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GIANT MONSTERS ALL-OUT ATTACK: Kaiju Culture in the Twenty-first Century
Edited by Alex Adams, independent scholar
Skenè Research Centre
Interdisciplinary Theatre and Drama Studies
Università di Verona
as part of the agreement with
Dipartimento di Filologia, Letteratura e Linguistica
Università di Pisa
Theatre and Anthropology
Theoretical Approaches to Text, Performance,
and Theatrical Practices
Verona (IT), November 19-20, 2026
Conference venue
Dipartimento di Lingue e letterature straniere,
Polo Zanotto, Aula Co-Working
via S. Francesco 22,
Verona, Italy
CFP – “BLACK ESSAYSM: FORMAL EXPERIMENTATIONS IN BLACK CREATIVE/CRITICAL PRACTICES”
liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies 12, no. 1, Spring 2028
Guest editor: Walton Muyumba
Submissions due: January 30, 2027
Haunted Thresholds:
The Southern Gothic in Comparative Perspective
South Atlantic Modern Language Association (SAMLA) 2026
Conference Dates: November 5–7, 2026
Location: Wyndham Atlanta Buckhead Hotel and Conference Center, Atlanta, Georgia
Contact: stacy.stingle@gmail.com
Haunted Thresholds: The Southern Gothic in Comparative Perspective
As more and more women's stereotypical images are distributed via digital networks, active counter-activism via digital networks is an urgent need in a post-truth media environment. In the age of audio-visual curation, the cultural narrative has been traditionally controlled by state and corporate power, while today, opaque automated content moderation, algorithmic sorting and filtering, and platform capitalism of transnational streaming networks dominate the scene.
2026 Imagining Creative Worlds Online Symposium, 11–12 November 2026
We invite proposals for 2026 Imagining Creative Worlds, an annual online symposium in the Common Ground Imagining Futures Series, taking place 11–12 November 2026.
The symposium brings together scholars, researchers, artists, designers, educators, publishers, museum professionals, media makers, and cultural practitioners working across creative fields and practices. We welcome proposals that explore how creative worlds are made, shared, interpreted, circulated, and transformed.
For 2026, The Arts in Society Research Network serves as the host Network, helping shape the symposium’s emphasis within the wider theme of Imagining Creative Worlds.
2027 Imagining Human Worlds Online Symposium, 27–28 January 2027
We invite proposals for 2027 Imagining Human Worlds, an annual online symposium in the Common Ground Imagining Futures Series, taking place 27–28 January 2027, online on CGScholar.
The symposium brings together scholars, researchers, educators, humanities scholars, learning specialists, technologists, practitioners, and community-engaged professionals working across questions of culture, learning, identity, meaning, communication, ethics, and human development. We welcome proposals that explore how human worlds are formed, interpreted, taught, experienced, mediated, and transformed.
2027 Imagining Social WorldsOnline Symposium, 17–18 March 2027
We invite proposals for 2027 Imagining Social Worlds, an annual online symposium in the Common Ground Imagining Futures Series, taking place 17–18 March 2027.
The symposium brings together scholars, researchers, educators, policy thinkers, practitioners, community leaders, organizers, and public-facing professionals working across social, political, civic, organizational, and global fields. We welcome proposals that explore how social worlds are formed, governed, connected, contested, sustained, and transformed.
2027 Imagining Sustainable Worlds Online Symposium, 12–13 May 2027
We invite proposals for 2027 Imagining Sustainable Worlds, an annual online symposium in the Common Ground Imagining Futures Series, taking place 12–13 May 2027, online on CGScholar.
The symposium brings together scholars, researchers, designers, planners, educators, policy thinkers, practitioners, health and care professionals, environmental researchers, and community-engaged professionals working across questions of sustainability, climate, infrastructure, food systems, mobility, aging, health, wellbeing, and the built environment. We welcome proposals that explore how sustainable worlds are designed, inhabited, maintained, challenged, and transformed.
The New Italians session explores contemporary Italian literature, culture, media, music, and film through the lens of migration, mobility, and evolving forms of Italian identity in a globalized world. In dialogue with PAMLA 2026’s theme, “Our Ruling Classes: Culture, Power, Conflict,” the session considers how cultural production engages structures of power shaping belonging, citizenship, linguistic authority, and cultural legitimacy in Italy and its diasporic contexts.
Conventional cinematic views of New York City are often characterized by aerials, panoramas, and long shots of the archetypal Manhattan skyline, montage of crowded sidewalks, and quick shots of the yellow cabs in congested traffic. Scholars have regularly linked such city views to their historical urban contexts: studies of city symphonies emphasize the concomitance of capitalist modernity, scholars of film noir associate the genre with Cold War anxieties magnified by urban disorientation, while studies of Blaxploitation link the films to the immediate precedents of urban crisis in the 1960s and 1970s.
Conference Details
We are seeking papers for the "Kafka Studies" panel at the 57th annual Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA), which will be held between March 6-9 in Newport, RI. You can find more information about the event on NeMLA's website: https://www.nemla.org/convention.html
Modality
Hybrid: The session will be held in-person but a few remote presentations may be included.
Panel Abstract
Accepting Submissions for NeMLA 2027 Roundtable:
In this in-person roundtable conference session, we are looking to open conversation about the unique ways that educators are innovating with forms of gaming, play, and playfulness in the classroom. We are interested in discussing the incorporation of any and all forms of games and gaming, including, but not limited to:
- board, tabletop, and card games
- social deduction games
- tabletop role-playing systems such as Dungeons and Dragons
- invented role-playing scenarios
- gamification of in-class activities
- video and digital games
Abstract / Overview
We invite you to submit an abstract and bio for the panel “Yesteryear: Cultural and Literary Possibilities”. We are seeking papers that address Caro Claire Burke’s breakout debut novel Yesteryear and its implications on literature and current American culture. How does Burke address established literary conventions? How might one conceive of the evocative narrative style of this novel? How does Burke conceptualize the conscription of motherhood, suppressed queerness, and conservative Christianity? How might the work fit into literary genealogies of sanity, purity, racial prejudice, and womanhood? Proposals should include a title, abstract, your name, and affiliation.
At its most ambitious, the New Hollywood was a movement intended to cut film free of its evil twin, commerce, enabling it to fly high through the thin air of art. The filmmakers of the '70s hoped to overthrow the studio system, or at least render it irrelevant, by democratizing filmmaking, putting it into the hands of anyone with talent and determination.
The Southeastern Renaissance Conference (SRC) invites submissions for presentation at our 83rd Annual Meeting, which will be hosted by the University of Tennessee Knoxville and its Marco Institute, to be held from Friday, October 23 to Saturday, October 24, 2026.
The organizers will consider papers on any topic related to the Early Modern / Renaissance period.
Call for Chapter Proposals for an Edited Book
Digital Precarity and Speculative Narratives in the South Asian Context
Call for Papers
BROLLY. Journal of Social Sciences
Vol. 7, No. 2, August 2026 (General Topic)
Submission Deadline: August 15, 2026
No processing or publication fees.
Peer-reviewed.
#openaccess
ISSN 2516-869X (Print)
ISSN 2516-8703 (Online)
Web:https://www.journals.lapub.co.uk/index.php/Brolly
Email: brolly@journals.lapub.co.uk
Labour is deeply intertwined with caste, gender and class in the socioeconomic fabric of India. However, caste and gender are the two factors that remain ignored in this discourse. In the Hindu social order, the caste system assigns vocations through arbitrary hierarchy, producing pernicious structures of marginalisation. Labour performed by Dalits is often stereotyped through casteist assumptions that naturalise certain kinds of work as “belonging” to these peripheral communities. These stereotypes that are perpetuated historically, culturally and socio-politically, are furthered through mechanisms of caste that operate in the material and affective realms.
The 1995 film Smoke, directed by Wayne Wang, features characters who band together by frequenting a corner cigar store in Brooklyn. Paul Auster, who wrote the screenplay, once described the community his characters created as a “little universe for themselves that is not determined by blood or the past.”
Call for Papers
NeMLA 2027 Annual Convention
Rethinking the Fantastic: Impossibility, Ontology, and Alternative Realities
What makes a text fantastic? While traditional definitions often emphasize the supernatural or the uncanny, many literary works generate the fantastic through impossibility itself. Impossible worlds, contradictory realities, unstable identities, infinite spaces, and paradoxical temporalities challenge readers' assumptions about reality and invite new ways of understanding existence.
Following Yiyun Li's May 2026 Pulitzer Prize win, this session is a critical reception of her memoir as an emancipatory narrative: a descriptive and agential act that represents the unrepresentable experience of maternal grief/trauma. Welcome papers that are interdisciplinary/inter-textual dealing with themes of maternal loss, grief, growth, birth/death, nature/unnatural, death by suicide. Mail 150-200 word abstracts to Dr. Anhiti Patnaik at apatnaik@cascadia.edu Submission Deadline:Monday, August 17, 2026Type:Just-in-Time Session, Modern Language Association Conference 2027Venue:Los Angeles
As Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson argue, “autobiographical storytelling is a performative act through which narrators construct rather than simply describe selves.” In recent times, “life writing” has become a familiar term in literary and cultural studies, encompassing a range of written texts, including autobiographies, biographies, letters, memoirs, slave narratives, prison narratives, captivity narratives, travel narratives, confessionals, conversion narratives and even in recent times, personal diaries. However, rather than remain transparent records of lived experience, life writings actively shape identities, produce historical knowledge, preserve cultural memory, and intervene in social and political worlds.
While tragedy and horror are often treated as distinct genres, both traditions ask audiences to look steadily at what ordinarily repels them. From unburied corpses and undead monsters to violated kinship and failed agency, these spectacles produce fear, pity, disgust, and sorrow alongside fascination. This session explores what might be understood as a tragedy–horror continuum, examining the aesthetic, affective, and ritual overlaps between tragic and horrific representation across historical periods and media.
The Southern Humanities Conference, 2027
Call for Papers
Conference Theme: Divergence, Convergence, Emergence
Knoxville, TN, January 28-31, 2027
The Southern Humanities Conference offers an opportunity for scholars, artists, writers, musicians, performers, and humanists of all kinds to share their knowledge, research, work, and experiences in an interdisciplinary, welcoming, and engaging intellectual space.
This panel proposes a revaluation of boundary-making between early modern and modern generic and affective registers in South Asia. While there is a consensus that genres of composition and cultural sensibilities did not change radically with the coming of print—“print did not so much produce new books as more old books” (Blackburn, 2002)—the precise sites of continuity/rupture differed widely based on the region and language in question.
Ecocriticism and Representations of the Sea in the Arts in Portugal
5 and 6 November 2026
Call for Papers
58th NeMLA Convention
Newport, RI
Format: In Person Only
This panel builds off feminist science fiction studies’ investigation of the role of gender in speculative texts by expanding the field of inquiry to the role of nonbinary characters and even nonbinary worldbuilding in contemporary speculative fiction. It asks how both science fiction as a genre and feminist science fiction as a field have transformed with the emergence of new gender subjectivities. How do these fictions empower trans and nonbinary communities? How must the methodological tools for studying SF change to meet this moment?
Special issue on the « Contemporaneities of Indigenous Poetry in the United States »
Edited by Aurore Clavier (U. Paris Cité), Mathilde Louette (U. Paris Cité) and Baptiste Rembert (Sorbonne U.)
ARGUMENT:
Still Screaming: An Online Conference Celebrating 30 Years of Scream
2026 marks the 30th anniversary of Wes Craven’s Scream (1996), which has had a profound impact on horror films and the slasher subgenre specifically. In the past three decades, Scream has become a franchise of seven films and a television series (2015-16, 2019). Scream has also expanded beyond the screen, reverberating throughout the popular culture landscape and serving as the foundation for a game, collectible figures, multiple Ghostface mask variations, and an entire collection of merchandise at Spirit Halloween (and elsewhere).
Masculinity in Crisis: Hegemony, Marginality, and Aesthetics of Failure in the Arts
In recent decades, the paradigm of masculinity has been increasingly problematized and challenged in the fields of social sciences, cultural studies, gender and queer studies (Connell 1995). Far from being stable or universally applicable, the colossal stature of masculinity has emerged as a space traversed by tensions, counter-narratives, fractures, and processes of symbolic delegitimization.
Update: The deadline for submissions have been extended to Sunday, October 11, 2026 to submit for the 2027 conference.
Anglica Wratislaviensia 65.2/2027
Anglica Wratislaviensia invites scholarly submissions for its forthcoming issue, which focuses on Anglophone literary and cultural studies and related interdisciplinary fields. While the journal's scope encompasses linguistics, translation studies, and language teaching methodology, this issue welcomes contributions in literary and cultural studies specifically. We seek rigorous, critically engaged work that brings together diverse critical traditions and perspectives from around the world. Comparative and methodologically innovative contributions are particularly welcome.
Submission Guidelines
Call for Papers: Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture
Special Issue: 'Forms, Limits and Future Directions of Storytelling in Migration Research'
Issue editors: Lena Englund (University of Eastern Finland) and Kaiju Harinen (Migration Institute of Finland, University of Turku)
View the full call here>>
https://www.intellectbooks.com/crossings-journal-of-migration-culture#call-for-papers
Delta Ecologies asks how delta worlds are shaped by water’s movement, land’s instability, infrastructural promises, and the public stories through which communities remember loss, claim responsibility, and imagine survival. This issue begins from the Bengal-Gangetic world--especially the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna delta, where river systems meet the Bay of Bengal--but it treats the delta not simply as a vulnerable climate zone. It understands the delta as a public world where environmental change becomes a matter of shared interpretation, memory, and responsibility.
What is the real difference between speaking with nature and speaking for it? Is eco-centric thought a universally shared ideology, or does it develop in reaction to historical, philosophical, and socio-cultural contexts? In what way do the fundamental principles of Indian ecology vary from prevailing Western structures? These essential inquiries delineate the parameters of Ramachandra Guha’s Speaking with Nature: The Origins of Indian Environmentalism (2024), which effectively contests the notion that environmentalism is a unidirectional phenomenon dictated by Western influence. This view posits that the rest of the world, particularly the Global South, lacks eco-conscious awareness because it is ‘too poor to be green’.
Who owns mythological creatures? What do they do in modern literature? Based on the reemerging prevalence of mythological influences in popular culture – cf. Madeline Miller, Jennifer Saint, Rick Riordan, etc. – it can be read that monstrosity is having a cultural renaissance and reimagining. With new interpretations and uses of mythology, what happens when a lens of modern feminist or queer theory is applied to these stories?
In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, humans are conditioned to seek out human companionship and to despise being by themselves. Helmholtz Watson, a lecturer of Emotional Engineering, relates a story to Bernard Marx about being disciplined for sharing some of his poems with the students he was paid to indoctrinate. When asked what the poems had been about, Helmholtz tells a surprised Bernard, “They were about being alone.”
CFP for NeMLA 2027 Conference
Virtual Only Panel
Oral Community Knowledge as Antidote for Empire in Anglophone Literature
The guiding thread of this panel develops around a curious remark by Jacques Rancière that would seem to amend a classically Aristotelian thesis: “man is a political animal because he is a literary animal,” the fundamental condition of which is the “excess of words” constitutive of the human animal’s politicalness. Literature (or poetry) has long been placed in close proximity to politics, as we find in Plato’s Republic, where philosophy and literature—and, more generally, philosophy and politics—turn out to be perennial adversaries.
OMNIALANG: International Journal of Language Continuum (Omnia-LC) invites original, unpublished manuscripts for Volume 1, Issue 2.
Omnia-LC is an international, peer-reviewed, open-access journal dedicated to advancing interdisciplinary scholarship on language, literature, linguistics, translation, education, and related fields. The journal welcomes innovative theoretical, empirical, and methodological contributions that deepen our understanding of language and its diverse cultural, social, and literary contexts.
We welcome submissions in (but not limited to) the following areas:
How do female characters employ their bodies to navigate, process, and challenge the cultural and socioeconomic structures of their times? Under the antagonistic system where the pursuit of “good life” is no longer plausible, how do women across different cultures, historical periods, and geopolitical contexts respond by utilizing their bodily autonomy and agency? This panel invites papers that critically investigate female bodily representation in the context of empowerment and change. In particular, this panel is interested in literary analyses that focus on the subtle yet tangible (dis)orientation of female bodies in and out of public spaces.
Media, Press Freedom, and Cultural Production in an Authoritarian Age (Submission Deadline Extended, Now July 19, 2026)
CFP: Media, Press Freedom, and Cultural Production in an Authoritarian Age
Co-sponsored by the Union for Democratic Communications, Project Censored and the Park Center for Independent Media
Oct. 23-24, 2026
Ithaca College, Ithaca, NY
We are pleased to announce an open call for bids to host the 2027 Post45 Graduate Symposium. The Post45 Graduate Symposium is a two-day event, typically held in Spring, which brings together graduate students and faculty members working on post-1945 arts, literature, media, and culture. Around fifteen graduate students each submit a work-in-progress and convene in a workshop-style setting along with faculty respondents to discuss each participant's work.
Repetition governed the rhythms of early modern life through the practices of liturgy and prayer, the rote drills of grammar-school pedagogy, the iterative logic of print, and the rhetorical schemes (anaphora, epistrophe, ploce, tautology) that early modern writers were trained to use. Repetition could consolidate memory and community, generate affect, structure devotion, or signal decorum. Yet it could also misfire—becoming tedious, compulsive, alienating, or a mark of failure, excess, or exclusion. This panel asks what repetition did in early modern literature and culture, and for whom, treating it simultaneously as a stylistic device and a lived cultural practice.
RISING ASIA JOURNAL is a peer reviewed journal published three times a year in January, May, and September.
Reviewers are welcome to submit book reviews on any aspect of Asia, covering India's Northeast, Southeast Asia, and East Asia (China, Japan, the Koreas, and Taiwan).
For details on our book reviews and manuscript preparation guidelines, please go to SUBMIT ARTICLES in our website www.rajraf.org
Send your reviews to Professor Tuan Hoang at tuan.hoang@pepperdine.edu and to the Editor Dr. Harish Mehta at hmehta76@yahoo.ca
How does lyric address create forms of relation across difference? This panel invites papers examining the intersections of poetry, lyric address, and peacebuilding, with particular attention to coexistence, care, responsibility, witness, repair, and collective life.
Northeast Modern Language Association 58th Annual Convention, Newport, RI, March 6-9, 2027 (Salve Regina University)
Deadline for abstract submissions: September 30, 2026
Please submit abstracts via the NeMLA portal: https://cfplist.com/nemla/User/SubmitAbstract/22533
In keeping with the theme of Empowering Communities, this panel looks at the ways in which scholarship can make visible the previously obscured agency of women and other historically marginalized groups. Invisible labor is a concept frequently applied to the domestic sphere to describe the work women do to maintain households. In the literary world, too, women have shaped the canon in ways that have been overlooked.
Philip Kan Gotanda’s play Yankee Dawg You Die centers a conflict between two Asian American actors. The aging Vincent Chang built his career playing bumbling Japanese soldiers and one-dimensional Asian stereotypes in classic Hollywood. He’s confronted by the up-and-coming Bradley Yamashita, who insists that Asian (American) characters should be played with dignity and accuracy. The heart of the play is an ambivalence about Asian (American) representation and whether viewers should sympathize with Chang for taking the only acting jobs available or with Yamashita in his condemnation of the racist roles—or with both.
2026 Dress and Body Association Conference
CALL FOR PAPERS
The Dress and Body Association invites submissions for the organization’s seventh annual conference, which will be held on November 7-8, 2026. Consistent with our long-term goals for inclusivity and sustainability, all activities will be 100% online.
Join our Google Group to learn about opportunities and converse with members of the DBA year-round! Email to request membership: dress.body.assoc@gmail.com.
Opening the Archives of Dress and the Body