In a 1918 speech at Munich University, sociologist Max Weber observed a widespread cultural loss of belief in magic and the supernatural: “the fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization, and above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world.’… the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life." Weber’s idea of disenchantment is borrowed from the Enlightenment-era playwright Fredrich Schiller's exploration of Entzauberung, the "de-divinizing" of art, literature, culture, and existence. As Richard Jenkins clarifies, Weber's disenchantment is “right at the heart of modernity,” a product of the world becoming “knowable, predictable, and manipulable by humans ...

Call for Papers

Digital & Analog Cultures

Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)

47th Annual Conference, February 25-28, 2026

Marriott Albuquerque

Albuquerque, New Mexico

https://www.southwestpca.org

Submissions open: September 1, 2025

Proposal submission deadline: October 31, 2025

“Formats and Institutions of American Literary Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century” Editors: Philipp Löffler (Universität Heidelberg) and Alexander Starre (Freie Universität Berlin) Deadline for Abstracts: October 31, 2025 This edited collection addresses alternative modes of writing nineteenth-century literary history, spanning the evolution of the literary field from a narrow patronage system in the 1810s and 1820s to a broad and expanding commercial literary market around 1900. The framing of the volume cuts across traditional period distinctions, from the early Republic to turn-of-the-twentieth-century naturalism, as well as canonized literary movements.

Call for Papers – ACLA 2026 SeminarSeminar Title: Heteronormativity, Resistance and Censorship: Queer Gothic Narratives in South Asian DramaConference: American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) Annual Meeting 2026Dates: February 26 – March 1, 2026Venue: Montréal, Canada (in person)

Organizers: Muhammad Numan, Faham Zeeshan (UMT Lahore)

CFP: 16th Annual African, African American, and Diaspora Studies (AAAD) Interdisciplinary Conference
A conference hosted by James Madison University, Harrisonburg, VA

Conference Theme: Sanctuary: Sites of Survival and Spontaneity 

February 11-13, 2026
Deadline: October 15, 2025

Faculty Development Programme

Translation as Dialogue: Creative License, Crossover and Current Developments

(Hybrid Mode) 

Organized by
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology (IIEST), Shibpur

Important Dates

The last decade of the Twentieth century witnessed a drastic shift from a ‘Bipolar’ to a ‘Unipolar’ world including the definition of the power politics and the diplomatic, economic and military status quo of the cold war era. Now the geographies of the globe had to shape the historical predictability, literary upsurges, socio-economic developments and psycho-cultural practices within the communities including the entire ecosystem of the various ecosophical narratives of climate change. In this context, ‘Geopolitics’ proved to the most apt term that invokes many things simultaneously. Political tussle and dominance is the most obvious meaning of the term that implicitly implies its global extent.

            As a vital medium of resistance, literature has long served as a cultural expression of oppression, displacement, censorship, and violence, offering both testimony and critique. Resistance narratives respond to the structures of domination that are colonial, patriarchal, racial, economic, and ecological. These texts often articulate alternative modes of existence, agency, and solidarity. While resistance may take multiple forms, it remains grounded in a shared ethical impulse: to challenge authority, expose injustice, and envision transformation.

S23.Shakespeare in the Cloud(s)  Organisers: Maria Elisa Montironi, Reto WincklerDescription: Shakespeare in the cloud(s) interrogates categories of temporality and spatiality in relation to digital Shakespeares in the form of performances, editing practices, adaptations, appropriations, community building, AI-revivifications, memes and more and explores their aesthetic and political implications.

K-Pop Reader: Gender and Technology in K-pop
Edited Volume

We invite proposals for chapters in a forthcoming edited volume, Electric Bodies, Digital Souls: Gender and Technology in K-pop. This collection examines K-pop as a key site for negotiating gender and identity in the digital age, where artificial intelligence (AI), algorithmic mediation, and posthuman aesthetics are reshaping what it means to be a gendered subject.

The 97th annual SAMLA Conference is taking place Thursday, November, 6, through Saturday, November, 8, 2025, at the Wyndham Atlanta Buckhead Hotel & Conference Center in Atlanta, GA.  For more information, see https://southatlanticmla.org/.

The Trans* Research Association of Ireland (TRAI)’s 2nd Annual Symposium is the sequel to the groundbreaking first T*RAI symposium hosted at the University College Dublin in 2024. This two-day symposium will bring together international scholars, artists and activists from across, between and against disciplines, all of whom are committed to research on transness and/or Irishness, broadly conceived.

Concept Note

CALL FOR CHAPTERS:  Fear as a Political Emotion: The Rise of New Violent Orders (Nova Science Publishers).

Maximiliano E Korstanje, University of Palermo, Argentina

Adrian Scribano, CONICET, University of Buenos Aires, Argentina

Starfish are echinoderms with a unique ability called autotomy where they can regenerate lost limbs. There are times when these creatures will even sacrifice a limb to save themselves. However, whether through natural causes or detriment, we learn that loss can equal a new beginning. These new appendages are not always exact matches. Nevertheless, these misshaped, Frankensteined pieces, marred by experience, can represent a new foundation that is more powerful, vigorous, efficient, and even healthier.

The so-called “post-secular turn” in Victorian studies has helped produce a more accurate view of the Victorian period by acknowledging the religiosity of the time rather than privileging doubt and skepticism. However, so far the post-secular turn, understandably, has focused on religious movements and the role of the Bible in the literature of the time. This panel seeks to broaden that focus by examining ways in which a consideration of Victorian religiosity sheds new light on a range of scholarly debates – including but not limited to such topics as disability studies, eugenics, “scientific” racism, or animal rights, among many other possibilities. Interdisciplinary papers are welcome.

A trace evokes the marks, remnants, and residues of the past. Rather than static records, trace embodies the temporal and spatial dimensions of the actions that produced them, representing intersections of movement, perception, and interaction. A trace can be the smallest and subtlest thing–a memory knot, a mark left by animals, travelers, or strangers, or can be the space between the lines of historical texts. A trajectory, on the other hand, is the path of movement that implies direction, growth, narrative, discourse, coming into an account, taking shapes, and becoming present. What is the dynamic tension between trace and trajectory? How do trace and trajectory translate and communicate with each other?

While ancient Europe regarded India as a land of material wealth and proverbial wisdom, it also saw it as a land of man-like monkeys, banyan trees, and enormous elephants. Ancient Europeans perceived Indians as wearing bright colors, eating rice and meat, and lacking wine-drinking finesse. Today, portrayals of India in prose fiction, cinema, social media, and historiography have shifted from polarized images of Europe and India to narratives depicting a “Dark” and a “Shining” India. Characters in these texts strive to be part of an economically thriving “shining” India, even as they face social, cultural, and political challenges daily.

Magics, Marvels, Metamorphoses, and Monsters: Horrors of the Medieval Past, Present, and Future (Virtual)

Co-sponsored by Monsters & the Monstrous Area of the Northeast Popular Culture Association, Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture, International Society for the Study of Medievalism

Organized by Michael A. Torregrossa, Bristol Community College, and June-Ann Greeley, Sacred Heart University

Call for Articles

Special Issue: (Re)articulating an Old Ideal: Self-Care and Self-Help in Contemporary Culture

Guest Editors: Alexandra Bacalu (University of Bucharest) & Dragoș Manea (University of Bucharest)

The Charles Olson Society will sponsor panels at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture, to take place in Louisville, Kentucky, February 16-21. 2026 marks the Centenary of poet Robert Creeley’s birth, and the Charles Olson Society will welcome abstracts pertaining to any aspect of Creeley’s life and work. Creeley was a central poet in the development of Black Mountain Poetry, and along with his life-long friend and companion in verse, Charles Olson, Creeley greatly influenced the development of American poetics after World War II. As he said, “I write to realize the world as one has come to live in it, thus to give testament. I write to move in words, a human delight. I write when no other act is possible.”

Pasados Special Issue: Against the Past/Contra Pasados

Co-edited by Jesse Alemán (University of New Mexico) and Evelyn Soto (Rutgers University—New Brunswick)

Deadline: January 15, 2026

Call for papers

Undisciplined Anthropologies: Practices, Trajectories, and Imaginations Beyond “Method”

Cultures and Societies Department, University of Palermo, Italy

Institut Français, Palermo, Italy

International Conference

30th, 31rst October 2025

Institut Français Palermo

Via Paolo Gili 4, 90138, Palermo

Deadline for abstracts: September 25th, 2025

Literary criticism is often treated as a secondary act, the intellectual afterimage of the work it addresses. This seminar proceeds from the opposite premise: criticism can be understood as a compositional art, a practice that gathers elements from different media, genres, and historical moments in order to propose a world in which the work might live. The critic does not merely interpret but constructs, weaving together forms, narratives and temporalities to re-situate a work within a newly configured cultural space, animated by the critical desire to imagine and construct more just and inhabitable worlds.