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.

Paper proposals invited for papers of 15-20 minutes. Please note corrected deadline of Friday, December 19, 2025 for submission of abstracts.

African and Caribbean Theatre and Performance Working Group
IFTR 2026 World Congress 6-10 July 2026 
The University of Melbourne
Melbourne, Australia 

Working Group Theme: 

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

Media in Full Bloom

A Central Valley Interdisciplinary Conference for Graduate and Undergraduate Students on Film, Television, and Media Studies

Sponsored by the Warrior Bookworms & Wordsmiths, the English Club at Stan State

Contact Email: Warriorwordsmiths@gmail.com

Conference Date: March 13th, 2026

Location: Stanislaus State University, Turlock, CA

Deadline for Submissions: January 19th, 2026

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

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

Plant Lives: Sacred Interdependencies in the Arts of the Americas

A planting event and conference hosted by the Yale Institute of Sacred Music

April 11, 2026

In 1831, the preacher Nat Turner testified that hieroglyphics had appeared to him on leaves and corn stalks in a field. These hieroglyphics, he said, relayed divine messages that inspired him to lead a rebellion of enslaved Virginians. The starting point for this one-day conference is the many capacities of plants to transmit divine insights across time. This event at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music will explore the ways in which plants perform, evoke, and embody sacred relations throughout the Americas.

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):

Call for Abstracts for Special Issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly Maternal Rhetorics: Deconstructing Expectations of Mother/Woman/ParenthoodCo-editors: Anna D'Orazio (University of Cincinnati), Wendy Sharer (East Carolina University), and Jurrita Williams (University of Alabama) In a 2021 interview with Tucker Carlson, then-Senate candidate and now-Vice President JD Vance criticized the Democratic Party “for becoming anti-family and anti-child.” He stated, “It's just a basic fact—you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez]—the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children….How does it make sense that we’ve

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.

Call for Papers

Following the success of the I International Conference on Gender Studies & Intermedial Narratives (UCM, 2024), this new edition seeks to go further, deeper, and bolder. If last year we worked around the idea of intermediality, this year we want to explore its most visceral and material dimension: how gender is inscribed on, through, and as bodies—and how bodies themselves become texts, interfaces, archives, and narrative machines.We begin with a simple premise: every text is a body, and every body is a text.

This is a Call for Papers for a special issue titled, "Mapping the Diverse Horizons of Oral History in India: Theory, Method, Practice." The central idea of the special issue is to map the multiple directions in which oral history is evolving within India today and to highlight its significance in understanding lives, histories, and identities that often remain outside conventional archives. The issue will be published in collaboration with The Oral History Review [ https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/uohr20  Scopus, Q1].

We invite interested individuals to send us an abstract based on the following themes, but not limited to:

NATIONAL SEMINAR ONDigital Futures and Beyond: Emerging Paradigms in English Studies

27 December 2025

Organised by
Department of English, Hill-Top Degree College, Mohana, Gajapati, Odisha
Venue: Seminar Hall, Hill-Top Degree College
Website:www.hilltopdegreecollegemohana.edu.in

 Invitation

Perennially understudied, Eurasia – as both a geographical and conceptual constellation – opens up a novel and fertile space for scholarly contributions. This call for papers invites submissions that engage with the region’s alternative media, information, and communications histories, bridging past and future frameworks, methodologies and forms.

ATHE 2026

“ACTIVATING IMAGINATION IN/AND COMMUNITY”
July 22–26, 2026  |  Baltimore, Maryland

This year’s conference theme, "Activating Imagination in/and Community," asks us to think deeply and courageously about the role of theatre and performance in shaping our shared presents and collective futures. It challenges us to contemplate not just what we do, but how and with whom we do it, while recognizing that, in the face of growing political repression and institutional instability, our collaborations—across disciplines, communities, and identities—are simultaneously more vulnerable and vital than ever.

Strangeness and Oddity:
Embracing the Extraordinary in Arts-Based Research

Conference Webpage: https://labrc.co.uk/2025/12/08/strangeness-and-oddity-2026/

A Transdisciplinary Conference
March 10-11, 2026
Online

Abstract Submission Deadline: January 31, 2026

Focusing on the past decade – particularly the summer of 2020 and its aftermath, which witnessed an unprecedented wave of iconoclastic acts against monuments and statues linked to colonialism, white supremacy, and slavery, alongside renewed calls for the decolonisation of museums and urban toponyms – much of the subsequent scholarly attention in English has centred on developments in the Anglophone world.