We live in an age of optimization. Norms of beauty and performance are relentlessly getting harder to achieve without modifying the psychophysiology of human beings. Humans are faced with choices and demands regarding increasing and reducing the size, mass, and weight of different body parts and the modification of the way they function. The normal no longer means the common, it means the optimal. From special diets and extreme workouts to silicon injections and from plastic surgery to brain chips, the human body is transforming into a workshop for different arts and technologies. The cosmetic surgery market, for example, is worth more than 57 billion dollars and is expected to continue to grow very fast.

Language, Literature, and Interdisciplinary Studies (LLIDS), an open-access peer-reviewed academic e-journal, invites original and unpublished, interdisciplinary, research papers and book reviews from various interrelated disciplines including, but not limited to, literature, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, history, sociology, law, ecology, environmental science, and economics.

The second Issue of Volume 7 of LLIDS examines how structures of power constitute and shape urban spaces. It proposes to explore their influence in determining social values wherein varied social groups—marked by religion, class, race, gender, etc.—negotiate the power dynamics that constitute life in urban spaces. The modern, bustling city carries within itself a continuous sense of becoming. The urban dwellers, inhabiting segregated parts of the city, shape the lived experience of these spaces through their socio-cultural interactions and relationships.

Call for Abstracts: 8th World Conference on Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences, and Education

Dates: May 22 - 23, 2025

Venue: ARCOTEL Wimberger Wien, Neubaugürte, 34-36, 1070, Vienna, Austria

CPD Accreditation

As a Certified CPD Accredited Provider (Provider Number #785414), this conference offers 18 CPD credit hours, providing attendees with valuable recognition for their professional development. Verification is available at https://thecpdregister.com/view/eurasia-conferences-816429.

The Function of Beauty: A Transdisciplinary Conference

“Beauty is not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart.”

— Khalil Gibran

Conference Dates: April 24-25, 2025
Location:

Day 1-Pembroke Lodge (Richmond Park, London) / Online (Hybrid Format)

Day 2- Online only
Abstract Submission Deadline: March 16, 2025
Cost: 180 GBP (in person)
100 GBP (Online)

ReFocus: The International Directors Series: David Cronenberg

Edinburgh University Press

Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg is widely regarded as one of the finest proprietors of the body-horror genre. Cronenberg’s filmography traverses the realm of the corporeal beyond its bare form, testing the limits of what a body can do. His films explore the intricate relations between the market, science, and desire. Cronenberg also examines disease and illness, situating their grotesque ramifications in the soma and the psyche, while many other later film narratives diverge from Cronenberg’s earlier focus on body horror to exhibit a wide spectrum of directorial capabilities.

Article Collection “Human & Beyond: Exploring Our More-Than-Human World”.

Collection's Advisors: Professor Peggy Karpouzou and Dr. Nikoleta Zampaki

Publisher: Routledge Open Research

The study of life-forms’ interplays has much to contribute to the survey of alternative post-anthropocentric narratives. This is no more pressing while the disastrous phenomena afflicted on Earth’s ecosystems continues to threaten all life-forms’ existence.

Book Series: "Posthumanities and Citizenship Futures" at Rowman & Littlefield

Series Editor: Professor Peggy Karpouzou and Series co-Editor: Dr. Nikoleta Zampaki

Book Series: “Brill Research Perspectives in Critical Theory”

Series Editor: Professor Peggy Karpouzou

The Book of Acts contains elements of human actions and inactions that depict the beginning of a
new religious dispensation – Christianity that sought to redefine the nexus between the nascent
Christian faith, ethnicity, and identity. Identity is a hallmark of many religious groups manifest in
their practices that become a cultural identity of the group. This did not leave out ethnic issues in
the nascent group called Christianity. Early Christianity is construed as a "Jewish ethno-religious
identity into a Christian identity that was unattached to a particular geopolitical and ethno-cultural
identity” (Bennema 2015). This identity was formulated and emerged through conflict with

MLA 2026, Toronto, Prose and poetics of aging in migration literature

I would like to organize a panel on aging in migration literature to provide a forum where participants can discuss current trends in and concerns about the representation of aging and older persons across various genres of migration writing as well as think about future possibilities. I am particularly interested in aesthetic representations of aging in irregular migration, asylum, and refugee narratives in addition to the portrayals of aging parents and relatives who are impacted by younger generations’ migration.

This interdisciplinary panel at the RMMLA 2025 seeks to examine the complex intersections of colonial power, medical practice, and literary representation and welcomes proposals of 250 words on topics that address the following questions. How does literature engage with colonial medical interventions, their successes, failures, and lasting impacts on colonized populations? What does medical fiction and film tell us about the tension between Indigenous healing practices and Western medicine, the role of medical “experimentation” in colonial contexts, and the literary afterlives of colonial medical disasters?

Call For Book Chapters

Don’t Get Lost in Their Sauce:

Navigating Academic Identity, the Creative Self, and Reductive Practices

Edited by

Amir A. Gilmore, Washington State University

Adrianne Mitchell, Washington State University

“See, when I had no money, I still had sauce. See if you don’t got no sauce, then ya lost. But you can also get lost in the sauce.” –Gucci Mane (2013) 

The King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies (KFCRIS), through its UNESCO Chair in Translating Cultures, and with support from the Literature, Publishing and Translation Commission, offers Early Scholars Publication Grants. These grants support the publication of outstanding PhD dissertations that critically examine contemporary debates related to the UNESCO Chair's two themes and adopt a global perspective that moves beyond Eurocentrism. Early Scholars Publication Grants will be awarded for this year's two themes:

1) Translating Cultures in the Digital Age