Research in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Call for Proposals

A Virtual Conference
12–13 March 2026

Sponsored by the University Writing Program at the University of Florida

Details

Like stories themselves, forests have little respect for geopolitical boundaries. And like forests, stories have always played a crucial role in human imaginations around the world. The wide distribution of forests across most of the planet's biospheres suggests that stories about forests, as well as the stories that forests tell, should be understood in relation to literary and theoretical encounters both with plants and with the planet. While discourse on climate change focuses on deforestation and reforestation in relation to the problem of dangerously increased carbon dioxide levels, trees and forests are treated in large part instrumentally rather than as agents in their own right.

In Poetics of Dislocation, Meena Alexander recalls her childhood migration as an experience of “unselving.” The ocean that makes her an immigrant also dissolves inherited identities. Yet this loss, for Alexander, is generative: a crucible of poetic vision, where the self, fluid as tidewater, reshapes itself from poem to poem, contouring itself to each new shore that it meets. 

This is a call for papers for a hybrid session at the Northeast Modern Language Association Conference in Pittsburgh, PA which will take place March 5-8, 2026. Please see this link for the CFP and to submit through the NeMLA site: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21963 .

Edouard Glissant and Michael Wiedorn call us to “think” with or like a geography. Evolving out of cultural studies, island and archipelagic studies have spurred a conversation regarding the connection between geography and culture. While Glissant and Wiedorn were particularly preoccupied with thinking (like) an archipelago, it is possible yet to conceive of other modes of geographical thought. Transatlantic, island, and even aquatic matrices of culture and geography have been well documented and studied. This panel welcomes submissions in the field of archipelagic and island studies and is particularly interested in papers exploring methods of geographical thought, the relationship between geography and culture, in the US South.

We invite submissions for a paper panel themed “Non-Western Aesthetics: Rhetoric, Resistance, and Representation” – an exploration of aesthetics from diverse cultural perspectives, non-Western rhetorical traditions, and globalized literary theory. Our aim is to examine non-Western, non-hegemonic discourses from non-White nations that incorporate indigenous critical approaches and local theories within artistic and literary practices. We are particularly interested in South and Southeast Asian literary and cultural studies.

Broad areas of exploration may include, but are certainly not limited to, the following literary and cultural theoretical perspectives:

The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin invites applications for its 2026–2027 research fellowship program. Up to 50 fellowships will be awarded to support projects that require substantial on-site use of the Center’s internationally renowned collections in all areas of the humanities, including literature, photography, film, art, the performing arts, music, and cultural history.

Second Conference of the European Children’s Literature Research Network.
Munich, Schloss Blutenburg, International Youth Library

19-21 October 2026

International Faculty Development Program

This seminar seeks to explore what we can learn about climate fiction and about literature’s role in understanding and addressing climate change when we look at literary texts written before climate change became a solidified discursive formation. Any discussion of climate presupposes a stable definition of the term within the scientific contexts that give it meaning, but the history of human activities that lead to human made climate change generally predates these discourses. Comparative work in the Environmental Humanities complicates dominant ideas about climate and interrogate the field’s tendency to focus on contemporary climate fiction.

Faculty Development Programme

Translation as Dialogue: Creative License, Crossover and Current Developments

Organized by
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology (IIEST), Shibpur

Important Dates

Nesir: Journal of Literary Studies invites submissions for its 10th issue (April 2026) and 12th issue (April 2027). These issues are open to original articles without thematic restriction, covering classical and contemporary literary theories, literary traditions, genres and discourses, text-based interpretations and analyses, as well as comparative and interdisciplinary studies. This call prioritizes approaches that consider literature as a mode of thought marked by conceptual depth and metaphorical dynamism, rather than as something confined to a single period or national context.

A conference hosted by the Graduiertenkolleg Authority and Trust (GKAT) at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies (HCA), Heidelberg University

Date: May 20–22, 2026
Location: Heidelberg Center for American Studies, Heidelberg

Nesir: Journal of Literary Studies welcomes submissions for its October 2026 issue, which seeks to reconsider how literature translates bodily experience into writing and visibility, and how the body, in turn, discloses and shapes literary meaning.

Be(Long)ing in Planetary Space

The Dickens Society invites submissions for its sponsored hybrid panel at the 57th NeMLA convention, which takes as its theme the concept of “(Re)generation.” This event, which utilizes the conference app Whova and Zoom to promote accessibility and hybridity, will be held in Pittsburgh, PA at the Wyndham Grand Downtown, on the Point from March 5-8, 2026.

Romancing the Gothic Talk Series

This talk series offers online talks each week and has a global audience and speaker pool. Talks are 40-45 minutes and are run (in real time) twice to catch different time zones. An honorarium is offered. Our categories, laid out below, allow for flexibility. Please contact me (details at the end) if you have any questions. We strongly encourage speakers to attend other sessions as well as there own and join in with the community!

We invite chapter proposals for an edited scholarly collection that critically examines the religious dimensions of Indian diasporic women’s literature, with a specific focus on conversion, resistance, and cultural memory. This volume will explore how women writers from the Caribbean, South Africa, Fiji, Mauritius, and other sites of indenture engage with Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam, addressing the gendered and ideological tensions of community rupture, religious fidelity, and transgenerational transmission in diasporic settings.

This roundtable will explore the theme of mad echoes within contemporary (re)generations of literature and her/their/history. The term (re)generation calls forth processes of renewing or restoring something that has been lost or damaged. Damage and loss have been ways of speaking about the lasting and ongoing violences against marginalized bodies that have been labeled as Mad, pathologized, or institutionalized, but the limits of these concepts have been contested, perhaps most notably in Eve Tuck’s “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities,” which interrogates the (un)helpfulness of damage-focused research to the pursuit of justice and wellbeing for members of marginalized communities.

FINAL CALL for papers: 1 spot remaining

This panel interrogates the title “The Uncanny and Sublime: The Liminality of Knowledge” by asking: what constitutes knowledge when it emerges from thresholds—moments of affect, disorientation, or aesthetic rupture? How does the liminal “unknowing” of the uncanny and sublime inform new modes of intellectual inquiry? Does this liminality reorient traditional ways of thought?

In the age of Artificial Intelligence, more accurately, the “age of AI Empire” (Tacheva and Ramasubramanian 2023), machines are no longer defined solely by their ability to process information. They are increasingly imagined as also capable of emotion, bodily awareness and interaction with the natural environment. This seminar examines the representation of embodied AI in literature and digital media focusing on the interrelationships between humans and the more-than-human alongside the growing emphasis on the body as a site of knowledge.

Call for Papers

Science, Technology, and Culture

Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)

47th Annual Conference, February 25-28, 2026

Marriott Albuquerque

Albuquerque, New Mexico

https://www.southwestpca.org

Submissions open: September 1, 2025

Proposal submission deadline: October 31, 2025

I invite you to please consider submitting a abstract for the following panel to be hosted ASECS (American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies) at the 2026 Conference. This conference will be help April 9-11 in Philadelphia.

“And away above all with the body, that idée fixe of the senses!” Nietzsche has philosophy proclaim. For it is “infected with every error of logic there is, refuted, impossible even,” and “impudent enough to behave as if it actually existed.” The body has long been one of philosophy’s more persistent preoccupations as it’s impossible to define without distortion yet impossible to fully discard. From Plato’s call to transcend the body in search of truth to Descartes’ relegation of the body to mere extension, philosophy has long sought to escape or sanitize embodiment. Even phenomenology, which counters the Cartesian account, privileges the lived body of perception over the objective, material body and its historical conditions.