MLA 2027 – Early American and Sexuality Studies Forum 

“The Body Before Sex”

This collaborative panel by the Early American LLC and Sexuality Studies TC of the Modern Language Association aims to bring forward trans, environmental, and affect methodologies to consider the historically and culturally specific ways the body and sex intersect and depart. We are particularly interested in papers that stretch and transgress temporal and spatial domains, offering critical juxtapositions that reexamine the materialities and temporalities that make visible the body before it becomes associated with, and attached to, sex. 

This session will be devoted to academic novels and academic administration. Panelists will consider what these novels (as well as television and films centered in academia) have to say about how higher education institutions are run, and what we might learn about how—and how not—to run them. Equally interested in literary studies (genre, form, representation) and Critical University Studies (history, politics, current events).

CFP for MLA 2027 (7-10 January, 2027), Los Angeles: Guaranteed ACIS Panel

Emancipations in Irish Literature and Culture

Fat has been ever-present in public imagination in various forms. Fat is perceived as a

public enemy and “demonized in medicine and public policy” (Blank 2020). It is “adored by chefs

and nutritional faddists, desired and abhorred when it comes to sex, and continually courted by a

multi-billion-dollar fitness and weight-loss industry” (Blank 2020). Yet, ‘Fat’ as an area of

academic research has remained remarkably underdeveloped in the Humanities and Social

Sciences domain. Only recently, it has emerged as a vibrant interdisciplinary field that interrogates

The International Vladimir Nabokov Society seeks paper proposals for presentations on the following themes for the Modern Language Association’s Annual Convention (January 7-10, 2027, Los Angeles):  

 Nabokov in the ‘70s / Nabokov’s Afterlife

Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU) Prague, Czech Republic

August 20–21, 2026

Call for Papers Deadline for proposals: April 1, 2026

Conference Directors: Petra Dominková (FAMU, Prague, Czech Republic), Thomas Ballhausen (Inter-University Organization Arts & Knowledges + Mozarteum University Salzburg, Austria)

Venues:

INHA – Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art
Académie du Climat
Université Paris 8 | Vincennes – Saint-Denis

Proposals should be sent to: extractivisms2@gmail.com before 30/03/2026

Organising Committee: LAE Network (Literatures, Arts, Extractivisms):

Christian Alonso, University of Lleida
David Castañer, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
Fortunata Calabro, University of Barcelona
Christian Galdón, École Polytechnique, Paris 8
Alessia Gervasone, University of Barcelona
Benoît Turquety, Université Paris 8

We invite additional submissions for Lands of the Lost, an edited collection that explores extinct animal parks real, imagined, unrealized, or yet to be. Our goal is to bring together multi-disciplinary perspectives to examine parks across time and space, across fact and fiction. We seek to understand how these projects, which reconstitute and enclose long-extinct life forms, intersect with histories of science, capitalism, imperialism, environmental change, and more.

The Margaret Atwood Society invites paper proposals for an online panel on testimony and resistance in Margaret Atwood’s work. In keeping with the MLA 2027 presidential theme, this panel welcomes papers that examine how Atwood’s narratives represent coercion and constraint while also tracing the risk and agency at stake in claiming liberatory space. Possible topics include but are not limited to:

• Testimony, witnessing, and the politics of voice

• Surveillance, secrecy, confession, and the archive

• Gendered power, reproductive politics, and bodily autonomy

• Critical reception and adaptation

Since the turn of the millennium, migration to Europe has significantly increased. Individuals have come to this continent often fleeing conflict and political instability as well as seeking improved social and economic wellbeing. For migrants, engagement in religious practice is a key resource in the post-migration period. Religious activities and infrastructure offer practical and spiritual support, as well as being a source of social belonging for newly arriving migrants. These factors often help individuals navigate structural inequalities, for example, facilitating access to social services.

We invite papers on automobility and/or transportation infrastructure in any aspect of literary and cultural studies. We are particularly interested in exploring how representations of vehicles address questions of social and environmental justice.

This is a proposed special session for the 2027 MLA convention in Los Angeles, 7-10 January. We plan to hold the session in person.

Please email abstract (250 words) and author bio (100 words) by March 3 to both organizers:

Govind Narayan Ponnuchamy, Northwestern University (gnarayan@u.northwestern.edu )Ben Jamieson Stanley, University of Delaware (bstanley@udel.edu )

Call for Papers — MLA 2027 (Los Angeles)

Black Motherhood in the African Diaspora: Narrating Care, Resilience, and Futures

Across African diasporic literary traditions, Black motherhood emerges as a crucial site through which histories of slavery, empire, migration, and racial capitalism are negotiated and reimagined. Literary representations of motherhood register both the intimate labor of care and the broader structural pressures shaping diasporic life, often producing alternative temporalities, ethical frameworks, and speculative futures.

It was a few years after the eve of Senegal’s independence that the first film made by an African was produced, as a way of offering an African account of Black struggles and living conditions. Ousmane Sembène viewed cinema as a more powerful medium for conveying African realities because it does not require literacy to grasp its message, making it a more effective tool for explaining the lived realities of Africa. A similar approach can be observed in the work of Alain Kassanda, especially in his documentary Colette and Justin, which not only revisits the historical context surrounding Patrice Lumumba and his death, but also dismantles claims often associated with Africans that are in fact inherited from colonialism, such as the non-schooling of girls.

CFP: The Body, Anatomy, and Aesthetics 

Special Issue: Art & the Public Sphere 

In an era marked by digital mediation, political polarization, and heightened ethical scrutiny, humour has become a high-stake cultural practice: jokes travel rapidly, provoke backlash, generate solidarity, and often become flashpoints for debates around offence, free speech, and accountability. In the twenty-first century, humour has emerged as one of the most powerful, contested, and ubiquitous modes of cultural expression. Circulating across literary texts, theatrical stages, digital platforms, popular media, and everyday social interactions, humour today functions not merely as entertainment but as a deeply performative, political, and ethical practice.

Call for Proposals:

Italian Americans and the Making of America:
Design, Diaspora, and the Architecture of Belonging

58th Annual Conference of the Italian American Studies Association
November 5-8, 2026

Tufts University, Medford, MA

https://italianamericanstudies.submittable.com/submit/348486/58th-annual-iasa-conference-at-tufts-university

“Creativity, Resistance and Social Change”International Conference13-14 June 2026 - Accra, Ghana / Online

organised by

London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research

Across history and cultures, creativity has played a central role in resisting injustice, challenging dominant narratives and imagining alternative social futures. From storytelling, music and visual art to literature, performance, digital media and everyday creative practices, acts of creation often emerge in response to exclusion, oppression or crisis. Creativity can unite communities, give voice to marginalised experiences and sustain collective struggles for dignity, justice and transformation.

In athletics, athletes are often described as ‘throwing down the gauntlet’ when they record a particularly impressive jump, race, throw, indicating a raise in the competition stakes, a nod to their fellow competitors that they are the champion to beat. In the 2001 movie A Knight’s Tale, jousting enthusiasts are depicted like modern day sports fans, with Ulrich’s friends even singing a football chant in the pub. 

Call for Papers

International Conference on Myths, Archetypes and Symbols:“Models and Alternatives” 26-27 September 2026 – London/Online

 organised by

London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research

“Beyond Labels”: International Conferenceon Disability, Different Ability and Neurodiversity12-13 September 2026Birkbeck, University of London / Online

organised by

London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research

Disability, different ability and neurodiversity are concepts that traverse boundaries, challenging disciplines to rethink foundational assumptions about identity, culture and power. This interdisciplinary conference seeks to bring together scholars from different fields to critically examine the shifting narratives, representations and lived experiences surrounding ability and difference.

Postcolonial Interventions invites scholarly articles for an OPEN ISSUE to be published in June 2026. As the journal enters its eleventh year, we are hoping to continue critical exploration of emerging voices and recent literary creations while remaining mindful of the various threats associated with older imperial aggressions, re-appearing across the globe, fissures within nation states, multiple forms of exclusionary violence and widening inequality and precarity. The next issue of Postcolonial Interventions seeks to explore such issues and more based on postcolonial experiences across the world.

Submission Guidelines:

Seeking 250-word proposals that engage with Filipino/a/x placemaking in literature, ecology, media, the arts, and the built environment. Particularly interested in proposals that bring together some combination of urban humanities, Global Asias, and archipelagic thinking.

The Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies publishes interdisciplinary and cross-cultural articles and interviews on literature, history, politics, and art whose focus, settings, or subjects involve colonialism and its aftermath, with an emphasis on the former British Empire.