This seminar seeks to read the concept of “kayfabe” alongside extant concepts in queer theory and criticism. The word “kayfabe” is quite young by linguists’ standards, and bears unclear etymology: coined by professional wrestling executives as an industry code word for manufactured narrative, the first printed reference to “kayfabe” occurs in 1988 wrestling newsletter, and its true linguistic origins remain obscure. Within professional wrestling, “kayfabe” refers to both “the tacit agreement between professional wrestlers and their fans to pretend that overtly staged wrestling events, stories, characters, etc. are genuine,” and “the playacting involved in maintaining kayfabe” (Merriam-Webster).

As a tribute to the recent passing of the prolific and excessively underrated Ted Kotcheff, this seminar will strive to offer a retracing and reevaluation of the director’s phenomenal career. It is stranger than his variegated filmography that there is a total absence of any academic book critically engaging with his works.

CALL FOR PAPERS | ACLA 2027 Virtual Seminar

Seminar Title: Comparative Literature and Commodity Worlds of Mainland Southeast Asia
Co-organizers: Nanthanoot Udomlamun (Kasetsart University) & Chi P. Pham (Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences)
Dates: May 15–16, 2027 (Virtual Sessions)
Co-organizers Nanthanoot Udomlamun and Chi P. Pham invite paper proposals for their seminar at the ACLA 2027 Annual Meeting.

Dear all,

I am pleased to announce the call for papers for the Philosophy of Religion unit at the 2027 American Academy of Religion, Western Region conference, which will be held at The Graduate Theological Union & Pacific School of Religion, Berkeley, California, March 19-21. We welcome all papers engaging this year’s conference theme, “Moving Beyond Boundaries and Silos Toward Interconnection and Collaboration,” as well as topics of general interest in the Philosophy of Religion.

The CFP is attached, so is the requisite proposal form. For further information see the American Academy of Religion Western Regional’s website.

CR: The New Centennial Review Special Issue CFP 

“Spirituality, Technology, and Artificial Intelligence”

This special issue explores how contemporary literary, artistic and cultural practices engage with, interrogate, and imagine decolonial ecologies. While decolonial ecology is best understood as a constellation of different ideas, schools, and disciplines, Malcom Ferdinand’s insistence on the politicization of ecology offers a useful point of departure. In his book, Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World (2019; English trans. 2022), Ferdinand identifies a “double fracture” in modernity:the colonial fracture, which produces hierarchies among people, and the environmental fracture, which separates humans from nature, treating the latter as an object of exploitation.

The 1980s represent a critical, yet highly under-researched decade in film studies. Frequently obscured by the towering grandeur of earlier revolutionary eras or the subsequent post-socialist New Waves of the 2000s, 1980s cinema across the socialist bloc suffers from low historical visibility, trapped in a volatile limbo of stagnant bureaucracy and early, destabilizing marketization.

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: THE CITY IN THREE LINES  An Urban Haiku Anthology

Fresh Words – An International Literary Magazine

Website:https://sites.google.com/view/freshwordsmagazine/announcements

  Key Dates

• Submission Deadline: September 30, 2026

American, British and Canadian Studies

Special Issue
After the Human, Before the Machine: Rethinking Creativity, Reading and Interpretation in Contemporary Anglophone Culture
December 2026

Deadline extension: 5 October 2026

Guest Editors
Merritt Moseley, University of North Carolina, Asheville (moseley@unca.edu)
Alexandra Mitrea, Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu  (alexandra.mitrea@ulbsibiu.ro)

CALL FOR PAPERS

On the GRATEFUL DEAD

The Grateful Dead Studies Association (GDSA)

at the

Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)

48th Annual Conference, February 17-20, 2027

Marriott Albuquerque

Albuquerque, New Mexico

https://swpaca.org

Submissions open: September 1, 2026

- Call for Presentations -  Celebrating Possibility and Empathy in Honors Education

“We are now in the middle of a deep and decisive moment towards a more disciplinary, authoritarian kind of society,” says Stuart Hall in his speech for Human Rights Day in 1979 (78). He proceeds to explain the components and manifestations of this “crisis,” which eventually morphs into a drive for more “Law and Order” (79). If that was the middle, are we at the end of the crisis? Our daily experiences prove otherwise, as the drive for more Law and Order keeps us in a chokehold. We seem to be in a perpetual global crisis in which we watch global systems of justice like international law and the International Criminal Court deteriorate in front of our eyes, while capitalist and genocidal systems globally continue to thrive and strengthen their hold.

36th ANNUAL BRITISH COMMONWEALTH AND

POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES CONFERENCE

MARCH 5–6, 2027

GEORGIA SOUTHERN UNIVERSITY, ARMSTRONG CAMPUS, SAVANNAH GA

CALL FOR PAPERS

The BCPS Conference, inaugurated in 1992, is the oldest and longest-running annual meetings of its kind in the U.S. We call for presentations situated in colonial and postcolonial histories, literatures, creative and performing arts, politics, economics, and all other aspects of the countries formerly colonized by Britain and other European powers.

European Journal of American Culture *Open Call for Reviews*

The European Journal of American Culture (EJAC) is an academic, peer-reviewed journal for scholars, academics and students from many disciplines with a common involvement in the interdisciplinary study of America and American culture, drawing on a variety of approaches and encompassing the whole evolution of the country.

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Recent scholarship in autobiography and life writing has expanded beyond traditional literary forms to encompass a wide range of practices through which individuals narrate, perform, and negotiate their identities. As scholars such as Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson have argued, life writing constitutes not merely the representation of a life but a dynamic process through which identities are constructed, mediated, and made visible within specific social and cultural contexts. Consequently, autobiography has evolved into an interdisciplinary field of inquiry encompassing visual art, graphic narratives, performance, body art, digital media, and other forms of self-representation.

In 1996, Carl Sagan warned us of a time when people would lose their ability to question, “when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few . . . when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.” Maybe Mr Sagan was somewhat pessimistic when writing The Demon-Haunted World. But then again, in times of conspiracy theories, Ancient Aliens, Antivaxxers, and Holocaust Deniers, the Age of Information appears just as capable of spreading dangerous frauds and charlatans as it is of disseminating reliable scholarship.

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.

The Global Southern Gothic

58th Northeast Modern Language Association Convention
March 6-9, 2027
Newport, RI

The US South, representative of the nation, has long been associated with gothic forms and tropes in part as a result of the suppression of violent histories. According to Sheri-Marie Harrison, the use of gothic tropes in American literature reveals “how ideologies of American exceptionalism rely on repressing the nation’s history of slavery, racism, and patriarchy.” Like the return of the repressed, what hasn’t been reckoned with in the nation’s history, such as slavery, racial oppression, and cisheteronormative expectations, reemerge in weird or haunted ways.

Shakespeare Here, Shakespeare Now 27-30 May 2027, Cape Town, South Africa

This 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)

In 1900, the Boston-based Colored American Magazine launched its inaugural issue, convinced of the “immediate need of a Race Journal, otherwise than our current local periodicals.” Within a year, Hopkins’s zeal would direct much of the publication. She quickly became the magazine's best-known literary contributor and one of the few Black women editors from the era. Hopkins continued to publish, lecture, and write after new management relocated the Colored American Magazine to New York City and severed the magazine’s relationship with the opinionated editor.

Seventeenth International Conference on Food Studies, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris, France, 9-10 September 2027

Founded in 2011, the Food Studies Research Network is brought together around a common interest to explore new possibilities for sustainable food production and human nutrition, and associated impacts of food systems on culture. We seek to build an epistemic community where we can make linkages across disciplinary, geographic, and cultural boundaries. As a Research Network, we are defined by our scope and concerns and motivated to build strategies for action framed by our shared themes and tensions.

The Seventeenth International Conference on Food Studies calls for research addressing the following themes.

Call for Papers

SPORTS AND POPULAR CULTURE

Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)

48th Annual Conference, February 17-20, 2027

Marriott Albuquerque

Albuquerque, New Mexico

https://swpaca.org/

Submissions open: September 1, 2026

Proposal submission deadline: October 31, 2026

The plantation’s agribiopolitical reorganization of environmental and (enviro-)racial relations has remained a focus of scholarship concerned with the afterlives of its logics. Yet, as Sylvia Wynter has argued, other narrative sites produced by and in dialogue with the plantation, such as the provision grounds, offer a means to think beyond the plantation’s hegemonic, monocultural narrative. In the Caribbean context of Wynter’s work, the provision grounds were found at the edge of the plantation hidden away from the main house, serving as a subsistence refuge for enslaved peoples to cultivate food on Sundays.

In her resolute commitment to telling stories about Black life without the white gaze, Toni Morrison articulated a model of community empowerment grounded in local knowledge, intra-communal collaboration, and the self-reflexive narration of Black worlds. While Morrison remains one of the most visible public advocates of this aesthetic and ethical orientation, practices of Black worldmaking across African and diasporic literatures have long exceeded mere response to anti-Blackness. Even under conditions structured by racial violence, coloniality, displacement, and social rupture, Black communities have continually generated modes of life, relation, memory, and imagination that assert the possibility of worlds otherwise.