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Theme: Is it a Wonderful Life?
Wonder (n.): a feeling of surprise or awe, caused by something beautiful, unexpected, unfamiliar, or inexplicable
Wonder (v.): to feel some doubt or curiosity; to be desirous to know or learn.
Wondrous (adj.): marvelous; wonderful.
Background
The Just Transition Knowledge Network (JETNET), an initiative of the Just Transition Research Centre at IIT Kanpur, invites national and international participants to its Annual Conference 2026.
PAMLA 2026 is pleased to present Pacific Northwest Literatures (https://pamla.ballastacademic.com/Home/S/20023)!
Past and present, the Pacific Northwest has functioned in literature as a dynamic space defined by transition, ecological precarity, and socio-political friction. This panel explores writers of fiction, poetry, memoir, and non-fiction whose work investigates the unique sense of place, history, and culture defining the region. We welcome papers that engage with the tensions between industry and preservation, indigenous sovereignty, labor movements, and the mythologies of the western wilderness.
PAMLA 2026 is pleased to present Translation and Temporality: Rewriting Ancient and Medieval Texts for the (Post)Modern World (https://pamla.ballastacademic.com/Home/S/20010)!
PAMLA 2026 is pleased to present New Directions in Mark Twain Studies (co-sponsored by the Mark Twain Circle) (https://pamla.ballastacademic.com/Home/S/20184)!
PAMLA 2026 is pleased to present Together and Apart: Muslims, Jews, and Christians in Medieval Spain (https://pamla.ballastacademic.com/Home/S/19955)!
Animal Adaptations
We invite proposals for a small number of additional chapters for an edited volume on animal adaptations, edited by Justyna Włodarczyk (University of Warsaw) and Michael Fuchs (University of Innsbruck).
Submissions are invited for an upcoming edited volume exploring the development of electoral politics in India in the post-liberalization era. This comprehensive publication will be brought out by the Department of Political Science, Seth Soorajmull Jalan Girls’ College (Affiliated to the University of Calcutta), Kolkata, West Bengal, India.
Concept Note:
The Indian diaspora is the largest diaspora community in the world, with an approximate population of 35.4 million. From the migration of the indentured labour force during the colonial period to the mass immigration of educated Indians to overseas countries in the late twentieth century, the Indian diaspora has indeed become a global phenomenon. Expanding migration circuits, job and business opportunities, shifting lifestyles, skilled and semi-skilled labour force, among others, have resulted in significant socioeconomic mobility, especially over the last 25 years. Besides making significant contributions to varied fields, the Indian diaspora has also arguably brought changes in how others have traditionally seen India.
grounding
recent conversations illustrating the gap between the notion of “living life” and the realities of our day-to-day functioning (often framed as “being in survival mode” or “the difference between surviving and thriving”) have served to underscore the importance of our rituals of pleasure and joymaking. the essentiality of these rituals, as reclamations of agency, methods of healing, and ways of maintaining community, is especially relevant for those throughout the African Diaspora and the broader Third World* global community who identify as femme-of-center.
Often, when thinking of academia, the ideas of books, writing, and theory are what make up the idea of the scholar. Many scholars who speak about activism, liberation, mutual aid, living in a collective community, and many other topics of concern for the JOAA team, do not always live the practice they write. This year, we are hoping to disrupt this focus on the blueprints of freedom and look into the way folks are working in the world to build, support, create, and live praxis in their lives.
Appalachian Glass: Furnace of Meaning and Memory
This edited collection addresses a major gap in current work focused on Appalachia’s glass industry. We have catalogs and reference books. We have histories focused on class, labor, and gender. We have histories focused on the rise and demise of glass factories. But the human work of meaning, identity, and memory--in the context of Appalachian glass--has yet to be gathered and shared in book form.
Call for Papers:
Cluster on Refusal in Migrant and Refugee Lifemaking
Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly
Convener: Monisha Das Gupta
Submission length: 6,000-8,000 words, including the list of references
Climate change is often discussed as an environmental emergency, but its most profound consequences are social, political, economic, and deeply gendered. The climate crisis does not operate in isolation from existing systems of inequality; rather, it intensifies historically entrenched hierarchies of gender, caste, class, race, labour, sexuality, and power. Women and gender minorities, frequently experience climate change not as a distant ecological abstraction but as everyday reality lived through food insecurity, water scarcity, displacement, unpaid labour, agrarian distress, and precarious working conditions.
India is poised to press home its civilisational charisma and unique advantages in the quest to realise its goals under the mission Viksit Bharat 2047. Fuelled by conceptual, imaginative and practical inputs derived from the continuously preserved Indian Knowledge Systems (Bharatiya Jñāna Paramparā), India’s developmental mission is not for its own exclusive benefit; rather, it is to guide the world in its anxious search for an alternative holistic paradigm of growth that preserves the universal core of human life and values, restores our vital spiritual connections with natural environments and rejuvenates an organic sense of community even as global enterprise prospers and enables a sense of economic well-being and security in people.
Cunterbury is a scholarly arts & comedy podcast hosted by three Gen Z academics — A.J. Scott, Alice Fulmer-Zelinka and Shannen Escote — exploring the major works of Geoffrey Chaucer and friends, starting with The Canterbury Tales. In our first season, we are providing witty commentary and voices to discuss the Tales and their pilgrims like you’ve never heard them before.
CFP: History and Popular Uses of the Past – NEPCA Virtual Fall Conference 2026
Deadline for submissions: June 15, 2026 (at 5 pm EDT)
Contact email:
Hannah Sophie Schiffner, h.schiffner@zeppelin-university.net
The History and Popular Uses of the Past Area invites submissions for the Northeast Popular Culture Association’s (NEPCA) annual conference to be held online October 15th – 17th, 2026.
SESSION DESCRIPTION
Afrofuturism, Latinx altermundos, Indigenous futurisms, solarpunk, cli-fi — the speculative modes through which BIPOC writers have imagined, contested, and survived the present are not marginal subgenres. They are among the most politically urgent literary formations of the last half-century, and among the least fully mapped by existing scholarship. This special session invites papers that read across these formations to ask: what does speculative fiction do when it is written from the borderlands, from the barrio, from the reservation, from the maquiladora corridor, from communities that have been made to inhabit the dystopian present that other traditions only project?
The First Global Algorithmacy Conference
Acronym
ALGOCON 2026
Web page
https://algorithmacy.com
Location
La Brea Pitch Lake, Trinidad and Tobago
Submission deadline
15 August 2026
Notification due
Rolling (public review on the PR thread, typically within ~5 business days of submission); final decisions by September 1 2026
Final version due
At acceptance — accepted papers are published with their full review history on the public repository
We invite proposals for individual papers for the critical mixed race studies panel at the annual conference of the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA) in Seattle, Washington, from November 12-15, 2026.
Paper proposals are due by June 6, 2026.
Welcoming submissions for a free scholarly conference on scary literature to be hosted online from October 22nd-24th, 2026 by graduate student, Anais Shelley.
Research may draw inspiration from (but is not limited to) these prompts:
Supernatural themes
Domestic horror
The role of setting within scary stories
Frightening myths and folklore
The gothic novel and short story
Monsters and the monstrous
Multicultural superstition and regional ghost stories
The deadline for abstract submission has been extended until 30 June, 2026.
2026 Global K-Culture Conference
August 20 (Thu.) ~ August 22 (Sat.), 2026 (3 days)
Chungbuk National University, Korea
Korean, English, or the presenter’s preferred language
Deadline for submissions: May 31, 2026
The Department of Global K-Culture at Chungbuk National University is pleased to invite submissions for the upcoming Global K-Culture Conference, aimed at fostering meaningful dialogue and the exchange of ideas among instructors and researchers working across diverse educational and cultural contexts.
In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the literatures of the Spanish State have witnessed a remarkable proliferation of Bildungsroman-inflected narratives, testimonial accounts, and coming-of-age fictions that fundamentally interrogate received models of subjectivity, identity formation, and social progress. This international congress invites critical engagement with a corpus of works — spanning authors such as Najat El Hachmi, Marta Sanz, Belén Gopegui, and Alana S. Portero — that contest hegemonic discourses of selfhood and becoming from positions of social, gendered, and cultural marginality.
We invite you to submit an abstract and bio by June 17, 2026, to participate in a Modern Language Association (MLA) 2027 seminar, "Queer Literary Studies NOW." Seminar participants will precirculate 1500-word papers on the theme, and we will discuss the papers and the larger theme during the seminar on the first day of the MLA 2027 conference. MLA 2027 will take place in Los Angeles, California, January 7-10, 2027. Participants must be MLA members and register for the conference.
Call for Papers
Journal of Narrative Theory (JNT)
Special Issue (Fall 2027)
Contemporary Narratives and Storytelling Cultures
Concept Note
Call for Papers
The Playful Monster
24–25 September 2026
The 123rd Annual PAMLA (Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association) Conference will be held in person, November 12–15, 2026, in Seattle, Washington.
20th Century Southern Women Writers Conference
presented by the Elizabeth Madox Roberts Society
October 15-18, 2026Springfield, Kentucky
The International Journal of James Bond Studies is now accepting submissions for Volume 10.
Language programs across the United States are navigating a period of significant uncertainty marked by declining enrollments, the loss of federal funding, shifting institutional priorities, and increasing budget constraints. In many cases, these pressures reflect broader institutional and political dynamics in which decisions about resource allocation, curricular value, and program viability are shaped by structures of power within higher education. As a result, language programs often find themselves particularly vulnerable within these hierarchies, with some facing downsizing or closure.
Extended deadline for chapter proposals: 10 June 2026.
Hogg’s Worlds Now
EXTENDED DEADLINE!
Theorizing Gender, Sex and Sexuality through Speculative Literatures
Edited Volume — Call for Contributions
Editors: Drs. Joshua Horton (Arizona State University) and Sandra Cox (Southeast Missouri State University)
contact emails: jthorto2@asu.edu and scox@semo.edu
Deadlines:
Abstracts (200-300 words) due September 30, 2026
Completed drafts (5000-8000 words, including MLA style citations and minimal endnotes) of accepted chapters due February 28, 2027
Overview:
The committee for the 49th annual UBC AHVA Graduate Symposium invites graduate students to submit abstracts that reflect upon, investigate, or challenge the theme of “perspective,” across all of its diverse meanings. We will be joined by Dr. Amy Knight Powell, Chair of the Art History Department at the University of Southern California, as our keynote speaker.
The 2026 Northeast Popular Culture Association (NEPCA) will host its annual conference this fall as a virtual conference from Thursday, October 15th through Saturday October 17th.
We are looking forward to another engaging and rewarding conference for new and seasoned members alike. We are seeking proposals for panels and presentations for this year’s conference, including proposals for the Philosophy, Belief, and Pop Culture Area.
The 2026 Northeast Popular Culture Association (NEPCA) will host its annual conference this fall as a virtual conference from Thursday, October 15th through Saturday October 17th.
We are looking forward to another engaging and rewarding conference for new and seasoned members alike. We are seeking proposals for panels and presentations for this year’s conference, including proposals for the Gender, Sex, and Sexuality Area.
The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literature and Popular Music
This comprehensive, interdisciplinary handbook will be published by Bloomsbury Academic in late 2027.
This collection explores how literature and popular music intersect, influence each other, and create new possibilities for artistic expression, and seeks to map the rich terrain where these two cultural forms meet. We will work from broad definitions of both literature and popular music, encompassing work from traditional novels and poetry to digital narratives and graphic novels, from classical and folk sound traditions to electric and contemporary electronic music.
South Atlantic Review, Call for Proposals for Special Issue
“Change for Sustainability in English, Rhetoric, and Writing:
Models for Transfer across Contexts”
Call for Papers: Global Hip Hop Studies
Special Issue: ‘Hip-Hop Diaspora: Memory, Technology and the Politics of Electric Infrastructure’
View the full call here>>
https://www.intellectbooks.com/global-hip-hop-studies#call-for-papers
Guest editors
Pablo D. Herrera Veitia, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy
Francesca D’Amico Cuthbert, University of Toronto, Canada
Myrtle D. Millares, University of Toronto, Canada
Dennis Howard, University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica
Indian psychoanalysis consistently finds itself in a space of translation—concepts and praxis generated through Euro-American epistemes are translated on the page and in the clinician’s office. Concepts forged in specific Euro-American contexts encounter Indian affective, political and cultural worlds that resist and reshape them. In India, these juxtapositions between lived worlds and psychoanalytic theory have often been navigated through recourse to Hindu mythology, or rarely, through strict adherence to European epistemes.
Special thematic dossier 8.2 | Aesthetics, Performance, Discourse and Spectacle in the Age of Trumpism
Editor: Anna Marta Marini (JFKI–Freie Universität Berlin)
The Northeast Popular Culture Association (NEPCA) The Body, Fashion, and Popular Culture Area invites submissions for NEPCA’s annual conference to be held online Thursday, October 15th through Saturday October 17th 2026.
Reception, including reading, listening and viewing, occurs at the tail-end of a complex process of production and reproduction that can create a significant distance between the authors who begin the process and the individual recipients who enact multiple, unique endings in their idiosyncratic experience. With an acknowledgement of the digital reproduction that enables this online conference to occur, we invite papers that address the impact of reproduction at any stage of this process. We especially welcome papers that address the impact of reproduction on the textual, material and cultural meaning of the work, text or image that is reproduced on, amongst others:
Papers are invited for an anthology to be brought out by a reputed international publisher on the theme, “100 Years of Gabriel García Márquez.”
Concept Note
Gabriel García Márquez, born in Colombia in the year 1927, is acknowledged as one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. As we head towards his birth centenary, it is time to look back at this literary giant, reassess his contribution and its impact on literary history.
The annual graduate student conference organized by the Division of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California is now accepting applications. EXTENDED submission deadline is June 15, 2026.
This year’s conference invites proposals that engage broadly with the theme, Delirium.
It will take place on October 23–24, 2026, at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, with Professor Eugenie Brinkema joining for the Keynote.
We welcome submissions from a wide range of disciplines and methodological approaches, including creative works.
We invite submissions for the upcoming issue of Theatre Academy: A Journal of World Theatre which will be published electronically in SEPTEMBER. Theatre Academy is indexed in MLA International Bibliography, ERIH Plus, DOAJ, EBSCO and Gale Cengage.
* Deadline is the end of JULY but we strongly advise the potential writers to send their manuscripts in as soon as possible.
* Original works, not published elsewhere or related to theatre in any context will be considered for publication.
* Please note that all manuscripts will be closely examined through Turnitin once they are received by the journal.
South Atlantic MLA Conference
November 5-7, 2026
In-Person Conference
Atlanta, GA
Panel Proposal: “Intertextual ‘Innerleckchuls’: Reading O’Connor in Conversation”
The Flannery O’Connor Society seeks abstract proposal submissions for a panel to be held at SAMLA’s annual conference (November 5-7, 2026) in Atlanta, GA.