The 17th Annual Research, Art, Writing Conference
February 21st, 2026, Saturday, University of Texas at DallasCall For Papers: RAW 2026

The inconclusive debates, the conflict of opinion, that this seminar aims to initiate and proliferate are about how body, culture, and plurality – three expansive and yet profound concepts – constellate, collapse and collide in varying registers that are both founded and unpredictable. The frames of our studies across disciplines are left in motion; the figures of understanding about how culture and the body and the bodies of culture in relation to plurality struggle to stay entrenched, occupy and distract us.

THE THIRD ANNUAL WOMEN, GENDER, AND SEXUALITY STUDIES GRADUATE SYMPOSIUM

A Century of Black History Commemorations

“The Impact and Meaning of Black History and Life Commemorations in Transforming the Status of

Black Peoples in the Modern World”

Morgan State University, April 2, 2026

Call for proposals for the 35th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf 

Virginia Woolf and Sound

24-28 June, 2026

İstanbul Bilgi University

İstanbul,Turkey

“I always think of my books as music before I write them” 

Virginia Woolf to Elizabeth Trevelyan, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 6, September 4, 1940.

CONCEPT NOTE

Has theatre (as a form of literature or performing arts) always been ‘experimental’ to some extent? Describing the attempt to ‘situate the beginning of experimental theatre historically’ as ‘arbitrary,’ Professor Patrice Pavis has pointed out that all new forms of theatre ‘necessarily experiments as soon as it is no longer content to reproduce existing forms and techniques and no longer considers the meaning of its production as self-evident’ (133). It is important to note at this point that Pavis’s analysis does not depict the idea of Experimental theatre to be essentially ‘Eurocentric’. Rather it hints at the possible presence of Experimental theatre across cultures.

ALA 2026: The Novel of Ideas in American Fiction

ALA Annual Conference (May 20-23, Chicago, IL)

Mysteries and Mayhem is our fourth conference theme. Why do we continue to crave mystery stories?  What do they tell us about our need for suspense and our desire to solve riddles,  including the most famous of all:Whodunnit?  What do these stories of murder and mayhem teach us about the nature of evil, ideas of sin, and the essence of a villain? What do we hope to see in the survivors of these threats?  –And what do we expect from the detectives and heroes who reveal the truth in these stories? We seek papers and creative projects that explore these and related questions. 

YSLS (Young Scholars Literary Sympsium) welcomes your undergraduate,  graduate,  educator,  and independent scholar proposals! 

… Ond þis geþeaht ic sylle eallum wyrhtum, þæt anra gehwylc cræft his geornlice begange, forþam se þe cræft his forlæt, he byþ forlæten fram þam cræfte. Swa hwæðer þu sy, swa mæsseprest, swa munuc, swa ceorl, swa kempa, bega oþþe behwyrf þe sylfne on þisum, ond beo þæt þu eart; forþam micel hynð ond sceamu hyt is menn nellan wesan þæt þæt he ys ond þæt he wesan sceal. 

DATE: Feb. 25-27

Humanities Education and Research Association

Theme: “The Essential Humanities in Practice and Perseverance” (Virtual Conference)

In keeping with HERA’s mission to promote the study of the humanities across a wide range of disciplines and interdisciplinary studies, we invite proposals for the 2026 conference. Submissions are encouraged from educators at all levels (including undergraduate and graduate students) and from anyone with an interest in the arts and humanities. Proposals for papers, panels, or workshops must be submitted through the conference web portals.

Sacred Arts 2026:
Exploring the Spiritual Dimensions of Artistic Expression and Ritual
Conference webpage: https://labrc.co.uk/2025/12/11/sacred-arts-2026/

University of Oxford
and online

May 16-17, 2026

Registration fees (for both attendees and presenters):

African and Caribbean Theatre and Performance Working Group

IFTR 2026 World Congress 6-10 July 2026 

The University of Melbourne

Melbourne, Australia

Keywords: African, Caribbean, African Diaspora, Theatre, Performance Studies

Working Group Theme: 

“What Theatre Does” – African and Caribbean Perspectives on Performance, History, and Identity

We are seeking chapter proposals for The Routledge Companion to the Posthuman in Literature and Culture. This new interdisciplinary volume seeks to foreground the representation of the posthuman: as a figure that often appears within certain genres (eg New Weird Fiction, Solarpunk, Autofiction), as an image deployed by specific authors and filmmakers (eg Nnedi Okorafor, Kazuo Ishiguro, Alex Garland), as a discourse that supports the proliferation of “studies” within academia (eg Animal Studies, Surveillance Studies, Affect Studies), and as a growing presence in college classrooms around the world.

The Romantic Literature Student Society of the Jagiellonian University under the patronage of the Enlightenment and Romantic Literature Department of JU is pleased to extend the invitation to take part in the Romantics in Relation to Science and Technology Undergraduate and Graduate Student Conference. The conference will take place in Krakow on the 26th and 27th of March, 2026 (foreign speakers will have the opportunity to present online).

Narrating Conflict:

Ethics, Identity, and the Stories We Tell

4/2026

Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai Philologia

philologia.studia@ubbcluj.ro

Guest editors

Amelia Precup (Babeș-Bolyai University) amelia.precup@ubbcluj.ro

The 2026 Benedict College International Multidisciplinary Conference (2026 BCIMC)
Thursday and Friday, April 23-24, 2026, at 9:00 AM-5:00 PM

Sponsored by the School of Communication, Arts, and Social Sciences (CASS)

CONFERENCE WEBSITE
https://benedict.edu/bciimc

CONFERENCE FORMAT
Hybrid
In-Person and Virtual

CONFERENCE VENUE
Benedict College
Dr. David H. Swinton Campus Center 
1616 Oak Street
Columbia, SC 29204

CONFERENCE THEME
The Age of Artificial Intelligence Across Academic Disciplines

Call for Papers 2026

For the inaugural 2026 meeting of our research group, Race, Ethnicity, and Identity in the Bible and the Ancient Mediterranean, we invite papers that explore how ancient identities were forged, reshaped, or contested in contexts of conflict, tension, and instability. Our theme for this year is Contested Identities in the Bible and the Ancient Mediterranean: Identity Formation in Contexts of Struggle and Conflict.

This panel explores the intersections of literature, sociability, and the history of emotions in the Hispanic world during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Following Raymond Williams’s notion of “structures of feeling” and Barbara Rosenwein’s concept of “emotional communities,” as well as more recent work in affect theory (Ahmed 2004), we consider emotions not as private, psychological states but as cultural and social practices. Recent scholarship has also stressed the dual nature of emotion concepts—oscillating between natural and normative kinds (Scarantino 2025)—and their role in shaping both political discourses and collective identities.

 “I, I wear a plastic suit / Plastic is my food / Perhaps, I’m plastic too,” sang the iconic Yugoslav New Wave band Idoli in their 1981 song “Plastika” (“Plastics”). These lyrics captured a 1980s moment in which Yugoslav production, import, and consumption of plastics reached their peak. Yet the groundwork for it had been laid in the preceding decades, since plastics production had begun shortly after the Second World War and rapidly permeated all aspects of everyday life (see Filipović 2023). Importantly, Yugoslavia’s trajectory differed from that of the Eastern Bloc.

The Shirley Jackson Society invites scholars at all stages of their careers to submit to our panels for the American Literature Association’s 37th Annual Conference in Chicago, May 20-23, 2026.

For “Shirley Jackson in an Age of Anxiety,” we invite papers that explore how Jackson’s texts speak to, reflect, or anticipate our current age of political instability, social fragmentation, economic uncertainty, and concerted attacks on human rights. Topics of interest include cultural and historical trauma, social conformity and marginalization, surveillance and paranoia, the uncanny in everyday life, prejudice, mob mentality, the dismantling of the American Dream, and mental illness as a cultural phenomenon.

AICED-27

THE 27th ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OF THE ENGLISH DEPARTMENT,

UNIVERSITY OF BUCHAREST

5-6 June 2026

CALL FOR PAPERS

Representations of

Crime in Literature and the Arts

University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures

7-13 Pitar Moș Street, Bucharest, Romania

Call for Papers:

Conventions and Subversions in Sino-Western Theatrical Settings

Edited by Kelly Kar Yue CHAN, Chi Sum Garfield LAU and Chi Chun CHAN

We are soliciting chapter proposals for an edited volume that contains 8-10 chapters of research articles which represent the efforts from both members of the academia and practitioners of theatre to sustain the tradition of Sino-Western theatrics, while demonstrating the evolving aspects of contemporary performances under the inexorable trends of digitalization and globalization.

The UI English Graduate Association is excited to announce our 2026 conference theme “(k)no(w) books, (k)no(w) people: Multidisciplinary Studies of Narrative, Media, and the Anthropocene.” At the forefront of our conference is the power of narratives. Humans are storytellers by nature, and for thousands of years we have used stories to remember our pasts and envision our futures. We have used them to entertain and inspire us, to empower us in the face of oppression, and to understand the world around us. And, as the Anthropocene makes strikingly clear, human stories have shaped the world, to an irreversible degree.

Watermark, the annual, peer-reviewed scholarly journal published by English graduate students at California State University, Long Beach, is now seeking submissions for its twentieth volume. Our journal is dedicated to publishing original, critical, and theoretical papers concerned with literature of all genres and periods or current issues in the field of rhetoric and composition. We also accept submissions from other areas including but not limited to: Comparative World Literature, Medieval Studies, Translation Studies, and Gender & Women’s Studies. As this journal is intended to provide a forum for emerging voices, only graduate and undergraduate student work will be considered.

“Violence in the Medieval and Early Modern North”

Aberdeen Medieval and Early Modern North Conference

University of Aberdeen, Scotland