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Where and how does African American culture begin?
Every story has a beginning, yet every beginning is a choice: a conscious decision about where, when, and how to start. Beginnings are contextual constructions as are endings.
A few months into his second term, President Trump announced he would order a new census that excludes non-citizens. This unprecedented move in U.S. history threatened to erase millions of people from the map. It would reshape electoral outcomes, going against the 14th Amendment that requires counting all persons in each state to determine representation, and it could impact public policymaking by removing crucial data for infrastructure, health, or education.
Childhood is often imagined as a period of innocence, protection, and dependence. However, across many historical and contemporary contexts, children experience various forms of violence, including interpersonal abuse, structural inequality, displacement, war, and environmental harm. Recent scholarship in childhood studies has challenged the tendency to view children solely as vulnerable victims, emphasizing their capacity for agency, resilience, and political engagement. Understanding how cultural narratives represent these experiences is essential for examining broader questions of justice, rights, and social belonging.
Following the lead of activist and disabled writer Alice Wong, this panel “creates a
dialogue” and is, of itself, “an intimate act bringing us together across space and time”
(Disability Intimacy xx). It therefore invites papers engaged in the long genealogy of literary,
visual, and historical representations of a frequently overlooked, or gainsayed, symbiosis: that is,
between intimacy, broadly defined, and the disabled or “defective” bodymind in the early
modern archive. This might include considering how disability sparks desire, enhances pleasure,
The Teaching with Media and Technology session welcomes proposals on any topic related to the use of media and technology in any modern language, composition, or literature classroom. Papers that engage with this year’s conference theme, "Our Ruling Classes: Culture, Power, Conflict," are welcome but not required. PAMLA's annual conference is being held in Seattle, WA, 12-15 November 2026.
For submissions and more information, please visit https://pamla.ballastacademic.com/Home/S/20030
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.
Mid-Atlantic Popular & American Culture Association (MAPACA) 2026 Annual Conference, November 5-7, 2026 in Baltimore, MD
Women and/of the Empire(s): On the 150th Anniversary of Queen Victoria’s Proclamation as Empress of India (1876-2026)
29-30 October 2026
An international conference hosted by the Faculty of Arts and Humanities (Faculdade de Letras), University of Porto, Portugal
Confirmed keynote speakers:
Ana Cristina Mendes (Professor of English Studies, University of Lisbon, President of the Association for Cultural Studies)
Martin Hewitt (President of the British Association for Victorian Studies, Visiting Professor of English, University of Leeds, Editor of the Curran Index)
Congreso Estética(s) del Horror: Filosofía, Cine y Literatura.
Invitación a envío de propuestas. Congreso presencial
(English version below)
En los últimos años, el terror ha experimentado una renovada visibilidad cultural. El éxito del cine reciente, la consolidación de una auténtica edad de oro de las series televisivas y la aparición de nuevas voces literarias, impulsadas también por el trabajo de editoriales especializadas, evidencian que el horror ocupa hoy un lugar central en el imaginario colectivo y mantiene una extraordinaria capacidad para dialogar con las preocupaciones estéticas, sociales y políticas de cada época.
This panel session seeks to explore the cultural fascination surrounding "The Backrooms," an internet 'creepypasta' about an abandoned office building with endless corridors that became a popular YouTube series and most recently, a blockbuster horror film. What are the Backrooms? Do they represent an artificial or alien intelligence attempting to simulate reality? Are they a glitch in the imperfect fabric of an unstable universe? Are they a metaphor for the subconscious, techno-paranoia, wasteland necrocapitalism, corporate control, or the internet itself? Or is this all just a retelling of the Greek myth of the Labyrinth for a Gen Z audience?
Resurgens Theatre Company, along with the Georgia State University Department of English, is pleased to announce our fourth biennial conference on early modern verse drama by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, “Shakespeare’s Apocrypha Now.” We’re calling for papers that examine some aspect of Shakespeare’s non-canonical plays, i.e., those dramatic works that have been or are currently attributed to Shakespeare (as a whole or in part) that have yet to receive widespread scholarly and/or theatrical recognition. We particularly welcome topics on canonicity, collaboration, and performance-oriented concerns regarding Renaissance drama and/or early modern print culture.
On January 19, 2022, Sheila Heti published the first of ten weekly installments of “A Diary in Alphabetical Order” in The New York Times. Each installment included an author’s note explaining that Heti had “loaded all 500,000 words of [her] journals into Excel to order the sentences alphabetically,” hoping to “see the self in a new way.” Over time, the project “grew into something more novelistic,” and the note concludes that “the self’s report on itself is surely a great fiction.” Heti is hardly the first author to challenge or destabilize autobiographical conventions.
Call for Chapters
Edited Volume: Rethinking M.R. James: Antiquarianism, Horror, and the Supernatural
Editor: Dr. Sakti Sekhar Dash, Fellow of Social Science Research Council
Introduction
The 98th annual SAMLA Conference is taking place Thursday, November, 5, through Saturday, November, 7, 2026, at the Wyndham Atlanta Buckhead Hotel & Conference Center in Atlanta, GA. For more information, see https://southatlanticmla.org/.
As we meet in Newport, an island at the edge of the Atlantic, this panel invites papers about ocean-based horror media. Oceans, seas, and other waterways have been central to human culture throughout history, offering both opportunities to build communities across the waves and the threat of lonely, painful death through drowning or isolation through shipwrecks.
Joyce Studies Annual invites submissions for a special issue featuring the topic of “Echo-Joyce: Reading Joyce in Relation” to be guest edited by Amadeo De La Pava, Faye Liu, and Jordan Smith.
Panel Proposal for the NeMLA Convention, Newport, RI, March 6–9, 2027
Planetary crises—climate change, toxic pollution, biodiversity loss, and energy transition—are profoundly uneven in their distribution. Their material consequences are shaped by infrastructures of class, race, colonial histories, state power, and global capitalism. Increasingly, literary, artistic, and cultural texts across the world foreground these asymmetries, framing ecological crisis not only as environmental catastrophe but as a question of justice: Who breathes polluted air? Who profits from green transformation? Who consumes melting ice? Who bears the social and environmental costs of planetary change?
OVERTONES EGE JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES
CALL FOR PAPERS
Annual deadline: September 15
Italian Teaching Symposium 2026 - II edition
“Creative Pathways in Italian Language and Culture Teaching”
September 25-26, 2026
St. Jerome’s University (University of Waterloo) & online
Call for Papers Extended: Edited Volume on Adoption in Popular Media
deadline for submissions:
July 31, 2026
full name / name of organization:
Stacy Fowler / St. Mary’s University
contact email:
This is a CFP seeking panelists for the 2027 Annual Conference of the Association for Asian Studies. We invite papers that examine racialization and ethnicization across Sinophone and Asian contexts in which local projects of improvement and rule are entangled with colonial and imperial systems and epistemologies, both Western and non-Western, external and internal, often sustained by local elites and intermediaries. We understand these contexts in broad terms, including transnational, diasporic, and colonial aspects. Processes of racialization and ethnicization, as well as resistance to and negotiation of such processes, could involve, but are not limited to, discussions of care, gender, and sexuality.
NeMLA annual conference: March 6-9, 2027, Newport Rhode Island. Panel is IN-PERSON
This special issue will highlight new work in queer ecology that engages and extends concepts of queer time developed by theorists such as Lee Edelman, Jack Halberstam, Elizabeth Freeman, José Muñoz, Kathryn Bond Stockton, Carolyn Dinshaw, and others.
The erotic is a point of infinite signification, a navel in humanity’s symbolic circuit. However, despite its resistance to formalization, it is always in the process of not being written. As Octavio Paz insists, the erotic is a metaphor indelible to the human. As such, it is unsurprising that the manifestations of the erotic in subjective embodied experience are variable and correspond to equally plural treatments of it across the academic panorama. This diverse archive is bound by certain distinguishable threads, in terms of the potentiality of the erotic, its singular relation to language, and to the sphere of sexuality.
Beyond the Ocean: Maritime Infrastructure and Hydro-Narratives of Indians under the Raj (Tentative Title)
Concept Note
The imperial ships of the British Raj bore millions of Indian migrants across waterways just the way Charon ferried souls across the river Styx to an irreversible fate. Nonetheless, the Indians transformed the vicious vessels into spaces of radical rebirth and enduring kinship.
How is everyone doing?
At a routine meeting of the Editorial Board of this journal in March 2026, this innocuous question erupted into disquiet, tension, unease. Speaking from vastly different parts of the world, there was an unmistakable sense of a planet slipping beyond available comprehension and unplugging us from work and life routines. As wars in the Middle East expand and fires spread from apartment blocks reduced to rubble to bombed oil refineries and shipping corridors, profound geopolitical, personal, even psychic rifts leave us grasping for the language and feel of the moment, the falling apart of things, the zeitgeist of an endangered now.
In Africa and the African diaspora, knowledge is often produced, circulated, and critiqued in “minor forms”—small-scale oral, visual, material, and digital ephemera such as proverbs, folktales, rites, images, social media, and other non-canonical modes of expression that structure everyday cultural life but are frequently marginalized within dominant academic and cultural hierarchies. While “major forms” such as the literary canon, the national archive, and peer-reviewed scholarship obscure the complexity and vitality of African cultural production, minor forms interact with, resist, coexist alongside, and reshape those dominant modes.
Cuteness is a twenty-first-century sensation—from the global expansion of Sanrio fandom to the rise of social capital around Labubu and Jellycat, from K-Pop stars (real or animated) to cute animals like the quokka and Fennec fox. This issue explores a “cuteness turn” found in many public realms around the world. The adoration of attractive or cheerful objects associated with childishness and youthfulness is part of the human experience. However, this issue does not examine cuteness as a transcultural aesthetic or psychological condition, but we focus on its larger political implications. Throughout history and around the world, this “universal” sentiment has often been manipulated for commercial and ideological purposes.
This special issue will explore current attacks on scholarship and scholars, and the multiple ways in which law, broadly conceived, is understood and deployed in these attacks with implications for who is allowed to shape and engage in the public sphere.
Call for Papers
The 2026 Multi-ConTEXT International Graduate Conference
“Interweaving Voices and Worlds:
English Studies in Transformative Contexts”
The Robert Lowell Society invites papers on the musical engagements of Confessional and late-Confessional poets with a view to sponsoring a panel at the ALA Symposium "Music and the American Literary Imagination" (January 28-30, 2027, Nashville, TN). Such papers could include inquiries into:
The musical forms of Confessional poets' verse—e.g., Sylvia Plath’s stark meters and her refrains, or John Berryman’s jazz-like syncopation, or Adrienne Rich’s and Frank Bidart’s use of musical metaphors and structures;
Call for Proposals for papers, possibly for the ACLA Seminar in Houston March 2027 and for a possible collection of published essays.
Women’s Writings against Oppression in the Middle East and South Asia
Historically, researching and teaching the different art forms took place in a well-sealed vacuum: for example, using literary theory to decipher one of the great texts, visual and compositional analysis to examine a sublime painting, or montage splicing to perceive the nuances of film. However, it is becoming more difficult to recognize the borders that separate cinema, literature, and the visual arts. Factors including the rise of globalized societies and the emergence of new technology have forced us to reconsider medium specificity and our relationship with creative expressions and works of art.
This panel explores how Latin American and Latine writers, filmmakers, and artists engage environmental elements as dynamic forces shaping human experience, identity, and social life. Grounded in the environmental humanities, the panel examines how cultural production renders visible the entanglements between ecological conditions and forms of movement, including migration, displacement, circulation, and transformation across human and more-than-human worlds.
American Conference for Irish Studies Mid-Atlantic and New England Regional Conference
November 6th and 7th 2026
Seton Hall University, South Orange, NJ
Please send abstracts of 250 words to Elizabeth.Redwine@shu.edu by August 28th, 2026.
“Not a Monoculture”: Ideas of Irishness
This CFP seeks submissions for a Just-in-Time session proposed for the 2027 MLA conference. If accepted, this panel will analyze the recent slew of literary and genre fiction about "trad wives." Caro Claire Burke's Yesteryear, Saratoga Sch
Special Issue: The State of LGBTQ Fiction (Humanities)
Guest Editor: Joseph M. Ortiz, University of Texas at El Paso
“I must be mad!” cries Elizabeth Costello at the close of J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals (1999). An author and animal advocate, Costello cannot reconcile how the atrocities of factory farming that keep her awake at night do not likewise haunt her peers. When picking up the character again over two decades later in The Pole and Other Stories (2023), Coetzee presents Costello in the grips of early dementia, which has brought her into even greater communion with the suffering of animals. As she discloses to her son, “I can’t put the image out of my mind, John.
Plant Pedagogy: Words Beyond Walls
Series Editor— Prof. Douglas Vakoch
Editors— Dr Subhashis Banerjee, Assistant Professor, Department of English, Nagaland University, India and Dr Tanmoy Bhattacharjee, Assistant Professor, Department of English, Women’s Christian College, Kolkata, India
Prospective Publisher— Bloomsbury (Critical Plant Studies Series)
In India, the displacement of Adivasis, tribals, poor, farmers, forest-dwelling and land-based people, and other marginalized communities for development and infrastructure projects like dams, railways, power projects, and bridge construction, or for capitalist accumulation like mining, resource extraction, tourism, and industry, is a common occurrence. The trajectory of such displacement has a long history, starting in the colonial period and being aggravated in the postcolonial period under the Nehruvian model of development. Although such projects are implemented for the sake of the ‘greater common good’ for all, only a few elites enjoy the benefit of these projects, depriving millions of displaced, marginalized people (Roy 1999).
"What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career."
— T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”
In bell hooks’ Belonging: A Culture of Place (2009), she posits that “many folks feel no sense of place” (1). She continues by explaining her personal experience with this spatiality, noting that, “Like many of my contemporaries I have yearned to find my place in this world, to have a sense of homecoming, a sense of being wedded to a place” (2). To that end, a commonality shared between all humans is a searching for a place in which we belong, and this is particularly evident in literature that is produced during times of major societal events.
The Global Asias Initiative (GAI) and Institute for Korean Studies (IKS) at the Pennsylvania State University (PSU), in partnership with UC-Irvine’s Center for Critical Korean Studies (CCKS), are conducting a mentoring project designed to foster a network of scholars working on Korean and Korean diasporic topics under the conceptual rubric of Global Asias. The goal of this project is to build a community of early-career scholars who are working at the intersections of Korean studies and Global Asias approaches; and to encourage intellectual exchange, collaboration, and the development of new critical approaches to Korean studies, Korean American studies, and Korean diaspora studies.
CALL FOR PAPERS
In giving visible form to the “crisis of cartographic reason” (Farinelli 2009), the notion of border has become a central concept of the contemporary spatial turn (Guglielmi, Pala 2011), for disciplines such as geography (Winders, Johnson, Schein 2016), cultural anthropology (Wilson 2023), philosophy (Cooper, Tinning 2019), literary theory (Youngs 2019), and political studies (Konrad, Amilhat Szary 2023), emerging as an autonomous field of study.
Marianne Moore 2027, hosted by the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge, will follow the highly successful formats of previous Moore conferences (Penn State 2003, Houston 2015, Buffalo 2020, Stanford 2025) with a schedule of panels, round tables and Q&As for a single audience over two and a half days. Exactly 100 years after Moore herself visited Cambridge, the purpose of the conference is to bring together an international and various group of readers with a strong predilection for thinking and writing about poetry, and put them to work newly and again on this singular, difficult, and discriminating poet. The schedule will take shape around readings between Marianne Moore and other writers.
About the Book
Indian Cultural Heritage: Perspectives is an edited volume that invites interdisciplinary scholarship on the diverse and dynamic dimensions of India's cultural heritage. The volume welcomes original contributions exploring tangible and intangible heritage, indigenous knowledge systems, languages, literature, folklore, performing arts, architecture, material culture, cultural memory, museums, heritage conservation, digital heritage, and contemporary issues of identity, sustainability, and cultural preservation. By bringing together diverse academic perspectives, the volume seeks to advance critical understanding of India's rich cultural traditions and their continuing significance in a rapidly changing world.
About the volume
The aim of this book series is to examine the history of institutions around the world through the lens of gender. Of interest
are institutions established with the specific purpose of regulating gender and sexuality (e.g. the Magdalen
asylums, Magdalen hospitals, penitentiaries, refuges, mother and baby institutions) as well as those with more general
purposes where gender has had an important role in their operation and function (e.g. prisons, workhouses, lunatic
asylums), including both religious and private organisations. The series supports the increasing interest in these
institutions internationally, both in academia and in the treatment of ‘historical’ abuse.
Call for Papers“I overstand you, you understand”: Joyce and the Nightmare of Interpretation
Conference Dates:
4–5 February 2027
Deadline for Abstracts:
9 November 2026
Successful Applicants Will Be Notified By:
30 November 2026
Keynote speakers:
Sara Sullam, University of Milan
Kris Peeters, University of Antwerp
Organisers:
Franca Ruggieri,
Fabio Luppi,
Enrico Terrinoni,
Serenella Zanotti