Concept Note

Bengal as a cultural, social, and analytical territorial space carries a series of nuances that bear, directly and indirectly, on the processes of identity formation. While these processes may be read as organic phenomena in pre-colonial and undivided Bengal, they became a prominent aspect of colonial and national identity politics in post-Partition Bengal. This volume explores the spectrum of such processes as they unfold across the transition from the pre-colonial to the post-colonial cultural and political history of Bengal, from the eighteenth century to the present.

As human rights institutions and legal frameworks are discredited, defunded, dismantled, and openly ignored across multiple national contexts, the question of what literature has to do with rights returns with new urgency. This moment demands new ways of thinking about these problems. This seminar responds by turning to the many literary traditions from the Global South and postcolonial contexts in which writers have narrated human rights and personhood on their own cultural terms and grounds.

The National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions' Journal of Collective Bargaining in the Academy, is an open-access, peer-reviewed, online periodical advancing research and scholarly thought related to collective bargaining and other issues in higher education, and making relevant and pragmatic peer-reviewed research readily accessible.

We invite submissions to participate in two free events organized and coordinated by the ‘Senses and Society’ Thematic Group (TG07) of the International Sociological Association and hosted by the Sociology Department of National University of Singapore (NUS). A vibrant and multicultural city like Singapore offers a highly suitable location for a conference and graduate workshop that seeks to engage with new and exciting scholarship on sensory approaches to embodied practices, urban experience, tourism, heritage, mobilities, food cultures, and more.

Over the past two decades, the environmental humanities have profoundly reshaped our understanding of oceans, rivers, and other aquatic environments. Simultaneously, Gothic studies have increasingly turned toward maritime spaces, revealing the sea not merely as a sublime backdrop but as a haunted archive where colonial violence, environmental catastrophe, and spectral histories continually return. This seminar proposes a dialogue between Blue Humanities and the Gothic by examining how oceans, rivers, and littoral zones emerge as spaces of haunting in world literature.

56TH ANNUAL COLLEGE ENGLISH ASSOCIATION CONFERENCE
CEA 2027/GATEWAYS
WESTIN HOTEL/ST. LOUIS, MO.
APRIL1-3,2027

CONFERENCE THEME:GATEWAYS
PAPERS ON GENERAL TOPICS ALSO WELCOMED

For its 2027 annual conference,the College English Association (CEA) invites proposals for papers and panels that explore the theme of “Gateways” and their significance in literature, criticism, and pedagogy.

While the purpose-built playhouses of early modern London – such as the Globe, Rose, and Blackfriars – dominate histories of early modern performance, theatrical activity frequently spilled out into non-dedicated, non-purpose-built sites. Command performances often took place at the royal court or on country estates, while the evidence for London playing companies on tour compiled by projects such as Records of Early English Drama (REED) has unveiled a rich regional theatre history in guildhalls, chapels, inn yards, open streets, and even the deck of an East India Company ship. Performance in early modern England was profoundly adaptable.

In the introduction to the Fourth Edition of The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Valerie Smith emphasize the imitativeness of literature—Black literature, specifically. To them, literature begets newer literature. At the same time, readers have traced formal patterns of repetition and imitation in Black literature across centuries, dating back to the antebellum.

The Art of Chaos

A Transdisciplinary Conference

Conference Dates: December 2-3, 2026
Location: Online
Proposal Deadline: November 1, 2026
Conference Fee: £100

Conference Webpage: https://labrc.co.uk/2026/08/13/the-art-of-chaos/

" In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order."
— C.G. Jung

In recent decades, the scientific search for extraterrestrial life has undergone a significant conceptual transformation. Earlier astrobiological research largely focused on identifying environments similar to those on Earth—particularly the presence of water and organic molecules—as indicators that life might exist elsewhere in the universe. Increasingly, however, scientists recognize that truly alien life may not resemble terrestrial biology at all. Rather than searching only for “life as we know it,” astrobiologists now explore the possibility that organisms could arise from unfamiliar biochemical systems, rely on alternative solvents, or take forms that challenge our current definitions of life.This shift has important cultural implications.

Gender and Fragmentation in the Fin de Siècle 

Nineteenth Century Gender Studies Special Issue – Summer 2027

Guest Edited by Emily Waller Singeisen and Ryan Carroll

As part of the 54th annual Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture, the Charles Olson Society invites papers on the theme of “Black Mountain Poetry and the Arts.” Working amidst the rich, interdisciplinary atmosphere of Black Mountain College and The Black Mountain Review, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, and many others developed their conceptions of projectivist poetics in tandem with colleagues in painting, music, and dance. As multimedia events like the first “Happening,” which featured poetry by Olson, readings by M.C.

In his book, Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species (2016), Neel Ahuja’s theory of “the body as a transitional theater of imperial warfare” explores how the control of human and nonhuman bodies proliferated the expansion of empire over the 19th century to the present. Despite the growing hegemony of biomedical control, there have always been and continue to be significant moments of resistance and agency in which marginalized (colonized/Indigenous) communities have challenged or reformulated/redefined the concepts of body, disease, and health.

Public scholarship is rapidly becoming both an essential part of an academic CV and a powerful tool for making the case for the importance of the humanities to our society. Adding public scholarship to one’s academic skills, however, is not as straightforward as it may seem. We are seeking scholars to join the roundtable discussion on what public scholarship is, what forms it may take, how to write for a public audience, how and where to pitch ideas, and how public scholarship can benefit one’s other work, among any other questions our colleagues may have about adding public scholarship to their humanities repertoire. We invite proposals from members with a range of public scholarly experience to share their perspectives and expertise.

Originally coined by David P. Barash and Judith Even Lipton in their 2001 book The Myth of Monogamy: Fidelity and Infidelity in Animals and People, “the myth of monogamy” is defined as “the often unspoken assertion that even desire-at-a-distance is not only wrong, but a uniquely human sin.” This roundtable builds on this definition and suggests that in 2026, the “myth of monogamy” also refers more broadly to the pervasive (and socially constructed) idea that monogamy is biologically natural and socially superior.

What futures can South Asia imagine for itself—and in whose languages, forms, and cosmologies are they written? This seminar takes up South Asian Futurisms, a concept that remains under-theorized within literary studies, as a lens for reading how South Asian literatures of the past and present, across regional and vernacular traditions, have envisioned the future. Amid the region's rapidly shifting economic, social, and geopolitical landscape, we ask: can there be a South Asian Futurism, and if so, what does it look like?

We are living in a time of extreme weather, ecological shift, and infrastructural decay, much of which is related to questions surrounding water. To further analyze the ways that water is affected by and in turn shapes our world, Blue Humanities emerges to critically contend with a shifting landscape. Our attempt through this panel is to expand the conversation by intentionally incorporating the nuances of trauma and infrastructure studies.  

Kids and Blue Humanities: Critical Frameworks for a Blue Children’s Culture [working title]

Edited by Sidney I. Dobrin and Kenneth B. Kidd, U of Florida.

Deadline for proposals: November 1, 2026, to both editors:

sdobrin@ufl.edu

kbkidd@ufl.edu

CALL FOR CHAPTER PROPOSALS

European modernism often imagined aesthetic form as a way to overcome mediation: to make alienated experience, fragmented sociality, or absent truth appear immediately whole or present. At the same time, Edward Said identifies one of the core mechanisms of imperial representation as how it effaces its own mediation of the Orient, as if representation delivered “presence” rather than “re-presence.” This panel explores to what extent the modernist fantasy of formal immediacy was historically enabled by a fantasy of immediacy built into Orientalist representation.

PCA/ACA Fat Studies 2027 Call for Papers/Presentations/Panels

Deadline: 10.31.26

PCA Fat Studies Area Call for Papers

Attention all Fat Studies academics, activists, and artists: Please join other Fat Studies scholars for the 2027 PCA/ACA National Conference in Boston, Massachusetts from March 24-27, 2027. Presenters must become members of the Popular Culture Association. Find more information on the conference and organization at https://sites.google.com/view/2026pcaconference/home.

Black Performing Arts: Sound, Movement, Image, Text

Submission Deadline: October 31, 2026

The Black Performing Arts Area provides a scholarly forum to share research pertaining to Black performance across expressive forms.  Broadly defined, the area focuses on all forms of performing and visual arts, including all musical genres, theatrical performance and performance art, performance elements in visual art, and connections between different Black expressive forms.  In all these contexts we are interested in investigating where aesthetic technique and embodiment merge across Black diasporic expressivity.

Human Creativity in the AI Era: New Horizons for Literature, Translation, and Linguistics

Faculty of Alsun – Fayoum University – Egypt

26–27 October 2026

Hybrid Conference (In-person & Online)

Conference Theme

Explore Shakespeare in a variety of media beyond traditional stage productions, including film, television, anime, manga, and recent novelizations of the plays. We have previously had papers on the following topics and invite new ideas all the time.

International, interdisciplinary conference titled:

Healing Narratives: Exploring Humanity in Medicine and Healthcare

In the realm of medicine and healthcare, narratives- whether spoken, written, visual, or performed- serve among others as powerful tools to humanize clinical experiences, challenge biomedical paradigms as well as foster empathy and understanding. These stories reveal the complex interplay between biological, psychological, social, cultural, and spiritual dimensions of health, illuminating the ways in which healing is intertwined with human dignity, identity, and societal values.