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The Pittsburgh Review of Books

updated: 
Friday, January 9, 2026 - 7:15pm
Carnegie Mellon University
deadline for submissions: 
Monday, August 2, 2027

Since September of 2025 the English Department at Carnegie Mellon University has housed a new publication called The Pittsburgh Review of Books (or PRoB), available at http://www.pghrev.com

Edited by author and Public Humanities Lecturer Ed Simon, PRoB is a home for engaged, creative, and interdisciplinary cultural criticism and analysis across the humanities. The tone of the publication is similar to other para-academic publications intended for both specialists and a general audience. Currently we are particularly interested in analysis that intersects with breaking news that can be produced by scholars quickly.

(Re)composing Rot

ACLA VIRTUAL SEMINAR
deadline for submissions: 
Tuesday, September 22, 2026

To decompose is to live too, I know, I know… (Beckett, Molloy)

Scrap, Trash, and Junk: Within the Margins of Writing

Onur Ayaz
deadline for submissions: 
Wednesday, September 30, 2026

What strategies can paper ephemera teach us in the digital age? This panel invites conversations by writing instructors, educators, poets, and artists exploring the work that happens at/within the margins of writing. Both literally and figuratively, we take an expansive scope to the term “margins,” imagining not only the writing that appears on the space of the printed page, but writing that would normally be scrapped, discarded, remixed, or ephemeralized. This can include digital ephemera, such as “disappearing” messages in Instagram or other communication services. At another angle: margins can also mean the liminality of writing, the furthermost edges of what’s often standard and visible.

Gulf Circulations: Transnational Ecologies and Environmental Humanities

American Comparative Literature Association’s convention in Houston May 20th to May 23rd, 2026
deadline for submissions: 
Tuesday, September 22, 2026

This seminar convenes Cuban, Mexican, and U.S. Gulf South scholars to theorize the Gulf of Mexico as a transnational zone of ecological entanglement, rather than a set of discrete national environments. Although the Gulf’s waters, storms, labor histories, and extractive infrastructures circulate across borders, scholarship often remains siloed within national or linguistic frames. This seminar asks how environmental humanities approaches might illuminate the Gulf as a shared, relational ecology shaped by movement, sedimentation, and uneven histories of extraction.

Han as a "Genre"

AAAS 2027
deadline for submissions: 
Thursday, October 1, 2026

This panel invites papers that offer provocative insights into the Korean concept of han (한/恨) across a wide range of cultural forms and genres. Echoing this year's conference theme, this panel asks: how might we recapture the magic of, and reinstill a sense of wonder and joy in, Asian Americanist work on han? Over the past decade, if not longer, han has arguably become one of the most revisited concepts among Korean American writers, artists, and thinkers. If these overlapping prisms of political, cultural, and academic representation have taught us anything, it is that han, at its best, is conceptually elusive.

SAMLA 98: Hospitality GENERAL CALL FOR ABSTRACTS

South Atlantic Modern Language Association
deadline for submissions: 
Tuesday, September 1, 2026

GENERAL CALL FOR ABSTRACTS CFP:

Submit here: https://samla.ballastacademic.com/Home/S/19572

Conference Dates: November 5-7, 2026

Conference Location: Wyndham Atlanta Buckhead Hotel and Conference Center in Atlanta, GA

Papers submitted to our general call for abstracts will be matched by SAMLA staff to appropriate spots on existing panels OR will be combined with similar general call papers to create new panels.

DEADLINE: September 1, 2026

 

SAMLA 98: Hospitality

South Atlantic Modern Language Association
deadline for submissions: 
Saturday, August 1, 2026

We may imagine the act of hospitality benign: to open a door, to welcome another across a threshold, or to make an offer to a guest. Rooted in such acts, however, is an ethics of how we engage with another, whether friend or stranger. Acts of hospitality contain their own contradictions, as to serve as host is to hold power, to set terms, to guard thresholds and entry points. For this year’s SAMLA conference, we invite papers, panels, and creative works that consider the many meanings and complications of hospitality—as practice, metaphor, ethics, affect, and structure.

Empathy and Storytelling Conference November 20-21, 2026

St. Bonaventure University
deadline for submissions: 
Thursday, October 1, 2026

Educators, researchers, writers, and content creators are invited to submit proposals for presentations. Graduate student participation is welcome. Presentation types might include:

• traditional oral readings of papers (15 minutes)
• timed slide presentations
• roundtable presentations
• pre-constituted panels

CFP – Shakespeare's 'The Winter's Tale': From Page to Stage

University of Padova
deadline for submissions: 
Sunday, February 28, 2027

Call for Papers

 

The Winter's Tale: From Page to Stage

 

IASEMS Tempera Seminar 2027

 

University of Padova, Department of Language and Literary Studies

 

7-9 June 2027

 

Thinking Stupidity: Literature, Philosophy, and Critical Theory

John Bolin/University of Exeter
deadline for submissions: 
Tuesday, September 22, 2026

This seminar explores stupidity as a literary and philosophical problem, alongside related concepts including ignorance, idiocy, folly, non-knowledge, and other forms of epistemic failure.

Literatures of the Global South: Space, Place, Environment

Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Toronto
deadline for submissions: 
Monday, August 31, 2026

CALL FOR PAPERS 

Literatures of the Global South: Space, Place, Environment 

University of Toronto 

2nd-4th June 2027 

Keynote Speakers: Amitav Ghosh and Ato Quayson (Stanford University

The Centre for Comparative Literature invites submissions for a scholarly conference and edited collection that will explore the material and imaginative alignments across literary cultures of the Global South. 

tBTR 4.2. Artificial/Ancestral: Black Theatre and the Question of AI

the Black Theatre Review
deadline for submissions: 
Friday, September 4, 2026

As artificial intelligence rapidly reshapes cultural, educational, and creative institutions, the field of Black theatre confronts a familiar set of questions in a newly technological register: Who creates knowledge, who benefits from it, who gets remembered, and whose labor remains obscured? Public conversations about AI often proceed as though these technologies have arrived without history, entering an empty landscape awaiting innovation. Yet Black theatre has long grappled with questions of representation, embodiment, archives, intellectual inheritance, collective memory, labor, and futurity.

Vampire Studies (PCA/ACA National Conference, March 24-27 2027)

Popular Culture Association
deadline for submissions: 
Saturday, October 31, 2026

The Vampire Studies Area of the Popular Culture Association welcomes papers, presentations, panels, and roundtable discussions exploring all aspects of the vampire throughout global culture.

Our theme for PCA 2027 is L.O.V.E.

L = Lust
O = Obsession
V = Vitality / Virility
E = Eternity / Exsanguination

Proposed ACLA Seminar - The Enaction of Thought in Interactive Storytelling

Justin R. Carpenter and Erick Verran
deadline for submissions: 
Friday, September 18, 2026

In literary fiction, the representation of consciousness has often been understood through what might be called the thought of looking: the ways narrative cognition renders a work into a perceptive, embodied, and self-reflexive experience through language. In cinema, by contrast, cognition typically becomes the look of thought: a mental interiority suggested through framing, editing, gesture, movement, and performance. Interactive stories told in videogames complicate this distinction through their intermedial nature. Games must not only represent what characters think, but also account for the player's "will to activity", translating the audience’s intentions into feedback, movement, and action.

Sappho’s Mirror: Images of Female Desire in Literature, Music & the Visual Arts

Diana Shaffer /NeMLA’s 58th Annual Convention March 6-9, 2027 / Salve Regina University / Newport, RI /
deadline for submissions: 
Wednesday, September 30, 2026

Sappho’s Mirror: Images of Female Desire in Literature, Music & the Visual Arts 

This seminar explores representations of female desire in music, literature and the visual arts. How have the complex poetics of female desire—the desire to have something, or escape something, or punish, or know—been represented over time? What strategies have been employed to subvert literary conventions defined predominantly by male perspectives on home, love, war, victory and loss? How have female characters navigated the interplay between things done overtly and thought covertly to reveal the inner web of desires, fears and conflicts that constitute a female poetics of love and longing?

This is a virtual session.

Mirrors of Desire: Ekphrasis & Mise en Abyme in Literature, Music & the Visual Arts

Diana Shaffer / NeMLA’s 58th Annual Convention/ March 6-9, 2027 / Salve Regina University / Newport, RI
deadline for submissions: 
Wednesday, September 30, 2026

Mirrors of Desire: Ekphrasis & Mise en Abyme in Literature, Music & the Visual Arts 

This seminar invites papers that explore the concepts of ekphrasis, the mise en abyme, and metaphorical mirrors in literature, music, and the visual arts. How are mirrors used by artists as deliberate tools to represent something else? How are metaphorical mirrors used to compare different types of reflections across mediums? How are mirrors used to suggest that the aesthetic “surface” is a distraction, and true clarity lies in understanding what the observer or listener wants to see or hear? Papers focused on one medium or interdisciplinary approaches from the Ancient, Medieval, Modern, and Postmodern periods are welcome.

Irony: Dramatic and Otherwise

Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate - University of Tübingen
deadline for submissions: 
Saturday, October 31, 2026

Call for Papers: 19th International Connotations Symposium

Irony: Dramatic and Otherwise

Tübingen, Germany, 25-28 July 2027

Communal Life, Abolition, and Space

American Comparative Literature Association
deadline for submissions: 
Tuesday, September 22, 2026

Call for Papers

Communal Life, Abolition, and Space

American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting

Houston, TX

May 20-23, 2027

 

Shakespeare Here, Shakespeare Now

Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa (SSOSA)
deadline for submissions: 
Thursday, September 24, 2026

Shakespeare Here, Shakespeare Now 27-30 May 2027, Cape Town, South AfricaThis conference, held as part of the thirteenth triennial congress of the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa (SSOSA), invites delegates to reflect on and utilise the axes of space and time in making new contributions to the field of Shakespeare Studies.

Keynote Speaker: Farah Karim-Cooper (Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC)

 

This conference, held as part of the thirteenth triennial congress of the Shakespeare Society of

ACLA SEMINAR: Becoming Monster: Representation and Rights

American Comparative Literature Association
deadline for submissions: 
Tuesday, September 22, 2026

American Comparative Literature Association  IN-PERSON 2027 Annual Meeting (May 20-23, 2027), Houston, Texas

Organizers: Dr. Julia Chan (Lingnan University)

Fatma Betul Ciftci (Lingnan University)

One is not born a monster; the monster is produced. From Beowulf to Ruthven to Dracula to cyborgs, ‘monster’ is a cultural construction, a humanly-produced non-human. This seminar invites scholars to discuss the monster both as a literary figure and as the representation and construction of a cultural and political identity. Through this, it aims to explore the question of where, why, and how monsters are produced, and what these monsterized creatures "show" about the communities that "produce" them. 

Critical Nonbinary Studies

Míša Stekl / CSU
deadline for submissions: 
Friday, August 21, 2026

This MLA just-in-time panel explores the evolving status of non-binariness in trans studies and beyond. Following Marquis Bey’s Nonbinary Life, we ask: Is non-binariness an emancipatory narrative? What are its critical potentialities and limitations? Send 150-200 word abstracts + bio to m.stekl@colostate.edu by 8/21. (The MLA will take place in Los Angeles from 7 to 10 January 2027.)

Critical Nonbinary Studies

Míša Stekl / CSU
deadline for submissions: 
Friday, August 21, 2026

This MLA just-in-time panel explores the evolving status of non-binariness in trans studies and beyond. Following Marquis Bey’s Nonbinary Life, we ask: Is non-binariness an emancipatory narrative? What are its critical potentialities and limitations? Send 150-200 word abstracts + bio to m.stekl@colostate.edu by 8/21. (The MLA will take place in Los Angeles from 7 to 10 January 2027.)

Star Wars 50 Years: Pasts, Presents, and Futures

University of Leicester
deadline for submissions: 
Sunday, November 1, 2026

Conference Call for Papers

The Star Wars 50 Years academic conference will be held by the University of Leicester and the Leverhulme Centre for Humanity and Space at Space Park Leicester on 21-22 May 2027 in anticipation of the 50th anniversary of the original release of the film on 25 May 1977 in the U.S. We are now inviting proposals for conference presentations.

Conference Organisers:

2027 PCA Conference - Neurodivergent Studies

Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association
deadline for submissions: 
Saturday, October 31, 2026

Neurodivergent Studies – Popular Culture Association 2027

 

“Neurodivergent just means a brain that diverges.” – Kassiane Asasumasu, Radical Neurodivergence Speaking

 

Revolutions & Revisions in Popular Culture (in Dime Novels & Juvenile Series Books) - PCA Annual Conference, March 24-27, 2027: Boston, Massachusetts

Popular Culture Association
deadline for submissions: 
Saturday, October 31, 2026

Call for Papers: Dime Novels and Juvenile Series Books, PCA 2027

The PCA Dime Novels and Juvenile Series Books Area is accepting proposals for presentations at the next PCA/ACA annual conference, to be held in Boston, MA from March 24-27, 2027. See the PCA website for more information on the conference and submission guidelines.

Cleveland Symposium 2026: Wear: Indexing the Human Body

Case Western Reserve University
deadline for submissions: 
Friday, August 14, 2026

Wear: Indexing the Human Body

52nd Annual Cleveland Symposium
Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio
Friday, November 13, 2026

NeMLA 2027 Panel | American Solidarities: Bridging Latin American Studies and Latinx Studies

Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)
deadline for submissions: 
Wednesday, September 30, 2026

Despite possessing intersecting histories and languages, Latin American studies and Latinx studies have historically been treated as separate fields of study. This panel seeks to spark a dialogue between fields by exploring themes of transhemispheric and archipelagic solidarity in Latinx and Latin American literature and media. Throughout the past and present century, how have Latinx and Latin American media—literature, film, art, or other forms—constructed expressions of community in dialogue with each other? How do works from Latin America reverberate in Latinx cultural productions, and how do Latinx cultural productions influence Latin American media?

The "Forms" of Academic Work

Fabio Durão (UNICAMP) and Tim Lanzendörfer (Frankfurt University)
deadline for submissions: 
Monday, November 30, 2026

Call for Abstracts / Papers for a Special Issue of MatLit (Materialities of Literature / Materialidades da Literatura), vol. 12, 2027, edited by Fabio Durao and Tim Lanzendörfer

https://impactum-journals.uc.pt/matlit/announcement/view/359

The "Forms" of Academic Work
Editors: Fabio Durão (UNICAMP) and Tim Lanzendörfer (Frankfurt University)

SAMLA panel: "Hospitality, Leisure, Vacations, Entertainment and Travels in Pre-1865 American Literature

Micahel Martin/Nicholls State University
deadline for submissions: 
Tuesday, September 1, 2026

How was the concept of “hospitality” and “leisure” conceived by early American writers? Travelogues, whether from William Bartram, Sara Kemble Knight, or others, served as a major genre type during the period. Topics may include stays at early American hotels, the way that leisure was/is linked to social class, and the Caribbean and European vacation in the early American imagination. What regional places of leisure figured heavily in the early American cultural imaginary? How did Black writers and Native American writers conceive of entertainment and visitation? This panel seeks contributors who can speak to leisure and travel from writings that span the early part of American culture and history into the nineteenth century.

A Golden Age? Global Historical Fictions and Political Nostalgia

Historical Fictions Research Network
deadline for submissions: 
Thursday, October 1, 2026

Call for Papers

A Golden Age? Global Historical Fictions and Political Nostalgia 

One-Day Online Workshop of the Historical Fictions Research Network

28 November 2026 (online in Zoom) ca 8 am to 5 pm (GMT)

15 min talks

The Historical Fictions Research Network, an interdisciplinary and international network of scholars examining historical fictions, i.e. narratives of the past in a variety of popular media, is happy to organise its 2026 one-day workshop on the topic of 

“A Golden Age? Global Historical Fictions and Political Nostalgia”.

National Advanced Writing Symposium (NAWS) 2027 - "Evolving Possibilities: Futures of Advanced Writing"

Elizabeth Durst/ The Writing Program/ University of Southern California
deadline for submissions: 
Friday, September 25, 2026

National Advanced Writing Symposium (NAWS) 2027 - January 29, 2027

Please use the link, below, to find a full description of our CFP for "Evolving Possibiilities: Futures of Advanced Writing."
The event is entirely ONLINE and FREE to both speakers and attendees.
Proposals are due Friday, September 25, 2026.

CFP: Popular Culture Association Libraries, Archives, and Museums

Elizabeth Downey/Popular Culture Association
deadline for submissions: 
Saturday, October 31, 2026

Call For Papers

The Popular Culture Association (PCA) annual conference will be held March 24-27, 2027 at the Boston Marriott Copley Place in Boston, Massachusetts. Scholars from a wide variety of disciplines will meet to share their Popular Culture research and interests. The Libraries, Archives & Museums area invites proposals dealing with any aspect of Popular Culture as it pertains to libraries, archives, museums, or related areas.

Can Literary Criticism Break Free of the Silos Trap—and Carry Literature Along?

Alejandro López / Boston University
deadline for submissions: 
Wednesday, September 30, 2026

CALL FOR PAPERS — NeMLA 2027 Seminar

Salve Regina University, Newport, RI | March 6–9, 2027

Can Literary Criticism Break Free of the Silos Trap — and Carry Literature Along?

In the early 1950s, Lacan admonished psychoanalysts for operating within Newtonian epistemology fifty years after Einstein and Heisenberg had dismantled it. It may be worth asking ourselves whether we, literary critics, 125 years later, have adjusted our analytical machine — or, at least, whether it is necessary that we do.

Necrocapitalism and Neoliberal Politics: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Responses in India

Ravenshaw University
deadline for submissions: 
Saturday, October 10, 2026

Call for Papers

 

Title of the book: Necrocapitalism and Neoliberal Politics: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Responses in India Publisher: The contract has been signed with Springer Nature

 

Deadline for submission of full paper: 10 October, 2026

Volume editors:

 

Abhijit Maity

Assistant Professor, Lady Shri Ram College for Women

University of Delhi, India

 

Dr. Joydev Maity,

Faculty,

Department of English, Ravenshaw University, India

 

TWO-DAY ONLINE WORKSHOP ON DIGITAL HUMANITIES & AI FOR STUDENTS, SCHOLARS & FACULTY

Department of English, Bhasha-Bhavana, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, West Bengal, India
deadline for submissions: 
Friday, August 14, 2026

“A mind all logic is like a knife all blade.

It makes the hand bleed that uses it.”

Rabindranath Tagore

Stray Birds (1916)

 

Generative AI, LLMs, and NLP are transforming the humanities by reshaping meaning, interpretation, and representation. However, humanities scholars face a widening skills gap due to limited structured access. To address this, Department of English is organising a first-of-its-kind workshop at Visva-Bharati. The programme offers research scholars, faculty, and postgraduate students a useful and rigorous introduction to Digital Humanities and AI tools.

 

Maps, Mechanics and Mobilities: Landscape & the Geographic Imagination in Video Games

Newcastle University, UK
deadline for submissions: 
Sunday, November 1, 2026

Maps, Mechanics and Mobilities:  Landscape & the Geographic Imagination in Video Games27th & 28th May 2027 (In-Person, Newcastle University, UK) Since their inception, video games have been defined by, and grounded in, space and place: from the maze in The Temple of Rom (1982) to the Hyrulian depths in Tears of the Kingdom (2023), from the Holy Land of the Crusades in Assassin’s Creed (2007) to the noirish city of Detroit: Become Human (2018), and from the farms of Stardew Valley (2016) to the depths of Hell in Hades (2020), video games have been concerned with the relationship between the player-character, place, mobility, an

CFP: Serial Killers: Fact into fiction (Peter Lang) – Urgent chapters required

University of Worcester
deadline for submissions: 
Wednesday, September 30, 2026

Urgent chapters are required for an upcoming collection, contracted to Peter Lang, Oxford. From existing chapters, this edited collection already clearly represents the areas of fact, fiction, and “inspired by”, with specific consideration to (fictional) serial killers, mass murderers, and their real-life counterparts.

At present, there are one or two areas of the collection that still require chapters – these will need to be delivered by 30 November 2026. Finished chapters should be approximately 2,500 words. I am welcoming abstracts of 250 words in the first instance, with no set deadline for abstract submissions – abstracts will be considered on a rolling basis until the chapter spaces are filled.

MYSTERY & DETECTIVE FICTION AREA, PCA 2027 BOSTON

Popular Culture Association
deadline for submissions: 
Saturday, October 31, 2026

The Mystery & Detective Fiction Area of the Popular Culture Association invites proposals for the annual conference in Boston, Massachusetts, March 24-27, 2027, to be held at the Boston Marriott Copley Place (110 Huntington Ave., Boston, MA). The deadline for submission is October 31, 2026.

Look Again: (Re)Vision for Community Empowerment

Accepted Panel for NeMLA 2027, Chairs: Audrey Peterson-McCann (University at Albany, SUNY ) Yolande Schutter (University at Albany, SUNY)
deadline for submissions: 
Wednesday, September 30, 2026

This panel invites papers on the topic of (re)vision—retelling, translating, adapting, re-seeing—literature in ways that engender community empowerment. There are myriad ways to revisit literary texts through new iterations, and it is often through the act of retelling and recrafting that subversive narratives are formed and new communities forged. This panel will explore how retelling a narrative shapes understandings of an original text, the community from which it was created, and the community into which it is being called forth. How can translation produce new entry points for readers into “foreign” texts, cultures, and languages? How might the adaptation of literature foster community across disciplines, ages, cultures, genders, and species?

Heritage Meets Modernity:Memory, Identity, Community, and Millennial Transformations

Peter Lang
deadline for submissions: 
Saturday, August 15, 2026

Call for Book Chapters:
Heritage Meets Modernity:Memory, Identity, Community, and Millennial Transformations

An Edited Volume under the ICSSR Major Research Project
(2024-2025): Heritage Meets Modernity: Millennial Interventions in Redefining Kolkata's Culinary Topography
Jadavpur University, Kolkata

Circuits: Transpacific Technologies and Speculative Futures in the Asian American South

Texas Association for Asian American Diaspora Studies (TAAADS)
deadline for submissions: 
Sunday, November 1, 2026

The Call for Papers for the TAAADS 2027 conference, taking place February 19-20 2027 at the University of Texas, Austin, is now live! The full CFP is available at https://tinyurl.com/TAAADS-2027. We're happy to have spent the past two years building this conference around Asian American studies in the South, and our CFP aims to continue this place-based scholarship through our conference theme, Circuits: Transpacific Technologies and Speculative Futures in the Asian American South.

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