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American Literature Association
May 20-23, 2026
Palmer House, Chicago, IL
The Richard Wright Society announces two sessions on Wright to take place at the 37th Annual American Literature Association Conference.
Rethinking Richard Wright’s Depiction and Analysis of Gender and Sexuality
Family, Power, and the Politics of Capital: A Symbolic Reading of HBO’s Succession
Shohini Sen
Research scholar
NorthCap University
Dr. Chetna Karnani
Assistant Professor
The NorthCap University, Gurugram, India
Dr. Gouri Kapoor
Assistant Professor
The NorthCap University, Gurugram, India
Abstract :
Motherhood Unbound: Global Pathways of Motherhood Across Cultures and Disciplines
Conference dates: 13–15 February 2026| Venue: IIM Calcutta
Overview
DECISION, the IIM Calcutta-Springer journal, aims to facilitate scholarly inquiry into the contexts of our concepts. In collaboration with Fact or Value, DECISION aims to continue the conversation: investigating process(es) via which some ideas, perspectives and readings of the world have come to be recognized as universal and true; in other words, a fact. Fact or Value is a forum for lectures and discussions on philosophy, aesthetics and history.
Cornell EGSO Conference 2026: Effervescence
Deadline for Submissions: January 5th, 2026
Conference Date: March 20th, 2026
Call for Academic and Creative Proposals
“This impulse to violence had been in her for a long time, growing, feeding, until finally she had blown up in a thousand pieces... Yes, a one-way ticket, she thought. I've had one since the day I was born. The train was on the track.”
—Ann Petry, The Street
Howells Society CFPs for American Literature Association Conference 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
Call for Papers for the International Conference on “Reading Disruptions, Mapping Alterities: of Australian Trans-Tendings, and India in an Age of Reimagined Plurilaterals” to be held on 03.02.26-04.02.26
“ One is never afraid of the unknown; one is afraid of the known coming to an end.”
- J. Krishnamurti
“No computer has ever been designed that is ever aware of what it’s doing; but most of the time, we aren't either.” - Marvin Minsky
The University of Iowa
Department of English
Graduate Student Conference 2026
Elaborating Labor
Conference date: Friday, April 10, 2026
Location: Richey Ballroom, Iowa Memorial Union, University of Iowa
Abstract due date: Saturday, January 31, 2026
Please email abstracts to c3conf@uiowa.edu
How do we mark transitions, generate transformational visions, and model alternate ways of being in a world imploding around us? How do we find joy while surrounded by brokenness? How do we heal when systems are structured against us? What rituals or practices can restore us, even speak to our souls? The next issue of Rejoinder explores the theme of ritual, healing, and world-making. Submissions (including essays, commentary, criticism, fiction, poetry, and artwork) should address this theme from feminist, queer, and social justice-inspired perspectives. We particularly welcome contributions at the intersection of scholarship and activism.
Final Call for Book Chapter Proposals/ Abstracts
Matrifocal Narratives in Indian Fiction
Co-Editors: Sushree Routray, Rashmi Gaur, and Rahul K. Gairola
Submission Deadline: December 31, 2025
We are seeking chapter proposals for The Routledge Companion to the Posthuman in Literature and Culture. This new interdisciplinary volume seeks to foreground the representation of the posthuman: as a figure that often appears within certain genres (eg New Weird Fiction, Solarpunk, Autofiction), as an image deployed by specific authors and filmmakers (eg Nnedi Okorafor, Kazuo Ishiguro, Alex Garland), as a discourse that supports the proliferation of “studies” within academia (eg Animal Studies, Surveillance Studies, Affect Studies), and as a growing presence in college classrooms around the world.
International Conference (Hybrid) on Impact of Globalization on Society, Culture and Literature, January 17-18, 2026, organized by IQAC, Onda Thana Mahavidyalaya, and Antarmukh: A Bengali Research Journal.
About the Conference
We are living in a rapidly changing world. For the last many decades, the contemporary world has been undergoing fundamental shifts and transformations in the social structures, systems, organisations, institutions, values, norms, and functions of a society. These social changes are often driven by technological breakthroughs, the penetration of social media, economic globalisation, ecological crises, war, disease, disorder, and so on, along with shifts in cultural and social paradigms.
Update: This year's keynote speaker is Camille Owens. Owens is assistant professor of English at McGill University. Her research focuses on the intersection of race, ableism, and childhood in the nineteenth-century United States. Her book, Like Children: Black Prodigy and the Measure of the Human in America (NYU Press, 2024), was 2025 Choice Outstanding Academic Title and received an honourable mention from the MLA in the William Sanders Scarborough Prize competition.
"There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses." —Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality
Proposed Panel (in-person) at International Seminar on Cultures of Body, Bodies of Culture: Thinking Plurality Today, organised by the Department of English, University of North Bengal.
The inconclusive debates, the conflict of opinion, that this seminar aims to initiate and proliferate are about how body, culture, and plurality – three expansive and yet profound concepts – constellate, collapse and collide in varying registers that are both founded and unpredictable. The frames of our studies across disciplines are left in motion; the figures of understanding about how culture and the body and the bodies of culture in relation to plurality struggle to stay entrenched, occupy and distract us.
In a provocative article titled Digging Wells While Houses Burn (2006), David Gordon White argues that certain studies of religion actively stoke supremacist ideologies and politics. The only way to avoid this unsavoury collaboration is to rethink the way we do our work — the stories we choose to tell, and the methods we use to tell them. According to White, academics of religion who fail to engage with this responsibility are “digging wells while houses burn”, ignoring devastating realities that urgently demand their attention. In this context, we invite scholars of all religions, across all disciplines, to reflect on the relationship between their academic work, on the one hand, and violence and supremacy, on the other.
CCLA – Fantastical Constellation Working Group Call for Proposals
CCLA Annual Conference / Colloque annuel de l’ACLC
The Fantastical Constellation Working Group invites proposals for a panel or round table topic, “Entangled Futures: Interstitial Fantasies from the Periphery,” as part of the Canadian Comparative Literature Association Annual Conference, 8-10 June 2026, hosted by the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at McGill University in Montréal.
Special Issue for LIT / The Anger Issue: Women’s Writing and Anger in Ireland
Deadline for full essays: July 15, 2026
SILENCE &—
What is silence? Might it be a gaping void or a buzzy medium—the absence
Conference: Collective Memory in Contemporary Fiction Films
University of Ottawa, June 11-12, 2026
Abstract: Collective memory and remembrance occupy an important place in film: whether through various themes that explore individual and national histories of; through the act of spectating (the act of watching a film), where the audience contributes their interpretation of the film; or where the audience uses their own memories to make sense of the narrative.
CFP for chapter contributions to book edited by the “VR as Empathy Machine: Media, Migration and theHumanitarian Predicament” Research Group at Utrecht University
Book Title: Beyond the Empathy Machine: Critical Perspectives on Virtual Reality
School of Humanities and Performing Arts
Department of English and Cultural Studies
Central Campus
CHRIST (Deemed to be University) Bangalore
Organizes
Mélange
An MA in English with Communication Studies Initiative
&
A Student Led - Postgraduate International Conference on
Archives of the Anthropocene: Writing Contemporary Humanities
Date: February 27, 2026
The Cultural Studies Cell
Department of English and Cultural Studies
CHRIST (Deemed to be University) Bangalore
in collaboration with
Department of English
Panihati Mahavidyalya
Organizes
A Symposium on
Raymond Williams’ Keywords at 50
Dates: February 12-14, 2026
NTU Press Call for Monograph on Humanities & Social Science 2026-2027
Publish Your Research with NTU Press: Global Impact and Scholarly Excellence
NTU Press invites you to submit your manuscript proposal for consideration in our Monograph on Humanities & Social Science 2026-2027 initiative. We’re looking for innovative and interdisciplinary research from Taiwan and the global academic community, aligned with current scholarly trends.
In the sociology of knowledge, some scholars argue that human memory can only function within a collective context (Halbwachs, 1968/2018). Others place the search for knowledge within the discipline of genealogy (Foucault, 2022; Mendoza, 2024). Qualitative research, on the other hand, is where sociology and philosophy intersect (Silverman, 2020; Adorno, 2022; Adorno, 1976). Genealogy, in the context of this volume, refers to the ancestry or history of a discipline, profession, or people (Haley, 1976/2021; Martin, 2016; Nietzsche, 1887/2022). The advent of the Fourth Industrial Revolution has brought about change and continuity in qualitative research (Jung, 2019; Mosweu, 2025).
Call for Papers:
“How Children’s Culture Fights Adult Authoritarians; or, Improvising Against the Machine”
American Studies Association, Chicago, Oct. 22-25, 2026
“Childhood in the Meantime: Interrupting Temporalities of Youth”
American Studies Association, Chicago, Oct. 22-25, 2026
The Children and Youth Studies Caucus seek panelists for a session entitled “Childhood in the Meantime: Interrupting Temporalities of Youth” for the American Studies Association 2026 meeting. We seek papers that consider the multiple temporalities that children are expected to inhabit: normative developmental timelines, trajectories oriented toward futures that adhere to the state-sanctioned scripts for proper adult citizenship, and culturally-accepted deviations of “sideways growth” that can ultimately be assimilated into dominant narratives of childhood presents and futures.
We are pleased to announce the CFP for a special 2026 issue of Academic Labor: Research and Artistry (ALRA) on Art & Engagement as Critical Response (300 word proposal deadline: 1/16/26). In the spirit of recognizing the ongoing precarities of higher education–both internal (neoliberalism, systemic institutional inequities) and external (crisis of public confidence in U.S. universities/colleges, threats to academic freedom), we invite proposals for a special issue of ALRA on art and engagement as critical response to the invisibility, illegibility, and silencing faced by much of the academic labor force.
Queer and minor audiovisual practices increasingly challenge the assumption that any form of visibility offers a reliable route to recognition or to political and evidentiary clarity. This panel asks how, rather than treating visibility or audibility as stable states, we might attend to the ways vocal fabulations, relational and spatial practices of telling, and imaginative or speculative interventions unsettle the evidentiary burdens traditionally placed on marginalized histories. In other words, we are interested in forms that make presence felt without fully disclosing it, and in the tensions that emerge when bodies, voices, images, and testimonies exceed the representational frames built to contain them.
Call for Participation
Workshop on Creativity and Artificial Intelligence
Hobart and William Smith Colleges
March 28, 2026
Keynote Speaker: Richard Jean So, Duke University
The Global Digital Humanities Working Group of Central New York Humanities Corridor is pleased to host a 1-day workshop on creativity and artificial intelligence at Hobart and William Smith Colleges on March 28, 2026.
The historical relationship between Muslims and Christians dates back to the seventh century C.E., when Islam began to spread throughout the Middle East, Africa, and the Indian subcontinent; by the early eighth century, parts of Europe were under Muslim control. Consequently, this Special Issue seeks to understand Christian–Muslim interactions over the centuries. Recent studies of Syriac texts reveal early interactions between Christians and Muslims, the beginning of centuries of Christian–Muslim dialogues, debates, and perspectives that continue into the present day.
THE LEGACY OF TED HUGHES
Call for papers for an international conference to be held at Pembroke College,Cambridge15-18 September 2026
CALL FOR PAPERS
The First Transdisciplinary Forum on Art, Culture, History, and Theory
May 2026, Online
The Global Forum on Art, Culture, History, and Theory (ACHT) hosted by Kaarnamaa Institute of Art and Visual Culture invites submissions.
Extended Deadline
Conference: March 20, 2026
Lehigh University, Bethlehem PA
Contact email: slb322@lehigh.edu
Call for Proposals for Vol. 4, Issue 1–Jackson & Animality [deadline extended: Feb. 1, 2026]
The Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic is excited to announce the call for papers for Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations (GIFCon) 2026, to be held online on 13-15 May, with the theme of ‘The Technologies of the Fantastic’.
The Washington Irving Society (washingtonirvingsociety.org) invites papers discussing innovative ways to teach and/or research Washington Irving and his texts, for the American Literature Association Conference in Chicago, May 20-23, 2026. We welcome papers offering new insight into “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” and also encourage insightful studies into other Irving texts. Please send an abstract of approximately 250 words plus a brief bio to Dr.
The blog section of Locomotive Magazine is seeking submissions of poems and multimedia media works (including photos, caricatures, short video essays, and short films) that address contemporary issues, including but not limited to:
Social justice
Gender
Class
Race
INTERNATIONAL PSYCHOHISTORICAL ASSOCIATION’S 49th ANNUAL CONFERENCE
MAY 29-31, 2026, VIRTUALLY ON ZOOM
THEME: Breaking Cycles of Violence: Psychohistorical Perspectives on Individual and Collective Healing
What Is This Conference About?
How do we break the cycles of violence — within ourselves, our families, and our societies — that perpetuate suffering across generations? What can psychohistory contribute to understanding and transforming these deep patterns? The 2026 IPhA Annual Conference invites scholars, clinicians, educators, and activists to explore these vital questions from both individual and collective perspectives.
American Literature Association
May 20-23, 2026
Chicago, IL
Thoreau and Abolition
This roundtable seeks to explore Thoreau’s relation to the abolitionist movement, whether through his antislavery writings, his biography, or the legacies and afterlives of some of his more famous essays such as “Civil Disobedience.” We are interested in papers that explore any aspect of his political and/or abolitionist thought, his political-economic critiques, or the intertwinement of Thoreau’s ecological and antislavery thinking. We also welcome papers that consider how turning to Thoreau or the politics of nineteenth-century abolition in these terrible times provides us with political paths forward.
American Literature Association
May 20-23, 2026
Chicago, IL
Thoreau, Place, and Travel
English
The University of Florida, the University of North Florida, the Universidad San Francisco de Quito, and the Transborder Digital Humanities Center and Consortium (TBDH) at the University of Texas San Antonio (UTSA) will host the fourth annual Latin American & Caribbean Digital Humanities Symposium from September 8-10, 2026, in person at the UT San Antonio-Downtown campus. The symposium will also offer virtual sessions the week of September 21, 2026.
In his delineation of the moral commitment of thinkers, Edward Said notes that “the proliferation of intellectuals has expanded into the very large number of fields in which intellectuals have become the object of study.” This self-reflexivity drives Said and other prominent scholars to grapple with the ever-changing global dynamics. The public role of the intellectual is therefore to critically engage in political life, rejecting moral detachment as ethical bankruptcy, emphasizing the responsibility of the intelligentsia, and cultivating anti-parochial modes of thought. They stand as a counterforce to the global corporate economic and political agendas that marginalize the human being and attempts to overwhelm human agency.
The theme of Mind and Body resonates with recent publications in Old Norse scholarship, such as Saga Emotions (2025) and The Norse Sorceress: Mind and Materiality in the Viking World (2023), considering how the mental and physical is understood and represented in the Old Norse world. This conference aims to tackle questions of how the mind and body are represented and understood in Old Norse-Icelandic language and literature, Icelandic and Scandinavian history and culture, and more. Potential topics may include (but not limited to):
Emotions
Dreams, Visions, and Magic
Gender (non-)conformity
This panel presents a historical account of the aesthetic and political resistance movements that proliferated across Asia in the 1970s, a decade marked by the legacies of post–World War II decolonization in South and Southeast Asia, as well as by pan-Asian militancy inspired by the 1949 Chinese Revolution. During this period, Asia emerged as a global center of radical politics, with revolutionary energies circulating transnationally and influencing militant movements in the United States, Europe, and beyond.
Journal of Travel Literature Studies (JTLS) (ISSN: 3106-6674，EISSN：3106-6682) is a rigorously peer-reviewed international academic journal, formally published by Hong Kong HIEP Press.. The journal is edited by Professor Tian Junwu of Beihang University. The journal welcomes submissions in both Chinese and English. It is dedicated to advancing foundational theoretical and methodological research in the field of travel literature. Unconstrained by temporal or geographical boundaries, JTLS seeks to showcase the diverse textual paradigms and narrative characteristics of travel literature, while encouraging interdisciplinary perspectives and pluralistic critical approaches.
School of Humanities and Performing Arts
Department of English and Cultural Studies
Central Campus
CHRIST (Deemed to be University) Bangalore
Organizes
Mélange
An MA in English with Communication Studies Initiative
&
A Student Led - Postgraduate International Conference on
NEKST 2026
13th International Conference of NextGen Korean Studies Scholars
May 8–9, 2026 | Ann Arbor, MI
Call for Papers
We invite graduate students in Korean Studies across all disciplines to participate in the 13th International Conference of NextGen Korean Studies Scholars (NEKST) at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The NEKST conference provides an opportunity for graduate students to share their research, receive feedback from faculty members and other graduate students, and participate in an interdisciplinary community of future and present scholars in Korean Studies.