In 2025 alone, public arts and humanities organizations have faced constant and systemic threats to their funding, their missions, and their ongoing goals to provide communities with access to the arts. The Trump administration's demolition of funding to the National Endowment for the Humanities immediately harmed the ongoing projects of organizations across the country, while imperiling most of the state humanities councils across the country. More recently, the rescindment of National Endowment for the Arts grants affected the publishing missions of nonprofit, independent publishers like Graywolf and Milkweed, while also shredding the community outreach efforts of public arts, literary arts, and literacy programs across the nation.

This edited volume seeks to collect scholarship on the treatment of political themes and world-building in the Star Wars franchise since Disney acquired Lucasfilm in 2012. Scholars have thoroughly explored political topics in George Lucas’s works, but have paid less attention to how Star Wars projects under Disney have continued, changed, or challenged the franchise’s approach to politics. To advance the scholarship on this subject, we welcome proposals from a variety of disciplines and perspectives, including literary criticism, cultural history, political science, film studies, and fandom studies. 

Possible / Suggested Topics:

Dear friends, colleagues, and students, 

We are excited to announce the Call for Papers for the third issue of the NEW BENJAMIN STUDIES yearbook, centred around the theme “Walter Benjamin in Times of Crisis”.

The editorial collective of NBS is pleased to welcome Anna Migliorini (Florence) and Ana María Miranda Mora (Utrecht) as guest editors for the issue. 

Latinx Visions 2.0

ONE PLANET—MANY WORLDS

CALL FOR PAPERS

ONLINE CONFERENCE

November 3-7, 2025

Co-Organizers: Matthew David Goodwin, Cathryn Merla-Watson, Taryne Jade Taylor

State of the Nation Film and TV in Britain: Representations of the Social, Political, and Cultural Landscape.

How might we illustrate, explore, and begin to define the ‘state of the nation’ film and television text? This edited collection, in collaboration with Intellect, invites consideration of these questions. We are particularly keen for considerations of contemporary nominees such as Adolescence (2025) and Mr Bates vs The Post Office (2024).

The editors invite abstracts for a forthcoming edited volume entitled Disney: A Companion, which will offer a comprehensive critical exploration of The Walt Disney Company’s cultural, historical, aesthetic, political, and industrial significance. The Companion is intended for the Peter Lang Genre Fiction and Film Companion series (https://www.peterlang.com/series/gffc), and aims to bring together a wide range of interdisciplinary perspectives that interrogate Disney’s enduring legacy and its evolving role in global media and culture.

A great number of Gothic fiction productions explicitly address themes such as gender roles and reproduction from diverse perspectives, which at times hold opposing viewpoints on certain aspects of these topics. The ability to gestate is often considered one of the key indicators of sexual difference. However, the subject of gestation and child-upbringing is not usually addressed in Gothic fiction, aside from iconic examples such as Rosemary’s Baby (1968). As Russ (2007: 25) has stated, these processes are often not described in many texts. Frequently, the women in these stories are either young and childless or middle-aged, with their children already grown and secure (ibid.).

The affordances of speculative fiction to provide not only specific examples, but also schemas, for alternate ways of knowing and being are well known. Suvin identified the novum as the central feature of science fiction, a feature which made it possible to consider humanity not generally nor as "fixed and supernaturally determined", but rather in terms of "which [human]? in what kind of world?: and why such a [human] in such a kind of world? (10).

CFP: Proposals Requested for Modernism in British & World Literature: A (Re)consideration (updated)

Deadline for submissions:

October 1, 2025

Note on Updated Proposal:

This CFP is now live on the Journal of Postcolonial Writing website.

Blue Humanities and the Indian Ocean: South Asian Literary and Cultural Representations

We are pleased to announce the launch of Commentarium: Journal of Humanities Studies, published by the University of Madeira's Faculty of Arts and Humanities. This interdisciplinary journal focuses on the Humanities and invites contributions that bridge various academic disciplines. It will be published annually, exclusively online, and will be freely accessible through the Open Journal System platform.

The journal welcomes submissions from both domestic and international scholars and researchers in Portuguese, English, Spanish, French, and Italian, with contributions accepted on a rolling basis. Book reviews may be submitted only in Portuguese or English.

Registration and submission are now open.

Harper Eternal: New Inquiries on Frances E.W. Harper 

We invite submissions for a paper panel themed “Non-Western Aesthetics: Rhetoric, Resistance, and Representation” – an exploration of aesthetics from diverse cultural perspectives, non-Western rhetorical traditions, and globalized literary theory. Our aim is to examine non-Western, non-hegemonic discourses from non-White nations that incorporate indigenous critical approaches and local theories within artistic and literary practices. We are particularly interested in South and Southeast Asian literary and cultural studies.

Broad areas of exploration may include, but are certainly not limited to, the following literary and cultural theoretical perspectives:

“There is a project that I’ve had in the back of my mind for several years. Not a solo project, but one that D and I envisioned as collective and that we thought to call “The Dictionary of Untranslatable Blackness.” Our imagined Dictionary was inspired by a read one: the dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, by Barbara Cassin [….]