ReFocus: The Films of Gerard Damiano

Weeks after the death of Nobel Prize-winning author Alice Munro last year, her daughter Andrea Skinner disclosed the sexual abuse she'd suffered as a child—abuse about which Munro had known and stayed silent. The disclosure is but one of many revelations in recent years to upend the legacy of a cultural icon. Neil Gaiman, Louis CK, Jean Vanier, and Avital Ronell are only a few public figures to be reassessed in the wake of accounts of sexual abuse. Similarly, disputed claims to Indigenous ancestry touted by artists including novelist Joseph Boyden and singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie have generated outrage and heartbreak among Indigenous groups and innumerable admirers, compounding generational traumas.

Call for Papers on The Beatles and Media Today

Special Issue of Rock Music Studies

Guest-edited by Shannon Howard (Auburn University Montgomery), Tom Grochowski (St. Joseph’s University, NY) and Richard D. Driver (McLennan Community College) 

From the iconic Orient Express to the shadowy alleys of urban noir, and to the contemporary invisible highways of cyberspace, transportation and mobility have long played an important role in crime fiction. Traditional detective fiction often relied on transportation as both setting and symbol, underscoring how mobility can conceal, isolate, or reveal, shaping the very structure of mystery and detection. In the digital age, mobility is no longer confined to physical movement; it also encompasses virtual travel, data flows, and algorithmic surveillance.

INTERNATIONAL INTERDISCIPLINARY CONFERENCE

TENNYSON 2026: ECOLOGY, LANDSCAPE, ENVIRONMENT

LINCOLN, UK, 14-17TH JULY 2026

**Deadline for Abstracts (300 w max.) and Bio (150 w max.)**

31 JANUARY 2026

 Edited by Professor Meenakshi Bharat (University of Delhi) and Dr. Blythe Worthy (University of Sydney)
Under preparation for submission to the ReFocus: International Directors series, Edinburgh University Press

Call for papers

29 July 2025

Special Issue: Contemporary India and Hindi Cinema

Journal: Women Studies International Forum

Link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/special-issue/324617/contemporary-india-and-hindi-cinema

Submission of abstracts: 30 September 2025

Submission of full manuscript: 31 July 2026

Abstract

Concept Note & CFP on

Crisis and Hope in Contemporary South Asia

Crisis can be understood as any event or a series of events that disrupts, destabilizes, and threatens the everyday individual, social, and political order, leading to moments of transition and transformation that are often challenging to comprehend. The past few decades have witnessed an unprecedented accruement of crises on a planetary scale manifesting as economic and environmental exploitation, geopolitical conflicts, pandemics and public health emergencies, and financial and economic turmoil, making the world an increasingly volatile and uncertain space.

ASANOR biannual conference 2026
June 4-6, Kristiansand, Norway CONSTITUTING THE US IN THE 21ST CENTURY
Proposal deadline: October 15, 2025

https://asanor.org/2026-conference/

The 2026 American Studies Association of Norway Conference looks back to its early years for inspiration. The very first themed ASANOR seminar was titled “The Bicentennial of the US Constitution.” Many years later we return to this document, not only to revisit its cultural and historical significance but also to ask what it means to invoke the Constitution now, in a time of intensifying democratic crisis and rising illiberalism.

Call for Proposals: Edited volume on screenwriter, actor, director, and comedienne Elaine May

SCREEN STORYTELLERS

The Works of Elaine May

Edited by Jonathan Winchell

This edited volume on the works of Elaine May will be a book in the SCREEN STORYTELLERS series published by Bloomsbury Academic. Seeking 250-word abstracts for previously unpublished chapters on Elaine May’s work as a screenwriter and comedy writer. Final chapters will be 3,000-3,500 words, written for an audience of student readers.

RSA 2026

San Francisco - February 19–21, 2026

Reimagining Disability through “Disability Intimacy”

Relatable! Exploring Difference & Relationality in Creative Writing Studies (CFP)

Proposal Deadline: September 5th, 2025

Conference Dates: November 7th & 8th, 2025

The Creative Writing Studies Organization is now accepting proposals for our online fall conference, to be held the weekend of November 7, 2025. In holding our conference virtually in alternating years, we hope to continue building Creative Writing Studies scholarship across borders and time zones while maintaining the felt benefits of in-person gatherings. This year, the CWSC seeks proposals that help us expand and refine our understandings of relationality. 

Call for Panel Participants

College Art Association Annual Conference

18-21 February 2026   |   Chicago, IL  USA

https://caa.confex.com/caa/2026/webprogrampreliminary/Session16720.html

“Dissent Nearby: Diasporic & LGBTQ+ Resistance”*

*guaranteed session with Sponsorship from the Society of Contemporary Art Historians

'The Soliloquist Journal' seeks submissions of poems and soliloquies for Fall 2025 issue

Theme for Fall 2025 issue: "Voices in Transition”

This theme explores moments of change, transformation, and evolution in our
personal and collective experiences - whether it's seasonal transitions, life
phases, social changes, or internal shifts in perspective.

Website: The Soliloquist Journal

SUBTHEMES:

Call for Papers: Historical Fiction in / and the Anthropocene

One-Day Online Workshop of the Historical Fictions Research Network

29 November 2025 (online in Zoom) ca 8 am to 5 pm (GMT)

15 min talks

The Historical Fictions Research Network, an interdisciplinary and international network of scholars examining historical fictions, i.e. narratives of the past in a variety of popular media, is happy to organise its third one-day winter workshop on the topic of “Historical Fiction in / and the Anthropocene”.

The E. E. Cummings Society and the Society’s journal, Spring, invite abstracts for 20-minute papers for the 53rd annual Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900, Feb. 19-21, 2026, at the University of Louisville (https://artsandsciences.louisville.edu/news-events/conferences/louisville-conference-literature-and-culture).

Throughout the past century, many theoretical approaches have put the indexical properties of the photographic image at the center of documentary's claims to the real. In today’s discussions of social media platforms, arguments about fakery, falsity, and deception abound across genres, from political deep fakes to more “innocuous” lifestyle influencing. Remarked on are the ways platforms such as Instagram and TikTok offer mesh-ups, montages, appropriated footage, nostalgic clips, and media plucked from their original contexts.

CALL FOR PAPERS

13th International George Moore Conference

May 5-7, 2026

at

         Atlantic Technological University, Mayo

&

Moore Hall

George Moore:  Landscape and Memory

“A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.” 

Dear Colleagues,

Please consider submitting a paper proposal to the panel, "Boccaccio and Boccaccian Medievalisms: Representatives of Gender in Storytelling" for the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The dates of the conference are May 14-16, 2026. The deadline to submit a paper proposal is September 15. This panel will be in person and is organized by Italian Studies@Kalamazoo.

Description

In Sarah Orne Jewett’s 1886 short story “A White Heron”, young protagonist Sylvia is approached by an itinerant hunter and asked to expose the location of the white heron’s nest. The threat to health, growth, and integrity here is complex, both for Sylvia and the heron, as well as the hunter. The central concept of the nest, as a space simultaneously protected and vulnerable, mundane and coveted, nourishing and abused, is an influential object and space in the narrative.

‘Theory Today’ working group [USC] is organizing an Online theory workshop on the theme of contemporary fascism with one of the most insightful thinkers on the topic―Alberto Toscano. The workshop will take place on October 17, 2025 via Zoom, and will have the following schedule:

………………………………………………

October 17, 2025

Session 1 | Toscano: Contours of Contemporary Fascism [10 am to 1 pm PST]

-          Workshop session focused on reading and discussing primary texts, including Marx, Badiou, Negri, et al.

As Toni Morrison notes in Playing in the Dark, the construction of Africanist ideologies that misread and/or misrepresent Black identities is as American as apple pie. The white gaze has historically and contemporaneously controlled what is known and unknown about African Americans, just as the ingestion of Africanist ideologies has shaped how many people of the African diaspora see themselves. However, the cultural productions of African American people have frequently not only asserted the heterogeneity of African American communities, contesting Africanist collectivization, but have also affirmed ways of knowing beyond the cultural and systemic erasure of Black personhood and agency.

Academia in Crisis: How Feminist Rhetorical Scholars Respond

Summer 2026 Special Issue of Peitho 

Editors: Patty Wilde, Erin Costello Wecker, and Justine Trinh

“What hurts? And how do we go on living while it hurts?”

–mimi khúc