Abstract: 

What role do the genres autoethnography and/or memoir play in the revolution and evolution of Black women in the academy? How can they help instigate radical change and encourage sustainable practices for Black women who seek to thrive in higher education?

In a roundtable format, "Write Smack In the Middle: Black Women, Autoethnography, Memoir, and the Academy" will shift the conversation from studying others to reflecting on oneself. This interactive session aims to create an intentional space for Black women who serve in academia to reflect and center on their daily experiences in their own words. 

From the Indian boarding schools of North America to the English curriculum mandate of the British empire, formal education, and the various guises it assumed, was an important instrument for colonial powers to exert dominance over its colonized subjects. The afterlives of such an education continue today through dominant knowledge systems that benefit the few at the expense of the many. This panel seeks papers that aim to disentangle and liberate education from colonial control, so that education can be a vehicle for vital knowledge production and empowerment.

Please note that all papers are accepted on a first come/first served basis so to guarantee the slot you want (subject to the paper being accepted), we recommend applying as early as possible.

I’m opening up the call for the 2025 Romancing the Gothic talk series! Each month has a theme but please interpret it liberally. We want a range of papers from different countries and traditions.

We welcome people from all stages of their academic career and from outside academia.

You can find a list of topics by month. If you don’t know where you’d fit, reach out anyway!

SPECULATIVE DETECTIVES

The biannual journal Studies in the Fantastic invites proposals for an upcoming special issue investigating the popular yet puzzling pairing of detective and speculative genres, guest edited by Christiana Salah and Steven Mollmann.

The Southern Humanities Conference, 2025

Call for Papers

Conference Theme: Real, Artificial, and Superficial

Greenville, SC, January 30- February 2, 2025

The Southern Humanities Conference offers an opportunity for scholars, artists, writers, musicians, performers, and humanists of all kinds to share their knowledge, research, work, and experiences in an interdisciplinary, welcoming, and engaging intellectual space.

The explosion of revolutionary literature in South Asia is traced back to the formation of the All India Writers’ Association in 1936. Within a few years, the Indian People’s Theatre Association was formed in 1943. Operating with a distinct socialist fervor partly inspired by the Bolshevik revolution, these umbrella organizations brought together hundreds of poets, writers, thespians, and musicians working in various languages across the length and breadth of undivided India to consolidate a consensus against colonialism and fascism. Although the 1947 partition soon separated them into India or East/West Pakistan, the polemics of their art could not be stopped from reverberating across borders.

L’Afrique est un continent aux expériences historiques et culturelles diversifiées, aux contextes politiques, économiques et sociaux variés. Ce continent incarne également des disparités culturelles, politiques et économiques, notamment en matière de développement humain et d’égalités de genre. Dans la majorité des pays africains, il est possible de tracer les grandes lignes d’un état des lieux du genre dans sa complexité et ses contradictions.

This panel seeks to explore and shed light to the multiplicity of voices and accounts that surround issues of memory and exile in Spain in relationship to the Spanish Civil War and its impacts as a reflection of unresolved issues that are portrayed in recent contemporary fiction. The goal is to foster an interdisciplinary discussion about how memory, and exile, that in many cases are intertwined in these narratives, deepen our understanding of how the female experience is portrayed. The intention of giving agency to the unheard women voices and those marginalized by normative discourses is prevalent in these counter discourses that, frequently, have an autobiographical component. 

In Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (2013), Michael Marder posits that plants “are agents in the production of meaning” (35), echoing Jane Bennett’s claim that “the concept of agency [is enlarged] once nonhuman things are figured . . . as actors . . . [and] affective bodies forming assemblages” (Vibrant Matters 21-24).

We invite proposals for 20-minute papers on any aspect of affective expression in medieval mystical and devotional texts. These papers will compose a series of panels to run at the International Medieval Congress, University of Leeds, July 7-10, 2025.

Potential themes could include – but are not limited to – the following:

• Experiencing divine grace/consolation

• Longing for God

• Compassionating Christ’s Passion

• Mystical ecstasies and affective transports

• External perceptions of mystics’ emotionality

Although some of the most iconic British fictional detectives—Marple, Poirot, and Holmes—are old-age pensioners, the 21st century is witnessing a proliferation of aging detectives in fiction, television, and film. Among recent novels are Jesse Q. Sutanto’s Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers (2023), Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club series (2021-), and Robert Thorogood’s The Marlow Murder Club series (2021-), but it is a growing trend that cannot be accounted for simply by demographics.

The next Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) Convention will be held in Philadelphia, PA, from March 6-9, 2025. The roundtable "Storytelling in and about the Humanities: (R)evolving Disciplinary Discourses" is seeking abstracts (200-300 words) consistent with the conference theme of (R)EVOLUTION:

The Societas Ovidiana welcomes proposals for a virtual panel to be held at the International Congress on Medieval Studies (ICMS) on May 8-10, 2025.

Given the global turn in medieval studies, it is important to reconsider the place of ancient authors beyond the sphere of European reception.

This panel invites global perspectives on the medieval reception of Ovid.

Proposals might consider, but are not limited to the topics of:

SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 Themed Issue (64.1, Winter 2026):
“Reproduction without Bodies, Bodies without Reproduction”