Call for Papers

Medievalisms Area

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: November 14, 2025

Utopian Impulses in the 2020sAn Interdisciplinary Graduate Student ConferenceUniversity of Cincinnati - Friday, February 6th, 2026 Among its political and technological predicaments, America’s 2020s have been a time of steady upheaval, crisis, and change. As we continue to wrestle our way through the agendas, regimes, and big-data systems of this historical moment as teachers, students, and researchers, we recall the utopian thinking of More and Marx, which reminds us “to keep from being blinded by what seems normal — to help us see that what is natural is constructed, not inevitable” (Elbow, p. 83).

Shakespeare is one of the inventors of the category of the human as many modern and contemporary cultures know it. Even his most monstrous and otherworldly creations have a detectable human side. The critical tradition of Shakespeare has already established that these characters are to be read as reflections of certain psychological aspects and repressed characteristics of the main characters of his plays, as allegorical representations of emotions, principles or beliefs, as codification of ethnic and sexual differences, etc. Thanks to this tradition, focusing on the human side of these characters has become the norm. It happens almost intuitively as soon as a critic or scholar starts their analysis of these characters.

The “Collecting and Collectibles Area” of the Popular Culture Association invites papers on “Collecting in/as Crisis” for the 2026 National PCA/ACA Conference to be held in Atlanta, GA, USA on April 8-11, 2026. We would especially like to encourage submissions that contribute new directions and calls to the existing scholarship on “Collecting in/as Crisis” and particularly address how collections/collectibles and their institutions and practices involve or respond to natural, cultural, economic, environmental, health, epistemic crises, etc.  

Possible topics for presentations include but are not limited to:

·         Collecting as systemic violence

·         Collecting as cultural erasure

American Literature Association
37th Annual Conference
May 20-23, 2026
Chicago, IL

What happens when the present becomes historical to itself and the contemporary turns into a categorizable literary-historical formation? Is that even possible, that is: can the contemporary ever become historical (to) itself? This special issue seeks to examine the conditions that would allow us to understand the contemporary as a distinct literary period which began in the 1990s—with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the rise of neoliberalism, and the growing sense that postmodern irony had outlived itself—and has now arguably come to an end. Not coincidentally, this was a period of almost uncontested, unipolar US political hegemony on a global scale.

Focus- Intra-European colonial histories/linguistic nationalism, the Nordic colonial legacies and the Sámi/de-centering dominant narratives of North-South polarity. Further to explore points of convergence between the North-South, South- South, paving way for transversal exchanges.

Framing Question– To what extent can multilingual interactions in the Nordic regions disrupt linguistic hierarchies rooted in colonial legacies and reshape dominant language ideologies? How do these disruptions inter-act with the multilingual societies elsewhere such as South Asia, South Africa, Chile and Colombia,  and processes of vernacularisation set in motion with respect to colonisation in some cases. 

General Issue | Rolling Submissions

The Critical Gender Studies Journal / Revista Crítica de Estudios de Género invites submissions for its upcoming general issue. We welcome original research articles, theoretical essays, creative interventions, and reviews that explore the multifaceted dimensions of gender and sexuality across diverse contexts and disciplines.

Creative Editor 

FEMSPEC, an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal dedicated to challenging gender through speculative means in any genre, seeks a volunteer editorial collective member starting for 26.1 no later than January 1.

Duties include:

Attending collective meetings on a regular basis (now Friday 10:30 AM EST)

Receiving creative submissions to screen and coordinate peer-review 

Seeking creative submissions and reviewers through professional channels and personal networks, and by distribution of brochures at appropriate conferences and to Creative Writing programs

“Teaching Annie Baker”

Comparative Drama Conference

Madison, WI, July 9-11, 2026

Deadline: December 12, 2025

“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”

George Orwell, 1984

Call for Papers: Film International: Journal of World Cinema

Special Issue series: Diasporic Cinemas

View the full call here>>

https://www.intellectbooks.com/film-international-journal-of-world-cinema#call-for-papers

Series overview

We are excited to announce a new interdisciplinary seminar series for postgraduate students and early career researchers on the Long Middle Ages, a period covering the Late Antique, Medieval, and Early Modern Periods. This series aims to bring together scholars working across this period to establish new connectivity and inclusivity between these disciplines, and to provide a more relaxed space for new and emerging researchers to present and test out ideas.

Visual Cultures of the Medical Modern

A two-day conference to be held at Azim Premji Bengaluru, 19th - 20th February, 2026 co-

organized by the English and Media Studies group

About the conference:

The Kate Chopin International Society is seeking individual proposals for two sponsored panels at the 2026American Literature Association conference in Chicago, Illinois, May 20–23, 2026

The first panel, a roundtable on “Teaching Kate Chopin,” seeks short (seven- to eight-minute) papers/remarks that address anyaspect of or strategy for teaching Chopin’s life or work to today’s students—to students of any kind at any level using any materials or technology in any educational environment anywhere. Proposals should include a title, your name and affiliation, and a paragraph about your proposed remarks.

Violence: Legacies of Conflict in Ireland

Comhfhios Boston College

February 7th, 2026

Connolly House, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA

The Irish Studies Graduate Students of Boston College, in conjunction with the Irish Studies Program, are pleased to host the 9th annual Comhfhios Boston College conference. Comhfhios (pronounced “co-is”) meaning “knowledge together,” or “open to all knowledge,” invites emerging scholars in all Irish Studies fields to gather in Boston. 

“Care & Communities” - Shifting Tides, Anxious Borders (STAB) 2026

Binghamton University, Department of English 

Conference date: March 21, 2026

Submission deadline: January 31, 2026

“Dominator culture has tried to keep us all afraid, to make us choose safety instead of risk, sameness instead of diversity. Moving through that fear, finding out what connects us, revelling in our differences; this is the process that brings us closer, that gives us a world of shared values, of meaningful community.” 

-bell hooks, Teaching Community

The Plantationocene: On Histories and Narratives of the Plantation

Special issue for Interdisciplinary Literary Studies

Editors:

Goutam Karmakar, University of Hyderabad, India

Somasree Sarkar, Ghoshpukur College, University of North Bengal, India

University of Arizona Graduate Literature Conference: Imagining the End(s)

Conference Dates: March 6-8, 2026, Tucson, AZ, USA

“It is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism” (Mark Fisher)

“But the plot too has its own history” (Wynter 101)

What is it we have in mind when we imagine the end of the world or the end of capitalism? 

Is it the temporal–the closing, conclusion, finale, the end of capitalism’s historical epoch?

Is it the spatial–the enclosure, edge, boundary, limit between persons, places, or things, the end of capitalism’s spread or reach?

“Curiosity & Care” - Stony Brook University English/WGSS CFP, New York Graduate Conference 

Stony Brook University’s English Graduate Department, in collaboration with the Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Department, invites abstracts and proposals from current graduate students and independent scholars for its annual spring conference on Friday, Feb. 27, 2026, at Stony Brook University in Stony Brook, NY.

The long nineteenth century was a period marked by industrial revolution, scattered religious beliefs and technological advancements. The Gothic tradition recorded these significant changes through a language of monstrosity, excess, and horror as the Industrial Revolution gained momentum, coal and steam power expanded, and as soon as the British Empire increased its extractive demands on colonized ecologies and laboring bodies. This edited volume proposes a new way of looking at Gothic figures such as vampires, parasites, doubles, and consuming machines in order to examine how such tropes adumbrated the anxieties, ethics, and violences of environmental extraction.

The University of Iowa

Department of English

Graduate Student Conference 2026

Elaborating Labor 

Conference date: Friday, April 10, 2026 

Location: Richey Ballroom, Iowa Memorial Union, University of Iowa 

Abstract due date: Wednesday, December 31, 2025

Please email abstracts to c3conf@uiowa.edu 

Call for Submissions: Race in Fantasy- for The British Fantasy Society Journal (Summer 2026) ‘Race’—that socially constructed and contentious term and concept—has long been a part of Fantasy. As a way of narrativizing alterity, Fantasy excels (one could argue that it is its sine qua non), but like all other cultural forms it has been prone to the best and worst excesses of this. Although the largesse of Fantasy—its broad, catholic imaginary—embraces a rich spectrum of species, ethnicities, ontologies, and lifeworlds, it has been prone to all the cultural myopias, prejudices, peccadilloes, and stereotyping as any other genre. Exoticism, Orientalism, and Essentialism are only some of its many crimes.

Todd Gitlin pointed out in 1983 that ‘‘The three networks now underwrite more original movies than the studios combined” (in Stone, 2017: 616). The made-for-TV movie was a vast cultural phenomenon, commanding huge viewing figures and global, syndicated reach. Many of the most memorable and culturally resonant of these  were horror films. Despite this, the made-for-TV film, especially horror, remains largely under-explored in academic writing. If, as Pirie states, ‘Our fears are among the most revealing things about us’ (1994: 224), then what might these hugely popular films suggest about the society that produced them?