In 2015, i-D magazine declared the year of the ‘sad girl’ (Thelandersson 2022: 157). In the decade since, portrayals of depressed, anxious, and mentally burdened women have scarcely abated, from the breakout success of Sally Rooney to the emergence of Sad Girl BookTok to Gen Z’s recent rediscovery of Lana Del Rey. Meanwhile, in the academy, subfields such as Affect Theory, Disability Studies, and Madness Studies represent growing areas of interest for increasing numbers of researchers and students.

The Hemingway Letters Project, under the direction of General Editor Sandra Spanier and Associate Editor Verna Kale, invites proposals for the panel "The Hemingway Letters Project: Emerging Research" to be presented at the 21st Biennial Hemingway Conference, July 20-25, 2026 in Toronto.

Edouard Glissant and Michael Wiedorn call us to “think” with or like a geography. Evolving out of cultural studies, island and archipelagic studies have spurred a conversation regarding the connection between geography and culture. While Glissant and Wiedorn were particularly preoccupied with thinking (like) an archipelago, it is possible yet to conceive of other modes of geographical thought. Transatlantic, island, and even aquatic matrices of culture and geography have been well documented and studied. This panel welcomes submissions in the field of archipelagic and island studies and is particularly interested in papers exploring methods of geographical thought, the relationship between geography and culture, in the US South.

The Western genre has been widely read within the confines of a national cinema and culture of the United States. However, the field of Film Studies has increasingly sought to emancipate the Western genre from discourses of American myth and identity, instead exploring its ongoing production, circulation, and reception beyond the borders of the United States (including Miller 2013; Higgins 2015; Mayer 2022, among many more). This body of work has significantly expanded our understanding of the Western’s transnational dimensions by highlighting the genre’s local rewritings on a global scale, and unpacking the complex transcultural negotiations involved in appropriating what is often considered an inherently American genre.

[re]frame is an online academic space that aims to amplify and foster early career scholarship as well as provide space for academic dialogue in postcolonial studies and related fields of study. Our academic blog is committed to investigating and problematising the complexities of forms of colonial, anticolonial, and decolonial patterns, phenomena, and infrastructures, as well as how they manifest in literary and cultural studies. Formed under the aegis of the GAPS (Association for Anglophone Postcolonial Studies), [re]frame encourages investigations of academia and academic practices, such as the colonial legacies of universities and the coloniality of knowledge systems that inform epistemologies.

THE LANGUAGES OF FASHION: CRITICAL REFLECTIONS ON FASHION DISCOURSESFashion Highlight Journal Call for paper Issue 7 (2026)

Guest editors Benjamin Wild and Natalia Berger

Fashion has been personified as the younger sister of Death, a daughter of Caducity. It has been portrayed as a lifelong companion and described as capitalism’s favourite child. It has been conceptualised as a belief, a system, and an empire. These varied characterisations hint at fashion’s complexity as both cultural phenomenon and global industry.

Digital Defoe: Studies in Defoe and His Contemporaries (https://cedar.wwu.edu/digitaldefoe/) is an open-access, mutually-anonymous peer-reviewed journal exploring the intersection of Defoe and/or his contemporaries and digital humanities.

We strongly encourage the submission of innovative digital and multimedia projects, as well as experimental essays and pedagogical approaches.

 Full submission guidelines and archived issues of the journal may be found on the website: https://cedar.wwu.edu/digitaldefoe/policies.html

 Call for Book Chapters

‘Mother(hood)’ in Anglophone Asian Literature: Representations, Interventions, and Critical Reframing

Eudora Welty Society Call for Papers at

American Literature Association 2026 Conference (May 20-23, 2026 at the Palmer House Hilton, Chicago)

New Approaches to Eudora Welty's The Golden Apples

Call for papers:
Philosophy and Literary Genres in the Twentieth CenturyJournal: Giornale Critico di Storia delle Idee - Critical Journal of History of Ideas 

(https://en.giornalecritico.it/)

Issue editors:

Raffaele Ariano (Vita-Salute San Raffaele University of Milan)

Paolo Babbiotti (University of Turin)

Matteo Falomi (Sapienza University of Rome / University of Essex)

In the Middle Ages, Christian liturgy was far more than a sequence of prayers and ceremonies: it structured religious practice, shaped sacred space, and gave material form to the expression of faith. Objects, vestments, and books played a central role in this framework, endowed with a visual, tactile, and symbolic language that embodied the theology of the sacred. The International Conference Instrumenta altaris: Ritual Artefacts and Their Images for Medieval Liturgy seeks to refocus attention on the material dimension that, throughout the medieval centuries, rendered the invisible visible and preserved —often in fragmentary form— a tangible legacy of devotion.

18th ESSE Conference (European Society for the Study of English)
31st August – 4th September 2026
Santiago de Compostela, Spain

Call for Contributions to the ESSE Panel "Infrastructures of Feeling: The European City in Contemporary Literature and Visual Media"

Shakespeare exists across and between multiple worlds today. After centuries of circulation in Asia, Shakespeare inhabits all locales and cultural formations in ever-changing forms, but is contained by none. Neither completely virtual nor concretely embodied, long dead yet very much alive, inhabiting past, present and future in equal measure, Shakespeare continues to thrive in the act of playing, teaching and thinking. Recent Asian Shakespeare scholarship has critically reflected upon, yet ultimately celebrated such cross-cultural, international, world-wide flourishing, bringing together new arrangements, forms and collaborations of Shakespeare’s work across art, performance and cultures.

Contributions on varied dimensions of Popular Literature in the Nineteenth Century are invited for Volume XIII of Critical Imprints (ISSN: 2319-4774), the annual peer-reviewed journal of the Department of English, Loreto College, Kolkata.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

The African American Literature and Culture Society invites abstracts (of no more than 250 words) for presentations at the annual conference of the American Literature Association (http://americanliteratureassociation.org/). We will also consider a limited number of panel proposals (of no more than 500 words).    

CfP New issue: Essence & Critique: Journal of Literature and Drama Studies (ISSN: 2791-6553) deadline for submissions: November 15, 2025 full name / name of organization: Essence & Critique: Journal of Literature and Drama Studies (ISSN: 2791-6553) contact email: essencecritiquejournal@gmail.com 

Essence & Critique: Journal of Literature and Drama Studies invites submissions for the New ssue of the journal - a general issue on Literature and Drama Studies. 

Indexed by MLA and EBSCO databases.

Sustainable Shakespeare

Exploring Human-Nature Interconnectedness in the Plays of William Shakespeare 

Edited by 

Prof (Dr) Seema Raizada, Professor and Head, Govt MLB Girls PG Autonomous College, Bhopal, 9827055738

Prof (Dr) Rolii Agrawal, Professor and Head, Jagran Lakecity University, Bhopal, 9425148782

Email –sustainableshakespeare@gmail.com

Concept Note:

ContactZone (http://www.aisff-starfiction.com/journal) Special Issue "Unruly Bodies and Astral Corporealities in Science Fiction Cinema and Television Series"

Edited by Giuseppe Balirano and Oriana Palusci

Call for Book Chapters

Title: Women in Motion: Perspectives from the Indian Subcontinent

Socio-cultural factors such as gender, class, caste, ethnicity, etc. determine the motion of an individual, making the discourse especially relevant when it comes to articulating experiences of motion by/of women in the Indian subcontinent. Studies interplaying ‘motion’ and ‘female bodies’ continue to be an important avenue of exploration, illuminating how women have been navigating motion – spatially, temporally, corporeally, cognitively, socially, culturally, historically.

We are pleased to announce our upcoming graduate conference, Mutations, which will take place at the University of California, Berkeley on February 12–13, 2026, with our prestigious Keynote Speaker Prof. Christy Wampole from Princeton University. You’ll find the conference abstract and further details below.

————

Call for Papers

Emily Thomas

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

Call for participation

Performing Ends 2026

University of Antwerp

Belgium

October 28–30, 2026

We are pleased to announce that the International Conference The Prism of Festivals and Performance Studies: Open Historiographical Questions, organized within the framework of the PRIN 2022 project – Theatre of Festivals between the Local and the Global. Rethinking the Italian Stage between the 1950s and the 1970s, involving the Universities of Rome “Tor Vergata” and Parma, will take place in Rome, at the University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, on 9–10 October 2025.

All details, including the full program and the Book of Abstracts, are available on the dedicated page of the MAP – Interuniversity Research Centre for the Memory of the Performing Arts website at the following link:

Victorian SoundingsAuckland University of TechnologyAuckland, Aotearoa/New Zealand, 25-26 June 2026 

Scholars of the nineteenth century have produced ground-breaking work in the interdisciplinary field of sound studies since its inception, and continue to as they help push the boundaries of the field and expand it in intriguing ways. Scholars are now exploring the importance of sound in connection to other areas, such as the interdependence of speaking, writing, reading, and listening; the sonic interconnections between the arts, science, and new technologies; and acoustic mediations in imperial encounters with indigenous peoples.