This seminar explores stupidity as a literary and philosophical problem, alongside related concepts including ignorance, idiocy, folly, non-knowledge, and other forms of epistemic failure.

As artificial intelligence rapidly reshapes cultural, educational, and creative institutions, the field of Black theatre confronts a familiar set of questions in a newly technological register: Who creates knowledge, who benefits from it, who gets remembered, and whose labor remains obscured? Public conversations about AI often proceed as though these technologies have arrived without history, entering an empty landscape awaiting innovation. Yet Black theatre has long grappled with questions of representation, embodiment, archives, intellectual inheritance, collective memory, labor, and futurity.

In literary fiction, the representation of consciousness has often been understood through what might be called the thought of looking: the ways narrative cognition renders a work into a perceptive, embodied, and self-reflexive experience through language. In cinema, by contrast, cognition typically becomes the look of thought: a mental interiority suggested through framing, editing, gesture, movement, and performance. Interactive stories told in videogames complicate this distinction through their intermedial nature. Games must not only represent what characters think, but also account for the player's "will to activity", translating the audience’s intentions into feedback, movement, and action.

In the present digital era, the public sphere, as defined by Jürgen Habermas—a space where citizens negotiate power through collective discussion and political participation—has shifted on digital platforms. 

ACLA 2027 Virtual Symposium: What We Are Going to Become?: Dysphoria Mundi, Weird , Excess

Contact Information

Elif Sendur, es1037@scarletmail. rutgers.edu

es1037@scarletmail.rutgers.edu

URL

https://www.acla.org/seminar/476406f6-1280-48ea-a968-33ae461c37d5

Announcement Type

Conference

Subject Fields

Call for Papers: 19th International Connotations Symposium

Irony: Dramatic and Otherwise

Tübingen, Germany, 25-28 July 2027

Shakespeare Here, Shakespeare Now 27-30 May 2027, Cape Town, South AfricaThis conference, held as part of the thirteenth triennial congress of the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa (SSOSA), invites delegates to reflect on and utilise the axes of space and time in making new contributions to the field of Shakespeare Studies.

Keynote Speaker: Farah Karim-Cooper (Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC)

This conference, held as part of the thirteenth triennial congress of the Shakespeare Society of

Call for Abstracts!

’00s Alternative and Philosophy: Every Thought in its Right Place

Edited by Joshua Heter and Richard Greene

This MLA just-in-time panel explores the evolving status of non-binariness in trans studies and beyond. Following Marquis Bey’s Nonbinary Life, we ask: Is non-binariness an emancipatory narrative? What are its critical potentialities and limitations? Send 150-200 word abstracts + bio to m.stekl@colostate.edu by 8/21. (The MLA will take place in Los Angeles from 7 to 10 January 2027.)

Conference Call for Papers

The Star Wars 50 Years academic conference will be held by the University of Leicester and the Leverhulme Centre for Humanity and Space at Space Park Leicester on 21-22 May 2027 in anticipation of the 50th anniversary of the original release of the film on 25 May 1977 in the U.S. We are now inviting proposals for conference presentations.

Conference Organisers:

Call for Papers: Dime Novels and Juvenile Series Books, PCA 2027

The PCA Dime Novels and Juvenile Series Books Area is accepting proposals for presentations at the next PCA/ACA annual conference, to be held in Boston, MA from March 24-27, 2027. See the PCA website for more information on the conference and submission guidelines.

Despite possessing intersecting histories and languages, Latin American studies and Latinx studies have historically been treated as separate fields of study. This panel seeks to spark a dialogue between fields by exploring themes of transhemispheric and archipelagic solidarity in Latinx and Latin American literature and media. Throughout the past and present century, how have Latinx and Latin American media—literature, film, art, or other forms—constructed expressions of community in dialogue with each other? How do works from Latin America reverberate in Latinx cultural productions, and how do Latinx cultural productions influence Latin American media?

How was the concept of “hospitality” and “leisure” conceived by early American writers? Travelogues, whether from William Bartram, Sara Kemble Knight, or others, served as a major genre type during the period. Topics may include stays at early American hotels, the way that leisure was/is linked to social class, and the Caribbean and European vacation in the early American imagination. What regional places of leisure figured heavily in the early American cultural imaginary? How did Black writers and Native American writers conceive of entertainment and visitation? This panel seeks contributors who can speak to leisure and travel from writings that span the early part of American culture and history into the nineteenth century.

Call for Papers

A Golden Age? Global Historical Fictions and Political Nostalgia 

One-Day Online Workshop of the Historical Fictions Research Network

28 November 2026 (online in Zoom) ca 8 am to 5 pm (GMT)

15 min talks

The Historical Fictions Research Network, an interdisciplinary and international network of scholars examining historical fictions, i.e. narratives of the past in a variety of popular media, is happy to organise its 2026 one-day workshop on the topic of 

“A Golden Age? Global Historical Fictions and Political Nostalgia”.

National Advanced Writing Symposium (NAWS) 2027 - January 29, 2027

Please use the link, below, to find a full description of our CFP for "Evolving Possibiilities: Futures of Advanced Writing."
The event is entirely ONLINE and FREE to both speakers and attendees.
Proposals are due Friday, September 25, 2026.

CALL FOR PAPERS — NeMLA 2027 Seminar

Salve Regina University, Newport, RI | March 6–9, 2027

Can Literary Criticism Break Free of the Silos Trap — and Carry Literature Along?

In the early 1950s, Lacan admonished psychoanalysts for operating within Newtonian epistemology fifty years after Einstein and Heisenberg had dismantled it. It may be worth asking ourselves whether we, literary critics, 125 years later, have adjusted our analytical machine — or, at least, whether it is necessary that we do.

“A mind all logic is like a knife all blade.

It makes the hand bleed that uses it.”

Rabindranath Tagore

Stray Birds (1916)

Generative AI, LLMs, and NLP are transforming the humanities by reshaping meaning, interpretation, and representation. However, humanities scholars face a widening skills gap due to limited structured access. To address this, Department of English is organising a first-of-its-kind workshop at Visva-Bharati. The programme offers research scholars, faculty, and postgraduate students a useful and rigorous introduction to Digital Humanities and AI tools.

Urgent chapters are required for an upcoming collection, contracted to Peter Lang, Oxford. From existing chapters, this edited collection already clearly represents the areas of fact, fiction, and “inspired by”, with specific consideration to (fictional) serial killers, mass murderers, and their real-life counterparts.

At present, there are one or two areas of the collection that still require chapters – these will need to be delivered by 30 November 2026. Finished chapters should be approximately 2,500 words. I am welcoming abstracts of 250 words in the first instance, with no set deadline for abstract submissions – abstracts will be considered on a rolling basis until the chapter spaces are filled.

European Historical Game Studies

call for papers – ‘‘Exploring Kingdom Come: Deliverance’’

Call for Book Chapters:
Heritage Meets Modernity:Memory, Identity, Community, and Millennial Transformations

An Edited Volume under the ICSSR Major Research Project
(2024-2025): Heritage Meets Modernity: Millennial Interventions in Redefining Kolkata's Culinary Topography
Jadavpur University, Kolkata

CALL FOR PAPERS / Mid-twentieth-century American Women’s Crime Writing
(theme issue of Clues: A Journal of Detection)
Guest editors: Erin A. Smith (University of Texas at Dallas) and Clare Rolens (Palomar College)

A Two-day Symposium and Exhibition at Loughborough University 18th-19th September 2026

 27th & 28th May 2027 (In-Person, Newcastle University, UK) Since their inception, video games have been defined by, and grounded in, space and place: from the maze in The Temple of Rom (1982) to the Hyrulian depths in Tears of the Kingdom (2023), from the Holy Land of the Crusades in Assassin’s Creed (2007) to the noirish city of Detroit: Become Human (2018), and from the farms of Stardew Valley (2016) to the depths of Hell in Hades (2020), video games have been concerned with the relationship between the player-character, place, mobility, and game-play mechanics.  This conference asks how place and space have been represented in and mobilised in video games: we are interested in spaces of imagina

The structure of Joan of Arc's early phase invites comparison to archetypal heroic narrative: reluctant departure, rejected petitioner, gatekeepers to persuade or evade, and the acquisition of skills and resolve before the great undertaking. Whether such comparisons illuminate Joan’s experience, distort it, or reveal more about her interpreters than Joan herself is the question this panel opens. What do we actually know about Joan before she became Joan? How have scholars, hagiographers, filmmakers, and popular adapters handled the silence and ambiguity of her early life? When Joan is made to fit a pattern, which Joan gets left out?