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Children's Literature and Graphic Narrative

updated: 
Friday, September 5, 2025 - 9:21am
Routledge
deadline for submissions: 
Wednesday, October 1, 2025

In recent years, publishers and children’s book professionals have registered a new enthusiasm for comic and graphic narrative forms. Graphic narratives as children’s literature offer an exciting new type of text for children and youth, providing important insights into the interests and capabilities of these youngsters as readers and as potential agents of change. Curiously, children’s literature criticism has tended to ignore or, at best, marginalize comics and graphic narratives for young people. This “blind spot” in children’s literature and comics criticism, as Charles Hatfield has called it on a number of occasions, is now being addressed.

ACLA2026: W[h]ither Identity?: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Unselving

updated: 
Friday, September 5, 2025 - 9:21am
Suchismito Khatua (Stanford University) & Jenny Andrine Madsen Evang (Utrecht University)
deadline for submissions: 
Thursday, October 2, 2025

In Poetics of Dislocation, Meena Alexander recalls her childhood migration as an experience of “unselving.” The ocean that makes her an immigrant also dissolves inherited identities. Yet this loss, for Alexander, is generative: a crucible of poetic vision, where the self, fluid as tidewater, reshapes itself from poem to poem, contouring itself to each new shore that it meets. 

NEMLA 2026: (Re)generating Dickens Studies

updated: 
Friday, September 5, 2025 - 9:18am
The Dickens Society
deadline for submissions: 
Thursday, September 18, 2025

The Dickens Society invites submissions for its sponsored hybrid panel at the 57th NeMLA convention, which takes as its theme the concept of “(Re)generation.” This event, which utilizes the conference app Whova and Zoom to promote accessibility and hybridity, will be held in Pittsburgh, PA at the Wyndham Grand Downtown, on the Point from March 5-8, 2026.

Literature and Geography

updated: 
Friday, September 5, 2025 - 9:18am
Bloomsbury/SAMLA
deadline for submissions: 
Friday, January 16, 2026

Edouard Glissant and Michael Wiedorn call us to “think” with or like a geography. Evolving out of cultural studies, island and archipelagic studies have spurred a conversation regarding the connection between geography and culture. While Glissant and Wiedorn were particularly preoccupied with thinking (like) an archipelago, it is possible yet to conceive of other modes of geographical thought. Transatlantic, island, and even aquatic matrices of culture and geography have been well documented and studied. This panel welcomes submissions in the field of archipelagic and island studies and is particularly interested in papers exploring methods of geographical thought, the relationship between geography and culture, in the US South.

Non-Western Aesthetics: Rhetoric, Resistance, and Representation

updated: 
Friday, September 5, 2025 - 9:16am
NeMLA (Northeast Modern Language Association)
deadline for submissions: 
Friday, September 26, 2025

We invite submissions for a paper panel themed “Non-Western Aesthetics: Rhetoric, Resistance, and Representation” – an exploration of aesthetics from diverse cultural perspectives, non-Western rhetorical traditions, and globalized literary theory. Our aim is to examine non-Western, non-hegemonic discourses from non-White nations that incorporate indigenous critical approaches and local theories within artistic and literary practices. We are particularly interested in South and Southeast Asian literary and cultural studies.

Broad areas of exploration may include, but are certainly not limited to, the following literary and cultural theoretical perspectives:

INNOVATIONS IN PSYCHOLOGY AND WELLBEING OF NEW GENERATION

updated: 
Friday, September 5, 2025 - 9:15am
Global Center for Social Dynamic Research
deadline for submissions: 
Wednesday, September 10, 2025

Innovations in Psychology and Wellbeing of New Generation

The 21st century has brought unprecedented transformations in society, technology, and education. With these changes, the psychological wellbeing of the new generation has become a matter of urgent attention. Young people today face unique challenges—digital overload, academic pressures, identity conflicts, mental health issues, and social inequalities—while also benefiting from extraordinary opportunities enabled by technology, AI, and global connectivity.

Harry Ransom Center, 2026-2027 Fellowships

updated: 
Friday, September 5, 2025 - 9:14am
Harry Ransom Center
deadline for submissions: 
Monday, November 3, 2025

The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin invites applications for its 2026–2027 research fellowship program. Up to 50 fellowships will be awarded to support projects that require substantial on-site use of the Center’s internationally renowned collections in all areas of the humanities, including literature, photography, film, art, the performing arts, music, and cultural history.

DEADLINE EXTENDED- SAMLA 2025 (Atlanta, GA; Nov 6-Nov 8): "Reimagining Realities, Reclaiming Knowledge in Francophone Literature and Art."

updated: 
Thursday, September 4, 2025 - 5:53pm
South Atlantic Modern Language Association
deadline for submissions: 
Monday, September 8, 2025

This panel invites submissions that explore how Francophone African and Caribbean writers, filmmakers, and artists use their creative works, personal experiences, spiritual beliefs, and the power of imagination to offer new or alternative ways of seeing/saying, knowing, and experiencing the world. In what way(s) do their works seek to disrupt, challenge, or reimagine old power structures and commonly accepted Eurocentric knowledge systems within a postcolonial framework? Whether in terms of identity, culture, or history, how do these writers, filmmakers, and artists provoke us to rethink our individual or collective existence? What alternative realities or new ways of being-in-the-world do they envision as Africans or Caribbeans?

CFP "The Other Sophie Treadwell" - US Drama & Theatre Conference (June 2026)

updated: 
Thursday, September 4, 2025 - 12:15pm
Alice Clapie / Columbia University
deadline for submissions: 
Sunday, September 14, 2025

 

US Drama & Theatre Conference

Of Mutability and Malleability:

Re-imagining the Contours of US Theatre and Drama

10-13 June, 2026

University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès, France

 

The Other Sophie Treadwell

 

Blue, Green, and In-between: Critical Ecologies in South Asia

updated: 
Thursday, September 4, 2025 - 9:56am
Nisarga Bhattacharjee
deadline for submissions: 
Wednesday, September 10, 2025

Concept Note

The rapidly escalating planetary crisis has precipitated a profound epistemic rupture, compelling the humanities to reconfigure their disciplinary coordinates in dialogue with the ecological. The evolving domain of ecological humanities has taken on the task of interrogating not only the material devastation wrought by extractive capitalism, militarised modernities, and petrochemical globalisation, but also the conceptual frameworks—ontological, epistemological, and ethical—that have historically sustained such devastation.

Resurrecting Species: Speculative Engagements with De-Extinction

updated: 
Thursday, September 4, 2025 - 6:02am
Hannah Stark, University of Tasmania
deadline for submissions: 
Monday, December 1, 2025

De-extinction - the resurrection of extinct species by back breeding, gene editing or synthetic biology - is a rapidly advancing biopolitical technology of conservation science which aims to create proxies of previously extinct species. This collection advances that de-extinction is a cultural and political phenomenon that intersects, communicates, and speaks to the limits of scientific discourses. It offers an intervention into debates about de-extinction from the rich and innovative perspectives of the humanities, social sciences, and creative arts.

ACLA 2026: Climate Fictions Before Climate Change

updated: 
Thursday, September 4, 2025 - 6:02am
American Comparative Literature Association
deadline for submissions: 
Thursday, October 2, 2025

This seminar seeks to explore what we can learn about climate fiction and about literature’s role in understanding and addressing climate change when we look at literary texts written before climate change became a solidified discursive formation. Any discussion of climate presupposes a stable definition of the term within the scientific contexts that give it meaning, but the history of human activities that lead to human made climate change generally predates these discourses. Comparative work in the Environmental Humanities complicates dominant ideas about climate and interrogate the field’s tendency to focus on contemporary climate fiction.

Translation as Dialogue: Creative License, Crossover and Current Developments

updated: 
Thursday, September 4, 2025 - 3:42am
Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology Shibpur, HSS Department
deadline for submissions: 
Friday, September 5, 2025

Faculty Development Programme

Translation as Dialogue: Creative License, Crossover and Current Developments

 

Organized by
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology (IIEST), Shibpur

 

Important Dates

Cinematic Memory: Narrative, Recollection, and Identity

updated: 
Wednesday, September 3, 2025 - 7:11pm
David Ryan, University of San Francisco
deadline for submissions: 
Friday, October 31, 2025

Call for Proposals

Cinematic Memory: Narrative, Recollection, and Identity

Edited by David Ryan

______________________________________________________________________________

“I have to believe in a world outside my own mind. I have to believe that my actions still have meaning, even if I can’t remember them.”
Leonard Shelby, Memento (2000)

“Memories can be vile, repulsive little brutes. Like children, I suppose. But can we live without them?”
The Joker, Batman: The Killing Joke (2016)

Theoretical Inquiries, Critical Dialogues I–II

updated: 
Wednesday, September 3, 2025 - 4:05pm
Nesir: Journal of Literary Studies
deadline for submissions: 
Thursday, January 15, 2026

Nesir: Journal of Literary Studies invites submissions for its 10th issue (April 2026) and 12th issue (April 2027). These issues are open to original articles without thematic restriction, covering classical and contemporary literary theories, literary traditions, genres and discourses, text-based interpretations and analyses, as well as comparative and interdisciplinary studies. This call prioritizes approaches that consider literature as a mode of thought marked by conceptual depth and metaphorical dynamism, rather than as something confined to a single period or national context.

Call for Submissions: *SHHH! BREATHE SLOW!* – A One-Minute Horror Plays Anthology (Volume 4)

updated: 
Wednesday, September 3, 2025 - 2:45pm
Fresh Words-An International Literary Journal
deadline for submissions: 
Sunday, September 28, 2025

*Fresh Words* is now accepting submissions for its **Special One-Minute Horror Plays Anthology**, titled ***SHHH! BREATHE SLOW!* (Volume 4)**. We invite playwrights worldwide to submit original, spine-chilling short works that deliver maximum impact in just 60 seconds.

 

Website:  https://sites.google.com/view/freshwordsmagazine/announcements?authuser=0

Contested Authority, Trust in Transition. Making Sense of the American Landscape

updated: 
Wednesday, September 3, 2025 - 2:45pm
Heidelberg Center for American Studies (Germany)
deadline for submissions: 
Saturday, November 15, 2025

A conference hosted by the Graduiertenkolleg Authority and Trust (GKAT) at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies (HCA), Heidelberg University

Date: May 20–22, 2026
Location: Heidelberg Center for American Studies, Heidelberg

Literature and the Body: The Relations Between Being and Writing

updated: 
Wednesday, September 3, 2025 - 2:43pm
Nesir: Journal of Literary Studies
deadline for submissions: 
Saturday, August 1, 2026

Nesir: Journal of Literary Studies welcomes submissions for its October 2026 issue, which seeks to reconsider how literature translates bodily experience into writing and visibility, and how the body, in turn, discloses and shapes literary meaning.

The Global Political Novel - ACLA 2026 Montreal

updated: 
Wednesday, September 3, 2025 - 2:43pm
Aleksandar Stevic
deadline for submissions: 
Thursday, October 2, 2025

Back in the mid-twentieth century, the political novel used to be a respectable field of study, commanding the attention of influential critics like Irwing Howe. These days, not so much. In fact, most scholarly books with the phrase ‘political novel’ in the title published over the past three decades or so were not written by professional critics, but rather by historians and political scientists (including Christopher Harvie, John Uhr, and Stuart A. Scheingold).

SAMLA 97: Adventures in Ecocriticism

updated: 
Wednesday, September 3, 2025 - 1:03pm
SAMLA 97 - South Atlantic Modern Language Association
deadline for submissions: 
Monday, September 8, 2025

 

Note on Publishing Opportunity:

We have been encouraged by the general editor of the Bloomsbury Ecocritical Theory and Practice series, Douglas Vakoch, to submit a proposal for an edited collection based upon this CFP. If you're interested in submitting your conference presentation as a proposed book chapter, please let us know in your submission. Bloomsbury requests chapters of at least 6000 words with at least one author with a PhD. More information on the series may be found here: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/series/ecocritical-theory-and-practice/ 

Panel CFP

Death, Dying, and Decolonisation: Legacies and Politics of Commemoration (ACLA 2026)

updated: 
Wednesday, September 3, 2025 - 3:35am
Dr Devaleena Kundu, UPES, Dehradun
deadline for submissions: 
Thursday, October 2, 2025

See ACLA (American Comparative Literature Association) listing for submission portal: https://www.acla.org/seminar/10bd9b61-e065-472a-8698-c8949a85f069 


Paper proposals cannot be accepted via email.


Death Studies is a field of study that not only draws from a host of disciplines like anthropology, sociology, philosophy, and psychology but also cuts across fields such as bereavement studies, trauma studies, and health humanities. 

CFP ACLA 2026: Be(Long)ing in Planetary Space

updated: 
Wednesday, September 3, 2025 - 12:07am
American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), Annual meeting 2026
deadline for submissions: 
Thursday, October 2, 2025

Be(Long)ing in Planetary Space

 

"Thinking Dickens" (2026 Dickens Society Symposium)

updated: 
Tuesday, September 2, 2025 - 10:14pm
The Dickens Society
deadline for submissions: 
Sunday, January 4, 2026

We invite papers on the cerebral Dickens, but also on “the mind of the heart” (David Copperfield): on how Charles Dickens thought, but also how and what we think about him. Suitable topics might include:

  • Dickens and philosophy, psychology, statistics, or the natural sciences

  • Dickens and his intellectual friends and contemporaries, such as Thomas Carlyle and George Eliot

  • How Dickens and his readers develop ideas through and by means of language

  • Plotting, planning, and making connections

NEMLA 2026: (Re)generating Dickens Studies

updated: 
Tuesday, September 2, 2025 - 10:14pm
The Dickens Society
deadline for submissions: 
Monday, September 8, 2025

The Dickens Society invites submissions for its sponsored hybrid panel at the 57th NeMLA convention, which takes as its theme the concept of “(Re)generation.” This event, which utilizes the conference app Whova and Zoom to promote accessibility and hybridity, will be held in Pittsburgh, PA at the Wyndham Grand Downtown, on the Point from March 5-8, 2026.

Lorefest 2025

updated: 
Tuesday, September 2, 2025 - 10:14pm
Texas A&M University, the departments of Performance, Visualization and Fine Arts (PVFA) and English
deadline for submissions: 
Friday, October 3, 2025

SUBJECT: Lorefest Call for Papers

Lorefest – Oct 29-Nov 01, 2025. Lorefest Conference 9am-5pm, Nov 01, 2025, Texas A&M University,

College Station, TX.

Lorefest is an annual festival combining scholarly research and creative practice

inspired by local and “glocal” (i.e. globally-inspired, locally-rooted) folklore. It brings together

the Texas A&M student body, their family and friends, and local Bryan/College Station

communities culminating in a four-day event in late October/early November. Its organizers

Online Talk Series - Gothic, Horror, Folklore and the Supernatural

updated: 
Tuesday, September 2, 2025 - 10:14pm
Romancing the Gothic
deadline for submissions: 
Saturday, December 20, 2025

Romancing the Gothic Talk Series

This talk series offers online talks each week and has a global audience and speaker pool. Talks are 40-45 minutes and are run (in real time) twice to catch different time zones. An honorarium is offered. Our categories, laid out below, allow for flexibility. Please contact me (details at the end) if you have any questions. We strongly encourage speakers to attend other sessions as well as there own and join in with the community!

REMINDER: Working With Tainted Legacies (virtual NeMLA panel)

updated: 
Tuesday, September 2, 2025 - 10:14pm
Northeast Modern Language Association
deadline for submissions: 
Tuesday, September 30, 2025

Weeks after the death of Nobel Prize-winning author Alice Munro last year, her daughter Andrea Skinner disclosed the sexual abuse she'd suffered as a child—abuse about which Munro had known and stayed silent. The disclosure is but one of many revelations in recent years to upend the legacy of a cultural icon. Neil Gaiman, Louis CK, Jean Vanier, and Avital Ronell are only a few public figures to be reassessed in the wake of accounts of sexual abuse. Similarly, disputed claims to Indigenous ancestry touted by artists including novelist Joseph Boyden and singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie have generated outrage and heartbreak among Indigenous groups and innumerable admirers, compounding generational traumas.

Call for Chapters: Religion, Conversion and Cultural Memory in Indian Diasporic Women’s Writing

updated: 
Tuesday, September 2, 2025 - 10:14pm
University of Delhi
deadline for submissions: 
Tuesday, September 30, 2025

We invite chapter proposals for an edited scholarly collection that critically examines the religious dimensions of Indian diasporic women’s literature, with a specific focus on conversion, resistance, and cultural memory. This volume will explore how women writers from the Caribbean, South Africa, Fiji, Mauritius, and other sites of indenture engage with Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam, addressing the gendered and ideological tensions of community rupture, religious fidelity, and transgenerational transmission in diasporic settings.

Mapping the Black Digital and Public Humanities - Call for Projects

updated: 
Tuesday, September 2, 2025 - 10:14pm
Mapping the Black Digital and Public Humanities
deadline for submissions: 
Friday, May 1, 2026

Mapping the Black Digital and Public Humanities formally invites Black Digital/Public Humanities project directors to submit their projects to our interactive map and searchable database of 650+ international Black Digital/Public Humanities projects.

Mapping BDPH is an interactive and searchable map of digital and public humanities projects related to Black history & culture. The goals of this project are threefold: 

  • to help people find digital and public projects about Black history and culture by topic, type, location, contributors, and more.

(NeMLA 26 Roundtable) Mad Echoes in Contemporary Regeneration(s)

updated: 
Tuesday, September 2, 2025 - 10:13pm
Northeast MLA Convention
deadline for submissions: 
Tuesday, September 30, 2025

This roundtable will explore the theme of mad echoes within contemporary (re)generations of literature and her/their/history. The term (re)generation calls forth processes of renewing or restoring something that has been lost or damaged. Damage and loss have been ways of speaking about the lasting and ongoing violences against marginalized bodies that have been labeled as Mad, pathologized, or institutionalized, but the limits of these concepts have been contested, perhaps most notably in Eve Tuck’s “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities,” which interrogates the (un)helpfulness of damage-focused research to the pursuit of justice and wellbeing for members of marginalized communities.

Queer Phenomenology at 20 (ACLA 2026)

updated: 
Tuesday, September 2, 2025 - 10:13pm
Tia Glista
deadline for submissions: 
Thursday, October 2, 2025

In her 2006 book Queer Phenomenology: Objects, Orientations, Others, Sara Ahmed asks how we are oriented and how we come to find our way. Ahmed thus thinks across queer feminist theories of sexuality and traditional phenomenology, evaluating the latter’s efforts to bring what is commonplace or taken-for-granted into focus, and doing so through matrices of gender, race, and sexuality.

The Uncanny and Sublime: The Liminality of Knowledge

updated: 
Tuesday, September 2, 2025 - 10:13pm
South Atlantic Modern Language Association: SAMLA
deadline for submissions: 
Saturday, September 6, 2025

FINAL CALL for papers: 1 spot remaining

This panel interrogates the title “The Uncanny and Sublime: The Liminality of Knowledge” by asking: what constitutes knowledge when it emerges from thresholds—moments of affect, disorientation, or aesthetic rupture? How does the liminal “unknowing” of the uncanny and sublime inform new modes of intellectual inquiry? Does this liminality reorient traditional ways of thought?

Odour and Order: Smell, Culture and Representation

updated: 
Tuesday, September 2, 2025 - 10:13pm
Nisan Karaca Odabasi, Cornelia Wächter (Technische Universität Dresden)
deadline for submissions: 
Friday, October 31, 2025

Odour and Order: Smell, Culture and Representation

 

Keynote: Jonathan Reinarz (University of Birmingham)

 

Human, Machine, Empire: Embodied AI and Postcolonial Agency

updated: 
Tuesday, September 2, 2025 - 10:13pm
ACLA 2026 Annual Meeting Seminar
deadline for submissions: 
Thursday, October 2, 2025

In the age of Artificial Intelligence, more accurately, the “age of AI Empire” (Tacheva and Ramasubramanian 2023), machines are no longer defined solely by their ability to process information. They are increasingly imagined as also capable of emotion, bodily awareness and interaction with the natural environment. This seminar examines the representation of embodied AI in literature and digital media focusing on the interrelationships between humans and the more-than-human alongside the growing emphasis on the body as a site of knowledge.

SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY -- SWPACA Call for Papers

updated: 
Tuesday, September 2, 2025 - 10:13pm
Southwest Popular and American Culture Association
deadline for submissions: 
Friday, October 31, 2025

Call for Papers

SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY

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: October 31, 2025

 

Science, Technology, and Culture -- SWPACA Call for Papers

updated: 
Tuesday, September 2, 2025 - 10:13pm
Southwest Popular and American Culture Association
deadline for submissions: 
Friday, October 31, 2025

Call for Papers

Science, Technology, and Culture

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: October 31, 2025

 

CFP: MYSTERY & DETECTIVE FICTION AREA

updated: 
Tuesday, September 2, 2025 - 10:12pm
Popular Culture Association (PCA/ACA) National Conference
deadline for submissions: 
Sunday, November 30, 2025

The Mystery & Detective Fiction Area of the Popular Culture Association invites proposals for the 56th annual conference in Atlanta, Georgia, April 8-11, 2026, to be held at the Atlanta Marriott Marquis.

We seek proposals from researchers, academics, graduate students, and independent scholars for scholarly discussions on all aspects and periods of mystery and detective fiction. Interdisciplinary approaches are strongly encouraged.

We ask that proposals extend existing scholarship in new directions and avoid plot summary or review. Proposals should have a clear and focused argument that can be developed adequately in a 15-minute presentation.

Some possible topics for the 2026 conference:

Founder’s Chic and America’s Future National Memory [ID 271]

updated: 
Tuesday, September 2, 2025 - 10:12pm
ASECS
deadline for submissions: 
Monday, September 22, 2025

I invite you to please consider submitting a abstract for the following panel to be hosted ASECS (American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies) at the 2026 Conference. This conference will be help April 9-11 in Philadelphia.

New Directions in Italian Language and Culture Teaching: North American Perspectives

updated: 
Tuesday, September 2, 2025 - 10:11pm
University of Guelph - CAIS
deadline for submissions: 
Monday, September 15, 2025

CAIS Fall Teaching Symposium

New Directions in Italian Language and Culture Teaching: North American Perspectives

October 25, 2025

University of Guelph and Online

 

The Canadian Association for Italian Studies invites proposals for a one-day conference, with in-person panels to be held at the University of Guelph and online panels via Zoom, that offers an opportunity to reflect on the current state of the evolving field of Italian language pedagogy in North America.

The World of World Literatures: Practices, Pedagogies, and Possibilities (ACLA 2026)

updated: 
Tuesday, September 2, 2025 - 2:58am
American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), Annual Convention 2026
deadline for submissions: 
Thursday, October 2, 2025


Seminar title: The World of World Literatures: Practices, Pedagogies, and Possibilities

Organizers: Dr. Mir Islam, Nalanda University, India. Arunav Das, University of South Carolina, USA

American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), Annual Convention 2026, Montreal, Canada


Abstract Submission Deadline: October 2, 2025. Must be submitted through the ACLA portal. 

ACLA annual convention: February 26 - March 1, 2026. Montreal, Canada (In-person) 

More info: https://www.acla.org/annual-meeting 

Gendered Modalities of Remembering in South Asian Literatures

updated: 
Tuesday, September 2, 2025 - 2:21am
Department of Liberal Arts, Indian Institute of Technology Bhilai
deadline for submissions: 
Tuesday, September 30, 2025

Department of Liberal Arts
Indian Institute of Technology Bhilai

presents

Gendered Modalities of Remembering in South Asian literatures

A National Conference
15–16 January 2026

Call for Papers

Concept Note:

Deadline Extended: Concealed Identities, Stage Personas, and Masked Singers in Heavy Metal

updated: 
Monday, September 1, 2025 - 7:59pm
Studies in Heavy Metal Music & Culture
deadline for submissions: 
Monday, September 15, 2025

We invite chapters for a multi-disciplinary edited collection exploring heavy metal and rock bands that use concealed identities, stage personas and masks as a substantial part of their performance and aesthetic. Hidden identities are not a new phenomenon in either popular music generally or heavy metal/hard rock music more narrowly, as performers obscuring their identity through face paint, masks, and wigs goes back over half a century and encompasses bands including Kiss, Slipknot, and Gwar. New masked bands, including Sleep Token and Ghost, have recently risen to widespread popularity.

CFP ACLA 2026: Impudent Flesh: Thinking Bodies & Material Life

updated: 
Monday, September 1, 2025 - 5:53pm
American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) 2026 Seminar
deadline for submissions: 
Thursday, October 2, 2025

“And away above all with the body, that idée fixe of the senses!” Nietzsche has philosophy proclaim. For it is “infected with every error of logic there is, refuted, impossible even,” and “impudent enough to behave as if it actually existed.” The body has long been one of philosophy’s more persistent preoccupations as it’s impossible to define without distortion yet impossible to fully discard. From Plato’s call to transcend the body in search of truth to Descartes’ relegation of the body to mere extension, philosophy has long sought to escape or sanitize embodiment. Even phenomenology, which counters the Cartesian account, privileges the lived body of perception over the objective, material body and its historical conditions.

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