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Calls for Papers for the 2026 MLA Convention

updated: 
Friday, March 14, 2025 - 4:28pm
The Doris Lessing Society
deadline for submissions: 
Sunday, March 9, 2025

The Doris Lessing Society, an allied organization of the MLA, invites proposals for the two 2026 MLA sessions; for details of the Calls, see below:

 

                                               Calls for Paper for the 2026 MLA Convention (01/08--01/11/2026)

 

1       Doris Lessing the Storyteller: Literature and Social Change

 

The goal is to explore the ways in which Lessing uses fiction for social transformation through the elaboration and dissemination of knowledge, e.g., self-education, constructing knowledge, questioning moral/political values, and the relationship to language.

 

Deadline for submissions: Sunday, 23 March 2025

 

Not Without Laughter: Tracing Humour in African American Literature Across the Ages

updated: 
Friday, March 14, 2025 - 4:28pm
African American Literature
deadline for submissions: 
Thursday, April 10, 2025

 

Not Without Laughter: Tracing Humour in African American Literature Across the Ages

Many philosophers, from Aristotle to Hobbes, Freud to Schopenhauer, Spencer to Peter McGraw, have given interesting insights on matters concerning humour, comedy, and laughter. While the classical theories of humour, namely the superiority theory, the incongruity theory, and the relief theory, discuss the fundamental nature of humour, its evolved forms, such as the benign violation theory, provide a more compact version of the same. Nevertheless, humour is pervasive and can be witnessed in all aspects of life.

Graduate Essay Contest in Theory & Criticism

updated: 
Friday, March 14, 2025 - 4:28pm
ATHE Association for Theatre in Higher Education
deadline for submissions: 
Tuesday, April 15, 2025

Call for Papers

 

The ATHE Theory & Criticism Focus Group seeks papers for its annual Graduate Student Essay Contest.

The contest presents an exciting opportunity for an emergent theatre and performance studies scholar. It introduces the winning writer to the ATHE conference and provides them with a venue in which to showcase their work. 

The contest prizes are intended to support the development of the student’s academic work, ease financial challenges related to conference attendance, and connect the student with appropriate scholarly resources for the paper’s development and impact. 

The winning scholar will receive: 

Esotericism, Occultism, and Magic at ONLINE VIRTUAL Southwest Popular/American Culture Association Summer Salon, June 26-28, 2025

updated: 
Friday, March 14, 2025 - 4:28pm
Southwest Popular/American Culture Association
deadline for submissions: 
Saturday, March 15, 2025

Call for Papers

ESOTERICISM, OCCULTISM, AND MAGIC

Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)

2025 SWPACA Summer Salon

June 26-28, 2024

Virtual Conference

https://swpaca.org/ 

Submissions open on March 25, 2025

Proposal submission deadline: April 15, 2025

Canadian and Québec Literatures: Online Conference May 23-25

updated: 
Friday, March 14, 2025 - 4:28pm
The Association for Canadian and Québec Literatures
deadline for submissions: 
Monday, March 31, 2025

ACQL General Call for Papers: 2025 ONLINE Conference 

Founded in 1975 in the wake of Canada’s official ratification of multiculturalism, the Association for Canadian and Québec Literatures has, over more than 45 years, emerged as Canada’s premier association for showcasing multilingual and transnational research in Canadian and Québec literatures. 

This year, ACQL will host its annual conference ONLINE between Friday, May 23rd and Sunday, May 25th.

We invite potential participants to submit NEW proposals in English or in French on research, teaching, and professional matters of relevance to current or prospective members. 

Call for Submissions: Voices Unbound – An Anthology of International Poetry

updated: 
Friday, March 14, 2025 - 4:28pm
Fresh Words-An International Literary Magazine
deadline for submissions: 
Monday, April 28, 2025

We are thrilled to announce an open call for submissions for 'Voices Unbound', a new poetry anthology that seeks to celebrate the diverse, vibrant, and transformative power of poetry. Whether you are an emerging voice or an established poet, we invite you to share your work and contribute to this collective tapestry of human experience.

 Website: https://sites.google.com/view/freshwordsmagazine/home

MLA 2026: Performing the Past: Historical Subjects on Stage

updated: 
Friday, March 14, 2025 - 4:02pm
Claire Sommers/Washington University in St. Louis
deadline for submissions: 
Friday, March 21, 2025

In his Poetics, Aristotle famously distinguishes poetry from history, claiming that “the distinction between historian and poet is not in the one writing prose and the other verse…it consists really in this, that the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be.” Yet despite their different intentions, history has continued to remain a subject of drama from Aristotle’s time until the present day, often serving to enact the tension between truth and believability in order to highlight the often porous boundary between fact and fiction. This session will explore the depiction of historical subjects on the stage in theatrical works originating from any time period.

Of Monsters and Mothers: Challenging Representations and Theories of Maternity in Literature

updated: 
Friday, March 14, 2025 - 4:02pm
Nasanin Rosado DeRodes
deadline for submissions: 
Friday, March 28, 2025

This panel, "Of Monsters and Mothers: Challenging Representations and Theories of Maternity in Literature," seeks to explore how literature complicates, subverts, and redefines conventional understandings of motherhood. From monstrous maternal figures to radical reimaginings of care, the maternal body has long been a contested site of power, anxiety, and transformation in literary texts. We invite interdisciplinary perspectives that engage with literature across historical periods and genres, drawing from feminist, psychoanalytic, postcolonial, disability, and queer theories to interrogate the intersections of motherhood, agency, and monstrosity.

Contemporary Impacts of Settler Traumas Upon Indigenous Peoples of North America

updated: 
Friday, March 14, 2025 - 4:02pm
Modern Languages Association 2026
deadline for submissions: 
Thursday, March 20, 2025

Title:Contemporary Impacts of Settler Traumas Upon Indigenous Peoples of North America Description & Requirements:Submit a brief bio and 150 word abstract to daniellemercier92@gmail.com examining contemporary narratives of Indigenous peoples of North America (U.S. and Canada), their bodies/embodiment. Presentations may focus on issues such as: trauma, time, capitalism, settler colonialism. Submission Deadline:Thursday, 20 March 2025

UVA Wise Medieval-Renaissance Conference XXXVIII (9/18-20)

updated: 
Friday, March 14, 2025 - 4:02pm
University of Virginia-Wise Center for Medieval-Renaissance Studies
deadline for submissions: 
Monday, June 23, 2025

Sponsored by the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, the University of Virginia’s College at Wise Medieval-Renaissance Conference promotes scholarly discussion in all disciplines of Medieval and Renaissance studies.

Diaspora and Canadian Multiculturalism

updated: 
Friday, March 14, 2025 - 3:56pm
Saint Paul University, Ottawa
deadline for submissions: 
Thursday, July 31, 2025

Publication Call: Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, University of Toronto 

 

           Immigrant Diaspora and the Future Dimensions of Canadian Multiculturalism 

Asian Films with Transgender Themes

updated: 
Friday, March 14, 2025 - 1:18am
The Handbook of Trans Cinema
deadline for submissions: 
Thursday, March 13, 2025

Seeking chapters about Asian films featuring transgender themes as part of a global survey for The Handbook of Trans Cinema. We already have over 50 confirmed chapters by prominent scholars exploring trans films from 6 continents, including chapters devoted to Bangladesh, China, Hong Kong, India, Iran, Japan, Pakistan, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam. We welcome the following high-priority chapters on Asian films: 

Translation, Speculative Justice and Sustainability in the Global South

updated: 
Thursday, March 13, 2025 - 11:35pm
IATIS; Sultan Qaboos University
deadline for submissions: 
Thursday, April 10, 2025

 

 

The IATIS - International Association for Translation and Intercultural Studies invites papers on  “Sustainable Translation in the Age of Knowledge Extraction, Generation, and (Re)Creation” for its 8th International Conference to be held at Sultan Qaboos University, Muscat, Sultanate of Oman on December 10-13, 2025.

We would especially like to encourage submissions that contribute new directions and calls to the existing scholarship on “Translation, Speculative Justice and Sustainability in the Global South.”

MLA 2026: Plural Cosmologies NEW DEADLINE (3/21/25)

updated: 
Thursday, March 13, 2025 - 9:09pm
2026 Modern Language Association Annual Convention
deadline for submissions: 
Friday, March 21, 2025

In her artist statement for Along the River of Spacetime (2020), a virtual reality “activation” of Anishinaabe star knowledge, scholar, artist, and video game designer Elizabeth LaPensée (Irish, Métis, Anishinaabe) described the ways in which Anishinaabe cosmologies anticipated a series of experiments carried out by CERN's Large Hadron Collider, the world's most advanced particle accelerator.

Technical and Professional Writing (MMLA 2025, Milwaukee, WI)

updated: 
Thursday, March 13, 2025 - 2:07pm
Midwest Modern Language Association
deadline for submissions: 
Friday, April 4, 2025

This panel seeks presentations on Technical and Professional writing, whether in the college classroom or in the world at large. The panel will be interdiscplinary - we invite proposals from those working in business writing, engineering communication, health science writing, and other fields.

Topics can range from ethics to pedagogy to technologies including AI. The final panel will seek to comprise a cohesive but varied set of papers.

Generative AI in the College Classroom (MMLA 2025, Milwaukee, WI)

updated: 
Thursday, March 13, 2025 - 2:07pm
Midwest Modern Language Association
deadline for submissions: 
Friday, April 4, 2025

This panel seeks presentations on uses of generative AI in the college classroom, with a particular focus on approaches that combine theory and practice. Especially welcome are presentations that are built around transferable skills and activities/assignments in different disciplines including writing and literature.

The panel will take place during the MMLA's annual convention from November 14-16 on the campus of Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. For more informationa about the organization and the conference, see: https://www.luc.edu/mmla/convention/futureconventionplans/

New Voices in Early Modern Material Culture, Theatre, and Performance

updated: 
Thursday, March 13, 2025 - 4:50am
Revels Office
deadline for submissions: 
Monday, March 24, 2025

“Make you to ravel all this matter out” (Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3.4)

Within early modern studies, there has been a growing interest in the intersections between text, materiality, and performance, both in and beyond the commercial theatres. The Revels Office, an international research group comprised of early career academics, has always been fascinated by the relationship between textual, visual and material cultures and the material realities of theatre and performance.

Fumes and Flames: Petro to Pyromodernism (proposed panel for MLA 2026 in Toronto)

updated: 
Wednesday, March 12, 2025 - 5:13pm
MLA Conference 2026
deadline for submissions: 
Friday, March 21, 2025

This panel explores how fire and fossil fuels shape modernity and modernisms, focusing on literature, art, and culture beyond 1850. Papers may explore intersections of:

  • Environmental and energy humanities 
  • Extractivism, petroculture, infrastructure
  • Anthropocene, Pyrocene, energy unconscious 
  • Fire, fire suppression, thermal politics 
  • Aesthetics, identity, materiality

Please submit 250-word abstracts to Jennie Sekanics at jennie-sekanics@uiowa.edu or Harry Stecopoulos at harilaos-stecopoulos@uiowa.edu

Modernism and Foodways

updated: 
Wednesday, March 12, 2025 - 12:30pm
Modernist Studies Association (MSA) Boston 2025, October 9-12
deadline for submissions: 
Tuesday, March 25, 2025

While revising Between the Acts in 1940, Virginia Woolf edited her drafts to reinforce the disruptive wartime shifts in food culture triggered by the Second World War: the novel notes a particular wariness for rationed beef and mutton, references the interwar freedom of easily obtaining bacon and oil, and suggests the indulgence of sugar consumption. The modernist moment saw a variety of such shifts in the alimentary, from increased industrialization and food processing to a more gastronomic turn to the realities of wartime food rationing that Woolf and others chart.

Enhanced Human Bodies in Literature and Cinema

updated: 
Wednesday, March 12, 2025 - 10:25am
Aqib Javid /Psau,KSA
deadline for submissions: 
Thursday, March 20, 2025

We live in an age of optimization. Norms of beauty and performance are relentlessly getting harder to achieve without modifying the psychophysiology of human beings. Humans are faced with choices and demands regarding increasing and reducing the size, mass, and weight of different body parts and the modification of the way they function. The normal no longer means the common, it means the optimal. From special diets and extreme workouts to silicon injections and from plastic surgery to brain chips, the human body is transforming into a workshop for different arts and technologies. The cosmetic surgery market, for example, is worth more than 57 billion dollars and is expected to continue to grow very fast.

General Call for Papers

updated: 
Wednesday, March 12, 2025 - 9:57am
Language, Literature, and Interdisciplinary Studies
deadline for submissions: 
Saturday, March 15, 2025

Language, Literature, and Interdisciplinary Studies (LLIDS), an open-access peer-reviewed academic e-journal, invites original and unpublished, interdisciplinary, research papers and book reviews from various interrelated disciplines including, but not limited to, literature, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, history, sociology, law, ecology, environmental science, and economics.

Power in Urbanscapes: Rethinking Spatiality and Sociality

updated: 
Wednesday, March 12, 2025 - 9:56am
Language, Literature, and Interdisciplinary Studies
deadline for submissions: 
Sunday, May 25, 2025

The second Issue of Volume 7 of LLIDS examines how structures of power constitute and shape urban spaces. It proposes to explore their influence in determining social values wherein varied social groups—marked by religion, class, race, gender, etc.—negotiate the power dynamics that constitute life in urban spaces. The modern, bustling city carries within itself a continuous sense of becoming. The urban dwellers, inhabiting segregated parts of the city, shape the lived experience of these spaces through their socio-cultural interactions and relationships.

Stories and Sacredness: Reimagining Myth and Folklore Across Indian Cultures

updated: 
Wednesday, March 12, 2025 - 9:35am
Dr. Rajkumar Bera and Dr. Sakti Sekhar Dash
deadline for submissions: 
Tuesday, April 15, 2025

Call for Papers: Stories and Sacredness: Reimagining Myth and Folklore Across Indian Cultures

(Proposed as Part of Palgrave Studies in Global Literatures and Religions)

Editors:

Dr. Rajkumar Bera, Assistant Professor, Dept. of English, Midnapore City College, West Bengal

Dr. Sakti Sekhar Dash, Fellow of Social Science Research Council, USA

Androgyny in Modern Literature

updated: 
Tuesday, March 11, 2025 - 2:42am
Modernist Studies Association
deadline for submissions: 
Tuesday, April 1, 2025

Call for Papers: Androgyny in Modern Literature

Submission Deadline: April 1, 2025
Conference Date: MSA Boston October 9-12
Organized by: Adriana Fischetti, CCNY, 2nd year graduate student

ReFocus: The International Directors Series: David Cronenberg (Re-CFP)

updated: 
Tuesday, March 11, 2025 - 2:41am
Edinburgh University Press
deadline for submissions: 
Sunday, April 20, 2025

ReFocus: The International Directors Series: David Cronenberg

Edinburgh University Press

Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg is widely regarded as one of the finest proprietors of the body-horror genre. Cronenberg’s filmography traverses the realm of the corporeal beyond its bare form, testing the limits of what a body can do. His films explore the intricate relations between the market, science, and desire. Cronenberg also examines disease and illness, situating their grotesque ramifications in the soma and the psyche, while many other later film narratives diverge from Cronenberg’s earlier focus on body horror to exhibit a wide spectrum of directorial capabilities.

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