The Lives and Legacies of Medieval Comics: A Commemoration of Ninety Years of Hal Foster's Prince Valiant (Hybrid)

62nd International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University (Kalamazoo, MI), Thursday, 13 May, through Saturday, 15 May, 2026

Co-sponsored by Medieval Comics Project, Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture

Co-organized by Michael A. Torregrossa, Bristol Community College, and Carl B Sell, University of Pittsburgh

Rationale 

Jordan Peele’s Us is a critically acclaimed horror original about government-manufactured clones that are forced to mimic the lives of the people who live on the surface like stringless puppets. While Peele focuses more on a physical tethering, there is a psychological tethering that can be gleamed from this piece, specifically as it relates to the idea of double consciousness. In his work “The Striving of the Negro People,” W.E.B. Du Bois describes this idea as “this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt or pity.

Bhāratīya Jñāna Paramparā, another name for Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS), is a comprehensive body of knowledge which has been accumulated over millennia. Indian Knowledge Systems encompasses philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, medicine (Ayurveda), government, ecology, the arts, and sustainable living. It is based on books such as the Vedas, Upanishads, Puranas, and treatises like the Arthashastra, Charaka Samhita, and Sushruta Samhita. This Knowledge systems place a strong emphasis on interconnection, moral behaviour, and harmony with the natural world - principles embodied in ideas such as Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam (the world is one family).

This session invites 15-20-minute papers that attend to the partial and resistant ways queerness and transness emerge in medieval archives. Torn pages, smudged images, misplaced marginalia, and fragmentary traces all signal forms of queer archival participation. In reimagining archival potential how might medievalists access, interpret, or refuse archival legibility? Contributions may address explicitly socio-political queer identities and communities, as well as approaching the archive itself as a site structured by both queer and trans abundance and absence.

Abstract

About the book: Human machine interfacing can be as simple as pressing a button or as complex and entangled (also entangling) as inserting a brain chip into the skull. science fiction. Humans with implants, prosthetic and hybrid humans with electronic and mechanical extensions are yet another level are no longer science fiction.  Yet, human-machine interfacing has started long before the invention of these technologies. Machines did communicate with us and tell us about themselves even before chatbots were invented. The clanking of a hammer on the anvil tells us that it is old and dull. The whistle of a microwave tells us that dinner is ready. The process of interfacing is not a one-way process.

The II International Congress of Videogames, Virtual Environments and Interactive Creation is an event of scientific and academic dissemination whose objective is the diffusion of studies related to the field of videogames, digital art and online and virtual environments, in its wide range of topics and media: development of ludic and interactive platforms; video game studies (Game Studies); initiatives around eSports; expressions of Digital Art, Virtual and Augmented Reality, and Artificial Intelligence applied to ludic or plastic creation; projects in networked communities and mobile devices; e-learning platforms; games and digital artistic works and their imbrications with cinema, animation, music, comics, etc. 

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.

Bhāratīya Jñāna Paramparā, another name for Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS), is a comprehensive body of knowledge which has been accumulated over millennia. Indian Knowledge Systems encompasses philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, medicine (Ayurveda), government, ecology, the arts, and sustainable living. It is based on books such as the Vedas, Upanishads, Puranas, and treatises like the Arthashastra, Charaka Samhita, and Sushruta Samhita. This Knowledge systems place a strong emphasis on interconnection, moral behaviour, and harmony with the natural world - principles embodied in ideas such as Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam (the world is one family).

The precarity of a volatile political environment, economic distress, unchecked genocide, and a global pandemic have pushed many Americans to the brink of late capitalist fatalism, dissociation, or gallows humor. In Rethinking Therapeutic Culture (2015), Timothy Aubry and Trysh Travis draw attention to our cultural “therapeutic orientation” that is so ubiquitous, we hardly notice it, as most Americans attempt to seek some kind of mental health support (1). Therapeutic culture perpetuates the mythos that self requires cultivation and improvement: “its economic, ethical, intellectual, and emotional possibilities are not predetermined by heredity or inherited social position” (5).

Editors: Dana Lee Baker and Matthew Mendez Garcia
Publisher: Edward Elger Publishing
Submission deadline for abstracts: 1 January 2027

We invite proposals for entries in an edited academic handbook on the politics of neurodiversity. This volume will bring together interdisciplinary perspectives on neurodiversity as a political, cultural, institutional, legal, and epistemic phenomenon.

American Literature Association: “Music and the American Literary Imagination” Symposium

January 28-30, 2027 in Nashville, Tennessee

CFP: “Sounding the Subject in the Nineteenth Century” 

In her book Bodyminds Reimagined, Sami Schalk asks us “What might it mean to imagine disability differently?” (2) Her work, situated in the exploration of black speculative fiction, engages with (dis)ability studies and black feminism to gesture toward a reimagining of what Margaret Price termed the ‘bodymind’, a concept predicated on “the enmeshment of the mind and body.” (5) How might this enmeshment be understood in the context of chronic conditions, themselves experienced as a direct result of climate change and biomedical violence? Is the planet - made sick by extractive capitalism and anthropogenic action as Shukla, Settee, Lincoln and others claim - now existing in a state of (dis)ability?

Recent scholarship in autobiography and life writing has expanded beyond traditional literary forms to encompass a wide range of practices through which individuals narrate, perform, and negotiate their identities. As scholars such as Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson have argued, life writing constitutes not merely the representation of a life but a dynamic process through which identities are constructed, mediated, and made visible within specific social and cultural contexts. Consequently, autobiography has evolved into an interdisciplinary field of inquiry encompassing visual art, graphic narratives, performance, body art, digital media, and other forms of self-representation.

“To be or not to be”—Hamlet’s timeless question of existence—resonates with a gendered undertone that continues to echo through literature and culture. This panel asks a related question: what does it mean to be (or not to be) a man, and how do literary texts help illuminate that question across genres, periods, and geographies?

2026: 09-15-26: CFP Holy Grail, Batman? Expanding Knowledge of the Grail Legends in Popular Culture (Online) (9/15/2026; ICMS Kalamazoo/Online 5/13-15/2027)

Holy Grail, Batman? Expanding Knowledge of the Grail Legends in Popular Culture (Online)

62nd International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University (Kalamazoo, MI), Thursday, 13 May, through Saturday, 15 May, 2026

Co-sponsored by Alliance for the Promotion of Research on the Matter of Britain, Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture

The rise of the superhero is one of the most significant cultural developments of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Since the debut of Superman in Action Comics #1 (April 18, 1938), superheroes have evolved from colorful comic-book figures into powerful global symbols that shape conversations about politics, morality, identity, technology, gender, race, mythology, trauma, and resistance. What began with the imaginative vision of Jerry Siegel (writer) and Joe Shuster (artist) has expanded into a worldwide phenomenon spanning comics, film, television, literature, gaming, digital media, and academic discourse.

                                     The Age of Brutalism: Sacrificial Modernity and the Contemporary Novel
                                          (The edited volume has received an expression of interest from Springer)

Volume Editors:

● Om Prakash Dwivedi, Professor, School of Liberal Arts and Behavioral Sciences, Chandigarh University Uttar Pradesh.

● Madhurima Nayak, Assistant Professor, School of Liberal Arts and Behavioral Sciences, Chandigarh University Uttar Pradesh.

● Arunima Moitra, Assistant Professor, School of Liberal Arts and Behavioral Sciences, Chandigarh University Uttar Pradesh.

In bell hooks’ Belonging: A Culture of Place (2009), she posits that “many folks feel no sense of place” (1). She continues by explaining her personal experience with this spatiality, noting that, “Like many of my contemporaries I have yearned to find my place in this world, to have a sense of homecoming, a sense of being wedded to a place” (2). To that end, a commonality shared between all humans is a searching for a place in which we belong, and this is particularly evident in literature that is produced during times of major societal events.

Over the last two decades, we have seen a surge of scholarship at the intersection of Food Studies and New Materialist theory. Thinkers like Elspeth Probyn (2000; 2016), Jane Bennett (2010), Annemarie Mol (2021; 2024), and Kyla Wazana Tompkins (2024) explore the diverse ways in which edible matter acts on our bodies, wills, and dispositions, in multilayered entanglements that involve water, minerals, fungi, bacteria, plants, as well as human and nonhuman animals. These material-discursive networks urge us to rethink not only our notions of agency but also our ways of being, knowing, and relating.

Editor
Dr Kaniphnath Malhari Kudale
Associate Professor of English, Gurunanak Institute of Technology (GNITC), Hyderabad, Telangana, India

General Editor
Dr Tarun Tapas Mukherjee
Editor, Rupkatha Journal

About the Volume

Changeling Country: Neurodivergence, Disability and the Irish Imaginary

An edited volume proposed for Vernon Press, Irish Studies series Editor: Tess Ezzy — Director, Neurodivergent Creative Methods Lab; PhD candidate, University of New England

Against Agency 

NeMLA 2027 

Chairs: Nicholas Bujalski (Oberlin College) and Valeria Dani (Hamilton College) 

Inspired by the emptiness of the National Mall celebration of America’s 250th, we invite 300 word abstracts that consider enclosure and vacancy in Americana and its related aesthetic categories, like the Western and Southern Gothic.

Presenters might engage with a variety of fields, especially black, feminist, and indigenous studies, and take up media across time periods, including contemporary art by Bisa Butler and Jeffrey Gibson, Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter, Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, Aleshea Harris’ Is God Is, and many more.

https://mla.confex.com/mla/2027/webprogrampreliminary/Paper36527.html