The Future is Past: Rethinking Dystopia in Contemporary Film and Literature
submission link: https://www.acla.org/seminar/8f71b36f-66a1-437f-bb70-25512282c0b6
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submission link: https://www.acla.org/seminar/8f71b36f-66a1-437f-bb70-25512282c0b6
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: SPECIAL ANTHOLOGY OF ONE-MINUTE PLAYS / MONOLOGUES ‘REWRITING SHAKESPEARE’ (Volume 2)
Website: Fresh Words: An International Literary Magazine - Announcements
Deadline: October 28, 2025
FRESH WORDS – An International Literary Magazine is thrilled to announce the call for submissions for Volume 2 of its acclaimed special anthology: ‘Rewriting Shakespeare’—a curated collection of bold, inventive, and contemporary one-minute plays and monologues that reimagine the timeless works of William Shakespeare.
By 2026, all nine volumes of The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins will be published, including the much-anticipated final volume in the series, Poetry. The 2026 international Hopkins conference will focus on the new research possibilities and provocations afforded by the texts. Hopkins 2026 will be held in historic Salem, Massachusetts (USA), at Salem State University, and will feature a Hopkins display and reception at the Burns Library, Boston College.
Topics could include:
Through their intricately textured scenes and characters, the ten plays of August Wilson’s American Century Cycle chart the epic historical contours and idiomatic genius of Black American life across the entire twentieth century. Despite his plans for continued literary production after the Cycle’s completion, Wilson died shortly after the final play (Radio Golf)’s world premiere in 2005.
Two decades hence, and now in the second quarter of the twenty-first century, Wilson’s presence and prescience in American culture are not only enduring but expanding:
This special issue of Public Art Dialogue invites scholarly contributions (research articles, short essays, and artists’ projects) that examine the enduring visual, spatial, and ideological legacies of colonialism in public spaces across the Pacific world. It seeks to explore how imperial legacies forged transoceanic connections that continue to shape the public sphere through means including but not limited to monuments, architecture, civic rituals, theater, dance, street art, and performative acts.
As environmental crises intensify, ecocriticism has emerged as a vital interdisciplinary lens for examining how literature and media represent, challenge, and reimagine human relationships with the natural world. Invested in the idea that, in such times, the center cannot [and should not] hold, this seminar explores how queer ecocritical approaches reveal the de-centering cultural, ethical, and political possibilities embedded in apocalyptic environmental narratives in both literary texts and visual media.
What stories can we tell of the vanishing mediator? Is it an irreducible kernel of transition between two different configurations of the social structure, or is it only imagined retrospectively, as the transient possibility of another world? Fredric Jameson shows, paradigmatically, that the Protestant ethic functions as "the vanishing mediator" in Max Weber's historical narrative between medieval society and modern capitalism, the "catalytic agent which permits an exchange of energies between two otherwise mutually exclusive terms." Slavoj Žižek adopts the term for his conception of subjectivity, where the subject exists as the transcendental excess of its symbolic universe—as an irremediable gap and a site of transformation.
Seminar title: Transgender Storytelling: Accounts of Oppositional Being and Becoming
Seminar link: https://www.acla.org/seminar/c997c5c5-09fd-4307-ba24-29af11d554d6
Organizers: Clarke Crockett and Ezekiel Greenwood, Florida State University, USA
American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), Annual Convention 2026, Montreal, Canada
Abstract Submission Deadline: October 2, 2025. Must be submitted through the ACLA portal.
This panel is interested in the close historical association between the discourse of fetishism in anti-capitalist critique, and representations of Indigenous peoples. William Pietz argues that, prior to the adoption of the fetish as an object of anthropological inquiry in the 19th century, the discourse of fetishism emerged as an offshoot of the Christian theory of idolatry. Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism, in turn, “was a vivid way of suggesting to his readers that the truth of capital was to be grasped from a perspective alien to that of bourgeois understanding, which knows capital exclusively through its own categories” (Pietz).
For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me.
-Vladimir Nabokov, The Eye
The Cornell Medieval Studies Program is pleased to announce the 36th annual Medieval Studies Student Colloquium (MSSC) in person at Cornell University’s A.D. White House on Saturday February 21, 2026. This year’s theme is “Mirror Worlds.”
You are invited to submit an abstract for this panel for the Northeast Modern Language Association Convention to be held on March 5–8, 2026 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania at the Wyndham Grand Hotel Downtown.
This VIRTUAL panel invites papers on “Dismantling the Neocolonial Maritime Archive: Indigenous Oceanic Epistemologies” for NeMLA 57th Annual Convention to be held on March 5-8, 2026.
The panel addresses how West Asian, South Asian, and Gulf literatures regenerate the power of oceanic precarity that propels newer modes of decolonial resistance and resilience to interrogate and distrust the rigid structures that propagate epistemic violence and archival control.
NeMLA’s 57th Annual Convention (Virtual Session)
Conference Date: March 5-8, 2026
Abstract Submission Deadline: September 30, 2025
All presentations will be delivered via Zoom.
Session Title: Touching the World at the Speed of Light: Community and Conflict in the Global Village
NeMLA’s 57th Annual Convention (Virtual Session)
Conference Date: March 5-8, 2026
Abstract Submission Deadline: September 30, 2025
All presentations will be delivered via Zoom.
Session Title: Touching the World at the Speed of Light: Community and Conflict in the Global Village
In recent decades, Black Studies has witnessed important work on the ways in which the overrepresentation of ‘man’ and the invisibilization of whiteness have functioned in service of a range of im/material violences. Our aesthetic and political investments, therefore, lie in arguments and examples that unsettle the imposed relationalities and the representational economy of what Saidiya Hartman calls the “racial calculus”, Katherine McKittrick considers as the “mathematics of unlivingness” and Christina Sharpe terms the “orthographies of the wake”.
Howells Society CFPs for ALA 2026 (Chicago)
The W.D. Howells Society will host two panels at the American Literature Association’s 37th annual conference, which will meet at the Palmer House in Chicago, May 20-23, 2026 (Wednesday through Saturday of Memorial Day weekend).
PANEL 1: HOWELLS & MEDIA
This panel invites papers that discuss transpacific, transnational, and cross-racial relations in Asian/American literature. How can literature facilitate the “(Re)generation” of solidarities and exchanges across identities and borders? How can it offer a site of intimacy, which Lisa Lowe defines as “the implied but less visible forms of alliance, affinity, and society among variously colonized peoples beyond the metropolitan national center”? How does literature generate discourses around cross-group tension, conflict, identifications, and disidentifications? How do literary and social forms reflect and reformulate each other, within and across nations? Where do Asian American studies and Global Asian studies meet and diverge?
PCA True Crime CFP 2026
Abstract Submission Deadline: November 30th, 2025
PCA/ACA will be held from April 8-11th, 2026 in Atlanta, GA
True Crime typically focuses on investigative journalism used to present a mystery or attempt to understand the psychology of a crime/perpetrator. It may include narratives of a case, victimology, forensics, or analysis of evidence, although each case is different. Much of True Crime focuses on serial killers/killings, although subsets of the genre may delve into topics such as kidnappings, cults, wrongful convictions, advocacy, white-collar crimes, trial proceedings, prevention of crime, survivor stories, or sensationalism/entertainment.
Ireland has often been held to be somehow exceptional, an island on the edge of Europe whose historical, social and cultural trajectories have at times led it to diverge in surprising ways from both its nearest neighbour, Great Britain, and the wider world. This perception of Irish exceptionalism has long played a role in how the island has been understood both within and beyond its borders.
Call for Book Chapters
Proposed for Routledge/ Asian Studies Association of Australia (ASAA) South Asian Series
Seeking submissions for a co-edited collection entitled:
Matrifocal Narratives in Indian Fiction
Co-Editors: Sushree Routray, Rashmi Gaur, and Rahul K. Gairola
Popular Culture Association: British Popular Culture
Call for Papers
The British Popular Culture area of the Popular Culture/American Culture Association (PCA/ACA) is now accepting submissions for the 2026 national conference to be held April 8-11, 2026, in Atlanta, GA at the Atlanta Marriott Marquis!
Academics at all stages in their careers, as well as independent scholars, are encouraged to apply. We particularly encourage submissions by graduate students.
Jürgen Habermas suggested that it is through communicative action, that is reasoned and open discourse, that we transmit, change, and recreate cultural knowledge, and that in so-doing we can achieve mutual understanding.
Communicative action and communicative rationality are self-reflexive dialogues through which we can learn from others, question dominant paradigms, and advocate for cultural change.
Call for Papers
ETKI: Journal of Literature, Theatre and Culture Studies
ETKI: Journal of Literature, Theatre and Culture Studies invites submissions for the New issue of the journal - a general issue on literature, theatre and culture studies.
Tragedy and Resistance, 16-17 April, 2026
Literaturforum im Brecht-Haus, Berlin (https://lfbrecht.de/)
Keynote Speakers:
Against Evidence Otherwise:
Bad Faith and Antiblackness in Education & Society
Under Contract with Brill Publishing
Edited by Amir A. Gilmore, Washington State University
What is to be done in a world of near universal sense of superiority to, if not universal hatred of, Black folk?
–Lewis R. Gordon (1997, p. 1)
I know I am a Human because I am not Black. I know I am not Black because when and if I experience the kind of violence Blacks experience there is a reason.
Call for Chapter Proposals – A Companion to Marxist Aesthetics
Editor: Kishore Kumar K. P. (Department of Philosophy, University of Kerala)
We invite chapter proposals for contributions to A Companion to Marxist Aesthetics, a comprehensive and cutting-edge volume that explores the historical evolution, critical debates, and contemporary relevance of aesthetic theory grounded in the Marxian tradition.
This companion is intended to serve as a definitive reference work for scholars, students, and researchers working in philosophy, literary theory, political aesthetics, cultural studies, art history, and adjacent disciplines.
Scope and Aim
Today, Bollywood is not merely an industry of Indian films representing the national cinema but also a global cultural phenomenon. From the singsong dance sequences on YouTube to its widespread circulation on Netflix, Amazon Prime, and regional streaming platforms, Bollywood redefines South Asian identities and how they are consumed, contested, and celebrated across the globe. Moreover, the intertwining of questions on cultural appropriation, culturalized representation, caste, gender, and diasporic negotiations emerges with renewed urgency and visibility.
Call for paper proposals - DEADLINE SEPTEMBER 30th
Please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words and a short (ca. 50 words) bio to the NeMLA portal at this link: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21839.
In periods of economic and cultural crisis, cui bono? Who benefits? How are accounts kept, and gains accounted for? Who is accountable and who is not? What forms does the balance sheet take? What is its narrative and who gets to construct it? How is creative accounting investigated?
(Un)natural Stevenson
Wild transgressions across literature, ecology, science and gender
Ca’ Foscari University of Venice
11-12 May 2026
Aula Baratto
Organizers: Lucio De Capitani & Alessandro Cabiati
Imagining the Impossible: International Journal for the Fantastic in Contemporary Media
CFP for Volume 5, Issue 1 (2026) Theme: Ciphers and Codes
Call for Abstracts (Themed Issue 2/26 and Accompanying Workshop)
“Fan Practices of Memory and Remembrance”
Deadline for Proposals: December 1st, 2025
Workshop Date: February 27th, 2026, in Marburg/Germany
Call for Papers
Pets and Pet-Owner Relationships in Literary Texts of the Long Eighteenth Century
(Edited Collection)
INTERNATIONAL DAVID FOSTER WALLACE CONFERENCE IN AUSTIN
June 4-6, 2026
University of Texas, Austin
CALL FOR PAPERS
#DFW26
To mark the 30th anniversary of the publication of Infinite Jest, the 2026 David Foster Wallace Conference invites papers examining Wallace’s masterwork.
Graduate Research Meet
11th Edition
Perspectives in Humanities and Social Sciences: Trends, Methods and Challenges
Concept Note:
In the mid-nineteenth century, the literacy rates among women and girls were on the rise. This was due to changing attitudes toward educating girls and women and the increasing popularity and availability of reading materials aimed at girls and women. Authors such as Lydia Maria Child, Louisa May Alcott, Juliana Horatia Ewing, E.D.E.N. Southworth, L.T. Meade, and Sarah Tytler wrote works specifically for girls, from novels and short stories to periodicals and conduct manuals.
The paradigmatic scene in a Western – witnessed in numerous movies, such as High Noon (1952), The Gunfight at the OK Corral (1957), or Tombstone (1993), as well as in classic western novels, such as Louis L’Amour’s The Lonesome Gods (1983) or Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove (1985) – is that of a confrontation between a sheriff and a bandit: it suggests the forces of civilization taking hold on the frontier, even if tentatively, and ultimately a triumph of the order imposed to protect those in need of protection.
The 57th Annual Northeast Modern Language Association Convention will be held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.
Conference Dates - March 5-8, 2026
Topic - Reclaiming History: Trauma, Memory and Resilience in the Narratives from Africa
Deadline for Abstract Submission - September 30th 2025
Modality - hybrid (in-person but accepting remote presentations)
Overview -
LANGUAGE AND THE INEFFABLE: EXPRESSING THE INEXPRESSIBLE
8th Annual International Comparative Literature Conference Louisiana State University March 27-28, 2026 (Friday-Saturday) Virtual Format
Conference Theme
What happens when language encounters its own limits? This year's conference explores how writers, thinkers, and artists across cultures and centuries have grappled with expressing experiences that seem to transcend ordinary language—the mystical, the traumatic, the sublime, the deeply personal, and the utterly foreign.
The 25th Vagantes Conference on Medieval Studies will be hosted by The University of Rochester in Rochester, New York, April 9-11, 2026. Vagantes is an interdisciplinary community of junior and early career scholars that offers an ideal opportunity for sharing new research. The conference accepts submissions on any topic pertaining to the long Middle Ages. We encourage submissions from scholars across all disciplines that engage with medieval studies and welcome work that explores medieval culture, religion, philosophy, literature, art, historiography, as well as medievalisms and reception studies.
PERFORMANCE MATTERS
https://performancematters-thejournal.com/
Call for Papers: “On Being There”
Call for Papers
Teaching Literary Maximalism
Fourth Alumni Research Conference on Linguistics, Literature, Didactics and Communication – 2025
Prishtina: 01.11.2025 - 01.11.2025
Organizer:
AAB College - Faculty of Foreign Languages, Faculty of Mass Communication, Faculty of Social Sciences, Faculty of Public Administration
In partnership with:
Call For Papers Nº 26 (Summer 2026)
"Touch Screen. Imaginaries of Hapticity in Audiovisual Media"
Call for Papers
The consolidation of food studies as a serious academic discipline has coincided with the extraordinary proliferation of food-related cultural forms—ranging from memoirs, cookbooks, and culinary novels to food documentaries, blogs, and digital platforms. These developments remind us that food is not merely a biological necessity, but a symbolic system that mediates between the material and the cultural, the everyday and the aesthetic, the policy and the political. Food operates simultaneously as a sensory artefact, an archive of memory, and a site of political contestation. As anthropologist Brillat-Savarin famously suggested in 1825, “Tell me what you eat, I will tell you what you are.”
Interspaces is an open-access, student-led journal that welcomes submissions in interdisciplinary work and research from inside and outside the proverbial ivory tower of the academic world. Interspaces currently seeks submissions for a special themed section, “Queering the Public Humanities.” The pitch deadline (200 words) is November 1, 2025. The final submission deadline is January 15, 2026. Click the link above to learn more about the theme and submission guidelines.
CFP: Handbook on Digital Activism Overview & Scope
https://paromitapain.com/call-for-chapter-proposals-digitalactivism/
Proposal Guidelines
Each proposal should include:
Masculinities Students' Conference I: Current Issues, Future Directions
Join us for a day filled with insightful discussions, engaging workshops, and networking opportunities. This event aims to create a space for discussing diverse approaches and complexities of contemporary masculinities and their impact on society. Whether you're a student, researcher, or simply interested in the topic, this conference is the place to learn and exchange ideas.
The conference will be held in person.
DATE: Thursday, 11 December 2025
SEXTANT (ISSN 2990-8124) is an online journal which navigates the lenses of masculinities, sexualities, and decolonialities.
SEXTANT aims to shift our understanding of these subjects while looking at the ways they intersect, especially in areas that are often overlooked.
SEXTANT features the work of researchers, activists, and artists, welcoming submissions in a wide variety of mediums, such as research papers, book reviews, creative writing, visual art, and digital projects.
Now accepting submissions for Volume 3, Issue 2. Deadline for submissions is November 17, 2025.
Call for Abstracts for a Special Issue
Interdisciplinary Literary Studies. A Journal Of Criticism and Theory
Contaminated Bodies, Contaminated Lands:
Transcorporeality in Eco-narratives
Editors
Dr. Paula Wieczorek, Assistant Professor, Department of English Studies, University of Information Technology and Management, Poland. E-mail: pwieczorek@wsiz.edu.pl
Journal Literatūra, Vilnius University
CALL FOR PAPERS
The Cultural Imaginaries of (Dis)Trust
Though more to know could not be more to trust,
From whence thou camest, how tended on: but rest
Unquestion’d welcome and undoubted blest.
Give me some help here, ho! If thou proceed
As high as word, my deed shall match thy meed.