2026 Meeting of the Society for Comparative Literature and the Arts

October 29-31, 2026
Embassy Suites Austin Central
Austin, TX

“Justice”

Keynote Speaker: TBA

Gothic Nature is a peer-reviewed, open access journal that engages with the Gothic conceptions of, and relationship to, the natural world. For the TV and film review section of its sixth issue, the journal seeks reviews for ecoGothic television series and films released in the last couple of years (2023–2026). Issue VI of the journal is unthemed, so there is no restriction on the types of film and TV we’d like reviews for. As a general guideline, we’d be interested to see reviews of the following (please note that this is not an exhaustive list, reviews of other relevant films and programmes are more than welcome):

Film:

The tenth annual Brandeis Novel Symposium (BNS), which will take place on Friday, October 23, 2026, invites proposals for papers on Han Kang’s 2014 novel Human Acts (original title: 소년이 온다, or A Boy Comes; English translation by Deborah Smith). The Brandeis Novel Symposium is a one-day conference that chooses a single novel as a point of focus for salient theoretical, historical, political, and narratological questions about the novel as a genre. (See the 2025 BNS websiteand this archive for more information about the BNS.)

Call for Proposals: Star Trek and the CourtroomAn Edited Collection on Justice, Law, and the Trial in Star Trek

We invite proposals for an edited volume examining trial and courtroom episodes across the Star Trek franchise. From “Court Martial” (TOS) to “Ad Astra per Aspera” (SNW), Star Trek has used the trial format to explore questions of personhood, justice, military law, civil rights, ethical responsibility, and the limits of legal systems. These episodes serve as philosophical laboratories, testing the boundaries of law when confronted with, for example, artificial intelligence, alien cultures, time travel, and evolving definitions of sentience and citizenship.

Conference online: 20-21 August 2026

ABOUT THE CONFERENCE: 

Theme: Is it a Wonderful Life?

Wonder (n.): a feeling of surprise or awe, caused by something beautiful, unexpected, unfamiliar, or inexplicable

Wonder (v.): to feel some doubt or curiosity; to be desirous to know or learn.

Wondrous (adj.): marvelous; wonderful. 

PAMLA 2026 is pleased to present Pacific Northwest Literatures (https://pamla.ballastacademic.com/Home/S/20023)!

Past and present, the Pacific Northwest has functioned in literature as a dynamic space defined by transition, ecological precarity, and socio-political friction. This panel explores writers of fiction, poetry, memoir, and non-fiction whose work investigates the unique sense of place, history, and culture defining the region. We welcome papers that engage with the tensions between industry and preservation, indigenous sovereignty, labor movements, and the mythologies of the western wilderness.

PAMLA 2026 is pleased to present New Directions in Mark Twain Studies (co-sponsored by the Mark Twain Circle) (https://pamla.ballastacademic.com/Home/S/20184)!

Animal Adaptations

We invite proposals for a small number of additional chapters for an edited volume on animal adaptations, edited by Justyna Włodarczyk (University of Warsaw) and Michael Fuchs (University of Innsbruck).

The Indian diaspora is the largest diaspora community in the world, with an approximate population of 35.4 million. From the migration of the indentured labour force during the colonial period to the mass immigration of educated Indians to overseas countries in the late twentieth century, the Indian diaspora has indeed become a global phenomenon. Expanding migration circuits, job and business opportunities, shifting lifestyles, skilled and semi-skilled labour force, among others, have resulted in significant socioeconomic mobility, especially over the last 25 years. Besides making significant contributions to varied fields, the Indian diaspora has also arguably brought changes in how others have traditionally seen India.

Often, when thinking of academia, the ideas of books, writing, and theory are what make up the idea of the scholar. Many scholars who speak about activism, liberation, mutual aid, living in a collective community, and many other topics of concern for the JOAA team, do not always live the practice they write. This year, we are hoping to disrupt this focus on the blueprints of freedom and look into the way folks are working in the world to build, support, create, and live praxis in their lives.   

The Aquatic Presence-Absence in World Literatures

Critical Language and Literary Studies (CLLS) invites original, unpublished research articles for a themed issue to be published in Fall 2026. The theme is examining aquatic presences and absences in world literatures.

Climate change is often discussed as an environmental emergency, but its most profound consequences are social, political, economic, and deeply gendered. The climate crisis does not operate in isolation from existing systems of inequality; rather, it intensifies historically entrenched hierarchies of gender, caste, class, race, labour, sexuality, and power. Women and gender minorities, frequently experience climate change not as a distant ecological abstraction but as everyday reality lived through food insecurity, water scarcity, displacement, unpaid labour, agrarian distress, and precarious working conditions.

Cunterbury is a scholarly arts & comedy podcast hosted by three Gen Z academics — A.J. Scott, Alice Fulmer-Zelinka and Shannen Escote — exploring the major works of Geoffrey Chaucer and friends, starting with The Canterbury Tales. In our first season, we are providing witty commentary and voices to discuss the Tales and their pilgrims like you’ve never heard them before. 

SESSION DESCRIPTION

Afrofuturism, Latinx altermundos, Indigenous futurisms, solarpunk, cli-fi — the speculative modes through which BIPOC writers have imagined, contested, and survived the present are not marginal subgenres. They are among the most politically urgent literary formations of the last half-century, and among the least fully mapped by existing scholarship. This special session invites papers that read across these formations to ask: what does speculative fiction do when it is written from the borderlands, from the barrio, from the reservation, from the maquiladora corridor, from communities that have been made to inhabit the dystopian present that other traditions only project?

Call for Papers: The Legacy of Norman Bates: Essays on the Psycho Franchise

Editor: Shane H Weathers, Bowling Green State University

Editors Introduction:

Welcoming submissions for a free scholarly conference on scary literature to be hosted online from October 22nd-24th, 2026 by graduate student, Anais Shelley.

Research may draw inspiration from (but is not limited to) these prompts:

• Supernatural themes

• Domestic horror

• The role of setting within scary stories

• Frightening myths and folklore

• The gothic novel and short story

• Monsters and the monstrous

• Multicultural superstition and regional ghost stories

2026 Global K-Culture Conference

August 20 (Thu.) ~ August 22 (Sat.), 2026 (3 days)

Chungbuk National University, Korea

Korean, English, or the presenter’s preferred language

Deadline for submissions: May 31, 2026

The Department of Global K-Culture at Chungbuk National University is pleased to invite submissions for the upcoming Global K-Culture Conference, aimed at fostering meaningful dialogue and the exchange of ideas among instructors and researchers working across diverse educational and cultural contexts.

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the literatures of the Spanish State have witnessed a remarkable proliferation of Bildungsroman-inflected narratives, testimonial accounts, and coming-of-age fictions that fundamentally interrogate received models of subjectivity, identity formation, and social progress. This international congress invites critical engagement with a corpus of works — spanning authors such as Najat El Hachmi, Marta Sanz, Belén Gopegui, and Alana S. Portero — that contest hegemonic discourses of selfhood and becoming from positions of social, gendered, and cultural marginality.

We invite you to submit an abstract and bio by June 17, 2026, to participate in a Modern Language Association (MLA) 2027 seminar, "Queer Literary Studies NOW." Seminar participants will precirculate 1500-word papers on the theme, and we will discuss the papers and the larger theme during the seminar on the first day of the MLA 2027 conference. MLA 2027 will take place in Los Angeles, California, January 7-10, 2027. Participants must be MLA members and register for the conference.

Call for Papers
The Playful Monster
24–25 September 2026

20th Century Southern Women Writers Conference
presented by the Elizabeth Madox Roberts Society
​October 15-18, 2026Springfield, Kentucky 

Language programs across the United States are navigating a period of significant uncertainty marked by declining enrollments, the loss of federal funding, shifting institutional priorities, and increasing budget constraints. In many cases, these pressures reflect broader institutional and political dynamics in which decisions about resource allocation, curricular value, and program viability are shaped by structures of power within higher education. As a result, language programs often find themselves particularly vulnerable within these hierarchies, with some facing downsizing or closure.

Hogg’s Worlds Now