a novel and fertile space for scholarly contributions. This call for papers invites submissions that engage with the region’s alternative media, information, and communications histories, bridging past and future frameworks, methodologies and forms.

ATHE 2026

“ACTIVATING IMAGINATION IN/AND COMMUNITY”
July 22–26, 2026  |  Baltimore, Maryland

This year’s conference theme, "Activating Imagination in/and Community," asks us to think deeply and courageously about the role of theatre and performance in shaping our shared presents and collective futures. It challenges us to contemplate not just what we do, but how and with whom we do it, while recognizing that, in the face of growing political repression and institutional instability, our collaborations—across disciplines, communities, and identities—are simultaneously more vulnerable and vital than ever.

WANT TO PUBLISH YOUR SCHOLARLY WORK?

• The Journal of Undergraduate Research in the Humanities (JURH) is looking for excellent undergraduate essays.

WHAT IS JURH?

Institute for the Humanities, University of Manitoba, February 5–6, 2026

The Institute for Humanities at the University of Manitoba invites proposals for papers and panel presentations for the international conference Identity in Motion: Literary Representations of Refugees, Exiles, and Immigrants. This conference seeks to explore the diverse literary portrayals of displacement, migration, exile, and the refugee experience across genres, languages, and cultures. We welcome interdisciplinary approaches, including but not limited to literary studies, cultural studies, history, and sociology.

Concept Note

National Conference on Interstices, Relationality and Sense-making: Navigating Peace, Ethics and AI in the 21st Century

Organised by the Centre for Peace and Ethics in the Age of AI under the aegis of Swami Vivekananda University, Barrackpore, West Bengal, India. 

19th-20th January, 2026 (Hybrid Mode) 

“ One is never afraid of the unknown; one is afraid of the known coming to an end.”

 -  J. Krishnamurti 

“No computer has ever been designed that is ever aware of what it’s doing; but most of the time, we aren't either.” - Marvin Minsky