Volcanic matter really matters. During a one hundred year span from the 1780s to 1880s, a series of volcanic eruptions occurred that altered the atmosphere, disrupted weather conditions, and caused unprecedented loss due to famine and widespread disease: Laki Iceland (1783-1784); Vesuvius, Italy (1794); Pico Viejo, Canary Islands (1798); Tambora, Indonesia (1815); Ferdinandea, Sicily (1831); Hekla, Iceland (1840, 1845); and Krakatoa, Indonesia (1883). Various critics have written about the systemic effects geologically, meteorologically, and ecologically such as Richard Altick, David Higgins, Monique Morgan, Marilynn Olsen, Nicholas Robbins, Jesse Oak Taylor, and Gillen D’Arcy Wood.

The last decade has seen a surge in scholarly interdisciplinarity, exploring the nonhuman in a broad range of critical perspectives. Whether through Glenworth et al (2024)’s conservationist prism which contextualises ‘Rewilding’ as a way of restoring ‘non-human autonomy’; or perhaps, through Bram Büscher (2021)’s capitalist reflections on nature’s alienation and entanglement, both of which are recent approaches that seek to champion the cause of ‘decentering the human in favor of a concern for the nonhuman’ (Grusin, 2015: 1), we see a growing pace of intersectionality within which nature and literature are brazenly intertwined.

Conference: 4-5 December 2025

Gdańsk (Poland) and online

Dear Colleagues,"Interface" calls for papers for a conference on the topic: “Embodied Experience, Emotions, and Creativity”Conference Date: September  17-19, 2025Conference Place: Doğuş University, Istanbul, TurkeyAbstract Submission Deadline: July 30, 2025 "Interface" would like to thank Trier University (Centre for Advanced Studies "Poetry in Transition”), Kobe University (Graduate School of Humanities), and Seoul National University (Institute of Classical Studies) for their kind support and co-operation in organizing this conference. 

“Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a programmeof complete disorder” (27) 
 
—Frantz Fanon, The Wretched OfThe Earth 

Great Britain has a rich and varied history when it comes to true crime. This statement applies as much to the crimes themselves as it does to media producers’ coverage of them. While a global canon of true crime is forming, there has to date still been an emphasis placed on Western narratives according to American culture, with crimes from this region dominating media attention. However, Britain itself has a long history of true crime that warrants further critical attention, to include some of the most prolific serial killers within the genre: Fred and Rose West; Harold Shipman; John Christie; Dennis Nilsen; and, more recently, and controversially, Lucy Letby.

The World of Warcraft Handbook: Twenty Years in Azeroth (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026)
Edited by David John Boyd (University of Glasgow) &  Russell McDermott (Dickinson College)

Virtual interventions have become permanently embedded in our spaces, and play a major role not only in how a space is constituted but also in how our bodies exist in, encounter, and co-constitute space. Physical space and virtual networks are inextricably intertwined today, such that a space is never purely physical.

The second Issue of Volume 7 of LLIDS examines how structures of power constitute and shape urban spaces. It proposes to explore their influence in determining social values wherein varied social groups—marked by religion, class, race, gender, etc.—negotiate the power dynamics that constitute life in urban spaces. The modern, bustling city carries within itself a continuous sense of becoming. The urban dwellers, inhabiting segregated parts of the city, shape the lived experience of these spaces through their socio-cultural interactions and relationships.

Reminder:

Call for Papers

Haunted Cities: Spaces, Spectres, and Urban Hauntologies

Edited Collection

Comparative Woman Journal – Volume 4, Issue 1 (2025)

CALL FOR PAPERS

Comparative Woman is an online journal affiliated with LSU’s Department of Comparative Literature that explores topics related to comparative literature and women/gender studies through art and academic essays.Comparative Woman Journal is inviting papers for Volume 4, Issue 1 (2025) on Aesthetic Education: From Sensibility to Critical Engagement.

THEME

Aesthetic Education: From Sensibility to Critical Engagement

SUB-THEMES (including but not limited to):

Call for submission of academic articles on William Carlos Williams for consideration by the William Carlos Williams Review. Articles must be between 20 to 30 pages in length. All topics welcome. Queries to the editor at copers@gmail.com. Deadline for submissions: July 28, 2025. To submit, register as an author and upload your article here: https://www.editorialmanager.com/wcwr/default.aspx

This panel invites papers that examine how early modern women were imagined and represented across genres and cultural contexts. From historical figures to literary characters, how were women positioned in relation to authority, virtue, sexuality, or empire?  How were women written, circulated, obscured, or celebrated in early modern texts? What roles did women play in shaping narratives of gender, race, and power? This panel welcomes work that attends to both the forms of representation and the structures that produced or obscured women’s presence in the early modern world. What kinds of authority or ambivalence did gendered figures carry, and how did race, class, and empire shape their depiction or erasure?

British cultural production has a long history of foreclosure. Understood as a premature abandonment, or an abortive failure, of radical political projects, foreclosure has an imaginative and material register in working-class writing, which has been read since the 1930s as failing to experiment, relying on realism without meaningful engagement with questions of literary form. This view has been challenged by literary scholars, who have demonstrated that formal experimentation did exist, though not in ways that comfortably align with the usual reading of middle-class modernism (Clarke Working Class Writing, 2018).