The Inscrutable Turn Across Race and Ethnic Studies
In a recent article (2021), Sue-Im Lee observes a rising phenomenon in Asian American formal criticism: the proliferation of aesthetic concepts such as “opaque, transparent, fragmented, linear, nonlinear, discordant, or lyrical” (690).
Projecting Belief: Cinema and the Re-enchanted World
Projecting Belief: Cinema and the Re-enchanted World
King’s College London – May 21-23 2026
Conference Organizers – Rachata Sasnanand and Benjamin Y Goff
Call for Papers:
15th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Music, Sound, Art and Design (EvoMUSART) 2026
Call for Papers for the 15th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Music, Sound, Art and Design (EvoMUSART) · Please distribute · Apologies for cross-posting
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The 15th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Music, Sound, Art and Design (EvoMUSART) will take place on 8–10 April 2026, in Toulouse, France, as part of the evo* event.
Teaching Baldwin / Baldwin as Teacher
Call for Papers: Teaching Baldwin / Baldwin as Teacher
In The Time of Man and Beyond: Rethinking Elizabeth Madox Roberts for the 21st Century
South Atlantic Review Special Issue
In The Time of Man and Beyond:
Rethinking Elizabeth Madox Roberts for the 21st Century
Proposals due November 21, 2025
Guest Editors:
James Stamant, Agnes Scott College
Amanda M. Capelli, New York University
Goretti Benca, Marist College
International African Theory Camp
Debates and initiatives on decolonising knowledge in Africa continue to pay significant attention to the need for increased African/indigenous content in the curriculum as well as raising awareness about biases inherent in historically dominant epistemological paradigms. However, there remains a critical gap regarding theories and theorisation as many African academics continue to rely on colonial western theories, models, concepts and paradigms for research and pedagogical purposes. This can be due to a lack of awareness of existing African-centred theories and the dearth of databases focusing on African-centred theories.
Naming and Classifying in the Long Eighteenth Century
CFP: Naming and Classifying
in the Long Eighteenth Century
The Dark House: Absalom, Absalom! at 90
The Ninth Faulkner Studies in the UK Colloquium
The Dark House: Absalom, Absalom! at 90
May 2nd and 3rd, 2026
Online via Zoom
With keynote addresses by:
Professor Mary M. Burke
(author of Race, Politics, and Irish America: A Gothic History [Oxford UP, 2022])
and
Dr John Michael Corrigan
Call for Abstracts for Edited Volume: Urban Waters in South Asian Literary Cultures
Call for Abstracts for Edited Volume
Urban Waters in South Asian Literary Cultures
Crisis of Writing in the Time of the "Limit-Experience"
Gentle Reminder: Abstract due 30 September 2025
DEADLINE EXTENDED: Care, Advocacy, and Children's Literature Research in Theory and Praxis
The 2026 CLA Online Research Conference, co-sponsored by the Children's Literature Assembly of NCTE and the Mary Frances Early College of Education at the University of Georgia, will be held on Friday, February 20th, 2026. The theme of the conference is Care, Advocacy, and Children's Literature Research in Theory and Praxis.
The conference will feature research presentations, a journal editor session, and a keynote talk from Dr. Jonda McNair, Charlotte S. Huck Endowed Professor of Children’s Literature, The Ohio State University.
Dominican Theology and Practice: The Past 100 Years
Dominican Theology and Practice:
The Past 100 Years
Friday, February 27-Saturday, February 28, 2026
Albertus Magnus College (New Haven, CT) Call for Papers: Dominican sisters and friars, their communities, and their collaborators have made monumental contributions to theological thought and pastoral ministry in the 20th and 21st centuries. This conference seeks to explore how Dominican theology and practice has shaped contemporary theology, ministry, and social engagement over the past hundred years.
We welcome submissions for 20-minute papers that examine Dominican theology and practice. Topics might include (but are not limited to):
Call for Articles No. 9: Texts and Practices in Contemporary Trans and Queer Autotheory
Editors of this issue:
Salomé Honório (University of Lisbon, Portugal)
Lamiae Bouqentar (University of Toronto, Canada)
ACLA 2026: After Autofiction
“Autofiction was fun,” laments Lauren Oyler, in a 2018 review for the Baffler, “while it lasted, but a self-conscious movement based on the lives and reading lists of young urban artists was never going to break new ground; nor did it give the reader a reason to jump out of bed in the morning." As a form (or a genre – as Oyler points out in an extended essay on the subject, these terms are often used interchangeably, although she favours the former), autofiction first came into being almost fifty years ago, coined on the back cover of Serge Doubrovsky’s Fils (1977) as “autobiography?
Critical Approaches in Black Media Culture (New Orleans, February 19-21, 2026)
Representation matters – but to whom? And how?
This iteration of the Critical Approaches to Black Media Culture conference considers the ongoing significance of representational analysis as well as the critical possibilities enabled by the turn to resonance in Black media and cultural studies. Our theme, Representation and Resonance, invites original research into images and storytelling, circulation and flows, and reception practices.
While we especially invite papers on this topic, we are open to any and all critical inquiry into Black media culture, broadly defined. Our hope is to bring together any and all scholars interested and invested in Black media culture, regardless of discipline or method.
The Future is Past: Rethinking Dystopia in Contemporary Film and Literature
submission link: https://www.acla.org/seminar/8f71b36f-66a1-437f-bb70-25512282c0b6
Call for Submissions: SPECIAL ANTHOLOGY OF ONE-MINUTE PLAYS & MONOLOGUES ‘REWRITING SHAKESPEARE’ (Volume 2)
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: SPECIAL ANTHOLOGY OF ONE-MINUTE PLAYS / MONOLOGUES ‘REWRITING SHAKESPEARE’ (Volume 2)
Website: Fresh Words: An International Literary Magazine - Announcements
Deadline: October 28, 2025
FRESH WORDS – An International Literary Magazine is thrilled to announce the call for submissions for Volume 2 of its acclaimed special anthology: ‘Rewriting Shakespeare’—a curated collection of bold, inventive, and contemporary one-minute plays and monologues that reimagine the timeless works of William Shakespeare.
Collecting, Collected, Collective: Working With Hopkins
By 2026, all nine volumes of The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins will be published, including the much-anticipated final volume in the series, Poetry. The 2026 international Hopkins conference will focus on the new research possibilities and provocations afforded by the texts. Hopkins 2026 will be held in historic Salem, Massachusetts (USA), at Salem State University, and will feature a Hopkins display and reception at the Burns Library, Boston College.
Topics could include:
ALA 2026: August Wilson’s Life After Death
Through their intricately textured scenes and characters, the ten plays of August Wilson’s American Century Cycle chart the epic historical contours and idiomatic genius of Black American life across the entire twentieth century. Despite his plans for continued literary production after the Cycle’s completion, Wilson died shortly after the final play (Radio Golf)’s world premiere in 2005.
Two decades hence, and now in the second quarter of the twenty-first century, Wilson’s presence and prescience in American culture are not only enduring but expanding:
CFP: Colonial Afterlives: Public Art and the Trans-Pacific World - Public Art Dialogue Special Issue
This special issue of Public Art Dialogue invites scholarly contributions (research articles, short essays, and artists’ projects) that examine the enduring visual, spatial, and ideological legacies of colonialism in public spaces across the Pacific world. It seeks to explore how imperial legacies forged transoceanic connections that continue to shape the public sphere through means including but not limited to monuments, architecture, civic rituals, theater, dance, street art, and performative acts.
ACLA 2026: Queering the Anthropocene: Radical Ecocritical Perspectives on the End of the World in Global Literature and Media
As environmental crises intensify, ecocriticism has emerged as a vital interdisciplinary lens for examining how literature and media represent, challenge, and reimagine human relationships with the natural world. Invested in the idea that, in such times, the center cannot [and should not] hold, this seminar explores how queer ecocritical approaches reveal the de-centering cultural, ethical, and political possibilities embedded in apocalyptic environmental narratives in both literary texts and visual media.
ACLA 2026: The Vanishing Mediator
What stories can we tell of the vanishing mediator? Is it an irreducible kernel of transition between two different configurations of the social structure, or is it only imagined retrospectively, as the transient possibility of another world? Fredric Jameson shows, paradigmatically, that the Protestant ethic functions as "the vanishing mediator" in Max Weber's historical narrative between medieval society and modern capitalism, the "catalytic agent which permits an exchange of energies between two otherwise mutually exclusive terms." Slavoj Žižek adopts the term for his conception of subjectivity, where the subject exists as the transcendental excess of its symbolic universe—as an irremediable gap and a site of transformation.
Transgender Storytelling: Accounts of Oppositional Being and Becoming (ACLA 2026)
Seminar title: Transgender Storytelling: Accounts of Oppositional Being and Becoming
Seminar link: https://www.acla.org/seminar/c997c5c5-09fd-4307-ba24-29af11d554d6
Organizers: Clarke Crockett and Ezekiel Greenwood, Florida State University, USA
American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), Annual Convention 2026, Montreal, Canada
Abstract Submission Deadline: October 2, 2025. Must be submitted through the ACLA portal.
ACLA Seminar: Anti-Capitalist Critique and the Fetish
This panel is interested in the close historical association between the discourse of fetishism in anti-capitalist critique, and representations of Indigenous peoples. William Pietz argues that, prior to the adoption of the fetish as an object of anthropological inquiry in the 19th century, the discourse of fetishism emerged as an offshoot of the Christian theory of idolatry. Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism, in turn, “was a vivid way of suggesting to his readers that the truth of capital was to be grasped from a perspective alien to that of bourgeois understanding, which knows capital exclusively through its own categories” (Pietz).
Mirror Worlds (Medieval Studies Student Colloquium, MSSC 2026)
For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me.
-Vladimir Nabokov, The Eye
The Cornell Medieval Studies Program is pleased to announce the 36th annual Medieval Studies Student Colloquium (MSSC) in person at Cornell University’s A.D. White House on Saturday February 21, 2026. This year’s theme is “Mirror Worlds.”
(Re)Generating Keywords for EcoLatinx Studies and Praxis
You are invited to submit an abstract for this panel for the Northeast Modern Language Association Convention to be held on March 5–8, 2026 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania at the Wyndham Grand Hotel Downtown.
NeMLA Virtual Panel/Dismantling the Neocolonial Maritime Archive: Indigenous Oceanic Epistemologies
This VIRTUAL panel invites papers on “Dismantling the Neocolonial Maritime Archive: Indigenous Oceanic Epistemologies” for NeMLA 57th Annual Convention to be held on March 5-8, 2026.
The panel addresses how West Asian, South Asian, and Gulf literatures regenerate the power of oceanic precarity that propels newer modes of decolonial resistance and resilience to interrogate and distrust the rigid structures that propagate epistemic violence and archival control.
[NeMLA] Touching the World at the Speed of Light: Community and Conflict in the Global Village
NeMLA’s 57th Annual Convention (Virtual Session)
Conference Date: March 5-8, 2026
Abstract Submission Deadline: September 30, 2025
All presentations will be delivered via Zoom.
Session Title: Touching the World at the Speed of Light: Community and Conflict in the Global Village
[NeMLA 2026] Touching the World at the Speed of Light: Community and Conflict in the Global Village
NeMLA’s 57th Annual Convention (Virtual Session)
Conference Date: March 5-8, 2026
Abstract Submission Deadline: September 30, 2025
All presentations will be delivered via Zoom.
Session Title: Touching the World at the Speed of Light: Community and Conflict in the Global Village
Black Matter(s): Opacity, Relation, Representation - ACLA 2026
In recent decades, Black Studies has witnessed important work on the ways in which the overrepresentation of ‘man’ and the invisibilization of whiteness have functioned in service of a range of im/material violences. Our aesthetic and political investments, therefore, lie in arguments and examples that unsettle the imposed relationalities and the representational economy of what Saidiya Hartman calls the “racial calculus”, Katherine McKittrick considers as the “mathematics of unlivingness” and Christina Sharpe terms the “orthographies of the wake”.
Howells Society CFPs for ALA 2026 (Chicago)
Howells Society CFPs for ALA 2026 (Chicago)
The W.D. Howells Society will host two panels at the American Literature Association’s 37th annual conference, which will meet at the Palmer House in Chicago, May 20-23, 2026 (Wednesday through Saturday of Memorial Day weekend).
PANEL 1: HOWELLS & MEDIA
[NEMLA 2026] Crossings: Across Racial and Oceanic Borders in Asian/American Literature
This panel invites papers that discuss transpacific, transnational, and cross-racial relations in Asian/American literature. How can literature facilitate the “(Re)generation” of solidarities and exchanges across identities and borders? How can it offer a site of intimacy, which Lisa Lowe defines as “the implied but less visible forms of alliance, affinity, and society among variously colonized peoples beyond the metropolitan national center”? How does literature generate discourses around cross-group tension, conflict, identifications, and disidentifications? How do literary and social forms reflect and reformulate each other, within and across nations? Where do Asian American studies and Global Asian studies meet and diverge?
True Crime CFP for Popular Culture Association Annual Conference 2026
PCA True Crime CFP 2026
Abstract Submission Deadline: November 30th, 2025
PCA/ACA will be held from April 8-11th, 2026 in Atlanta, GA
True Crime typically focuses on investigative journalism used to present a mystery or attempt to understand the psychology of a crime/perpetrator. It may include narratives of a case, victimology, forensics, or analysis of evidence, although each case is different. Much of True Crime focuses on serial killers/killings, although subsets of the genre may delve into topics such as kidnappings, cults, wrongful convictions, advocacy, white-collar crimes, trial proceedings, prevention of crime, survivor stories, or sensationalism/entertainment.
Irish Exceptionalism
Ireland has often been held to be somehow exceptional, an island on the edge of Europe whose historical, social and cultural trajectories have at times led it to diverge in surprising ways from both its nearest neighbour, Great Britain, and the wider world. This perception of Irish exceptionalism has long played a role in how the island has been understood both within and beyond its borders.
Popular Culture Association: British Popular Culture, April 8-11, 2026
Popular Culture Association: British Popular Culture
Call for Papers
The British Popular Culture area of the Popular Culture/American Culture Association (PCA/ACA) is now accepting submissions for the 2026 national conference to be held April 8-11, 2026, in Atlanta, GA at the Atlanta Marriott Marquis!
Academics at all stages in their careers, as well as independent scholars, are encouraged to apply. We particularly encourage submissions by graduate students.
Beyond the Power of Words: Language as a Tool for Radicalization, Subversion, and Social Change
Jürgen Habermas suggested that it is through communicative action, that is reasoned and open discourse, that we transmit, change, and recreate cultural knowledge, and that in so-doing we can achieve mutual understanding.
Communicative action and communicative rationality are self-reflexive dialogues through which we can learn from others, question dominant paradigms, and advocate for cultural change.
Call for Papers ETKI: Journal of Literature, Theatre and Culture Studies
Call for Papers
ETKI: Journal of Literature, Theatre and Culture Studies
ETKI: Journal of Literature, Theatre and Culture Studies invites submissions for the New issue of the journal - a general issue on literature, theatre and culture studies.
Tragedy and Resistance
Tragedy and Resistance, 16-17 April, 2026
Literaturforum im Brecht-Haus, Berlin (https://lfbrecht.de/)
Keynote Speakers:
(Deadline 10/10) Call For Book Chapters: Against Evidence Otherwise: Bad Faith and Antiblackness in Education & Society
Against Evidence Otherwise:
Bad Faith and Antiblackness in Education & Society
Under Contract with Brill Publishing
Edited by Amir A. Gilmore, Washington State University
What is to be done in a world of near universal sense of superiority to, if not universal hatred of, Black folk?
–Lewis R. Gordon (1997, p. 1)
I know I am a Human because I am not Black. I know I am not Black because when and if I experience the kind of violence Blacks experience there is a reason.
Call for Chapter Proposals – A Companion to Marxist Aesthetics
Call for Chapter Proposals – A Companion to Marxist Aesthetics
Editor: Kishore Kumar K. P. (Department of Philosophy, University of Kerala)
We invite chapter proposals for contributions to A Companion to Marxist Aesthetics, a comprehensive and cutting-edge volume that explores the historical evolution, critical debates, and contemporary relevance of aesthetic theory grounded in the Marxian tradition.
This companion is intended to serve as a definitive reference work for scholars, students, and researchers working in philosophy, literary theory, political aesthetics, cultural studies, art history, and adjacent disciplines.
Scope and Aim
Abstracts for NeMLA 2026 Panel - Creative and Forensic Accounting: Cultural and Corporate Continuity Beyond Weimar
Call for paper proposals - DEADLINE SEPTEMBER 30th
Please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words and a short (ca. 50 words) bio to the NeMLA portal at this link: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21839.
In periods of economic and cultural crisis, cui bono? Who benefits? How are accounts kept, and gains accounted for? Who is accountable and who is not? What forms does the balance sheet take? What is its narrative and who gets to construct it? How is creative accounting investigated?
(Un)natural Stevenson: Wild transgressions across literature, ecology, science and gender
(Un)natural Stevenson
Wild transgressions across literature, ecology, science and gender
Ca’ Foscari University of Venice
11-12 May 2026
Aula Baratto
Organizers: Lucio De Capitani & Alessandro Cabiati
Imagining the Impossible Vol. 5 - Ciphers and Codes
Imagining the Impossible: International Journal for the Fantastic in Contemporary Media
CFP for Volume 5, Issue 1 (2026) Theme: Ciphers and Codes
Fan Practices of Memory and Remembrance
Call for Abstracts (Themed Issue 2/26 and Accompanying Workshop)
“Fan Practices of Memory and Remembrance”
Deadline for Proposals: December 1st, 2025
Workshop Date: February 27th, 2026, in Marburg/Germany
DFW26: The International David Foster Wallace Conference (June 4-6, 2026 in Austin, TX)
INTERNATIONAL DAVID FOSTER WALLACE CONFERENCE IN AUSTIN
June 4-6, 2026
University of Texas, Austin
CALL FOR PAPERS
#DFW26
To mark the 30th anniversary of the publication of Infinite Jest, the 2026 David Foster Wallace Conference invites papers examining Wallace’s masterwork.
Perspectives in Humanities and Social Sciences: Trends, Methods and Challenges
Graduate Research Meet
11th Edition
Perspectives in Humanities and Social Sciences: Trends, Methods and Challenges
Concept Note:
The Political Dimension of the Western: Power and Legitimacy on the Frontier
The paradigmatic scene in a Western – witnessed in numerous movies, such as High Noon (1952), The Gunfight at the OK Corral (1957), or Tombstone (1993), as well as in classic western novels, such as Louis L’Amour’s The Lonesome Gods (1983) or Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove (1985) – is that of a confrontation between a sheriff and a bandit: it suggests the forces of civilization taking hold on the frontier, even if tentatively, and ultimately a triumph of the order imposed to protect those in need of protection.
NeMLA Session on African Literature and Abdulrazak Gurnah
The 57th Annual Northeast Modern Language Association Convention will be held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.
Conference Dates - March 5-8, 2026
Topic - Reclaiming History: Trauma, Memory and Resilience in the Narratives from Africa
Deadline for Abstract Submission - September 30th 2025
Modality - hybrid (in-person but accepting remote presentations)
Overview -
8th Annual International Comparative Literature Conference
LANGUAGE AND THE INEFFABLE: EXPRESSING THE INEXPRESSIBLE
8th Annual International Comparative Literature Conference Louisiana State University March 27-28, 2026 (Friday-Saturday) Virtual Format
Conference Theme
What happens when language encounters its own limits? This year's conference explores how writers, thinkers, and artists across cultures and centuries have grappled with expressing experiences that seem to transcend ordinary language—the mystical, the traumatic, the sublime, the deeply personal, and the utterly foreign.
