This seminar investigates how repression, repetition, and unresolved rhythms shape emotional experience across Anglophone literature, heritage film, and contemporary media. It emphasizes stalled movements of feeling, looping tensions, and residues that resist closure. Such affective patterns disrupt inherited memories and unsettle formations of Englishness and other post-imperial identities. At the center of this seminar lies a guiding question: how do patterns of emotion simultaneously sustain and fracture collective identity?

In a world that constantly urges us to scale up—to dream bigger, to grow up, to grasp the “big picture”—what does it mean to think small? This seminar turns to the miniature, not merely as an object of study but as a method of inquiry. To think with the miniature is to reconsider scale itself—not as a neutral or fixed formal property of things, but as a way of seeing and knowing, shaped by desire, enabled by technology, and embedded within power relations. 

Forms in Dialogue

Universität Konstanz, 11-13 Juni 2026

                                Trans-scriptions: Cultural Codings and the Poetics of the Body
                     International Conference organized by University of Szczecin & University of Wrocław
                                                       
                                                                    11-13 February 2026
                Institute of English Studies, University of Wrocław, Poland Hybrid On-site Conference

This panel invites presentations that explore “extreme geographies”—sites at the limits of habitability and at the horizon of speculation—in literary, visual, and cinematic archives of Latin America. Drawing from David J. Nemeth’s working definition (entry in Encyclopedia of Geography, 2010), we consider both material environments beyond human thresholds, such as polar zones, tropical belts, deserts, volcanic craters, deep-sea trenches, and outer space, and imagined loci including utopias/dystopias, lost islands, fantastic and counterfactual frontiers.

Video essays are inevitably entwined with today’s content industry, which relies on engagement metrics, personal branding, and like-and-subscribe platforms to generate revenue and increase time-on-device. Perhaps for this reason, they are frequently associated with advertising or edutainment and rarely appear in journals and other scholarly venues.

This is an updated CFP for an edited collection representing contemporary “conservative cultural criticism” of books, film, TV, and other media. We are taking a broad view of what conservatism entails, but common influences cited by contributors include Russell Kirk, C. S. Lewis, Paul Elmore More, and Roger Scruton. I have 12 chapters so far on the following topics / authors:

Call for Papers

Biography, Autobiography, Memoir, & Personal Narrative

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

ACLA 2026: Marxism & Lyric

This seminar examines the lyric as a central and contested form in Marxist literary theory. Often viewed as the genre most resistant to historical materialist analysis—associated with interiority, formal autonomy, and expressive immediacy—lyric has nonetheless emerged, across multiple Marxist traditions, as a nexus for theorizing the contradictions of subjectivity, value, and mediation under capital.

Tinta regada (Spilled Ink) a multilingual publication, invites submissions for a Series on Travel Writing (Literatura de viajes). 

The editors of the literary magazine of the Instituto Nuevos Horizontes welcome personal commentaries, essays, poetry, short story and other forms, in any language, up to 2,500 words.

Send questions and submissions to nuevos.horizontes.uprm@gmail.com. 

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

A guest-edited special issue of the journal SOUTHEAST OF NOW: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia. Editors: Louis Ho, Michelle Lim, Sushma Griffin Deadline for proposals and abstracts (in all formats):Nov 1, 2025 (please submit an abstract of 400-500 words, and a brief biographical note) Deadline for the submission of complete manuscripts for accepted proposals (in all formats):Mar 1, 2026 (please see below for more details about the submission formats) Please send all submissions for, and queries regarding, this issue to artecopol.seon@gmail.com. About the journal:Southeast of Now is a scholarly journal on art and visual cultur