In recent years, publishers and children’s book professionals have registered a new enthusiasm for comic and graphic narrative forms. Graphic narratives as children’s literature offer an exciting new type of text for children and youth, providing important insights into the interests and capabilities of these youngsters as readers and as potential agents of change. Curiously, children’s literature criticism has tended to ignore or, at best, marginalize comics and graphic narratives for young people. This “blind spot” in children’s literature and comics criticism, as Charles Hatfield has called it on a number of occasions, is now being addressed.

Call for Papers -- AAR Western Region, Pagan Studies Unit
Religion, Technology, and Innovation

See the full conference Call for Papers here: https://www.aarwr.com/

The Dickens Society invites submissions for its sponsored hybrid panel at the 57th NeMLA convention, which takes as its theme the concept of “(Re)generation.” This event, which utilizes the conference app Whova and Zoom to promote accessibility and hybridity, will be held in Pittsburgh, PA at the Wyndham Grand Downtown, on the Point from March 5-8, 2026.

International Faculty Development Program

Innovations in Psychology and Wellbeing of New Generation

The 21st century has brought unprecedented transformations in society, technology, and education. With these changes, the psychological wellbeing of the new generation has become a matter of urgent attention. Young people today face unique challenges—digital overload, academic pressures, identity conflicts, mental health issues, and social inequalities—while also benefiting from extraordinary opportunities enabled by technology, AI, and global connectivity.

This panel invites submissions that explore how Francophone African and Caribbean writers, filmmakers, and artists use their creative works, personal experiences, spiritual beliefs, and the power of imagination to offer new or alternative ways of seeing/saying, knowing, and experiencing the world. In what way(s) do their works seek to disrupt, challenge, or reimagine old power structures and commonly accepted Eurocentric knowledge systems within a postcolonial framework? Whether in terms of identity, culture, or history, how do these writers, filmmakers, and artists provoke us to rethink our individual or collective existence? What alternative realities or new ways of being-in-the-world do they envision as Africans or Caribbeans?

International Faculty Development Program

This seminar seeks to explore what we can learn about climate fiction and about literature’s role in understanding and addressing climate change when we look at literary texts written before climate change became a solidified discursive formation. Any discussion of climate presupposes a stable definition of the term within the scientific contexts that give it meaning, but the history of human activities that lead to human made climate change generally predates these discourses. Comparative work in the Environmental Humanities complicates dominant ideas about climate and interrogate the field’s tendency to focus on contemporary climate fiction.

Faculty Development Programme

Translation as Dialogue: Creative License, Crossover and Current Developments

Organized by
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology (IIEST), Shibpur

Important Dates

Nesir: Journal of Literary Studies invites submissions for its 10th issue (April 2026) and 12th issue (April 2027). These issues are open to original articles without thematic restriction, covering classical and contemporary literary theories, literary traditions, genres and discourses, text-based interpretations and analyses, as well as comparative and interdisciplinary studies. This call prioritizes approaches that consider literature as a mode of thought marked by conceptual depth and metaphorical dynamism, rather than as something confined to a single period or national context.

A conference hosted by the Graduiertenkolleg Authority and Trust (GKAT) at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies (HCA), Heidelberg University

Date: May 20–22, 2026
Location: Heidelberg Center for American Studies, Heidelberg

Nesir: Journal of Literary Studies welcomes submissions for its October 2026 issue, which seeks to reconsider how literature translates bodily experience into writing and visibility, and how the body, in turn, discloses and shapes literary meaning.

Be(Long)ing in Planetary Space

The Dickens Society invites submissions for its sponsored hybrid panel at the 57th NeMLA convention, which takes as its theme the concept of “(Re)generation.” This event, which utilizes the conference app Whova and Zoom to promote accessibility and hybridity, will be held in Pittsburgh, PA at the Wyndham Grand Downtown, on the Point from March 5-8, 2026.

Romancing the Gothic Talk Series

This talk series offers online talks each week and has a global audience and speaker pool. Talks are 40-45 minutes and are run (in real time) twice to catch different time zones. An honorarium is offered. Our categories, laid out below, allow for flexibility. Please contact me (details at the end) if you have any questions. We strongly encourage speakers to attend other sessions as well as there own and join in with the community!

We invite chapter proposals for an edited scholarly collection that critically examines the religious dimensions of Indian diasporic women’s literature, with a specific focus on conversion, resistance, and cultural memory. This volume will explore how women writers from the Caribbean, South Africa, Fiji, Mauritius, and other sites of indenture engage with Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam, addressing the gendered and ideological tensions of community rupture, religious fidelity, and transgenerational transmission in diasporic settings.

This roundtable will explore the theme of mad echoes within contemporary (re)generations of literature and her/their/history. The term (re)generation calls forth processes of renewing or restoring something that has been lost or damaged. Damage and loss have been ways of speaking about the lasting and ongoing violences against marginalized bodies that have been labeled as Mad, pathologized, or institutionalized, but the limits of these concepts have been contested, perhaps most notably in Eve Tuck’s “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities,” which interrogates the (un)helpfulness of damage-focused research to the pursuit of justice and wellbeing for members of marginalized communities.

FINAL CALL for papers: 1 spot remaining

This panel interrogates the title “The Uncanny and Sublime: The Liminality of Knowledge” by asking: what constitutes knowledge when it emerges from thresholds—moments of affect, disorientation, or aesthetic rupture? How does the liminal “unknowing” of the uncanny and sublime inform new modes of intellectual inquiry? Does this liminality reorient traditional ways of thought?

In the age of Artificial Intelligence, more accurately, the “age of AI Empire” (Tacheva and Ramasubramanian 2023), machines are no longer defined solely by their ability to process information. They are increasingly imagined as also capable of emotion, bodily awareness and interaction with the natural environment. This seminar examines the representation of embodied AI in literature and digital media focusing on the interrelationships between humans and the more-than-human alongside the growing emphasis on the body as a site of knowledge.

Call for Papers

Science, Technology, and Culture

Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)

47th Annual Conference, February 25-28, 2026

Marriott Albuquerque

Albuquerque, New Mexico

https://www.southwestpca.org

Submissions open: September 1, 2025

Proposal submission deadline: October 31, 2025

I invite you to please consider submitting a abstract for the following panel to be hosted ASECS (American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies) at the 2026 Conference. This conference will be help April 9-11 in Philadelphia.

“And away above all with the body, that idée fixe of the senses!” Nietzsche has philosophy proclaim. For it is “infected with every error of logic there is, refuted, impossible even,” and “impudent enough to behave as if it actually existed.” The body has long been one of philosophy’s more persistent preoccupations as it’s impossible to define without distortion yet impossible to fully discard. From Plato’s call to transcend the body in search of truth to Descartes’ relegation of the body to mere extension, philosophy has long sought to escape or sanitize embodiment. Even phenomenology, which counters the Cartesian account, privileges the lived body of perception over the objective, material body and its historical conditions.

CERÆ: An Australasian Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies

invites submissions for hybrid panels at the Leeds International Medieval Conference 2026 (July 6-9) on the theme of

Premodern Timeliness and Timelessness

Time is a construct with notoriously blurry definitions and boundaries. The artificiality of time can evoke anything from comforting nostalgia to worrying anachronism. Ceræ invites papers that deal with the unfocused and unreal aspects of premodern temporality, including but not limited to:

Open to any languages, this roundtable explores how instructors are integrating AI tools in the context of translation—whether through small tasks, full assignments, or larger projects—and how these technologies can be leveraged to enhance students’ linguistic and cultural competencies. More specifically, how can AI support the development of students’ intercultural awareness, stylistic sensitivity, and translation skills? In what ways might it help students better understand grammar, vocabulary, idiomatic expressions, and register in both the source and target languages? What kinds of assignments can we design to foster a critical and effective use of AI without compromising learning outcomes or creative engagement?