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The Dame Ivy Compton-Burnett Estate is delighted to invite applications for a generous new scholarship to enable a student, independent scholar or academic to develop and disseminate new research into any aspect of the work or legacy of one of the most famous 20th century English writers.
The MLA Drama and Performance Forum is currently accepting proposals for the two panels it is sponsoring for the 2026 conference in Toronto: https://www.mla.org/Events/2026-MLA-Convention.
Crowd Work: Audiences in Drama and Performance
How do drama and performance engage audiences as spectators and participants? What work does the audience do and how is it negotiated across local, transnational, economic, generic, or mediatized performance and reception contexts?
Please submit brief bios and 200-word proposals.
Deadline for submissions: Friday, 21 March 2025
CALL FOR RESEARCH PAPERS (2025-2026)
SOPHIA COLLEGE FOR WOMEN INVITES RESEARCH PAPERS FOR THE FIFTH ISSUE OF SOPHIA LUCID: A PEER REVIEWED MULTIDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH JOURNAL.
Call for Chapters in an Edited Volume
Soundscapes in Indian Art, Literature and Culture
Newly launched by De Gruyter, Digital Studies in Language and Literature (DSLL, ISSN: 2943-0607) is a peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary publication dedicated to advancing research on the intersection of digital technology, language, and literature.
DSLL welcomes all submissions in line with the aims and scope below. Accepted articles will be published via fully sponsored Open Access through a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY-4.0) License, so your research will be freely available for all to read and download.
Useful Links
The Gaskell Journal
Joan Leach Memorial
Graduate Student Essay Prize 2026
Deadline for submissions: 1 February 2026
The Gaskell Journal runs a biennial Graduate Student Essay Prize in honour of Joan Leach MBE, founder of the Gaskell Society. The winning essay will be published in the Gaskell Journal (with revisions as appropriate), and its author will receive £200 from the Gaskell Society, and a complimentary copy of the Journal.
Vampires and Fashion
For the last 100 years, from Nosferatu to Nosferatu, vampires have graced screens large and small, dressed in clothing that has become part and parcel of their appeal. From drab gray and black German frock coats to full formal tuxes, from diaphanous gowns to sleek, form-hugging dresses, from haute couture to jeans and leather jackets, and from wing-collared capes to Middle Eastern chadors, vampire fashion is varied and exciting, yet has, to date, received little academic attention.
The Doris Lessing Society, an allied organization of the MLA, invites proposals for the two 2026 MLA sessions; for details of the Calls, see below:
Calls for Paper for the 2026 MLA Convention (01/08--01/11/2026)
1 Doris Lessing the Storyteller: Literature and Social Change
The goal is to explore the ways in which Lessing uses fiction for social transformation through the elaboration and dissemination of knowledge, e.g., self-education, constructing knowledge, questioning moral/political values, and the relationship to language.
Deadline for submissions: Sunday, 23 March 2025
Not Without Laughter: Tracing Humour in African American Literature Across the Ages
Many philosophers, from Aristotle to Hobbes, Freud to Schopenhauer, Spencer to Peter McGraw, have given interesting insights on matters concerning humour, comedy, and laughter. While the classical theories of humour, namely the superiority theory, the incongruity theory, and the relief theory, discuss the fundamental nature of humour, its evolved forms, such as the benign violation theory, provide a more compact version of the same. Nevertheless, humour is pervasive and can be witnessed in all aspects of life.
Call for Papers
The ATHE Theory & Criticism Focus Group seeks papers for its annual Graduate Student Essay Contest.
The contest presents an exciting opportunity for an emergent theatre and performance studies scholar. It introduces the winning writer to the ATHE conference and provides them with a venue in which to showcase their work.
The contest prizes are intended to support the development of the student’s academic work, ease financial challenges related to conference attendance, and connect the student with appropriate scholarly resources for the paper’s development and impact.
The winning scholar will receive:
Call for Papers
ESOTERICISM, OCCULTISM, AND MAGIC
Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)
2025 SWPACA Summer Salon
June 26-28, 2024
Virtual Conference
Submissions open on March 25, 2025
Proposal submission deadline: April 15, 2025
ACQL General Call for Papers: 2025 ONLINE Conference
Founded in 1975 in the wake of Canada’s official ratification of multiculturalism, the Association for Canadian and Québec Literatures has, over more than 45 years, emerged as Canada’s premier association for showcasing multilingual and transnational research in Canadian and Québec literatures.
This year, ACQL will host its annual conference ONLINE between Friday, May 23rd and Sunday, May 25th.
We invite potential participants to submit NEW proposals in English or in French on research, teaching, and professional matters of relevance to current or prospective members.
Call for Papers
Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)
2025 SWPACA Summer Salon
June 26-28, 2025
Virtual Conference
Submissions open on March 25, 2025
Proposal submission deadline: April 15, 2025
We are thrilled to announce an open call for submissions for 'Voices Unbound', a new poetry anthology that seeks to celebrate the diverse, vibrant, and transformative power of poetry. Whether you are an emerging voice or an established poet, we invite you to share your work and contribute to this collective tapestry of human experience.
Website: https://sites.google.com/view/freshwordsmagazine/home
Bloomsbury has shown interest in publishing this project.
Editors:
Dr. Shubhanku Kochar shubhankukochar@outlook.com
Dr. Tanupriya tanupriya.2493@gmail.com
In his Poetics, Aristotle famously distinguishes poetry from history, claiming that “the distinction between historian and poet is not in the one writing prose and the other verse…it consists really in this, that the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be.” Yet despite their different intentions, history has continued to remain a subject of drama from Aristotle’s time until the present day, often serving to enact the tension between truth and believability in order to highlight the often porous boundary between fact and fiction. This session will explore the depiction of historical subjects on the stage in theatrical works originating from any time period.
Longing to Know:
Gender and the Production of Scientific Knowledge
Special Issue of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies
Issue editors: Imogen Forbes-Macphail and Anna Henchman
Call for Papers
This panel, "Of Monsters and Mothers: Challenging Representations and Theories of Maternity in Literature," seeks to explore how literature complicates, subverts, and redefines conventional understandings of motherhood. From monstrous maternal figures to radical reimaginings of care, the maternal body has long been a contested site of power, anxiety, and transformation in literary texts. We invite interdisciplinary perspectives that engage with literature across historical periods and genres, drawing from feminist, psychoanalytic, postcolonial, disability, and queer theories to interrogate the intersections of motherhood, agency, and monstrosity.
Title:Contemporary Impacts of Settler Traumas Upon Indigenous Peoples of North America Description & Requirements:Submit a brief bio and 150 word abstract to daniellemercier92@gmail.com examining contemporary narratives of Indigenous peoples of North America (U.S. and Canada), their bodies/embodiment. Presentations may focus on issues such as: trauma, time, capitalism, settler colonialism. Submission Deadline:Thursday, 20 March 2025
Sponsored by the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, the University of Virginia’s College at Wise Medieval-Renaissance Conference promotes scholarly discussion in all disciplines of Medieval and Renaissance studies.
Publication Call: Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, University of Toronto
Immigrant Diaspora and the Future Dimensions of Canadian Multiculturalism
The IATIS - International Association for Translation and Intercultural Studies invites papers on “Sustainable Translation in the Age of Knowledge Extraction, Generation, and (Re)Creation” for its 8th International Conference to be held at Sultan Qaboos University, Muscat, Sultanate of Oman on December 10-13, 2025.
We would especially like to encourage submissions that contribute new directions and calls to the existing scholarship on “Translation, Speculative Justice and Sustainability in the Global South.”
In her artist statement for Along the River of Spacetime (2020), a virtual reality “activation” of Anishinaabe star knowledge, scholar, artist, and video game designer Elizabeth LaPensée (Irish, Métis, Anishinaabe) described the ways in which Anishinaabe cosmologies anticipated a series of experiments carried out by CERN's Large Hadron Collider, the world's most advanced particle accelerator.
This panel seeks presentations on Technical and Professional writing, whether in the college classroom or in the world at large. The panel will be interdiscplinary - we invite proposals from those working in business writing, engineering communication, health science writing, and other fields.
Topics can range from ethics to pedagogy to technologies including AI. The final panel will seek to comprise a cohesive but varied set of papers.
This panel seeks presentations on uses of generative AI in the college classroom, with a particular focus on approaches that combine theory and practice. Especially welcome are presentations that are built around transferable skills and activities/assignments in different disciplines including writing and literature.
The panel will take place during the MMLA's annual convention from November 14-16 on the campus of Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. For more informationa about the organization and the conference, see: https://www.luc.edu/mmla/convention/futureconventionplans/
“Make you to ravel all this matter out” (Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3.4)
Within early modern studies, there has been a growing interest in the intersections between text, materiality, and performance, both in and beyond the commercial theatres. The Revels Office, an international research group comprised of early career academics, has always been fascinated by the relationship between textual, visual and material cultures and the material realities of theatre and performance.
This panel explores how fire and fossil fuels shape modernity and modernisms, focusing on literature, art, and culture beyond 1850. Papers may explore intersections of:
Please submit 250-word abstracts to Jennie Sekanics at jennie-sekanics@uiowa.edu or Harry Stecopoulos at harilaos-stecopoulos@uiowa.edu.
CALL FOR BOOK CHAPTERS
Psychoanalyzing the Post-Apocalypse:
Psychoanalytic Approaches to 21st Century Fiction and Film
“Under Strong Interest” by McFarland’s Critical Explorations in Science Fiction and Fantasy series
Editors’ Introduction
While revising Between the Acts in 1940, Virginia Woolf edited her drafts to reinforce the disruptive wartime shifts in food culture triggered by the Second World War: the novel notes a particular wariness for rationed beef and mutton, references the interwar freedom of easily obtaining bacon and oil, and suggests the indulgence of sugar consumption. The modernist moment saw a variety of such shifts in the alimentary, from increased industrialization and food processing to a more gastronomic turn to the realities of wartime food rationing that Woolf and others chart.
We live in an age of optimization. Norms of beauty and performance are relentlessly getting harder to achieve without modifying the psychophysiology of human beings. Humans are faced with choices and demands regarding increasing and reducing the size, mass, and weight of different body parts and the modification of the way they function. The normal no longer means the common, it means the optimal. From special diets and extreme workouts to silicon injections and from plastic surgery to brain chips, the human body is transforming into a workshop for different arts and technologies. The cosmetic surgery market, for example, is worth more than 57 billion dollars and is expected to continue to grow very fast.