Memory, Myth, and Meaning: Cather in Dialogue with America 250

Willa Cather Spring Conference | Thursday, June 4 - Saturday, June 6, 2026 

This year marks the centennial of My Mortal Enemy, one of Cather’s least affirmative works and one not produced in the Cather Scholarly Edition (translation: much important work remains to be done!)  We invite papers on new approaches to My Mortal Enemy, including but not limited to the following considerations of style, form, provenance, and themes:

This edited volume extends the project initiated by the Korean Studies 2025 special section “Feminist Korean Studies,” which deployed feminist critique across digital media, popular culture, legal discourse, public health, neoliberalism, and postcoloniality. Building on that foundation, the volume invites interdisciplinary, interregional, and bilingual feminist scholarship to address pressing global and regional developments: the rise of right-wing authoritarianism, intensified anti-feminist backlash in South Korea, and the persistent marginalization of feminist discourse in Anglophone Korean Studies. 

In 2025, broad legislative and cultural backlash is focused on eliminating even the idea of trans people from public space. When public space is inaccessible, online communities have, for more than the past twenty years, been a place where trans people can still find one another, self-represent, and build their own publics. Now the walled world of the app economy, organized personal attacks, discriminatory social media algorithms, ID verification laws, and government intervention are changing the internet too. At such a moment, understanding the ways that trans people navigate their digital worlds is more important than ever.

In honor of Jack London's 150th birthday anniversary in 2026, paper submissions are invited for the Jack London Society panels at the American Literature Association 37th Annual Conference, May 20-23, 2026,Palmer House 17 East Monroe Street, Chicago, IL. Papers may address any aspect of Jack London studies. Send a 250-to-300 word abstract for a twenty-minute presentation to Kenneth K. Brandt at kbrandt@scad.edu by January 26, 2026. Include a brief biographical sketch and any AV equipment needs.

The English department at Duke University is thrilled to host the 11th annual Post45 Graduate Symposium on February 20-21, 2026.

The Post45 Graduate Symposium seeks graduate-level works-in-progress related to post-1945 media, arts, literature, textual or visual objects, digital platforms, politics, and culture. We welcome submissions that expand our conception of objects and meaning-making post-1945 or place them in comparative, transnational, or hemispheric frames. We especially welcome contributions that foreground the importance of race, gender, class, and sexuality to post-45 studies. 

DEADLINE EXTENDED!

Call for Papers

“Horror (Literary & Cinematic)”

Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)

47th Annual Conference, February 25-28, 2026

Marriott Albuquerque

Albuquerque, New Mexico

https://www.southwestpca.org

NEW Submission Deadline: November 14, 2025

The esoteric, occult, and magical roots of deep ecology have become increasingly interconnected with the growing popularity of witchcraft practices, neopagan worldviews, and explicitly spiritual climate activism and environmentalism.  These developments include specific foci on particular ecological concerns and crises, but such trends are equally exemplified by transdisciplinary dialogues in which holistic scientific perspectives intersect with diverse systems of belief. This special panel seeks 15-20 conference presentations to explore these connections and their influence on, reception by, and expression through popular culture in any and all of its manifestations.  

The extraordinary success of K-Pop Demon Hunters (2025) as the most-watched original title in the history of Netflix (with over 325 million views) invites the reconsideration of a surprisingly vast and multivalent “mega-trope” that has proliferated throughout popular culture in numerous variations for centuries.  Its deep roots in folklore and mythology remain to be further explored, mapped, and connected with its various historical expressions throughout indigenous worldviews, Classical cultures and civilizations into Late Antiquity and ultimately through the global Middle Ages and straight through into the interactions of Western, East/Asian, and diverse global civilizations of the contemporary period.  While this mega-trope is here identified

Call for Papers

Medievalisms Area

Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)

47th Annual Conference, February 25-28, 2026

Marriott Albuquerque

Albuquerque, New Mexico

https://www.southwestpca.org

Submissions open: September 1, 2025

Proposal submission deadline: November 14, 2025

Utopian Impulses in the 2020sAn Interdisciplinary Graduate Student ConferenceUniversity of Cincinnati - Friday, February 6th, 2026 Among its political and technological predicaments, America’s 2020s have been a time of steady upheaval, crisis, and change. As we continue to wrestle our way through the agendas, regimes, and big-data systems of this historical moment as teachers, students, and researchers, we recall the utopian thinking of More and Marx, which reminds us “to keep from being blinded by what seems normal — to help us see that what is natural is constructed, not inevitable” (Elbow, p. 83).

Shakespeare is one of the inventors of the category of the human as many modern and contemporary cultures know it. Even his most monstrous and otherworldly creations have a detectable human side. The critical tradition of Shakespeare has already established that these characters are to be read as reflections of certain psychological aspects and repressed characteristics of the main characters of his plays, as allegorical representations of emotions, principles or beliefs, as codification of ethnic and sexual differences, etc. Thanks to this tradition, focusing on the human side of these characters has become the norm. It happens almost intuitively as soon as a critic or scholar starts their analysis of these characters.

American Literature Association
37th Annual Conference
May 20-23, 2026
Chicago, IL

What happens when the present becomes historical to itself and the contemporary turns into a categorizable literary-historical formation? Is that even possible, that is: can the contemporary ever become historical (to) itself? This special issue seeks to examine the conditions that would allow us to understand the contemporary as a distinct literary period which began in the 1990s—with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the rise of neoliberalism, and the growing sense that postmodern irony had outlived itself—and has now arguably come to an end. Not coincidentally, this was a period of almost uncontested, unipolar US political hegemony on a global scale.

Focus- Intra-European colonial histories/linguistic nationalism, the Nordic colonial legacies and the Sámi/de-centering dominant narratives of North-South polarity. Further to explore points of convergence between the North-South, South- South, paving way for transversal exchanges.

Framing Question– To what extent can multilingual interactions in the Nordic regions disrupt linguistic hierarchies rooted in colonial legacies and reshape dominant language ideologies? How do these disruptions inter-act with the multilingual societies elsewhere such as South Asia, South Africa, Chile and Colombia,  and processes of vernacularisation set in motion with respect to colonisation in some cases. 

General Issue | Rolling Submissions

The Critical Gender Studies Journal / Revista Crítica de Estudios de Género invites submissions for its upcoming general issue. We welcome original research articles, theoretical essays, creative interventions, and reviews that explore the multifaceted dimensions of gender and sexuality across diverse contexts and disciplines.

Creative Editor 

FEMSPEC, an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal dedicated to challenging gender through speculative means in any genre, seeks a volunteer editorial collective member starting for 26.1 no later than January 1.

Duties include:

Attending collective meetings on a regular basis (now Friday 10:30 AM EST)

Receiving creative submissions to screen and coordinate peer-review 

Seeking creative submissions and reviewers through professional channels and personal networks, and by distribution of brochures at appropriate conferences and to Creative Writing programs

“Teaching Annie Baker”

Comparative Drama Conference

Madison, WI, July 9-11, 2026

Deadline: December 12, 2025

“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”

George Orwell, 1984

Call for Papers: Film International: Journal of World Cinema

Special Issue series: Diasporic Cinemas

View the full call here>>

https://www.intellectbooks.com/film-international-journal-of-world-cinema#call-for-papers

Series overview

We are excited to announce a new interdisciplinary seminar series for postgraduate students and early career researchers on the Long Middle Ages, a period covering the Late Antique, Medieval, and Early Modern Periods. This series aims to bring together scholars working across this period to establish new connectivity and inclusivity between these disciplines, and to provide a more relaxed space for new and emerging researchers to present and test out ideas.

Visual Cultures of the Medical Modern

A two-day conference to be held at Azim Premji Bengaluru, 19th - 20th February, 2026 co-

organized by the English and Media Studies group

About the conference:

The Kate Chopin International Society is seeking individual proposals for two sponsored panels at the 2026American Literature Association conference in Chicago, Illinois, May 20–23, 2026

The first panel, a roundtable on “Teaching Kate Chopin,” seeks short (seven- to eight-minute) papers/remarks that address anyaspect of or strategy for teaching Chopin’s life or work to today’s students—to students of any kind at any level using any materials or technology in any educational environment anywhere. Proposals should include a title, your name and affiliation, and a paragraph about your proposed remarks.

Violence: Legacies of Conflict in Ireland

Comhfhios Boston College

February 7th, 2026

Connolly House, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA

The Irish Studies Graduate Students of Boston College, in conjunction with the Irish Studies Program, are pleased to host the 9th annual Comhfhios Boston College conference. Comhfhios (pronounced “co-is”) meaning “knowledge together,” or “open to all knowledge,” invites emerging scholars in all Irish Studies fields to gather in Boston. 

“Care & Communities” - Shifting Tides, Anxious Borders (STAB) 2026

Binghamton University, Department of English 

Conference date: March 21, 2026

Submission deadline: January 31, 2026

“Dominator culture has tried to keep us all afraid, to make us choose safety instead of risk, sameness instead of diversity. Moving through that fear, finding out what connects us, revelling in our differences; this is the process that brings us closer, that gives us a world of shared values, of meaningful community.” 

-bell hooks, Teaching Community