The Mind and the Machine: Mental Disability and Technology

George Washington University (GWU) English Graduate Student Association Symposium

Friday, 20 March, 2026

This virtual symposium invites papers that explore how mental disability and technology intersect in literature, film, and media.

By mental disability, we include conditions such as mental illness, neurodivergence, emotional distress, and psychological differences as represented across cultures.

By technology, we refer broadly to scientific, digital, or mechanical systems (such as medical instruments, typewriters, social media, surveillance systems, and artificial intelligence).

Our moment is one in which information literacy is an increasingly vital skill. As misinformation invades everything from hallucinatory AI-generated online search results, to fallacious social media posts, to official statements from the highest levels of government, the ability to discern between facts, fiction, and opinion is as important as ever. Yet, as history reveals, our times are not entirely unprecedented. In particular, African Americans have long dealt with lies about who we are similarly promoted at every societal level.

The American Academy of Religion, Western Region (AAR-WR) 2026 Annual Conference will be held in person, with some hybrid capabilities.

R. Murray Schafer: Reassessing His Work and Legacy

Eric Schmaltz, Dalhousie University, schmaltzeric@gmail.com  Shannon Brown, Dalhousie University, slbrown@dal.ca 

Co-editors Heather M. Porter and Michael Starr invite proposals or completed essays for an edited collection of scholarly works that explore the ground-breaking HBO series Sex and the City(1998 -2004) along with shows that came before and after, including the divisive …And Just Like That (2022-2025) which has just finished its three-season run. Proposals should demonstrate a clear methodology and strong thesis and a familiarity with prior and current conversations and publications concerning the series, and any incorporated series. The collection seeks to showcase a range of theoretical lenses; we are hence interested in diverse disciplinary approaches concerning a wide variety of topics.

We live in a time marked by uncertainty, yet such historical junctures are not unprecedented. The 1980s likewise represented a period of profound instability and transition across multiple regions. In Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, this decade culminated in the fall of socialism, while in China it witnessed the transformation of Maoism into what became known as “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” These developments reoriented all the societies in question from relative cultural isolation to increasingly market-oriented and globally integrated economies in the 1990s.

Call for Papers

Interdisciplinary Foreign Studies (IFS)

About the Journal

The Routledge Handbook to Star Wars

Edited by Lorna Piatti-Farnell, Angelique Nairn, and Justin Matthews

The Editors invite abstract submissions for The Routledge Handbook to Star Wars. Contributions are encouraged from scholars across disciplines, including film and media studies, cultural studies, sociology, history, gender studies, literature, and related fields, as well as from those engaging with interdisciplinary approaches.

Communication skills are recognized as an integral component of professional competence in engineering education, complementing technical proficiency. English language educators play a significant role in developing communication skills among engineering students. Nevertheless, undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in English most often overlook the inclusion of courses on science communication in the curriculum. As a result, research scholars in English who aspire to take up faculty positions in the engineering institutes do not get any formal training in science communication before entering academia. This FDP aims to bridge this gap by equipping English language educators with the skills necessary to become effective science communicators.

Building Spaces of Freedom
Society for the Study of Southern Literature 2026 CFP
Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee, March 28-31, 2026

The Society for the Study of Southern Literature seeks submissions for our biennial conference, which will take place March 28-31, 2026, at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee.

Keynote Speakers: Michele Aaron (University of Warwick) and Jean-Baptiste Thoret (Université
de Poitiers)

12–14 March 2026

Queer Bibliography in the South:

Space, Place, Community

Athens, GA and online

Queer Bibliography invites proposals for papers considering how gender, sexuality, and textuality intersect with place in the production of queer identity.

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.

Conference: 4-5 December 2025

Gdańsk (Poland) and online

Today, the Cold War is theorized through the organizational structure of the nation state (political knowledge) and area studies (institutional knowledge). Yet, in this framework, the key role of language—in diplomacy, intelligence, interrogation, and more—is often underlooked. Indeed, the Cold War and the ongoing cold war of today as a cultural, diplomatic exchange relies fundamentally on translation. While language has been privileged within area studies, with its focus on literary translation (Okada 2002), the perforation of the concept of “language” itself as a tool and weapon during the Cold War deserves greater analysis (Martin-Nielsen 2010, Haddadian-Moghaddam & Scott-Smith 2020).

In celebration of our 15th year anniversary, we are delighted to open our Call for Papers for the 2026 Háskóli Íslands Student Conference on the Medieval North. The conference shall be held on April 16th to 18th 2026, in the Edda auditorium at Háskóli Íslands and online. The conference is an interdisciplinary forum for postgraduate students (master’s and doctoral level) and early career researchers working in the field of medieval northern studies. Students who have not given papers at an academic conference before are especially encouraged to submit. 

We are currently accepting abstract submissions for the fifteenth annual 

Háskóli Íslands Student Conference on the Medieval North.