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NeMLA
58th Annual Convention, Newport, RI March 6-9 2027
CALL FOR PAPERS
Jokes in Dark Times: Humor, Crisis, and the Postdigital Public Sphere
Panel Chair: Ana León-Távora
Virtual session
New Work in Eliot Studies
South Atlantic Modern Languages Association
November 5–7, 2026, Atlanta, GA
The Graduate Journal of Food Studies invites submissions for a special issue exploring the theme Food as Joy.
Food is and will always be a source of pleasure, celebration, creativity, and connection. This issue seeks contributions that examine the intersections, tensions, and possibilities of food as a source of joy. We welcome interdisciplinary perspectives and encourage submissions that engage with food's social, cultural, political, environmental, and emotional dimensions.
Hosting Identity: Boundaries, Bodies, and Belonging in Popular Culture
Who—or what—do we let in?
This panel invites papers that examine how identity in popular culture is shaped through the logics of hospitality: encounters structured by thresholds, boundaries, and negotiations of belonging. From the body to the home to the platform, popular media repeatedly stages identity as something that must be received, managed, or refused.
International Conference
Université de Montréal
February 5-7, 2027
Call for Papers
Geo-Medical Syndemics: Earthquakes, Geotrauma, and Mental Health in the Planetary Imagination
International Coference (Hybrid) in collabortion with South Asian Studies Research Group, London Metropolitan University and Emerald India as Academic Partner
Proposed panel for the Association for Asian Studies conference, AAS to be held in Boston in March 2027.
This panel explores how multimodal science fiction and fantasy pedagogies invites student engagement, retention, and career readiness across disciplines. Building on research demonstrating that storytelling supports the retention and transfer of knowledge, the panel argues that speculative and multimodal teaching practices create immersive learning environments that connect imagination to real-world application.
The “Inter-American Mobility” conference will take place at the Inter-American Research Center of the University of Szeged, Hungary, on November 6–7, 2026. Inter-American mobilities encompass a wide range of movements, from geographical migration to the circulation of cultural productions and ideas, following both material and conceptual routes: People, objects, capital, cultural artifacts, and ideas are produced and (re)used by communities in changing contexts. The conference will explore how these diverse forms of mobility have shaped Inter-American relations from the era of exploration to the present day.
Since 1991 the Pulitzer Prize has been awarded to four novels that reimagined literary works that have long been a part of the canon. They are: A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley (a contemporary King Lear); March by Geraldine Brooks (Little Women from the perspective of the absent father); Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (David Copperfield set in Appalachia); and James by Percival Everett (Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim). This panel looks to open a discussion about how these and other contemporary novels both explore and challenge the themes of the source material. What do they say about society, race, gender, feminism, and marginalization?
Between the Arts, the 36th annual international conference on Virginia Woolf, invites contributions across the fields of academic and artistic research that emphasize artistic expression, and draws on the inspiration of the Bloomsbury group, Woolf’s circle of artists, writers, critics, and public intellectuals.
Narratives of Space: Eco-Feminist Perspectives on Postcolonial Environmental Discourse
Submission deadline: 2027-07-31
Organization: Environment and Social Psychology Journal (Scopus-indexed), ISSN: 2424-8975 Special Issue Editors: Dr. Behzad Pourgharib, Dr. Moein Moradi
Contact Email:
As Jacques Derrida asks in Of Hospitality, “Must we ask the foreigner to understand us, to speak our language, in all the senses of this term, in all its possible extensions, before being able… to welcome him into our country?” (15). Derrida’s question is rooted in the conception of the foreigner as the cultural, and important to this panel, the spatial other. Coming up on America’s 250th anniversary, this question is particularly fruitful when considering the environment of the United States; historically (i.e. Indigenous land theft and mistreatment, slavery, capitalist implementation) and contemporarily (i.e.
CFP: Smell Studies Journal
General Editors: Will Tullett, University of York and Manon Raffard, University of Manchester.
Editorial board: Andrew Kettler, Chanelle Dupuis, Jayanthan Sriram, Ally Louks, Hsuan Hsu, Sandra Barré.
Call for Papers & Proposals:
2026 Youth Symposium: Youth Agency and Activism in an Age of Precarity
The Intersection of Research, Civil Society, and Young People
The University of Tokyo Komaba Campus, Tokyo, Japan
September 7-8, 2026 (Hybrid)
Organized by
East Asia Young Scholars Association (EAYSA)
Concept Note
The Passage of Time and Generational Conflict: Theory, Narrative, Thought
Submission deadline: Friday, 30th October 2026. We kindly invite prospective authors to register on the journal website some days ahead of the deadline.
Peer-review (est.): March 2027.
Publication date: 30 May 2027.
Editors: Alessandro Cifariello (University of Tuscia), Emanuela De Blasio (University of Tuscia), Giovanni Palilla (University of Tuscia), Roberto Romagnino (University of Tuscia), Victoria Almonte (University of Tuscia)
Queer Theory in the Age of Global Asias: An International Conference December 11-12, 2026 University of Hong Kong In the last two decades, queer theory has shifted from theoretical focuses on shame, performativity, and identification to questions of transnationalism, diaspora, queer liberalism, homonormativity, and homonationalism. Simultaneously, when US-based queer theorists (Eng, Ferguson, Gopinath, Munoz, etc.) devised new models such as queer of color critique and queer diaspora to name the alternative subjectivities and telos of modernity beyond queer liberalism, the AsiaPacifiQueer (APQ) network based in Australia collaborated with queer scholars in Asia to organize the First International Conference of Asian Queer Studies in Bangkok in July 2005.
Call for Chapters
Horror has long been described as a genre about the unknown — the thing lurking just beyond the edges of civilization. But as Stephen Graham Jones (Blackfeet Nation) has written, horror uniquely allows "two timelines — the past and the present, the legacy of colonialism and the world of the story — to simultaneously exist. Not just exist, but intersect."[1] It is this capacity for temporal and cultural intersection that has made horror and the Gothic not merely accessible to Indigenous writers, but essential.
Call for papers
Undisciplined Anthropologies II: Beyond Borders
American University of Rome, Italy
Department of Cultures and Societies, University of Palermo, Italy
International Conference
25th, 26th September 2026
The conference will take place in Rome
American University of Rome
The Aurelia Auditorium
Via Pietro Roselli, 4
Roma 00153
Deadline for abstracts: September 1st, 2026
American Comparative Literature Association 2027 Annual Meeting
University of Houston
May 20-23
The Poverty of Literature
Organizer:
Gabriel Quigley, University of Victoria (gabrielquigley@uvic.ca)
Theatre Topics Special Issue (July 2027): Dramaturgy as Inquiry
“Unruly Realism: Conventions and Contestations in 19th-Century American Realist Fiction”
Workshop at the University of Erfurt – November 26 - 27, 2026
Co-organized by Ilka Saal (Erfurt) and Antonia Purk (Mannheim)
In both her life and her literary work, American writer Edith Wharton was a keen observer and recorder of the interrelationship(s) between power and community at the end of the 19th century and throughout the early decades of the 20th. Born into the world of wealth and privilege of “Old New York” society, Wharton grew weary of its longstanding communal norms and constraints. At the same time, however, she was also openly critical of the ostentation and conspicuous consumption on display during the annual Newport, RI “summer season.”
Resources for American Literary Study (Penn State UP), a peer-reviewed journal of archival and bibliographical scholarship in American literature, invites submissions for our upcoming 2027 issues. Covering all periods and genres of American literature, RALS welcomes both traditional and digital approaches to archival and bibliographical analysis. We also welcome proposals for our "Prospects" series in which scholars forecast future developments (and identify scholarly gaps) in the study of major authors.
Instructions for submissions may be found @ http://www.psupress.org/Journals/jnls_rals.html.
This accepted panel for NeMLA 2027 (March 6-9, 2027. Newport, RI) seeks to investigate works of American drama that engage deeply with other (possibly more canonical) American plays. Engagement is defined broadly and might include subtle evidence of influence, extended allusions, plays within plays, or outright sequels, prequels, and revisions of earlier works. Also welcome are examinations of how American plays appear in pop culture texts like TV shows.
Centre for Science, Technology, and Society Studies at the Czech Academy of Sciences invites prospective participants to submit abstracts for presentation at the international research symposium Novelty and Inequalities in Science, to be held in Prague, Czechia, on October 8-9, 2026.
Novelty and Inequalities in Science
International Research Symposium on Recognizing and Rewarding Novelty in Science
October 8-9, 2026 Prague, Czechia
Submit abstract of 150-300 words or find more information here:
https://stss.flu.cas.cz/novelty2026
Call for Abstracts
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When we think of the Central Valley, that strange opaque space between Los Angeles and San Francisco, we often think of heat, smog, and sometimes fruits and vegetables. What we don’t think about, however, is the immense literary scene of writers from the Central Valley and/or writing about the Central Valley. From Manuel Muñoz, to Gary Soto, to Juan Felipe Herrera, to Lee Herrick, to Marisol Baca, to David Dominguez, to many others, the Central Valley literary community is capacious and deserves attention. As such, this panel session invites papers that discuss the literary community of the Central Valley.
The ancient Greek concept of parrhesia, or “fearless speech,” examined by Michel Foucault in a series of later lectures, has generated a steady stream of scholarship from a variety of perspectives: philosophical, political, social, even personal. Considering instances of parrhesia in literary texts can help us understand the underlying tensions between oppression and resistance, especially for those figures whose parrhesia takes the form of refusal.
This panel at the SAMLA 97 conference (Nov. 5-7, 2026) examines hospitality as a critical framework within postcolonial studies, attending to the ways literary and cultural texts negotiate welcome, refusal, obligation, and exposure in the aftermath of empire. Within empire studies, hospitality emerges as a fraught ethical and aesthetic relation shaped by colonial histories, uneven mobility, and asymmetrical power. We consider how such texts register these dynamics across postcolonial contexts. Readings across genres and media—including novels, graphic novels, life writing, film, poetry, and theory—deploy hospitality as a vital lens for understanding postcolonial subjectivity, relationality, and the ongoing legacies of colonial governance.
From its founding ideals framing rights as tied to individuals to many of the ‘myths that made America,’ such as the self-made man, ideas of individualism are deeply entrenched in the culture of the United States. Yet at the same time, the US has also always understood itself as a particular community: as a city upon a hill, a melting pot, a more perfect union. As such, the United States has been established on a seeming paradox, forming ‘out of many, one.’ More recently, this previous consensus has become increasingly brittle, with fragmentation, polarization, hyper-individualism, and loneliness on the rise—as some would argue: again.
MLA 2027 - Just-in-Time Session Proposal
Conference Date: January 7 to 10, 2027.
Location: (Los Angeles, CA)
Submission Deadline: (August 17th, 2026)
TITLE: Many Stories, One History: Re-examining the Diverse Coalition of the American Revolution
Tentative Title- Cross Imagination and Literary Production: African Writers and Indian Characters, Indo- African Writers and African Characters
Globalectics is the interrelationship of all things, the mutual containment of the local and the global.”
— Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing (2012)
Transnational Feminisms have emerged out of the need for women’s groups to address oppression that crosses national borders and to build solidarities rooted in an exploration of the articulation between the local and the global. These forms of feminisms examine the ways in which women’s groups transcend location beyond national boundaries to address their political and ideological struggles, exploring the interrelationships between discrete factors such as caste, class, ethnicity, sexuality, ability, age, and multiple other positionalities and contexts of inequalities as they overlap and are shaped by neoliberal economic and political forces, patriarchies and various other systems of stratification.
CFP NEPCA Monsters & the Montrous Area 2026 - UPDATED DEADLINE
The Monsters & the Monstrous Area of the Northeast Popular Culture Association (a.k.a. NEPCA) seeks proposals for inclusion in NEPCA’s 2026 annual conference.
The event will run as a virtual conference from Thursday, October 15th, through Saturday, October 17th. Virtual sessions will take place via Zoom throughout the day on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Registration will open up in mid-July. The registration fee is expected to be around 50 USD.
The Cultural Translation and Mobility: Processes, Spaces, Objects Working Group invites proposals for a panel titled “Planetary thinking at the intersections of cultural translation and mobility“ as part of the Canadian Association of Cultural Studies Biennial Conference (hybrid), November 5-7, 2026, hosted by the Cultural Studies Department, Trent University, Canada.
The Politics of Literary Form
Graduate Student Conference at Johns Hopkins University
Date: November 13–15, 2026
Location: Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD
Keynote Speaker: Oliver Simons, Columbia University
Femspec seeks both scholarly and creative submissions for its upcoming Issue 26.2. Femspec is an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed feminist academic journal dedicated to science fiction, fantasy, magical realism, surrealism, myth, folklore, and other supernatural genres. Femspec publishes both academic scholarship and creative writing. Creative writing submissions could include short fiction, poetry, or experimental forms.
The 123rd Annual Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA) Conference will take place this November in Seattle, Washington, from November 12-15.
This session seeks papers that explore forms of play in American fiction from 1945 to the present. There are many conceptual genealogies of play within fields such as psychoanalytic theory, Marxist theory, structuralist and poststructuralist theory, affect theory, critical race theory, queer theory, and video game theory.
**DEADLINE EXTENDED TO 7/15/26**
The Writing, Speaking, and Argument Program, along with the Department of English and the Film and Media Studies Program at the University of Rochester are pleased to announce an upcoming undergraduate conference on horror, to be held October 23-25, 2026. The conference will featuring a keynote address by the University of Rochester’s own Jason Middleton, author of numerous articles on horror films, co-editor (with Aviva Briefel) of Labors of Fear: The Modern Horror Film Goes to Work (U of Texas P, 2023), and a featured expert on the AMC series Eli Roth’s History of Horror.
Call for Papers / Presentations
Montparnasse and its Legacies
November 13-14, 2026
Columbia Global Paris Center | Reid Hall
Paris, France
Theme: Hip Hop and Rap Conference
Tentative date: November 19-22
Location: Houston, TX
Award for best presentation
Scholarship for top scholars
Drawing inspiration from Adrienne Rich's seminal book Of Woman Born (1976), in 2006, Andrea O'Reilly coined the term "Motherhood Studies" and established a new interdisciplinary academic field aimed at studying "motherhood" as an institution and "mothering" as an experience. O'Reilly emphasized the importance of adopting a feminist framework designed expressly for mothers: a "matricentric feminism" necessary for an intersectional exploration of motherhood. Within "Motherhood Studies," being or not being a mother matters, and the experience of motherhood is treated as a category alongside gender, class, and race.
A small number of additional abstracts (on disability in German Literature) are currently being sought for an edited volume to be published by Metzler Publishing House (an imprint of Springer Nature). The volume adopts a comparative approach and examines representations of disability and/or addiction in German-language and Japanese literature. Interested scholars are invited to send a brief abstract or topic proposal as soon as possible to habib.tekin@hotmail.com and hayashih@kansai-u.ac.jp by 2.7.2026.
One hundred years:
still, the fire burns.
In 1926, Wallace Thurman, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Aaron Douglas lit a match called FIRE!!, a journal by younger Black artists who refused to wait for permission.
It ran one issue. It changed everything.
Now, we strike the match, one century later.
FIRE!!! returns to publish twenty-one new pieces, paid, in the spirit of the original.
There are seats at this table for emerging African American writers, poets, photographers, makers, and artists.
Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature invites article submissions on the topic of “planetary precarity” for its Winter 2027 issue. This special issue will consider how precarity is produced on both local and global scales. As we confront our own possible extinction-level threats caused by climate disaster and, supposedly, a future dominated by artificial superintelligence, we seek to investigate how the Victorians reconceived their own precarity in the face of extractive capitalism and ecological crisis.
Call for Papers:
Conference on Multiracial Democracy
University of Notre Dame
CFP: Smell Studies Journal
General Editors: Will Tullett, University of York and Manon Raffard, University of Manchester.
Editorial board: Andrew Kettler, Chanelle Dupuis, Jayanthan Sriram, Ally Louks, Hsuan Hsu, Sandra Barré.
Call for Abstracts for a Panel at SAMLA 98
Narratives of Displacement in Global South Literature