Non-guaranteed panel at MLA 2027 co-sponsored by the Children’s Literature Association and the MLA forum on Science and Literature. This panel seeks papers on how children’s and young adult literature has engaged the natural sciences across historical and contemporary contexts, including plants, animals, evolution, and the scientific study of the natural world. We invite papers exploring the diverse ways literature for children and young adults mediates knowledge of the natural world, sometimes to instruct, sometimes to inspire wonder, sometimes to question the very authority of empirical observation. How does a text balance the excitement of botanical, zoological, or ecological discovery with the weight of explanation?

Critical essays are invited for an edited collection on the Historical Horror novel in the twenty-first century. This volume will focus on the intersection of women, history and the horror novel. It will explore representations of gender, sexuality and power in historical horror novels.

Horror and history have been intertwined since the publication of the first Gothic novel, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, in 1764. The past is a useful landscape for the horror novel, as it allows both a distancing—horror is imagined to happen on other shores or in other times—as well as a closer exploration of the horrors to be found at home.

The emergence and growing predominance of artificial intelligence have fundamentally reshaped how we understand knowledge, creativity, labour, and subjectivity. As AI models increasingly participate in writing, visual creation, research, and cultural production, long-standing assumptions within the Arts & Humanities (such as authorship, interpretation, agency, and even human experience) are being unsettled. Yet this disruption, rather than signaling the eclipse of the Humanities, intensifies their relevance. As algorithmic systems appropriate tasks once considered uniquely human, they reinvite considering some of the foundational questions of the Humanities: What constitutes a human? Where does meaning reside?

Why is close reading a particularly valuable learning strategy/professional practice at the current moment? This MLA seminar (a guaranteed session) seeks participants interested in thinking and talking through aspects of close reading with an eye towards producing pieces of public writing (e.g. an OpEd, think piece, lyric essay, call to action, etc. published in a newspaper, magazine, or periodical, in print or online). Topics for exploration may include, but are not limited to:

University of Toronto Quarterly (UTQ) is currently seeking submissions. Established in 1931, UTQ publishes innovative and exemplary scholarship from all areas in the humanities. As an interdisciplinary journal, UTQ favours articles that appeal to a scholarly readership beyond the specialists of a given discipline or field.

This in-person panel invites 250-word abstracts that examine women’s narratives, (self)representations, and forms of agency within resistance movements across film and digital platforms.

Related topics are welcome to be discussed.

Call for Papers: International Journal of Education Through Art

Special Issue: ‘Reimagining Place and Place-Based Art Education’

View the full call here>>

https://www.intellectbooks.com/international-journal-of-education-through-art#call-for-papers

Guest Editors:

Rabindranath Tagore and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, two of the greatest thinkers of the world had, between them, a kinship and appreciation of profound depth and mutuality. Both stood for universal humanism and emancipation of the dispossessed though their paths were seminally divergent.

Call for Proposals

Fan Studies Network North America Conference 2026 (virtual)

October 22-25, 2026

THE BOUNDARIES OF FAN STUDIES AND FANDOM

Hi all,

See the below CFP for a panel on Pacific early American literature for next year’s MLA. Please circulate to anyone you think might be interested!

Conspiracy Theories in the Wake of Disaster

Matthew N. Hannah

Associate Professor

Department of Communication Arts

University of Wisconsin—Madison

mhannah2@wisc.edu

Zachary Loeb

Assistant Professor

Department of History

Purdue University

zloeb@purdue.edu

Vulnerability has become a key term in contemporary critical theory, ethics, trauma studies, gender studies, disability studies, postcolonial studies, and affect theory. But fiction has long engaged with vulnerability – not necessarily as weakness or exposure, but as a condition of relationality, openness, resistance, and change. From tragic protagonists to marginalized bodies and precarious subjectivities, literary texts have repeatedly returned to fragility, dependency, and risk.

AICED-27

THE 27th ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OF THE ENGLISH DEPARTMENT,

UNIVERSITY OF BUCHAREST

5-6 June 2026

CALL FOR PAPERS

Representations of

Crime in Literature and the Arts

University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures

7-13 Pitar Moș Street, Bucharest, Romania

National Video Games: Cultures, Industries, Communities
international conference

10–12 September 2026
University of Warsaw, Poland

The end of history was cancelled years ago, and national ideas have been on the rise ever since. Game scholars, too, have been studying the relationships between national cultures, video games and game industries for about a decade. We now have a wealth of material about the game cultures of numerous different countries across the world; there are also publications that examine the national categorization of games itself.

The Function of Beauty: A Transdisciplinary Conferenc

“Beauty is not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart.”
— Khalil Gibran

Conference Dates: Thursday April 22-23, 2026
Location: Online
Abstract Submission Deadline: March 22, 2026
Fee: £100
Conference Webpage: https://labrc.co.uk/2026/01/26/function-of-beauty/

Call for papers: Mythical Archipelagos: Islands, Narratives, and Imaginaries Across Cultures and Media

International Interdisciplinary Seminar

University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (Spain)

14–15 May 2026 | Hybrid format

The seminar explores islands as mythical, symbolic, and narrative spaces across cultures and media. We welcome interdisciplinary contributions from island studies, environmental humanities, anthropology, cultural studies, linguistics, media studies, and related fields.

Abstract deadline: 30 March 2026

Full CFP and details:

FEMSPEC, an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal dedicated to challenging gender through speculative means in any genre, seeks volunteers to fill the following roles:

PRODUCTION EDITOR

Duties include:

Collating and formatting content for each new issue of the journal.  Liaising with the journal's editor and other volunteer collective members to make changes to the issue's content and layout until the end of each issue's production period.

This online panel seeks proposals that examine how humor, irony, and formal games use linguistic misbehavior to create new emotional landscapes, construct gendered subjectivities, and challenge traditional hierarchies across global literatures.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Puns, irony, or broken syntax and a gendered “I”
• Mis-translation and playfulness in translation
• Mixing languages and subjectivity
• Post-colonial parody
• Joy as defiance
• Humor in crisis
• Games based on works of literature

Please send a 250-word abstract and a brief bio to Dr. Haihong Yang (hyang@udel.edu) by March 15th. 

The 2026 International Postgraduate Comparative Literature Conference (IPCLC 2026), hosted by the Master of Arts in Literary and Cultural Studies (MALCS) at The University of Hong Kong (HKU), brings together postgraduate students and emerging scholars from Hong Kong and beyond for a day of cross-cultural conversation. Taking place in person at HKU on May 26, 2026, the conference offers a supportive forum for sharing work in progress, building scholarly networks, and testing new comparative methods across literary, cultural, and media studies. Featuring themed panels, a keynote lecture, and Best Paper Award(s), IPCLC 2026 invites participants to consider how comparison can sharpen our understanding of urgent questions in the humanities.

Call for Papers

Philip K. Dick at 100: Fiction, Philosophy, and Cultural Afterlives

Edited Volume (Centenary Collection)

Editors:
Assoc.Prof.Dr. Ercan Gürova
Ankara University, Turkey

Prof. dr Mladen Jakovljević
University of Priština in Kosovska Mitrovica, Serbia

“Under consideration for publication by a reputable international academic publisher.”

CALL FOR PAPERS

Edited Volume

Island Studies in South Asia: Gender, Culture and Islandness

We're excited to announce that the DIY Methods Conference is back for another year! Pitches are due by April 20th, 2026. Please don't hesitate to email us (annepasek@trentu.ca and trentwintermeier@utexas.edu) if you have any questions.

Call for Paper

The Politics of Ableism: Gender, Sexuality, and Disability in Literature and Media

Edited by Habib Tekin & Nizara Hazarika

Call for Papers

In the Introduction to In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination, Margaret Atwood makes a clear distinction between science fiction and speculative fiction: the former concerns events that could not happen; the latter draws on developments that could happen or that have already occurred in some historical form. The distinction was publicly contested, including in an exchange with Ursula K. Le Guin, and Atwood insists her terminology was descriptive rather than hierarchical. She places The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) within the speculative category on the grounds that nothing in the novel exceeds documented historical precedent (Atwood 5–6). This conference takes Atwood at her word.