In recent decades, the scientific search for extraterrestrial life has undergone a significant conceptual transformation. Earlier astrobiological research largely focused on identifying environments similar to those on Earth—particularly the presence of water and organic molecules—as indicators that life might exist elsewhere in the universe. Increasingly, however, scientists recognize that truly alien life may not resemble terrestrial biology at all. Rather than searching only for “life as we know it,” astrobiologists now explore the possibility that organisms could arise from unfamiliar biochemical systems, rely on alternative solvents, or take forms that challenge our current definitions of life.This shift has important cultural implications.

Gender and Fragmentation in the Fin de Siècle 

Nineteenth Century Gender Studies Special Issue – Summer 2027

Guest Edited by Emily Waller Singeisen and Ryan Carroll

As part of the 54th annual Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture, the Charles Olson Society invites papers on the theme of “Black Mountain Poetry and the Arts.” Working amidst the rich, interdisciplinary atmosphere of Black Mountain College and The Black Mountain Review, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, and many others developed their conceptions of projectivist poetics in tandem with colleagues in painting, music, and dance. As multimedia events like the first “Happening,” which featured poetry by Olson, readings by M.C.

In his book, Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species (2016), Neel Ahuja’s theory of “the body as a transitional theater of imperial warfare” explores how the control of human and nonhuman bodies proliferated the expansion of empire over the 19th century to the present. Despite the growing hegemony of biomedical control, there have always been and continue to be significant moments of resistance and agency in which marginalized (colonized/Indigenous) communities have challenged or reformulated/redefined the concepts of body, disease, and health.

Public scholarship is rapidly becoming both an essential part of an academic CV and a powerful tool for making the case for the importance of the humanities to our society. Adding public scholarship to one’s academic skills, however, is not as straightforward as it may seem. We are seeking scholars to join the roundtable discussion on what public scholarship is, what forms it may take, how to write for a public audience, how and where to pitch ideas, and how public scholarship can benefit one’s other work, among any other questions our colleagues may have about adding public scholarship to their humanities repertoire. We invite proposals from members with a range of public scholarly experience to share their perspectives and expertise.

Originally coined by David P. Barash and Judith Even Lipton in their 2001 book The Myth of Monogamy: Fidelity and Infidelity in Animals and People, “the myth of monogamy” is defined as “the often unspoken assertion that even desire-at-a-distance is not only wrong, but a uniquely human sin.” This roundtable builds on this definition and suggests that in 2026, the “myth of monogamy” also refers more broadly to the pervasive (and socially constructed) idea that monogamy is biologically natural and socially superior.

What futures can South Asia imagine for itself—and in whose languages, forms, and cosmologies are they written? This seminar takes up South Asian Futurisms, a concept that remains under-theorized within literary studies, as a lens for reading how South Asian literatures of the past and present, across regional and vernacular traditions, have envisioned the future. Amid the region's rapidly shifting economic, social, and geopolitical landscape, we ask: can there be a South Asian Futurism, and if so, what does it look like?

We are living in a time of extreme weather, ecological shift, and infrastructural decay, much of which is related to questions surrounding water. To further analyze the ways that water is affected by and in turn shapes our world, Blue Humanities emerges to critically contend with a shifting landscape. Our attempt through this panel is to expand the conversation by intentionally incorporating the nuances of trauma and infrastructure studies.  

Kids and Blue Humanities: Critical Frameworks for a Blue Children’s Culture [working title]

Edited by Sidney I. Dobrin and Kenneth B. Kidd, U of Florida.

Deadline for proposals: November 1, 2026, to both editors:

sdobrin@ufl.edu

kbkidd@ufl.edu

CALL FOR CHAPTER PROPOSALS

European modernism often imagined aesthetic form as a way to overcome mediation: to make alienated experience, fragmented sociality, or absent truth appear immediately whole or present. At the same time, Edward Said identifies one of the core mechanisms of imperial representation as how it effaces its own mediation of the Orient, as if representation delivered “presence” rather than “re-presence.” This panel explores to what extent the modernist fantasy of formal immediacy was historically enabled by a fantasy of immediacy built into Orientalist representation.

PCA/ACA Fat Studies 2027 Call for Papers/Presentations/Panels

Deadline: 10.31.26

PCA Fat Studies Area Call for Papers

Attention all Fat Studies academics, activists, and artists: Please join other Fat Studies scholars for the 2027 PCA/ACA National Conference in Boston, Massachusetts from March 24-27, 2027. Presenters must become members of the Popular Culture Association. Find more information on the conference and organization at https://sites.google.com/view/2026pcaconference/home.

Black Performing Arts: Sound, Movement, Image, Text

Submission Deadline: October 31, 2026

The Black Performing Arts Area provides a scholarly forum to share research pertaining to Black performance across expressive forms.  Broadly defined, the area focuses on all forms of performing and visual arts, including all musical genres, theatrical performance and performance art, performance elements in visual art, and connections between different Black expressive forms.  In all these contexts we are interested in investigating where aesthetic technique and embodiment merge across Black diasporic expressivity.

Human Creativity in the AI Era: New Horizons for Literature, Translation, and Linguistics

Faculty of Alsun – Fayoum University – Egypt

26–27 October 2026

Hybrid Conference (In-person & Online)

Conference Theme

Explore Shakespeare in a variety of media beyond traditional stage productions, including film, television, anime, manga, and recent novelizations of the plays. We have previously had papers on the following topics and invite new ideas all the time.

International, interdisciplinary conference titled:

Healing Narratives: Exploring Humanity in Medicine and Healthcare

In the realm of medicine and healthcare, narratives- whether spoken, written, visual, or performed- serve among others as powerful tools to humanize clinical experiences, challenge biomedical paradigms as well as foster empathy and understanding. These stories reveal the complex interplay between biological, psychological, social, cultural, and spiritual dimensions of health, illuminating the ways in which healing is intertwined with human dignity, identity, and societal values.

We are currently inviting abstracts for an upcoming Special Issue on “Reparation in Sinophone Literatures”. We are delighted that this issue will be guest-edited by Dr Tammy Lai-Ming Ho, Editor-in-Chief of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Honorary Researcher at the Richard Charles Lee Canada-Hong Kong Library at the University of Toronto, and former Senior Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Centre for Cultural Practices of Reparation (CURE), Saarland University.

The deadline for abstracts for this Special Issue is 15 October 2026, while full papers are expected by 28 February 2027.

Call for Papers

SAMLA 2026 Panel: Adapting Alice: Alice in Wonderland in the 21st Century Imagination 

SAMLA 98 (Thursday, November 5 - Saturday, November 7, 2026): Call for Abstracts

Link for Submissions: https://samla.ballastacademic.com/Home/S/19713 

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.

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

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

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. 

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

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.

Call For Papers

Issue VII: Reclaiming the City: Built Environment and Social Change