Second Conference of the European Children’s Literature Research Network.
Munich, Schloss Blutenburg, International Youth Library

19-21 October 2026

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.

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.

Paper Pushers and Ink Suckers: Objectifying the Administrative Subject in Bureaucratic Fiction

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)

*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

Anglistik (e-ISSN: 2625-2147) is a peer-reviewed German-based triannual open-access journal for Anglophone Studies

https://angl.winter-verlag.de/?_locale=en

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).

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. 

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Odour and Order: Smell, Culture and Representation

Keynote: Jonathan Reinarz (University of Birmingham)

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

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:

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.

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:

“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.

Dissension exists on a spectrum. It can be expressed on an individual scale—by rejecting challenges to ethical or moral beliefs—or within collectives that object to systems that harm or subjugate. Literature can be used as an act of protest and resistance, to create counter narratives that combat oppressive agendas; it can mirror the outcry of societies that wish to test the limits of oppression but lack the voice to do so. Now more than ever, it is imperative that we listen to those voices that systems continually work to silence. Authoritarianism, protest, incarceration, and revolution are interwoven themes that dominate allegorical genres such as dystopian fiction.

CERÆ: An Australasian Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies

invites submissions for hybrid panels at the Leeds International Medieval Conference 2026 (July 6-9) on the theme of

Premodern Timeliness and Timelessness

Time is a construct with notoriously blurry definitions and boundaries. The artificiality of time can evoke anything from comforting nostalgia to worrying anachronism. Ceræ invites papers that deal with the unfocused and unreal aspects of premodern temporality, including but not limited to:

Open to any languages, this roundtable explores how instructors are integrating AI tools in the context of translation—whether through small tasks, full assignments, or larger projects—and how these technologies can be leveraged to enhance students’ linguistic and cultural competencies. More specifically, how can AI support the development of students’ intercultural awareness, stylistic sensitivity, and translation skills? In what ways might it help students better understand grammar, vocabulary, idiomatic expressions, and register in both the source and target languages? What kinds of assignments can we design to foster a critical and effective use of AI without compromising learning outcomes or creative engagement?

The groundbreaking anthology Early American Writings (2001)edited by Carla Mulford, Angela Vietto, and Amy E. Winans, incorporated writing that represented a range of authors and texts that showcased the broad diversity of literature of the early Americas. The volume not only reflected but inspired new areas of research and teaching that have continued today. In keeping with the theme of the 2026 NeMLA conference, (Re)generation, the goal of this session will be to continue this expansive vision of the literature of the early Americas and showcase scholarship that represents innovative ways of thinking about these literatures.