Paper proposals are welcome on any aspect of Hardy’s life, work, and legacy for the Twenty-Seventh International Hardy Conference and Festival (Dorchester, Dorset, UK; July 25th—August 1st 2026). Significant Hardy anniversaries in 2026 include the 150th anniversary of The Hand of Ethelberta, the 140th anniversary of The Mayor of Casterbridge, the 120th anniversary of The Dynasts (Part 2), and the 110th anniversary of Selected Poems. Proposals for papers on any of these anniversary texts are especially welcome.

Papers should be planned for delivery times of a maximum of 20 minutes (approximately 2000 words).

For the occident, a surprising cultural norm in India is that of men holding hands. Seen as unconventional and in sharp contrast to the West, the phenomenon symbolic of India (in particular) and South Asia at large became a project in 2018, whereby photographer Vincent Dolman created a series depicting an organic and intimate aspect of male friendship. Appreciating such uninhibitedness in a country given to rampant homophobia and toxic masculinity, Dolman, in one of his interviews, observes how such practices hold a mirror to society and societal conventions of masculine constructions and performances. 

Duplicity/Duplicität: Betwixt intimates and strangers.

Opening Symposium of the collaborative research project Studies in Remoteness. Sensoria of Absence, Distance and Neglect.

https://userblogs.fu-berlin.de/remoteness/winter-symposium-2026/ 
https://www.nsuweb.org/circle-1-studies-in-remoteness-sensoria-of-absenc...

January 29-31 2026. 

Call for additional chapters for an edited collection (under consideration by publisher): proposals due November 16, 2025

Land of the Free, Home of the Brave?: American Children’s Literature in an Era of Heightened Censorship

In a country advocating, loudly, the rights of the individual, what about child readers? Are they granted an expansive vision of their world? What rights do children have where books are concerned?

The Journal of Popular Romance Studies is calling for papers for its Special Issue “Romancing the Posthuman” focusing on romance, critical love studies and posthumanism.

The National Humanities Center (NHC) invites proposals for the Being Human Festival (US), a public humanities initiative for diverse, non-academic audiences across regions and subject areas. Events for this year’s Festival will take place April 18–May 2, 2026, and will be organized around the theme of “Between the Lines”–a space of hidden histories, shifting borders, and unspoken meanings.

Poetry’s Environments  (June 9-11 2026)

Poetry shapes and transforms experiences and attitudes toward nature and ecology, just as the natural environment maps the poetic imagination. Poetry roots itself in the environment of the breath, the voice, the hand, and the ear. It roams over pages of books and across digital, computational, performative, archival, monumental, and ephemeral landscapes. Poetry emerges and resides in institutional and ad hoc ecosystems, and it sounds and senses within and without the body of the poet, the audience, the blade of grass.

ELLAK 2026 International Conference

The End: Reclaiming the Beginning

Dates: December 17–19, 2026
Venue: Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul, South Korea
Host: The English Language and Literature Association of Korea (ELLAK)

Keynote Speakers

The online issue of Negotiations: An International Journal of Literary and Cultural Studies, the bi-annual journal of the Department of English, University of North Bengal,  has been published. The journal is now inviting submissions for its December, 2025 issue. The details of the journal can be found at https://negotiations.nbu.ac.in . All details regarding the submission procedure, processes of free registration, current issue, style sheet can be obtained from the journal website.

Peace in the Age of Forever Wars

Temple University

April 3–4, 2026

Conference:
Children’s Literature Association Annual Conference
“Won’t You Be My Neighbor”
May 28–30, 2026
Omni William Penn Hotel, Pittsburgh, PA

Roundtable Format:

This will be proposed as a roundtable.

I am looking for 4–6 participants to give short (5–10 minute) provocations or reflections that will spark an open discussion.

Organiser Contact Info:
Samira Abdur-Rahman, Assistant Professor of Literature and the Environment, The College of New Jersey (TCNJ) 

Roundtable Description:

In 2015, i-D magazine declared the year of the ‘sad girl’ (Thelandersson 2022: 157). In the decade since, portrayals of depressed, anxious, and mentally burdened women have scarcely abated, from the breakout success of Sally Rooney to the emergence of Sad Girl BookTok to Gen Z’s recent rediscovery of Lana Del Rey. Meanwhile, in the academy, subfields such as Affect Theory, Disability Studies, and Madness Studies represent growing areas of interest for increasing numbers of researchers and students.

The Hemingway Letters Project, under the direction of General Editor Sandra Spanier and Associate Editor Verna Kale, invites proposals for the panel "The Hemingway Letters Project: Emerging Research" to be presented at the 21st Biennial Hemingway Conference, July 20-25, 2026 in Toronto.

Edouard Glissant and Michael Wiedorn call us to “think” with or like a geography. Evolving out of cultural studies, island and archipelagic studies have spurred a conversation regarding the connection between geography and culture. While Glissant and Wiedorn were particularly preoccupied with thinking (like) an archipelago, it is possible yet to conceive of other modes of geographical thought. Transatlantic, island, and even aquatic matrices of culture and geography have been well documented and studied. This panel welcomes submissions in the field of archipelagic and island studies and is particularly interested in papers exploring methods of geographical thought, the relationship between geography and culture, in the US South.

The Western genre has been widely read within the confines of a national cinema and culture of the United States. However, the field of Film Studies has increasingly sought to emancipate the Western genre from discourses of American myth and identity, instead exploring its ongoing production, circulation, and reception beyond the borders of the United States (including Miller 2013; Higgins 2015; Mayer 2022, among many more). This body of work has significantly expanded our understanding of the Western’s transnational dimensions by highlighting the genre’s local rewritings on a global scale, and unpacking the complex transcultural negotiations involved in appropriating what is often considered an inherently American genre.

[re]frame is an online academic space that aims to amplify and foster early career scholarship as well as provide space for academic dialogue in postcolonial studies and related fields of study. Our academic blog is committed to investigating and problematising the complexities of forms of colonial, anticolonial, and decolonial patterns, phenomena, and infrastructures, as well as how they manifest in literary and cultural studies. Formed under the aegis of the GAPS (Association for Anglophone Postcolonial Studies), [re]frame encourages investigations of academia and academic practices, such as the colonial legacies of universities and the coloniality of knowledge systems that inform epistemologies.

THE LANGUAGES OF FASHION: CRITICAL REFLECTIONS ON FASHION DISCOURSESFashion Highlight Journal Call for paper Issue 7 (2026)

Guest editors Benjamin Wild and Natalia Berger

Fashion has been personified as the younger sister of Death, a daughter of Caducity. It has been portrayed as a lifelong companion and described as capitalism’s favourite child. It has been conceptualised as a belief, a system, and an empire. These varied characterisations hint at fashion’s complexity as both cultural phenomenon and global industry.

Digital Defoe: Studies in Defoe and His Contemporaries (https://cedar.wwu.edu/digitaldefoe/) is an open-access, mutually-anonymous peer-reviewed journal exploring the intersection of Defoe and/or his contemporaries and digital humanities.

We strongly encourage the submission of innovative digital and multimedia projects, as well as experimental essays and pedagogical approaches.

 Full submission guidelines and archived issues of the journal may be found on the website: https://cedar.wwu.edu/digitaldefoe/policies.html

 Call for Book Chapters

‘Mother(hood)’ in Anglophone Asian Literature: Representations, Interventions, and Critical Reframing

Eudora Welty Society Call for Papers at

American Literature Association 2026 Conference (May 20-23, 2026 at the Palmer House Hilton, Chicago)

New Approaches to Eudora Welty's The Golden Apples

Call for papers:
Philosophy and Literary Genres in the Twentieth CenturyJournal: Giornale Critico di Storia delle Idee - Critical Journal of History of Ideas 

(https://en.giornalecritico.it/)

Issue editors:

Raffaele Ariano (Vita-Salute San Raffaele University of Milan)

Paolo Babbiotti (University of Turin)

Matteo Falomi (Sapienza University of Rome / University of Essex)

In the Middle Ages, Christian liturgy was far more than a sequence of prayers and ceremonies: it structured religious practice, shaped sacred space, and gave material form to the expression of faith. Objects, vestments, and books played a central role in this framework, endowed with a visual, tactile, and symbolic language that embodied the theology of the sacred. The International Conference Instrumenta altaris: Ritual Artefacts and Their Images for Medieval Liturgy seeks to refocus attention on the material dimension that, throughout the medieval centuries, rendered the invisible visible and preserved —often in fragmentary form— a tangible legacy of devotion.

18th ESSE Conference (European Society for the Study of English)
31st August – 4th September 2026
Santiago de Compostela, Spain

Call for Contributions to the ESSE Panel "Infrastructures of Feeling: The European City in Contemporary Literature and Visual Media"

Shakespeare exists across and between multiple worlds today. After centuries of circulation in Asia, Shakespeare inhabits all locales and cultural formations in ever-changing forms, but is contained by none. Neither completely virtual nor concretely embodied, long dead yet very much alive, inhabiting past, present and future in equal measure, Shakespeare continues to thrive in the act of playing, teaching and thinking. Recent Asian Shakespeare scholarship has critically reflected upon, yet ultimately celebrated such cross-cultural, international, world-wide flourishing, bringing together new arrangements, forms and collaborations of Shakespeare’s work across art, performance and cultures.