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.

Evolutions in Cinematic Virtual Reality  

Symposium at The University of Hong Kong 

18. – 19. May 2026

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.

Call for Papers: Nature Remembers: War, Trauma, and Environmental Postmemory in Contemporary Anglophone Literature and Culture

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."

ACCSFF ‘26

                                                                                         Call for Papers

The 2026 Academic Conference on Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy will be held Saturday and Sunday, May 30-31, 2026, in Toronto, Ontario, at York University, Canada.

This year's author GoH keynote speaker is the Nebula Award winning Premee Mohamed.

We invite proposals for papers in any area of Canadian science fiction and fantasy, including:

    -studies of individual works and authors;
    -comparative studies;
    -studies that place works in their literary and/or
     cultural contexts.

JAMS@AX26

Want to present your work at the one-and-only Anime Expo? The Journal of Anime and Manga Studies(JAMS) and Anime Expo have once-again teamed up to give you the JAMS@AX26 academic symposium, July 2-5, 2026 at the Los Angeles Convention Center. This symposium presents an incredible opportunity to connect fans of all ages directly to scholars researching and writing about the medium we all love. 

The JAMS@AX26 welcomes all papers taking a scholarly perspective on anime, manga, cosplay, and their fandoms.

Concept Note

The Faerie Queene confronts its characters and readers alike with perceptual, cognitive, and physical struggles, and the reader’s passage through Spenser’s monumental work is as arduous and seemingly unending as the journeys and quests of its knights. The parallels between the characters’ trials and the readers’ embodied experience of the poem become more pronounced when The Faerie Queene is read out loud in its entirety. In 2019, the English department at Tampere University organised its first marathon reading of Spenser’s epic romance. The 2026 iteration will be the sixth marathon reading overall, and the second to be attached to an international symposium.

One response to the official archives’ violent erasure(s) of multiethnic subjects (and the associated literatures) in the US has been scholarly investment in digital archiving. Still, the digital archives (and/or the metadata culled from them) can–and often do–reify whiteness as normative and the marginalization of other Americans. MELUS invites papers that consider how digital archiving (re)shapes and/or supports lay communities that inform the literature of the marginalized. We are particularly interested in papers that address how practices of liberatory archiving resist objectification of multiethnic subjects and/or authors. Submit titled proposals (250 words), a brief CV, and AV needs.

Seeking folks for our CFP below. Please email Dana Ahern (dtahern@usf.edu) and SJ Dillon (sjdillo@emory.edu).

Shakespeare’s works continue to inhabit what Stephen Greenblatt calls a “circulating energy system,” an ever-renewing sphere in which texts, performances, and interpretations travel across borders and epochs, sustaining the playwright’s presence in world culture. Tiffany Stern’s seminal research further reminds us that Shakespeare should be understood not as a fixed authorial entity but as an ongoing “process”—a dynamic constellation of scripts, fragmentary documents, performance traces, and editorial interventions that resist the notion of a stable text.

2026 Wenshan x TSA International Conference Call for Papers

Hosted by: NCCU Department of English, Taiwan Shakespeare Association

Date: November 29, 2026

Venue: National Chengchi University

Shakespeare Across Centuries:

Reception, Resonance, and Reinvention

Shakespeare’s works continue to inhabit what Stephen Greenblatt calls a “circulating

Call for Proposals
MLA 2027 (Los Angeles)
Special Session

We are proposing a special session for the 2027 MLA Convention in Los Angeles on "Edited Collections: Tips and Tricks to Successful Publishing." This special session will be a roundtable featuring six presenters with the following format: 

MLA 2027 – Early American and Sexuality Studies Forum 

“The Body Before Sex”

This collaborative panel by the Early American LLC and Sexuality Studies TC of the Modern Language Association aims to bring forward trans, environmental, and affect methodologies to consider the historically and culturally specific ways the body and sex intersect and depart. We are particularly interested in papers that stretch and transgress temporal and spatial domains, offering critical juxtapositions that reexamine the materialities and temporalities that make visible the body before it becomes associated with, and attached to, sex. 

This session will be devoted to academic novels and academic administration. Panelists will consider what these novels (as well as television and films centered in academia) have to say about how higher education institutions are run, and what we might learn about how—and how not—to run them. Equally interested in literary studies (genre, form, representation) and Critical University Studies (history, politics, current events).

CFP for MLA 2027 (7-10 January, 2027), Los Angeles: Guaranteed ACIS Panel

Emancipations in Irish Literature and Culture

Fat has been ever-present in public imagination in various forms. Fat is perceived as a

public enemy and “demonized in medicine and public policy” (Blank 2020). It is “adored by chefs

and nutritional faddists, desired and abhorred when it comes to sex, and continually courted by a

multi-billion-dollar fitness and weight-loss industry” (Blank 2020). Yet, ‘Fat’ as an area of

academic research has remained remarkably underdeveloped in the Humanities and Social

Sciences domain. Only recently, it has emerged as a vibrant interdisciplinary field that interrogates