Call for Papers

“War & Culture”

Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)

48th Annual Conference, February 17-20, 2027

Marriott Albuquerque

Albuquerque, New Mexico

https://swpaca.org

Submissions open: September 1, 2026

Proposal submission deadline: October 31, 2026

Panel: Precarious and Obsolete Spaces in the Novel

We form strong attachments with the spaces we inhabit, which shape us as we shape them. Spaces house our memories, provide opportunities for encounters, and alter our individual and collective identities. But what happens when these locations deteriorate, become obsolete, or disappear entirely? This panel invites papers considering representations of neglected, abandoned, or otherwise ephemeral spaces in novels from any period or location. We welcome papers on places and spaces of any scale: buildings, towns and cities, landscapes, even nations and worlds.  

Conference Location: University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC

The relation between a theory and its so-called “object” always poses the danger of reducing an art form (in this case film) to a mere instance testifying to the validity of the theory. In this way, the theory provides the “genus” of which a given film will be a mere “species”. The application of psychoanalytic ideas or Marxist concepts to film would therefore run the risk of depriving the specificity and singularity of the object in favour of the hegemony of the theory. Here, theory would truly live up to its theological vocation (the “theo” in theory refers to God) standing transcendentally above its “object” upon which it would cast its daunting shadow.

Scraps…

Reading Residuality

13-15th April 2027

Krapp: Past midnight. Never knew such silence. The earth might be uninhabited.

Pause.

Krapp: Here I end.

Krapp switches off, winds tabe back, switches on again.

“Here I end” declares Krapp, the titular protagonist of Samuel Beckett’s 1958 play Krapp’s Last Tape. Yet an ending is impossible. Why?

March 6-9, 2027
Newport, RI
Convention Site: Salve Regina University

Procedural Poetry Now: Precedents, Tools, Goals

ACLA 2027 Annual Meeting
University of Houston: May 20–23, 2027
Proposal deadline: September 22, 2026

NeMLA: March 6-9, 2027

Location: Newport, RI

Session Type: Roundtable (this is a hybrid roundtable with in-person and virtual presentations allowed)

Full Call and Submission: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22319

Animals, Animalities, and Ecocriticisms in Hagiography 

Modality: Hybrid 

Sponsor: Hagiography Society, Medieval Ecocriticisms 

Organizers: Julia Salkind (julia.salkind@marquette.edu) Grace K. DiModugno (gd69@fordham.edu) 

This conference explores decay as a transformative, liminal state that bridges the physical, the political, and the conceptual. During the process of decomposition, systems and objects start to break down, existing in a precarious limbo that simultaneously signals contamination to the surrounding environment. As theorized by Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror, the abject corpse and the decaying material remind us of the fragility of our own boundaries, confronting us with what must be cast off to constitute a stable self. This fear of bodily disintegration and abjection mirrors the anxieties we project onto broader cultural and institutional structures.

Environmental racism predates its own name. The term entered public discourse in 1982, but the conditions behind it, namely exposure to hazard and unequal claim to safety, go back to slavery itself. Historian Carl Zimring traces this to a basic split in American thought: white meant clean, Black meant dirty. That split decided who did the dirtiest, most dangerous work, and who lived closest to pollution, for generations. In 1968, Memphis sanitation workers went on strike over exactly that: unsafe, degrading labour shaped by the same racial split. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis while there in support of the very strike. That split still operates today.

Although internet culture may have brought about the hashtag #WeirdGirlLit,” women authors have long used writing to explore taboo and forbidden topics deemed beyond the purview of polite/patriarchal society. While Heather Colley of Writers Digest has noted that “Women in literary fiction are becoming murderers, cannibals, psychopaths, and stalkers,” we contend that female protagonists have long been unhinged both across time and space. Historically, freaky (anti)heroines have served as a release through which women readers could escape the restrictive confines of ideal femininity and instead probe hidden desires and other illicit aspects of their identities. 

Open Call for Papers

Folklore is having a moment in South Asian writing, and it isn't a nostalgic one. Novelists, poets, memoirists, playwrights, and graphic novelists across the region and its diaspora keep returning to myth, oral narrative, legend, and vernacular ritual, not to decorate their work with the past, but to think through the pressures of the present: ecological collapse, historical trauma, gendered violence, migration, and a digital, algorithmic world the old tales never anticipated and somehow still speak to.

In an era characterized by unprecedented technological advancements and escalating ecological crises, the fundamental assumptions of what it means to be human are undergoing a radical reassessment. The traditional framework of humanism, predicated on a singular, anthropocentric worldview, is increasingly challenged by the rise of artificial intelligence, biotechnologies, and global ecological interdependence. This interdisciplinary conference aims to explore how various forms of cultural production, including literature, film, and digital media, function not merely as reflections of the posthuman turn but as active agents in shaping and articulating it.

Reading, Writing and Translating Early Modern Women’s Fiction: Imagined Communities

Guest editors: Line Cottegnies (Sorbonne Université) and Sonia Villegas-López (University of Huelva)

Dear Fellow Writers and Thinkers,

The Windhover Writers' Festival (February 18-19, 2027) promises to be a vibrant gathering to explore the intersection of faith and creativity, with a central theme of Narrative Beauty.

The Windhover Writers' Festival has long been a cherished space for writers, scholars, and readers to connect, share their work, and delve into the power of words. We invite you to be a part of this exciting event by submitting a proposal for an individual or a panel discussion.

Proposals:

We are seeking proposals for engaging and thought-provoking discussions that explore the theme. Here are some potential areas of focus:

James Baldwin and the Work of Witnessing, Teaching, and Public Intellectualism

I am seeking James Baldwin scholars and contributors to a forthcoming/newly completed Baldwin anthology who are interested in participating as virtual guest lecturers in my Fall 2026 course, ENG 393: Special Topics: James Baldwin, at Philander Smith University, an HBCU in Little Rock, Arkansas.

The Institute for Medieval Studies at the University of New Mexico invites proposals for three
sponsored sessions for ICMS 2027. Proposals must be submitted through the ICMS Confex
Portal (https://shorturl.at/d05So) by 15 September 2026, including title, 300 word abstract and
50 word description.

Medieval Ruins from Old English Motif to Modern Archaeology:
Past, Present and Future

CALL FOR PAPERS

In Brightest Day: Race, Justice, and the Speculative in HBO's Lanterns and the Green Lantern Mythos

Proposed for New Suns: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Speculative -- The Ohio State University Press

Edited by Julian C. Chambliss, Ritesh Khandelwal, and Harry M. Foster (Michigan State University)

ABSTRACT DEADLINE: October 15, 2026
Send abstracts (300-500 words) and a bio (approx. 100 words) to greenlanternbookproject@gmail.com with the subject line "Lanterns CFP -- [your surname]."

OVERVIEW

CALL FOR CHAPTER PROPOSALS

Eating for a Green Future

Literature, Culture, and the Politics of Food in Contemporary India

Edited by

Dr. Manisha Mohanty (Assistant Professor, S'O'A University & Fulbright-Nehru Fellow)

Dr. Shashibhusan Nayak (MLA Bibliography Fellow, MLA)

Dr. Sonali Das (Assistant Professor, S’O’A University)

• Event: This seminar is planned as part of the 2027 American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meet.
• Mode: VIRTUAL
• Event Dates: May 15 & 16, 2027
• Seminar Title: Narrative Futures and the Politics of World-Making
• All paper proposals are due by September 22,2026.
• Final Decision: Status will be available after December 1, 2026

Concept Note:

Call For Papers: 2027 ALA Symposium

“Music and the American Literary Imagination” 

January 28 – January 30, 2027

Hyatt Centric Downtown Nashville

210 Molloy Street

Nashville, TN   37201 

Call for Papers

Volume 3 Number 2

“Empires’ Echo: Colonial Legacies in Postcolonial South Asia”

CALL FOR PAPERS

Ecologies of Tomorrow

Environmental Humanities, Literature, and Culture in the Twenty-First Century

A Two-Day Online International Conference

(7th & 8th October 2026)

Organised by Creativitas: Critical Explorations in Literary Studies (An International Journal of English and Cultural Studies)

in collaboration with

the Department of English, Serampore Girls’ College (Affiliated to the University of Calcutta)