Victorian popular fiction is replete with animals – racing horses, loyal dogs, caged birds, exotic creatures, and anthropomorphic companions. These beings carried immense symbolic significance: they could function as status symbols, metaphors for the body or soul, expressions of sentiment, or instruments of moral instruction. Animals also frequently offered a lens through which Victorians addressed issues surrounding empire, industrialisation, science, social mobility, and domesticity. In popular fiction, animals were not merely background – they were moral barometers, class indicators, narrative devices, and symbols of broader anxieties regarding industrialisation, gender roles, and empire.

Call for Papers 2026

Deadline: February 28th 2026

Theme: Gender and Supernatural

“You should be women, And yet your beards forbid me to interpret That you are so.” Macbeth 1.3.46-47

Call for Submissions

Eye to the Telescope Guest Editor Angela Acosta is accepting poetry submissions for Issue 60, Paying Tribute

The Zeitpyramide in Germany gains a new block every decade to mark the passage of time until the year 3183. Will future humans remember this art installation, or will it cease to have any meaning by the next millennium?

CALL FOR PAPERS

Anglica: An International Journal of English Studies

Thematic Issue 2027

Apocalypse as Utopia:

Hopeful Visions of Apocalypses in Literature, Media and Culture

Guest Editors:

Magdalena Cieślak, University of Lodz

Paola Spinozzi, University of Ferrara

Katarzyna Więckowska, Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun

The Society for the Study of American Poetry invites proposals for a roundtable to be held at the 37th annual American Literature Association conference in Chicago, IL, May 20-23, 2026. 

Roundtable: “Teaching American Poetry Now”

This roundtable invites participants to reflect on the challenges, possibilities, and urgencies of teaching American poetry in the current moment. Across institutions, student populations, and media environments, instructors are rethinking how—and why—we teach American poetry now.

Announcing

The 2026 First Book Institute

May 31-June 6, 2026

Hosted by the Center for American Literary Studies (CALS) at Pennsylvania State University

Co-Directors

Priscilla Wald, R. Florence Brinkley Distinguished Professor of English, Duke University, and Co-Editor of American Literature

Sean X. Goudie, Director of the Center for American Literary Studies and Past Winner of the MLA Prize for a First Book

CFP | Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins Society (PEHS) session 

American Literature Association Annual Conference, Chicago, IL, May 20-23, 2026

Hopkins’s America, Then & Now

ECOS DEL INTERIOR: POTENCIALIDADES ESTÉTICAS Y POLÍTICAS DE LO AFECTIVO EN LA LITERATURA  

Edificio A, Facultad de Filología de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 11 y 12 de mayo de 2026

Legacies of Performance: Inheriting Pasts & Imagining Futures

Graduate Student Symposium

Sponsored by the Department of Theater and Dance

University of California, Santa Barbara

April 18, 2026

“Every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own threatens to disappear irretrievably.” – Walter Benjamin, 1942

“I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.” – Audre Lorde, 1978

Since Benedict Anderson’s 1983 theorization of imagined communities, the historical alliance between the novel and the nation has been a key problematic of literary studies. And yet, in the post–Cold War decades, the centrality of the nation and its ideological weight seemed to wane. The rise of neoliberalism produced an ideology of free circulation of capital and goods, which heralded a new era of weakening national borders and enhanced cultural exchanges. In literary studies, this period saw the rise of a new critical field, world literature (Moretti, Damrosch), and the theorization of a World Republic of Letters (Casanova), which held a similarly borderless aspiration.

A "Melange," sans accent, is a term we use to refer to a work of art of literature that mixes form, genre, and/or media. Princeton University's Melange: A Journal of Prose Poetry and the Arts accepts creative melanges, academic essays on melanges, and melanges in translation. 

To submit, please send the following to melange@princeton.edu: 

June 3rd-5th, 2026 | Université de Montréal, Montréal, Québec

Submission URL (ConfTool): https://conftool.net/csdh-schn-2026/

Greensboro, North Carolina, the host city for this year’s joint conference, is geographically, culturally, and historically a space between. Known as “Gate City” because of its key position on the rail network, it is not only a midpoint between the state capital, Raleigh, and North Carolina’s biggest city, Charlotte, but also an entrance to the South. At once an integral part of the region and open to the broader world, it has long exemplified the solidarities as well as the divisions that have marked the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

CALL FOR PAPERS: VOICES

Representation, Recognition, Resistance

Call for Chapters for an edited volume titled: Cyborg Voices: Identity, Artistry, and Performance in the Age of AI

Editor: Chloe Kirson-Jones
Publisher: Jenny Stanford publishing distributed through Taylor and Francis/Routledge
Projected Publication: January 2027

Overview

How does the voice change when it becomes digital, disembodied, and co-created with machines?

Call for Proposals for a special issue of Studies in Musical Theatre on the films Wicked and Wicked: For Good.

View the full call here>>

https://www.intellectbooks.com/studies-in-musical-theatre#call-for-papers

This is a CFP for an edited collection on Vestron horror.

This manuscript is almost complete, so we cannot offer authors more than two months to complete their essays. Please bear this in mind.

At present, we are only looking for three chapters to round off the collection. The chapters should focus on one of the following films:

Slaughter High

Beyond Re-animator or Dagon

Little Monsters

Chopping Mall

The Gate

The Unholy

Chud II: Bud the Chud

Sundown the Vampire in Retreat

A chapter dedicated to thrillers made by Vestron.

Please spread the word. Below is the original CFP with the new deadline.

The Mid-Atlantic Review is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal published annually by the College English Association Mid-Atlantic Group (CEAMAG). The journal specializes in literary and cultural criticism, discussions of pedagogy, public humanities work, reviews of scholarly books, personal essays concerned with the teaching of English, photographs and visual art related to the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States, and creative writing related to the humanities, teaching, or the craft and art of writing. The Mid-Atlantic Review is indexed in the MLA International Bibliography and available to scholars through the EBSCO and ProQuest Literature databases.

The forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present.

— Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844)

Lose your mind and come to your senses.

— Frederich (Fritz) Perls, Gestalt Therapy Verbatim (1969)

CFP Journal of the European Association for Studies of Australia

Special Issue: Minding the Present. Bodies, Places, Matter in and between Australia and Europe

Deadline for proposals: 15 March 2026

Taking its cue from a very vibrant conference held in Padova (Italy) in September 2025, the Journal of the European Association for Studies of Australia is seeking articles that examine the shaping experiences, identities, and perceptions of the present as a catalyst to urgent action both in Australia—with a special alertness to the very rooted cultures of Indigenous Australia—and in the complex relations between Europe and Australia.  

Call for Papers: 

I am pleased to share a call for chapter proposals for an edited collection currently in development titled Black Feminist Practices and AI in the Composition Classroom: Memoir, Pedagogy, and Futures. This volume invites scholars, teachers, and practitioners to explore how Black Feminist rhetorical traditions can guide ethical, humanizing, and culturally responsive uses of artificial intelligence in writing instruction.

CFP | Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins Society (PEHS) session 

American Literature Association Annual Conference, Chicago, IL, May 20-23, 2026

Hopkins’s America, Then & Now

CFP “A Vision for Liberating Our Democracy” Conference, February 27–28, 2026

The conference builds on a growing body of research that examines the theological, cultural, and political intersections of democracy, citizenship, and power. Participants will investigate how worldviews and faith traditions have informed concepts of governance, belonging, and personhood from the founding era to the present. The conference will highlight not only the Haudenosaunee Influence on American Democracy but also the historic and present contributions to Democratic thought by Black, Indigenous, and Latine communities, contributions which are often forgotten and ignored.

Featured Speakers

Elmira 2026: The Tenth International Conference on the State of Mark Twain Studies

Conference Theme: Irreverence, Rebellion, and Resilience