In bell hooks’ Belonging: A Culture of Place (2009), she posits that “many folks feel no sense of place” (1). She continues by explaining her personal experience with this spatiality, noting that, “Like many of my contemporaries I have yearned to find my place in this world, to have a sense of homecoming, a sense of being wedded to a place” (2). To that end, a commonality shared between all humans is a searching for a place in which we belong, and this is particularly evident in literature that is produced during times of major societal events.

CALL FOR PAPERS

In giving visible form to the “crisis of cartographic reason” (Farinelli 2009), the notion of border has become a central concept of the contemporary spatial turn (Guglielmi, Pala 2011), for disciplines such as geography (Winders, Johnson, Schein 2016), cultural anthropology (Wilson 2023), philosophy (Cooper, Tinning 2019), literary theory (Youngs 2019), and political studies (Konrad, Amilhat Szary 2023), emerging as an autonomous field of study.

About the Book

Indian Cultural Heritage: Perspectives is an edited volume that invites interdisciplinary scholarship on the diverse and dynamic dimensions of India's cultural heritage. The volume welcomes original contributions exploring tangible and intangible heritage, indigenous knowledge systems, languages, literature, folklore, performing arts, architecture, material culture, cultural memory, museums, heritage conservation, digital heritage, and contemporary issues of identity, sustainability, and cultural preservation. By bringing together diverse academic perspectives, the volume seeks to advance critical understanding of India's rich cultural traditions and their continuing significance in a rapidly changing world.

The aim of this book series is to examine the history of institutions around the world through the lens of gender. Of interest
are institutions established with the specific purpose of regulating gender and sexuality (e.g. the Magdalen
asylums, Magdalen hospitals, penitentiaries, refuges, mother and baby institutions) as well as those with more general
purposes where gender has had an important role in their operation and function (e.g. prisons, workhouses, lunatic
asylums), including both religious and private organisations. The series supports the increasing interest in these
institutions internationally, both in academia and in the treatment of ‘historical’ abuse.

Nineteenth-century British literature frequently interrogates the boundaries of community dynamics, examining not only what the individual contributes to a collective and what it means to belong, but how communal engagement fundamentally reshapes the individual. 

Consistent with the NeMLA 2027 theme, "Empowering Communities," this panel explores a vital dual imperative within the nineteenth-century British novel: the structural tension between individuals whose actions serve to empower their communities, and communities that conversely function to shield and empower otherwise fragile individuals.

Beecroft argues in The Cambridge Companion to the Novel that, if we understand the novel as storytelling in any narrative form indigenous to a particular culture or people, then we must acknowledge the existence of multiple novels, each with distinct temporal and spatial origins. He maintains that storytelling traditions are embedded in every society, and that many of these traditions have complemented, intersected with, or diverged from Western narrative forms (46–48). However, the narrative form canonized as the “novel” in the Western literary tradition has a specific historical and aesthetic origin in ancient Greece.

In keeping with Katherine Philips’s reputation as an exemplary practitioner of friendship and curator of connections, this panel invites papers that put Philips’s work in conversation with writers outside the Society of Friendship, outside coterie poetry, outside the English context, or even outside the early modern period altogether. 

6/26/26 - 8/31/26: Subs are OPEN for our big 10th Issue: A Day In The Life.

… um, like The Beatles’ song?‍ ‍

YES!

We’re interested in the ways in which art like this exists in the world — with such wildly different fragments and contrasting energies not just coming together but overflowing with a vivid, mad, inventive creativity! (We do like this song.)

So, do we want poems and artworks about this song, or pieces about The Beatles? NO!

When Henry James described the Victorian multi-plot novel as “large loose baggy monsters,” he didn’t have twentieth and twenty-first century horror in mind, but the echoing effects of the Gothic on writers like Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Charles Reade, and others. These writers drew on the multiplied plots and perspectives of the Gothic to represent how social worlds were constructed and constrained. 

International Conference at Le Mans University, France

in association with The Philip Roth Society

and The National and Kapodistrian University of Athens

April 7-8, 2027

Roth Unbound: Transcultural signposts from Goodbye Columbus to Nemesis 

Roots and Routes in Philip Roth’s Works

[Panel, Virtual]

NeMLA 2027 annual convention - Newport, RI (March 6-9 2027)

Historical fiction is generally associated with the novel (see Green [2011] and Young [2018]). Yet the historical short story was significant before WWI: “from 1901 to 1914, over 1200 works of historical fiction were issued, of which nearly a quarter were short-story collections” (Cox and Adrian 1994, xiv). We may wonder if and how the genre has been impacted by the renewed interest in the past and history in fiction over the past 30 years.

Intimately Disconnected
4-5 December 2026 (Friday and Saturday)
The University of Sydney

Call For Papers for Italian Ecofeminism and Literature

Deadline for Submissions: August 1, 2026

Notification date: September 1, 2026

Full name / Name of organization: Nicole C. (Civitano) Dittmer, PhD

Contact email: ncdittmer@gmail.com

Social Lens (ISSN: 3078-3941 (Online), 3078-3933 (Print) is an international, peer-reviewed, open-access scholarly journal committed to advancing innovative, interdisciplinary, and evidence-based research across the broad spectrum of the social sciences. The journal provides a global platform for researchers, academicians, practitioners, and policymakers to disseminate original research that contributes to contemporary academic discourse and informs policy and practice.

Themes of Interest

Submissions are welcomed in, but are not limited to, the following areas:

Public understanding of American cultures—peoples, neighborhoods, languages, foods, histories, arts, religions—has always been vulnerable to myth and misinformation, in particular from the far right. Collectively the humanities work to establish an ever-more accurate/inclusive lens on culture, but the (re)mainstreaming of far-right voices has dangerously distorted the diverse American story.

CFP: Handbook of the Cultural Legacy of 9/11. (under contract with Springer)

 Edited by:

 Marc A. Ouellette, Old Dominion University, (mouellet@odu.edu) and Peter Pericles Trifonas, University of Toronto

UVA Wise Medieval-Renaissance Conference XXXIX
Undergraduate Sessions
The University of Virginia’s College at Wise
September 17-19, 2026

Keynote Address:  
“Arthur's Great Death in Malory and its Afterlives”
Karen Cherewatuk, Saint Olaf College

CALL FOR PAPERS FRAME 40.1 “(Be)Longing”

Haryanvi Dalit theatre occupies a highly marginalised position within the broader landscape of Indian theatre. It may aptly be described as “the marginalised among the marginalised,” as it has remained largely excluded from both mainstream theatre studies and Dalit cultural historiography. Haryanvi Dalit Swang theatre was active long before the Dalit Panther Movement, but it received little attention due to its lack of publication and translation into English. This book seeks to recover, document, and critically examine the neglected legacy of Haryanvi Swang, with particular emphasis on its Dalit traditions and practitioners, thereby contributing to a more inclusive understanding of Indian theatrical heritage.

This panel invites theoretical and pedagogical explorations of experiential approaches to teaching environmental studies in higher education through the frameworks of new materialism, transcorporeality, affect theory, and embodied pedagogy. Aligning with NeMLA 2027’s theme, “Empowering Communities,” the panel examines how environmental learning can move beyond hierarchical and text-centered models toward collaborative, community-oriented, and experiential forms of knowledge production.

Rome and Capri, 21–28 June, 2027

F. Scott Fitzgerald visited Italy on two distinct occasions: first in the spring of 1921 during his and Zelda’s long-deferred honeymoon trip, and again from late 1924 to early 1925 during his unsuccessful attempt to economize. While the Fitzgeralds made brief stops in Venice, San Remo, Portofino, Savona, Pisa, Fiesole, Florence, and Naples, it was in the two host sites of this conference—Rome and Capri—that he spent the most time. It was here that he found inspiration for some of his most celebrated works, as well as several others that remain underexplored.

In the definition given by Podnieks, matrifocal literatures are written and narrated by mothers in the first-person or limited third-person voice, rendering maternal identity and experience from subjective perspectives. Such narratives (re)value the significance and meaning of maternal figures in cultural, social, and national arenas, and often contest or negotiate traditional ideologies of the “good” mother as self-sacrificing, nurturing, and sexless with her antithesis, the “bad” mother. In the last few years, we have seen the rise of matrifocal writings published to break taboos about previously silenced reproductive experiences, create a sense of community, support, and care, and, overall, empower people.