Archives are not neutral: they tell stories about who counts, whose experiences are remembered, and whose are erased. For centuries, racial hierarchies have shaped the preservation of knowledge, leaving silences where Black, Indigenous, and other marginalized voices should be. The Antiracism Permanent Section of the MMLA invites submissions that move beyond critique, asking how we can reimagine, rebuild, and transform the archive to reflect justice, equity, and shared humanity.We are especially interested in work that explores:

CONFERENCE

2026 PAMLA Conference, taking place November 12–15 at the Hyatt Regency Seattle

SESSION/PANEL ABSTRACT

Research group “Translation and Language Studies” (Faculty of Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities, Kaunas University of Technology) is organising an international conference on linguistics, discourse, media, communication, translation, cultural literacy and impact on society “Intermediality in Communication: Translation, Media, Discourse” held in Kaunas, Lithuania.

The scope of the conference includes 8 thematic sections with their own set of topics:

Linguistics. This section aims to examine the current directions in linguistic research, particularly focusing on how language interacts with different forms of media. 

Many notable comic book scholars highlight Alan Moore as one of the most ambitious writers in mainstream American and British comics. Along with writers like Grant Morrison and artists like Dave McKean, Moore was part of the so-called “British Invasion” of the American comic book industry in the 1980s, and artists of this period are credited as bringing an air of credibility as well as transforming the artistic standards of the medium. Greg Carpenter, for instance, likens the work of these artists to “Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson, elevating the English language into a vehicle for poetic drama.

Call for proposals: no-stage PressCritical Ballet Studies 

no-stage press invites submissions for its inaugural publication, dedicated to critical ballet studies. We seek academic articles, critical essays, and interviews that interrogate the histories, aesthetics, and power structures embedded in ballet and ballet-adjacent forms.

The theme for this year’s MMLA conference explores the relational dynamics inherent in an archive. Since Derrida’s Archive Fever, the role of the archive has been conceived as a site for both the storage and construction of memory. What is selected and how it is framed by the archival materials works both to capture memory and history and shape how something or someone should be remembered. In keeping with this theme, the permanent section for comics and graphic novels is interested in research that interrogates the intersection of comic studies and the archive.

British literature of the 1800s has a close relationship to archival forms and practices. With a boom in bureaucratic record-keeping, extensive imperial documentation, meticulous medical and legal case histories, and the development of libraries and institutional archives, Victorian literary texts frequently include, copy, or contest letters, ledgers, case files, diaries, and serialized records. By engaging with and appropriating formal aspects of “the archive,” Victorian literature often blurred the boundaries between history and literature, fact and fiction, what is real and what is constructed. But who was keeping records? And of whom?

The 123rd Annual Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA) Conference will take place this November in Seattle, Washington, from November 12-15.

This session seeks papers that explore forms of play in American fiction from 1945 to the present. There are many conceptual genealogies of play within fields such as psychoanalytic theory, Marxist theory, structuralist and poststructuralist theory, affect theory, critical race theory, queer theory, and video game theory.

Call for Papers
PAMLA 2026 Special Session: Seattle
Spanish and Portuguese (Peninsular)

This special session invites papers that explore the rich and multifaceted landscape of Spanish and Portuguese literature, film, and cultural studies within the Iberian Peninsula. We welcome presentations that engage with a broad spectrum of topics, particularly those that foreground the experiences of historically marginalized communities, including (but not limited to) Romani/Gypsy and Afro-Hispanic populations.

Reading in the Digital Age: R. E. Sterling Havens Writing and Reading Symposium

Call for Papers – Opens April 6, 2026

Deadline for submissions: May 25, 2026 

Sponsored by: R. E. Sterling Havens Writing and Reading Symposium, September 19, 2026

Writing and Reasoning Program, Department of English

Southern Methodist University

Dallas, Texas 75205

Reading in the Digital Age

Reading is one of the oldest academic practices, and certainly one of the most rapidly changing.

Conference Dates: June 1–2, 2026 

Location: North Carolina A&T State University 

Proposal Submission Deadline: April 23, 2026 

The American Literature II: Literature after 1870 Permanent Section of the Midwest Modern Language Association (MMLA) is seeking proposals for this year’s in-person convention in Chicago, Illinois. This year’s theme for the conference is “After the Archive”; accordingly, the Permanent Section encourages presentations that focus on the notion of the archive.

One of the fundamental limitations of English literature before 1800 is that in order to study this literature it must have survived to us in some form: it must have been preserved, intentionally or accidentally, in whole or in part, and usually in some form of archive. This call seeks papers that reflect on or account for the impact of this archival presence in premodern studies. How has or does the need for our texts to have been archived impact the field, whether broadly or through its effect on the understanding of a particular text, author, or genre? How does reading “after the archive” in this subfield differ from similar readings in other subfields, or from readings that do not consider the significance of the archive?

Invitation to Publish 

in ACTA IASSYENSIA COMPARATIONIS no. 37 (2026)

Thematic issue:CITIES IN LITERATURE  / LA VILLE DANS LA LITTÉRATURE/ ORAŞUL ÎN LITERATURĂ

The deadline for the submission of articles and book reviews (in Romanian, English, French, German, Spanish or Italian) is September 01, 2026.

The final decision of the AIC Editorial Board will be passed on before December 15, 2026.

Corrections (if required) and comments by the authors expected between December 15, 2026 and January 15, 2027.

 Lyric / Narrative: Crossings, Tensions, Reconfigurations

Sixth Biennial Conference of the International Network for the Study of Lyric (INSL) University of Liège, Interdisciplinary Center for Applied Poetics (UR Traverses), June 1-3, 2027 Languages: French, English German

RAILIMAGE Conference, 1-3 April 2027, Turku, Finland

Call for Papers

Imagining Railways from 1900 to the Present: Places, People, Infrastructures, Texts

The project ‘Twentieth-Century Railway Imaginations: Building the Mobility and Infrastructural Humanities’ (RAILIMAGE) invites scholars from all backgrounds to submit paper proposals for its 2027 conference. We also warmly encourage early-career researchers to apply.

African writers such as Chris Abani, Teju Cole, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, NoViolet Bulawayo, Biyanvanga Wainaina, Dinaw Mengestu and many others are committed to reimagining the concept of “home” and “what it means to be African?” in the era of mass globalization and “new” diasporic belonging.

The inaugural Edinburgh Bibliographical Seminar and Workshop (EBSW) seeks proposals on the theme of ‘Catalogues and Registers as Evidence in the History of Mathematics, Science, and Technology’. The event will occur at the University of Edinburgh from 20 July to 24 July, 2026, the week after the joint meeting of the History of Science Society and the European Society for the History of Science.

Call for Papers: Autumn 2026: Biophilia: The Shape of the Future
Coreopsis

A Multidisciplinary Journal of the Mythic Arts

This journal accepts papers from many disciplines and is welcoming of all faiths and philosophies. We publish about 5 papers per issue that have been peer-reviewed according to academic standards. Final submissions should be 3000 to 10,000 words. 

If you have a finished paper ready for submission, send it directly to coreopsisjournalofmyththeatre@gmail.com

Call for Papers

Biography, Autobiography, Memoir, and Personal Narrative

Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)

2026 SWPACA Summer Salon

June 25-27, 2026

Virtual Conference

https://swpaca.org/

Submissions open on March 30, 2026

Proposal submission deadline: April 27, 2026

The 21st century has been defined by large-scale global change driven by migration, exile, border reconfigurations, political upheaval, and shifting power dynamics – all of which have profoundly shaped debates surrounding human rights, identity, culture, and belonging. Furthermore, as digital platforms collapse geographic distance and intensify new forms of surveillance, nationalism, and exclusion, diasporic subjects must navigate complex landscapes of memory, language, race, gender, and political belonging.

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the players come with their own requests (“Write me a prologue”, Botttom asks), in a hilarious example of group-working. In Hamlet, as the Prince of Denmark gets ready to take action, one of his first decisions is to appoint himself as co-writer of The Murder of Gonzago: “You could, for a need, study a speech of some dozen or sixteen lines which I would set down and insert in’t, could you not?” (2.2.5.528-30). Both examples show the nuts and bolts of early modern stage practice, in which co-writing was commonplace. 

ROUNDTABLE: Writing Communities in and Beyond the Classroom (PAMLA, Seattle, Nov 12-15, 2026)

Deadline for Proposals: May 15

This roundtable revisits writing as a fundamentally social, collaborative, and democratic act at a time when many writers and students experience it as isolated, pressured, and increasingly mediated by technology. Beyond offering emotional and peer support, writing communities in classrooms, online and social spaces, and professional and informal networks shape how writers see themselves, understand their audience, engage in metacognitive practices, and take creative and intellectual risks.

Call for Papers Ecofeminist Drama: Theatre, Performance, and Ecological Futures

Edited by Douglas A. Vakoch and Işıl Şahin Gülter
Under review with the University of Illinois Press