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The Diaspora Child Strikes Back is a multidisciplinary conference held in-person in Camden, NJ, USA, from June 11-13 2026.
Since the 1990s, comics and graphic narratives have emerged as an emphatic media form for exploring the embodied experiences of disability and identity (e.g., Alaniz, Chute, Czerwiec, Dolmage, and Refaie). To date, much scholarship has focused on Anglophone or Euro-American paradigms, leaving significant gaps in our understanding of how disability intersects with race, gender, class, and colonial histories in graphic narratives from diverse contexts. To bridge the gap, this seminar brings together international scholars from multiple disciplines (e.g., comics narratology and 4EA cognition, graphic medicine, posthumanist studies, history, and visual studies) to discuss both established and emerging works, especially those from the Global South.
The Center for the Advancement of Women at Mount Saint Mary’s University, Los Angeles
Collectif Research and Writing Anthology 2027 Call for Papers
Do you want to forge community and ignite your scholarship? Connect with scholars, activists, artists, and others passionate about the advancement of women? Impact a wider audience? By publishing in Collectif, Mount Saint Mary’s University’s interdisciplinary journal of research, writing, and art, you will reach 50,000 potential readers. To celebrate the issue’s release, The Center for the Advancement of Women will host a salon, where contributors can share their work and connect with the Center community.
2027 Theme and Call
We invite short abstracts (100-200 words) in response to our call for contributions for an edited volume, ‘The Medieval in Museums’. Please send abstracts by 5pm GMT on Monday 3 November to Fran Allfrey (University of York) and Maia Blumberg (QMUL) fran.allfrey@york.ac.uk ; m.blumberg@qmul.ac.uk. Please be in touch with us to discuss your idea more informally should you wish.
CFP: Sensation Fiction and the Health Humanities
A VPFA Study Day
Loughborough University, 27 March 2026
Call for Papers
Midwest Winter Workshop 2026
Rhetoric Program
Indiana University Bloomington
Friday, February 6th – Saturday, February 7th, 2026
[AAAS 2026] Asian American Literature and the Law
Asian American literature has emerged as a critical site of representation and resistance within the context of over 150 years of exclusionary legal policies targeting Asian communities in the United States. Beginning with the Page Act of 1875 and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, federal legislation systematically constructed Asians as perpetual foreigners, legally ineligible for citizenship and fundamentally “unassimilable.” These exclusionary frameworks extended beyond immigration to encompass alien land laws, antimiscegenation statutes, and labor restrictions that relegated Asian Americans to legal and social marginality.
Seeking a draft (or, less preferred, a detailed and specific abstract, minimum 350 words) of an essay for an edited volume titled Shakespeare and Narrative Theory, co-edited by Hannibal Hamlin and Nick Moschovakis. No contract yet - only prospects.
Most spaces in this project are already filled with complete drafts; confirmed contributors include established Shakespeareans as well as leading narrative theorists.
“When seeking knowledge of a work of art or an art form, it never proves useful to take the receiver into account”: thus begins Walter Benjamin’s foundational essay on the study of translation. This seminar proceeds against Benjamin’s injunction, paring translation studies with recent inquiries into reading practice and readerly attention to ask how modernist writers use translation to modulate readerly difficulty. How do modernist translators adjust difficulty both to safeguard and to enhance the reader’s imagination of an original text from which they are withheld? Do moments of difficulty in translated modernist texts – whether Victorian archaisms in C.K.
In a recent article (2021), Sue-Im Lee observes a rising phenomenon in Asian American formal criticism: the proliferation of aesthetic concepts such as “opaque, transparent, fragmented, linear, nonlinear, discordant, or lyrical” (690).
Projecting Belief: Cinema and the Re-enchanted World
King’s College London – May 21-23 2026
Conference Organizers – Rachata Sasnanand and Benjamin Y Goff
Call for Papers:
Call for Papers for the 15th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Music, Sound, Art and Design (EvoMUSART) · Please distribute · Apologies for cross-posting
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The 15th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Music, Sound, Art and Design (EvoMUSART) will take place on 8–10 April 2026, in Toulouse, France, as part of the evo* event.
Call for Papers: Teaching Baldwin / Baldwin as Teacher
South Atlantic Review Special Issue
In The Time of Man and Beyond:
Rethinking Elizabeth Madox Roberts for the 21st Century
Proposals due November 21, 2025
Guest Editors:
James Stamant, Agnes Scott College
Amanda M. Capelli, New York University
Goretti Benca, Marist College
Debates and initiatives on decolonising knowledge in Africa continue to pay significant attention to the need for increased African/indigenous content in the curriculum as well as raising awareness about biases inherent in historically dominant epistemological paradigms. However, there remains a critical gap regarding theories and theorisation as many African academics continue to rely on colonial western theories, models, concepts and paradigms for research and pedagogical purposes. This can be due to a lack of awareness of existing African-centred theories and the dearth of databases focusing on African-centred theories.
CFP: Naming and Classifying
in the Long Eighteenth Century
The Ninth Faulkner Studies in the UK Colloquium
The Dark House: Absalom, Absalom! at 90
May 2nd and 3rd, 2026
Online via Zoom
With keynote addresses by:
Professor Mary M. Burke
(author of Race, Politics, and Irish America: A Gothic History [Oxford UP, 2022])
and
Dr John Michael Corrigan
Call for Abstracts for Edited Volume
Urban Waters in South Asian Literary Cultures
Gentle Reminder: Abstract due 30 September 2025
The 2026 CLA Online Research Conference, co-sponsored by the Children's Literature Assembly of NCTE and the Mary Frances Early College of Education at the University of Georgia, will be held on Friday, February 20th, 2026. The theme of the conference is Care, Advocacy, and Children's Literature Research in Theory and Praxis.
The conference will feature research presentations, a journal editor session, and a keynote talk from Dr. Jonda McNair, Charlotte S. Huck Endowed Professor of Children’s Literature, The Ohio State University.
Dominican Theology and Practice:
The Past 100 Years
Friday, February 27-Saturday, February 28, 2026
Albertus Magnus College (New Haven, CT) Call for Papers: Dominican sisters and friars, their communities, and their collaborators have made monumental contributions to theological thought and pastoral ministry in the 20th and 21st centuries. This conference seeks to explore how Dominican theology and practice has shaped contemporary theology, ministry, and social engagement over the past hundred years.
We welcome submissions for 20-minute papers that examine Dominican theology and practice. Topics might include (but are not limited to):
Editors of this issue:
Salomé Honório (University of Lisbon, Portugal)
Lamiae Bouqentar (University of Toronto, Canada)
“Autofiction was fun,” laments Lauren Oyler, in a 2018 review for the Baffler, “while it lasted, but a self-conscious movement based on the lives and reading lists of young urban artists was never going to break new ground; nor did it give the reader a reason to jump out of bed in the morning." As a form (or a genre – as Oyler points out in an extended essay on the subject, these terms are often used interchangeably, although she favours the former), autofiction first came into being almost fifty years ago, coined on the back cover of Serge Doubrovsky’s Fils (1977) as “autobiography?
Representation matters – but to whom? And how?
This iteration of the Critical Approaches to Black Media Culture conference considers the ongoing significance of representational analysis as well as the critical possibilities enabled by the turn to resonance in Black media and cultural studies. Our theme, Representation and Resonance, invites original research into images and storytelling, circulation and flows, and reception practices.
While we especially invite papers on this topic, we are open to any and all critical inquiry into Black media culture, broadly defined. Our hope is to bring together any and all scholars interested and invested in Black media culture, regardless of discipline or method.
submission link: https://www.acla.org/seminar/8f71b36f-66a1-437f-bb70-25512282c0b6
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: SPECIAL ANTHOLOGY OF ONE-MINUTE PLAYS / MONOLOGUES ‘REWRITING SHAKESPEARE’ (Volume 2)
Website: Fresh Words: An International Literary Magazine - Announcements
Deadline: October 28, 2025
FRESH WORDS – An International Literary Magazine is thrilled to announce the call for submissions for Volume 2 of its acclaimed special anthology: ‘Rewriting Shakespeare’—a curated collection of bold, inventive, and contemporary one-minute plays and monologues that reimagine the timeless works of William Shakespeare.
By 2026, all nine volumes of The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins will be published, including the much-anticipated final volume in the series, Poetry. The 2026 international Hopkins conference will focus on the new research possibilities and provocations afforded by the texts. Hopkins 2026 will be held in historic Salem, Massachusetts (USA), at Salem State University, and will feature a Hopkins display and reception at the Burns Library, Boston College.
Topics could include:
Through their intricately textured scenes and characters, the ten plays of August Wilson’s American Century Cycle chart the epic historical contours and idiomatic genius of Black American life across the entire twentieth century. Despite his plans for continued literary production after the Cycle’s completion, Wilson died shortly after the final play (Radio Golf)’s world premiere in 2005.
Two decades hence, and now in the second quarter of the twenty-first century, Wilson’s presence and prescience in American culture are not only enduring but expanding:
This special issue of Public Art Dialogue invites scholarly contributions (research articles, short essays, and artists’ projects) that examine the enduring visual, spatial, and ideological legacies of colonialism in public spaces across the Pacific world. It seeks to explore how imperial legacies forged transoceanic connections that continue to shape the public sphere through means including but not limited to monuments, architecture, civic rituals, theater, dance, street art, and performative acts.
As environmental crises intensify, ecocriticism has emerged as a vital interdisciplinary lens for examining how literature and media represent, challenge, and reimagine human relationships with the natural world. Invested in the idea that, in such times, the center cannot [and should not] hold, this seminar explores how queer ecocritical approaches reveal the de-centering cultural, ethical, and political possibilities embedded in apocalyptic environmental narratives in both literary texts and visual media.
What stories can we tell of the vanishing mediator? Is it an irreducible kernel of transition between two different configurations of the social structure, or is it only imagined retrospectively, as the transient possibility of another world? Fredric Jameson shows, paradigmatically, that the Protestant ethic functions as "the vanishing mediator" in Max Weber's historical narrative between medieval society and modern capitalism, the "catalytic agent which permits an exchange of energies between two otherwise mutually exclusive terms." Slavoj Žižek adopts the term for his conception of subjectivity, where the subject exists as the transcendental excess of its symbolic universe—as an irremediable gap and a site of transformation.
Seminar title: Transgender Storytelling: Accounts of Oppositional Being and Becoming
Seminar link: https://www.acla.org/seminar/c997c5c5-09fd-4307-ba24-29af11d554d6
Organizers: Clarke Crockett and Ezekiel Greenwood, Florida State University, USA
American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), Annual Convention 2026, Montreal, Canada
Abstract Submission Deadline: October 2, 2025. Must be submitted through the ACLA portal.
This panel is interested in the close historical association between the discourse of fetishism in anti-capitalist critique, and representations of Indigenous peoples. William Pietz argues that, prior to the adoption of the fetish as an object of anthropological inquiry in the 19th century, the discourse of fetishism emerged as an offshoot of the Christian theory of idolatry. Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism, in turn, “was a vivid way of suggesting to his readers that the truth of capital was to be grasped from a perspective alien to that of bourgeois understanding, which knows capital exclusively through its own categories” (Pietz).
For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me.
-Vladimir Nabokov, The Eye
The Cornell Medieval Studies Program is pleased to announce the 36th annual Medieval Studies Student Colloquium (MSSC) in person at Cornell University’s A.D. White House on Saturday February 21, 2026. This year’s theme is “Mirror Worlds.”
You are invited to submit an abstract for this panel for the Northeast Modern Language Association Convention to be held on March 5–8, 2026 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania at the Wyndham Grand Hotel Downtown.
This VIRTUAL panel invites papers on “Dismantling the Neocolonial Maritime Archive: Indigenous Oceanic Epistemologies” for NeMLA 57th Annual Convention to be held on March 5-8, 2026.
The panel addresses how West Asian, South Asian, and Gulf literatures regenerate the power of oceanic precarity that propels newer modes of decolonial resistance and resilience to interrogate and distrust the rigid structures that propagate epistemic violence and archival control.
NeMLA’s 57th Annual Convention (Virtual Session)
Conference Date: March 5-8, 2026
Abstract Submission Deadline: September 30, 2025
All presentations will be delivered via Zoom.
Session Title: Touching the World at the Speed of Light: Community and Conflict in the Global Village
NeMLA’s 57th Annual Convention (Virtual Session)
Conference Date: March 5-8, 2026
Abstract Submission Deadline: September 30, 2025
All presentations will be delivered via Zoom.
Session Title: Touching the World at the Speed of Light: Community and Conflict in the Global Village
In recent decades, Black Studies has witnessed important work on the ways in which the overrepresentation of ‘man’ and the invisibilization of whiteness have functioned in service of a range of im/material violences. Our aesthetic and political investments, therefore, lie in arguments and examples that unsettle the imposed relationalities and the representational economy of what Saidiya Hartman calls the “racial calculus”, Katherine McKittrick considers as the “mathematics of unlivingness” and Christina Sharpe terms the “orthographies of the wake”.
Howells Society CFPs for ALA 2026 (Chicago)
The W.D. Howells Society will host two panels at the American Literature Association’s 37th annual conference, which will meet at the Palmer House in Chicago, May 20-23, 2026 (Wednesday through Saturday of Memorial Day weekend).
PANEL 1: HOWELLS & MEDIA
This panel invites papers that discuss transpacific, transnational, and cross-racial relations in Asian/American literature. How can literature facilitate the “(Re)generation” of solidarities and exchanges across identities and borders? How can it offer a site of intimacy, which Lisa Lowe defines as “the implied but less visible forms of alliance, affinity, and society among variously colonized peoples beyond the metropolitan national center”? How does literature generate discourses around cross-group tension, conflict, identifications, and disidentifications? How do literary and social forms reflect and reformulate each other, within and across nations? Where do Asian American studies and Global Asian studies meet and diverge?
PCA True Crime CFP 2026
Abstract Submission Deadline: November 30th, 2025
PCA/ACA will be held from April 8-11th, 2026 in Atlanta, GA
True Crime typically focuses on investigative journalism used to present a mystery or attempt to understand the psychology of a crime/perpetrator. It may include narratives of a case, victimology, forensics, or analysis of evidence, although each case is different. Much of True Crime focuses on serial killers/killings, although subsets of the genre may delve into topics such as kidnappings, cults, wrongful convictions, advocacy, white-collar crimes, trial proceedings, prevention of crime, survivor stories, or sensationalism/entertainment.
Ireland has often been held to be somehow exceptional, an island on the edge of Europe whose historical, social and cultural trajectories have at times led it to diverge in surprising ways from both its nearest neighbour, Great Britain, and the wider world. This perception of Irish exceptionalism has long played a role in how the island has been understood both within and beyond its borders.
Call for Book Chapters
Proposed for Routledge/ Asian Studies Association of Australia (ASAA) South Asian Series
Seeking submissions for a co-edited collection entitled:
Matrifocal Narratives in Indian Fiction
Co-Editors: Sushree Routray, Rashmi Gaur, and Rahul K. Gairola
Popular Culture Association: British Popular Culture
Call for Papers
The British Popular Culture area of the Popular Culture/American Culture Association (PCA/ACA) is now accepting submissions for the 2026 national conference to be held April 8-11, 2026, in Atlanta, GA at the Atlanta Marriott Marquis!
Academics at all stages in their careers, as well as independent scholars, are encouraged to apply. We particularly encourage submissions by graduate students.
Jürgen Habermas suggested that it is through communicative action, that is reasoned and open discourse, that we transmit, change, and recreate cultural knowledge, and that in so-doing we can achieve mutual understanding.
Communicative action and communicative rationality are self-reflexive dialogues through which we can learn from others, question dominant paradigms, and advocate for cultural change.
Call for Papers
ETKI: Journal of Literature, Theatre and Culture Studies
ETKI: Journal of Literature, Theatre and Culture Studies invites submissions for the New issue of the journal - a general issue on literature, theatre and culture studies.
Tragedy and Resistance, 16-17 April, 2026
Literaturforum im Brecht-Haus, Berlin (https://lfbrecht.de/)
Keynote Speakers:
Against Evidence Otherwise:
Bad Faith and Antiblackness in Education & Society
Under Contract with Brill Publishing
Edited by Amir A. Gilmore, Washington State University
What is to be done in a world of near universal sense of superiority to, if not universal hatred of, Black folk?
–Lewis R. Gordon (1997, p. 1)
I know I am a Human because I am not Black. I know I am not Black because when and if I experience the kind of violence Blacks experience there is a reason.