CFP--MLA 2027: The Melville Society

           Melville and McCarthyism

This panel invites papers reflecting on the value of Melville’s work for our authoritarian present. A pivotal revival of Melville during the nineteen-fifties by C.L.R. James and F.O. Matthiessen (both victims of McCarthyist surveillance and fear tactics) catapults Moby-Dick to attain the status of an American “classic” emblematic of a more, free democratic ethos. Moreover, Melville remains the author of the longest poem, Clarel, on Palestine in American literary history. Recent literary scholars of Melville also mobilize his writings to analyze the limits and possibilities of U.S. constitutionalism, including the First Amendment. 

Session CFP:

CALL FOR BOOK CHAPTERS
Criminologies, Borders, and Humanities in North Africa
An Edited Volume for the Emerald Borders, Criminalisation and Society Series
Editor: Dr. Rachid Benharrousse*

*Tilburg Law School, Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands

Email: rachid.benharrousse@proton.me

About the Series

This volume is proposed for the Emerald Borders, Criminalisation and Society Series: an interdisciplinary and inclusive space that examines how laws, policies, and practices shape, regulate, and contest borders and the people affected by them. 

“What is Theory, and why are they saying such terrible things about it? (And who—if we indulge in paranoiac criticism—are ‘they’, anyway?) To take the second part of the question first, ‘they’ say terrible things about Theory because much of it is admittedly jargon-ridden and often appears incomprehensible. But also (and this is the uncharitable answer) because: (i) it takes considerable patience and effort to understand the ‘key’ essays, and most diatribes against Theory come from people unwilling to make that effort; and (ii) it destabilises authority over interpretation and authority is precisely what teachers (especially teachers of literary studies) seek to impose over texts, meanings, and readers.”

The theme for Volume 13 of Ceræ: An Australasian Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, as well as for our 3rd annual online Conference, is Fame and Fortune. 

We invite submissions to both the conference and the journal on this theme.

Full details can be found here: 2026 Ceræ Call For Papers – CERÆ: An Australasian Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies

The Sally Mitchell Dissertation Prize is awarded annually to the best Ph.D. dissertation, defended in the previous calendar year, that explores the British periodical press of the long nineteenth century (including magazines, newspapers, and serial publications of all kinds) as an object of study in its own right, not as a source of material for other historical topics. Winners of the prize receive a monetary award of $1,000 and a two-year membership to RSVP.

This guaranteed panel (in-person at the Modern Language Association in Los Angeles, California; January 7-10, 2027) takes a cue from the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of African American Humor Studies and seeks 250-word proposals that discuss how African American humorists eschew "just jokes" to articulate personal and collective selfhood and freedom. Please submit abstracts by Monday, March 16 to dmorgan@scu.edu. This panel is sponsored by the Screen Arts and Culture Committee.

Accepted presenters must be MLA members by April 1, 2026. 

C21 is inviting scholars and researchers to contribute book review essays for upcoming issues. We currently have a selection of titles published in 2025 available for review, spanning literary studies, film and media studies, cultural studies, and gender and sexuality studies. We invite prospective authors to submit ideas for review essays that discuss 2–3 recently published scholarly texts. For the full CFP, and to see our list of available titles, please visit: https://c21.openlibhums.org/news/923/.

Existing scholarship in Asian (North) American Literature has long examined travel narratives about Asian travelers within immigrant or diasporic paradigms: Sau-ling Wong famously establishes the Necessity/Extravagance framework in understanding transpacific mobility by early Asian American immigrants (1993), whereas Chih-ming Wang reads the autobiographical travelogues by diasporic Vietnamese American writers as “homecoming stories” (2013), and Patricia Chu interprets them as “return narratives” deploying acts of countermemory and postmemory to address racial melancholia (2019).

Special Issue: The Subject and its Estrangements

‘The wounds of the Spirit heal, and leave no scars behind.’ Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit

What makes literary collaboration unexpected, difficult, or strange? How have authors transcended barriers – national, social, ideological, religious, temporal – in the collaborative production of texts?

For the upcoming EGO conference at Oxford University, we invite students to write on the prismatic theme of “strange bedfellows”. From plagiarism of unusual sources to fraught collaboration between literary “frenemies” to allyship across religious and political lines, this theme lends itself to discussions of the way literature is shaped by the collaboration of radically different perspectives and interests.

Children and adolescents frequently appear in Doris Lessing's fiction, specifically in her African short stories. However, Lessing did not write these stories with a child audience in mind; rather, she used child and adolescent characters to dissect African colonial society in the aftermath of the break-up of the British Empire (García Navarro, 2021). We invite contributions to a co-edited collection exploring what it means to be educated and to grow up as a child in Lessing's African stories, particularly in the context of 20th-century African society ruled by white European colonists. 

We are delighted to announce the return of the Raymond Williams Society postgraduate essay competition for its 12th year. The deadline for entries is Friday 3 April 2026.

The prize for the winning entry is £250 and a year’s subscription to the Society. The winning essay will be considered for publication in the academic journal Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism (subject to peer review). The competition aims to encourage a new generation of scholars working in the tradition of cultural materialism, especially those whose research is rooted in the work of Raymond Williams.

Updated CFP: We invite three additional contributors to join the volume, replacing previously shortlisted chapter authors who were unfortunately unable to continue with the project. This presents an excellent opportunity to participate in a substantial scholarly publication that already includes confirmed contributions from researchers based in India, Palestine, Indonesia, the Netherlands, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Scholarly discussions on environmental concerns have long been Euro-American-centric. In his 2005 essay, Rob Nixon critiques literary representations of environmentalism as an “offshoot of American Studies,” which has excluded non-American and non-Western perspectives on environmental degradation from critical inquiry. Nixon highlights Nigeria’s Abacha regime’s execution of Saro-Wiwa, a writer, activist and poet, who died fighting for his Ogoni people’s farmlands and the encroachment of their fishing waters by American and European conglomerates, supported by the local despotic regime. Nixon observes that Saro-Wiwa’s writings have received little attention from ecocriticism scholars (2005).

This call invites the submission of proposals for a dossier that will be submitted for consideration to A Contracorriente: A Journal of Latin American Studies. The dossier will focus on the following theme:

Material Plots: Commodity, Capitalism, and National Imaginaries in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Latin American Culture

Call for PapersCaliban Speaks: International Conference on Recentering Indigenous Thought in the Age of Decolonialism and Technology

April 21–22, 2026 | International Islamic University Islamabad (IIUI)

1. Conference Rationale

In the contemporary intellectual landscape, postcolonial theory has illuminated important questions of empire, identity, and resistance. Yet, its limits are increasingly visible: while interrogating colonial legacies, it has too often re-centered Eurocentric epistemologies and sidelined Indigenous thought.

In the early stages of understanding the scope of the most horrifying criminal empire in American history, we are grappling with academia’s role in it. Several faculty members and institutions have been implicated. A few were genuinely innocent and ignored Epstein’s invitations, and some were willingly complicit in crimes against humanity. 

Epstein’s co-conspirators have fundamentally compromised the student-teacher relationship and the student-university relationship.

Narratives of Resistance and African Literature: Articulating Dissent, Disobedience and Pluriversal Futures

Special issue of English Academy Review (Taylor and Francis)

Link: https://think.taylorandfrancis.com/special_issues/narratives-of-resistan...

Special Issue Editor(s)

Goutam Karmakar, University of Hyderabad, India
goutamkarmakar@uohyd.ac.in

Strangeness and Oddity:
Embracing the Extraordinary in Arts-Based Research

Conference Webpage: https://labrc.co.uk/2025/12/08/strangeness-and-oddity-2026/

A Transdisciplinary Conference
March 10-11, 2026
Online

Abstract Submission Deadline: February 17, 2026

Liverpool John Moores University, UK

6-8th July 2026

Confirmed keynotes:

Melissa Gustin (National Museums Liverpool), with guided tours of the Walker Art Gallery

Tara MacDonald (University of Lethbridge, Canada) “Public Institutions, Private Care: Sex Work and Care Work in Victorian Popular Fiction”

War leaves lasting marks not only on people and communities, but also on the natural world that witnesses, and endures, its violence. Long after the fighting has stopped, landscapes shaped by destruction remain living archives, bearing the aftereffects of conflict: damaged forests, polluted rivers and seas, and disrupted ecosystems that continue to hold its traces. These ‘trauma ecologies’ pass on the legacy of war from one generation to the next, forming what we call ‘environmental postmemory.’

Call for Papers

University of Delaware’s 5th CMCS Conference in Material Culture

April 2-3, 2027

                                        “What’s the Matter with Description? Form, Practice, and Material Culture”

Keynote Speaker

SUSAN STEWART

(Princeton University)

This MLA special sessions panel invites papers on literary and cultural approaches to Los Angeles infrastructure, aimed at interrogating the political aesthetic of social, natural, and built environments. Please send a 250 word abstract and short bio. 

2027 MLA Convention: January 7-10 in Los Angeles (accepted presenters must be MLA members by April 1)