The Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities (LCH) is accepting submissions for the 2026 Julien Mezey Dissertation Award. This annual prize is awarded to the dissertation that most promises to enrich and advance interdisciplinary scholarship at the intersection of law, culture, and the humanities.

CFP--MLA 2027: The Melville Society

           Melville and McCarthyism

This panel invites papers reflecting on the value of Melville’s work for our authoritarian present. A pivotal revival of Melville during the nineteen-fifties by C.L.R. James and F.O. Matthiessen (both victims of McCarthyist surveillance and fear tactics) catapults Moby-Dick to attain the status of an American “classic” emblematic of a more, free democratic ethos. Moreover, Melville remains the author of the longest poem, Clarel, on Palestine in American literary history. Recent literary scholars of Melville also mobilize his writings to analyze the limits and possibilities of U.S. constitutionalism, including the First Amendment. 

Affective Shakespeare and the Early Modern Imagination:

Empathy, Voice, and Spectatorship

The Seventeenth IASEMS Conference

University of Naples Federico II, Naples, 28–30 May 2026
Convenors: Michele Stanco, Angela Leonardi, and the IASEMS Executive Board

Call for Book Proposals: Secrecy in Literature and Culture Secrecy in Literature and Culture (Edinburgh University Press) Series Editors: Simon Cooke (University of Edinburgh) and Natalie Ferris (University of Bristol) We invite proposals for critical studies exploring the pivotal role of secrecy in literature and culture, with interdisciplinary, international and transhistorical scopeThe ‘secret’ is a concept of pivotal importance across a range of disciplines – from political studies of espionage and the ethics of intelligence work to law, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and literary and cultural studies – inflected by diverse cultural and historical contexts, and in terms of gender, sexuality, race and cla

Special Session Title: Anglophone Ottoman/Turkish Writers from the Ottoman Empire to Contemporary Turkey (Online Session)

The Patrick Leary Resource Development Grant is named for long-time RSVP supporter, Board member and former President, Patrick Leary. It is intended to support one scholar or a team of researchers in creating resources that will facilitate the work of other scholars in their studies of British newspapers and periodicals from the long nineteenth century. The grant was created with funds from a generous bequest to RSVP by the late Eileen Curran, pioneering researcher and Emerita Professor of English at Colby College.

Microgrants are seed grants designed to support new research projects and/or explore ideas in the field of periodical studies.

The Microgrants scheme was established in response to the 2025 survey of RSVP’s members, who informed us that they would benefit greatly from access to smaller pockets of funding for existing or exploratory projects. (For our full list of awards, please see the Eligibility chart). The funding for these grants is made possible through the generosity of the late Eileen Curran, Professor Emerita of English, Colby College, and inspired by her pioneering research on Victorian periodicals.

Call for Abstracts!Elvis and Philosophy: Essays Concerning the King

Edited by Joshua Heter and Richard Greene

Abstracts are sought for a collection of essays on any philosophical topic related to Elvis Aaron Presley to be published with Wallace & Jacobs Press. We hope to receive a number of submissions concerning his music and movies as well as his persona, life, relationships, cultural impact, legacy, mythos, etc.

The image of California as the Golden State—a land of promise, risk, reinvention, and imagined abundance—has long shaped literary and cultural narratives of aspiration and freedom. Yet “golden states” are not bound to geography: they materialize wherever communities imagine possibility, long for deliverance, or chart pathways beyond constraint.  

The King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies (KFCRIS), through its UNESCO Chair in Translating Cultures and with the support of the Literature, Publishing and Translation Commission, is pleased to invite applications for the Early Scholars Publication Grants. These grants support the publication of outstanding PhD dissertations that critically examine contemporary debates related to the UNESCO Chair’s two themes for this year and adopt a global perspective that moves beyond Eurocentrism. Early Scholars Publication Grants will be awarded for this year's two themes:

1) Modern Arab Thought in Translation

What makes literary collaboration unexpected, difficult, or strange? How have authors transcended barriers – national, social, ideological, religious, temporal – in the collaborative production of texts?

For the upcoming EGO conference at Oxford University, we invite students to write on the prismatic theme of “strange bedfellows”. From plagiarism of unusual sources to fraught collaboration between literary “frenemies” to allyship across religious and political lines, this theme lends itself to discussions of the way literature is shaped by the collaboration of radically different perspectives and interests.

Children and adolescents frequently appear in Doris Lessing's fiction, specifically in her African short stories. However, Lessing did not write these stories with a child audience in mind; rather, she used child and adolescent characters to dissect African colonial society in the aftermath of the break-up of the British Empire (García Navarro, 2021). We invite contributions to a co-edited collection exploring what it means to be educated and to grow up as a child in Lessing's African stories, particularly in the context of 20th-century African society ruled by white European colonists. 

We are delighted to announce the return of the Raymond Williams Society postgraduate essay competition for its 12th year. The deadline for entries is Friday 3 April 2026.

The prize for the winning entry is £250 and a year’s subscription to the Society. The winning essay will be considered for publication in the academic journal Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism (subject to peer review). The competition aims to encourage a new generation of scholars working in the tradition of cultural materialism, especially those whose research is rooted in the work of Raymond Williams.

Updated CFP: We invite three additional contributors to join the volume, replacing previously shortlisted chapter authors who were unfortunately unable to continue with the project. This presents an excellent opportunity to participate in a substantial scholarly publication that already includes confirmed contributions from researchers based in India, Palestine, Indonesia, the Netherlands, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

 In a Conference Far, Far Away…Traversing Forms of the Folkloric  (Graduate Student Conference)

 New York University, Department of Comparative Literature: Friday, May 1, 2026

WRITING THE MIDWEST: A Symposium of Scholars and Creative Writers

The Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature (SSML)

May 28-29, 2026. Kellogg Hotel and Convention Center, East Lansing, Michigan

About SSML and The Writing the Midwest Symposium: The Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature (SSML), founded in 1971, exists to support the study and dissemination of work in Midwestern literature, art, film, and scholarly study. 

CALL FOR PAPERS

Edited Volume 

Traumatic Geographies.

Marginal Voices in Central and Eastern European Literatures

Editors: Alina Bako (Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu), Merritt Moseley (University of North Carolina at Asheville), Iris Rusu (Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, University of Bucharest)

Across the African continent and its global diasporas, trauma reverberates through histories of slavery, colonialism, racial capitalism, gendered violence, war, migration, and displacement. However, African and Afrodiasporic writers and artists have not only transformed experiences of pain into sites of creativity, survival, and healing but also reflected in their works the use of African approaches to restoration. This edited volume seeks to explore the ways in which trauma is reconstituted, managed, borne, and cured in African and Afrodiasporic literature and cultural expressions.

War leaves lasting marks not only on people and communities, but also on the natural world that witnesses, and endures, its violence. Long after the fighting has stopped, landscapes shaped by destruction remain living archives, bearing the aftereffects of conflict: damaged forests, polluted rivers and seas, and disrupted ecosystems that continue to hold its traces. These ‘trauma ecologies’ pass on the legacy of war from one generation to the next, forming what we call ‘environmental postmemory.’

Call for Papers

University of Delaware’s 5th CMCS Conference in Material Culture

April 2-3, 2027

                                        “What’s the Matter with Description? Form, Practice, and Material Culture”

Keynote Speaker

SUSAN STEWART

(Princeton University)

This MLA special sessions panel invites papers on literary and cultural approaches to Los Angeles infrastructure, aimed at interrogating the political aesthetic of social, natural, and built environments. Please send a 250 word abstract and short bio. 

2027 MLA Convention: January 7-10 in Los Angeles (accepted presenters must be MLA members by April 1)

2027 MLA Convention

Los Angeles, CA | January 7-10, 2027

CALL FOR PAPERS
MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION CONVENTION
Los Angeles
JANUARY 7-10, 2027

The Ernest Hemingway Society will sponsor a panel at the upcoming MLA Conference:

Hemingway and Disability

Journal of Anime and Manga Studies (JAMS) - Volume 7

Volume to be published in December of 2026

The Journal of Anime and Manga Studies (JAMS) is excited to announce the call for papers for our seventh volume, to be published December 2026.

The Journal of Anime and Manga Studies is a peer reviewed, open-access journal published by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. JAMS is dedicated to publishing scholarly works exploring anime, manga, and a broad range of related topics, such as methodologies, cosplay, fandoms, adaptations, and more. As an open-access journal, JAMS aims to reach a broad-ranging audience of scholars (both within and beyond the academy) and interested general readers.