Global Cinema Symposium

Organized by the Harry W. Bass Jr. School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology

 
Nov. 13-14, 2026

In-person at the University of Texas at Dallas

Keynote Speakers:

Professor Katarzyna Marciniak, Occidental College

Professor Meta Mazaj, University of Pennsylvania

Call for Papers

Abstract

This session invites papers exploring the role of affect and emotion in contemporary world literature. Recent developments in affect theory—particularly the work of Sara Ahmed and Lauren Berlant—have emphasized how emotions circulate across individuals, communities, and cultural contexts. Literary texts offer a powerful site for examining how affect shapes narratives of identity, belonging, and social transformation within global and transnational frameworks.

The everlasting debates surrounding the relationship between literature and film as distinct mediums of artistic expression have long fascinated both philosophy and critical theory. While proponents of cinema argue that cinema is superior to other forms of artistic expression, especially literature, in the sense that it has a unique ability to engage emotions, convey abstract concepts in tangible settings, and challenge, what Gilles Deleuze might call, human “sensory-motor” perception through cinematic techniques, others might disagree by saying that cinema is inferior to literature due to its passive nature and over-reliance on immediate sensory experience rather than intellectual abstraction, which is one of the major characteristics of literature.

[please note the updated conference date and timeline]

National Video Games: Cultures, Industries, Communities
international conference

4–6 December 2026
University of Warsaw, Poland

Deadline Extension: We are happy to announce that we continue to accept submissions until April 10, 2026. You may find further information on our website: www.thescatteredpelican.ca

Throughout the history of political thought and cultural production, multitudes and mobs that stir up disturbance across the nation, whether revolutionary or reactionary, have frequently been portrayed by the images and metaphors of monstrosity. From the many-headed hydra which was adapted into a political discourse in the early modern age and later revisited by historians such as Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, to contemptuous terms toward the insurrectionists such as swarms or locusts described in Samuel Dolbee’s Locusts of Power, monstrosity and various of dehumanizing terms have long been employed as a signifier through which fears of insurrections are expressed.

The advancement of artificial intelligence has transformed humanities research and education, deepening computation’s influence on scholarly practice and everyday life. From the early era of “humanities computing” in the 1970s to the rise of “computational humanities” over the past decade, this trajectory highlights the enduring—and expanding—role of computation in shaping inquiry across the humanities. These intersections are especially visible in interdisciplinary work. As T. S. Eliot observes, “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” The same spirit can illuminate how methods and tools migrate across fields.

Panel Stream: Early American Forms and Formalisms This panel stream interrogates formalism in early American literature following a postcritical turn in the field. One result of literary studies’ recent postcritical turn has been renewed attention to aesthetics, feeling, and form as essential aspects of literary analysis. In early American studies, this reassessment has taken a distinctive shape, particularly in work that foregrounds the formal and aesthetic dimensions of literary culture across the long eighteenth century — from special issues and essay collections (Looby and Weinstein; Cahill and Larkin; Pethers and Koenigs; Pethers and Couch) to monographs (Armstrong and Tennenhouse; Koenigs, Couch, Tawil, Gardner, Garrett).

FellowshipsHoratio Alger Fellowship for the Study of American Popular Culture

The 123rd Annual Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA) Conference will take place this November in Seattle, Washington, from November 12-15.

Our panel will focus on American Literature from 1945 to the present. The category of “literature” includes imaginative works (fiction, poetry, drama) but also essays, memoirs, or creative nonfiction. This session investigates texts that are written by American-identifying authors, composed by writers in the US, or address American life.

International conference co-organized

with the French School of Athens

From imagination to remains, from remains to imagination: literary representations of ancient Greece in its materiality (14th-19th centuries)

February 25-26, 2027 at the French School of Athens

This special session invites papers on zombies and the undead as figures through which literature, film, television, games, and popular culture imagine power, hierarchy, and social conflict. In keeping with PAMLA 2026’s theme, “Our Ruling Classes: Culture, Power, Conflict,” this panel explores how zombie narratives dramatize the fragility of social order, the failures of ruling elites, and the tensions between collective survival and unequal power.

The volume Women's Autobiographies and Memoirs 1920-2025: Precarity, Resistance and Selfhood attempts to look into the dialectics of identity and writing - the compulsion to respond to the other inhabiting the self, which provokes in her something peculiar and singular - a text of one's own. The self-authenticated narratives are often haunted by many an unsubduable voice that breaks open the self-centred finitude of living and dying.

Call for Papers

ATHE Theory & Criticism Graduate Student Essay Contest 

The ATHE Theory & Criticism Focus Group seeks papers for its annual Graduate Student Essay Contest. The contest presents an exciting opportunity for an emergent theatre and performance studies scholar. It introduces the winning writer to the ATHE conference and provides them with a venue in which to showcase their work. 

The contest prizes are intended to support the development of the student’s academic work, ease financial challenges related to conference attendance, and connect the student with appropriate scholarly resources for the paper’s development and impact. 

Translational Research and Teaching: Bridging Knowledge, Practice, and Community October 29-November 1, 2026 Panama City, Florida 

Hosted in partnership by Florida State University, Florida A&M University, and the University of Mississippi 

The Association for Interdisciplinary Studies (AIS) is pleased to invite proposals for our 48th annual conference. AIS 2026 focuses on the theme of Translational Research and Teaching, exploring interdisciplinary work that bridges the gap between researchers, educators, practitioners, and community partners.

Call for Chapter Proposals: Tana French and Ireland Deadline for abstract submissions:May 1, 2026 Deadline for paper submissions:November 1, 2026 contact email:escheible@bridgew.edu Popular genre fiction offers an influential platform for the critique of Irish cultural containment and the victimization of women. Despite commercial dominance, genre fiction holds a complicated position in the literary marketplace, which carries over to scholarly appraisals.

The Call for Papers of the academic journal The Grove. Working Papers on English Studies for its following volume is open until May 31, 2026. Volume 33 will be published in December 2026.

The Grove is a peer-reviewed, indexed periodical. Published annually and distributed both nationally and internationally, The Grove is sponsored by the research group HUM-271 of the Regional Andalusian Government, published by the University of Jaén (Spain).

The primary scope of The Grove is literatures in English, critical theory, English language and linguistics, translation, English as a foreign language and cultural studies.

Queer Heroes and Queer Villains

54th Annual Conference on South Asia, October 28-31, 2026

“Literary texts are not, of course, merely passive conduits. They actively shape what the technologies mean and what the scientific theories signify in cultural contexts […] culture circulates through science no less than science circulates through culture.” (Hayles How We Became Posthuman 21) We can expand this view beyond science and technology. All aspects of human cultures circulate in artistic productions, most notably in prose fiction, and in return, fiction has the potential to influence cultures and to inspire innovations.

Call for Papers

Digital & Analog Cultures

Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)

2026 SWPACA Summer Salon

June 25-27, 2026

Virtual Conference

https://swpaca.org/

Submissions open on March 30, 2026

Proposal submission deadline: April 27, 2026

This roundtable, inspired by the 2026 PAMLA conference theme “Our Ruling Classes: Culture, Power, Conflict,” invites short (5-minute) presentations on possible approaches and challenges to teaching figures who have been rejected by cancel culture for their harmfully dated representations of marginalized figures and communities or their creators’ mistreatment of other people or toxic attitudes: writers like Mark Twain, Vladimir Nabokov, and J.K. Rowling; filmmakers from Alfred Hitchcock to Woody Allen; and performers like Kevin Spacey and Louis C.K. Possible approaches might include:

Call for PapersLiterature-General Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA) 2026 SWPACA Summer Salon June 25-27, 2026Virtual Conferencehttps://swpaca.org/Submissions open on March 30, 2026Proposal submission deadline: April 27, 2026 Proposals for papers are now being accepted for the SWPACA Summer Salon. SWPACA offersnearly 70 subject areas in a variety of categories encompassing the following: Film, Television,Music, & Visual Media; Historic & Contemporary Cultures; Identities & Cultures; Language &Literature; Science Fiction & Fantasy; and Pedagogy & Popular Culture.

Call For Proposals
The Upstart Crows: The Beatles and the British Literary Tradition
(Edited Volume)

Deadline for Submissions:
November 1, 2026

Contact email:
tpace@jcu.edu