The Fifteenth IASEMS Conference

University of Salento (Lecce), 16-17 May 2025
Convenors: Maria Luisa De Rinaldis, Maria Renata Dolce and the IASEMS Executive Board

The Fifteenth IASEMS Conference in Lecce, University of Salento, 16-17 May 2025, will investigate the imaginary of waters in Shakespeare and early modern texts, aiming at the exploration of notions of fluidity and crossing. The conference wishes to investigate what meanings, both personal and collective, circulated around ‘water’ in early modern culture, but also to discuss the water-related relevance and value of the ideas of shapelessness and transformation, mutability and sea change as opposed to fixity, solidity, and normativity.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Landscapes Of the Mind: Narratives of Cultural Encounters

Anda International Conference

Università del Salento, Lecce – Italy

25-26 September 2025

Landscapes of the Mind: Narratives of Cultural Encounters explores how different cultures perceive, interpret, and narrate their experiences and interactions. Possible topics related to the conference include:

CFP: Dracula: A Companion

Matthew Crofts & Maddy Potter

Dracula: A Companion is intended to both be an essential guide to interpreting Bram Stoker’s Dracula and a collection of new perspectives supporting a reshaping of the way the text is taught and engaged with by students. 

We are looking for submissions to a symposium as part of the 2025 Brazilian Association for Comparative Literature Conference "Redes, Margens et Rios," held June 23-28 in Manaus, Brazil. The symposium format is designed to allow for a several day working period over the course of the conference's days (depending on number of submissions). We are looking for 250 words abstracts for 20 minute presentations on the below topic. We expect to combine presentations, working periods, and discussion elements over the course of two to three days.

Call For Papers

Special issue:        Faravid – Journal for Historical and Archaeological Studies

Publication date:    Spring 2026

Guest editors:        Moussa Pourya Asl, Henry Oinas-Kukkonen, and Johanna Leinonen

Language:              Finnish, English, German or Swedish

Migration Histories to Finland: Global Movements, Local Impacts

Indie Lens Pop-Up, WBGU-PBS, the Popular Culture Program, and the School of Cultural and Critical Studies at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio are proud to announce the Funk Music in Popular Culture Conference to be held on Friday, April 25 and Saturday, April 26, 2025. The Funk Music in Popular Culture Conference will serve as a celebration and screening of the Independent Lens film We Want the Funk.

Call for Nominations: The Penny Pether Law & Language Scholarship Award 2024

A passionate advocate for interdisciplinary scholarship in law, literature, and language, Penelope J. Pether (1957-2013) was Professor of Law at Villanova University School of Law and former Professor of Law and Director of Legal Rhetoric at the American University Washington College of Law. Her own scholarship focused not only on law, literature, and language, but also on constitutional and comparative constitutional law; legal theory, including constitutional theory; common law legal institutions, judging practices, and professional subject formation.

Call For PapersWe are pleased to invite experts, students, and researchers interested in blockchain and crypto assets to the First International deBlock Conference, which will take place in Tehran in May 2025.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Maps in American Literature, 15th-21st c.

 International symposium

April 1-3, 2026
ENS de Lyon, France

Organized by Aurore Clavier (Université Paris Cité), Monica Manolescu (University of Strasbourg, USIAS), Julien Nègre (ENS de Lyon, IUF) and Pauline Pilote (Université Bretagne Sud).

Keynote speaker: Martin Brückner, Professor at the University of Delaware and Director of the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture (WPAMC).

(What’s the story) Reunion glory?

Assessing Oasis’s legacy as Morning Glory turns 30.

Université Rennes 2 (France), 27 November 2025

Organisation committee: Aurore Caignet, Guillaume Clément, David Haigron

It is estimated that nearly 14 million people tried to get tickets for this year’s Oasis’s UK tour following the announcement of their reunion in 2024. This staggering figure echoes the band’s one-off concert at Knebworth in 1996, when 4% of the British population had applied for tickets. Such statistics confirm Oasis’s special status within British popular culture and the band’s ability to allow people to come together.

Epistolography, knowledge, and the Ancient World

Conference, University of Bucharest, October 3-4, 2025 (hybrid) 

CFP deadline: February 28, 2025

Each year the Hemingway Society accepts applications for its Lewis-Reynolds-Smith Founders Fellowship grant, and typically makes two awards of $1,000 each to support the development of a Hemingway-related project.

Description

We live in a world where interfaces play an increasingly central role. Interfaces are our means of engaging with both technical and social realities; gradually, they become not only conditions of access to the world of technology but also intrinsic structures of our experience. The interfaces designed by major corporations, game developers, and social application creators set standards of perception and self-awareness, disciplining us and determining the measure of control. This makes it all the more crucial to continue experimenting with interfaces, developing a new semiotic, symbolic, and bodily grammar—a challenge embraced by digital artists, gamers, science fiction writers, and neuromancers of media reality.

For MLA in Toronto (January 8-11, 2026), we welcome contributions on Morris, his associates, and their influence in relation to material culture: the Arts and Crafts movement, the portrayal of objects and environments in literature, and the meanings ascribed to “things.” In addition to seeking new approaches to the work of Morris and his circle in the book arts, stained glass, textiles, architecture, and landscape design, we seek reevaluations of materiality and concrete symbolism within Pre-Raphaelite writings more broadly as reflective of beliefs about identity, permanence, and change. Contributions on Morrisian and Arts and Crafts-related Canadian material culture are especially welcome. Please send abstracts and a brief c. v.