This NeMLA panel invites proposals exploring the social, cultural, and political uses of regionalist aesthetics throughout the 20th cnetury.

From brainwashed assassins to complicated anti-heroes to villains on a redemption arc, comic books, films, television, and novels frequently present readers with complicated antagonists-turned-superheroes, many of which become beloved characters. Through varied processes of regeneration, former antagonists remake themselves into superheroes in fascinating and often unexpected ways.

We seek panelists for Northeast MLA 2026, "The Name of the Witch." 

Conference Details

57th NeMLA Annual Convention, March 5 - 8, 2026, Pittsburgh, PA. Visit https://www.nemla.org/convention/future.html for more details. 

Modality 

Panel / In Person Only: The session will be held fully in person at the hotel. No remote presentations will be included.

Submissions and Deadline

Global South is a phrase often heard in the academic parlance to categorise a group of nations which have been broadly classified in economic terms by the United Nations Trade and Development (UNCTAD) based on certain defining characteristics (socio-economic and political factors). The countries or continents which come under this category are Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia (excluding Australia and New Zealand). However, to classify economic grounds poses severe questions about factors contributing to the dissemination of this inequality. This unevenness as one suspects can be a major reason for armed conflicts often leading to tensions and permanent war zones.

57th Northeast Modern Language Association Convention 2026

Conference Date: March 5-8, 2026

Abstract Submission Deadline: September 10, 2025

All presentations will be delivered via Zoom regardless of whether the presenters are in person. We will use Whova (our conference app) and Zoom to integrate remote sessions into the conference.

Session Title: World Literature and Cultural Globalization (Roundtable/Virtual).

“The era of world literature is at hand, and everyone must contribute to accelerating it,” Goethe said to Eckermann on the afternoon of 1827, and the idea of world literature (Weltliteratur) was born.

CFP: Lexicon for Animacy

This session explores how postcolonial and diasporic literatures grapple with memory, trauma, and cultural haunting. Rather than thinking of identity as fixed or linear, selfhood is complex and palimpsestic due to colonial violence, migration, and historical erasure. This session invites papers that analyze how characters or narratives navigate misremembering, inherited trauma, or overwritten histories to reclaim belonging and agency. Topics may include narrative voice, transgenerational memory, silence, storytelling, and archival gaps in multiethnic and immigrant literatures. This session welcomes interdisciplinary approaches and encourages work on Asian American, Black, Indigenous, and other diasporic communities.

Modality: in-person only

Across cultures and histories, women have journeyed through visible and invisible migrations: geographic, emotional, spiritual, intellectual. This panel invites explorations of how these journeys and thresholds: both outer and inner, shape the evolution of selfhood. From the classroom to the kitchen, from the mother’s memory to the daughter's voice, from exile to homemaking, we seek narratives that dwell in moments and spaces of unfolding and becoming. These are stories of transition and tension, of belonging and othering, of rupture and reconciliation. 

Conference Location: NeMLA 2026 March 5-8, Pittsburgh, PA (virtual option available)

In her essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Hortense Spillers articulates the enduring violence of racial enslavement through the concept of the “hieroglyphics of the flesh” (67). This term marks how the captive body, stripped of legal and social personhood, became inscribed with meaning through the violence of racial differentiation. This transformation rendered the Black body not only a surface upon which terror was written but also a metaphysical site from which alternative modes of being might be imagined. In attending to the duality of skin and flesh, Spillers distinguishes between Black skin as legible and social, and Black flesh as ungendered, unsovereign, and open—both wounded and full of radical potential. 

This NeMLA session critically discusses the novels of Sally Rooney. We will ask: is Rooney's oeuvre a critique, a snapshot, a suggestion, or a warning about a way forward for fiction, the novel form, feminism, and contemporary culture?

View full CFP here: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21883

Modality:

In Person Only: The session will be held fully in person at the hotel. No remote presentations will be included.

Questions/Comments:

Contact Kimberlyjcoates@gmail.com

Call for Papers

REACT 2025: Research and Educational Advancements in Culture and Technology

Vienna, October 20–21, 2025

Venue: University of Applied Arts Vienna

More info & submissions: culttech.at/react

Feminist scholar Peggy Phelan (1993) famously said that “visibility is a trap” and argued for the immense power of the unmarked. Such a theory of the unmarked finds utmost relevance in the case of what R.W. Connell calls hegemonic masculinity, which often maintains its superiority by being the norm and thus abstract, untraceable. However, material bodily practices among marginalized groups of men often subvert such invisibility tactics, expose the nodes of hegemonic and normative masculinities, and articulate a language of resistance. For example, dance scholar Mark Broomfield (2024) observes that black gay male dancers in America use “straight acting” as a way of passing and surviving in a world where white heterosexual masculinity is the norm.

Poetics of Embedded Narratives and Images in the Literature and Arts of the English-speaking World: Moving Borders

Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour (July 2-3, 2026)

Organisers: Françoise Buisson, Fabienne Gaspari and Arnaud Schmitt 

(ALTER, UR 7504)