Medieval and Early Modern People and their Things

People perceive the world and their place in it through interacting with objects. Through these subject-object relationships, people experience the potential of materials, both naturally sourced and manmade, as physical resources that can be perceived. A number of concerns arise with the use of these materials amidst acts of meaning-making. How do people use subject-object relationships in negotiating their treatment of objects to define their world views? To innovate new ways of engaging with and replicating the world around them? And how does that process continue to influence how we create future realities for ourselves and others?

While Indigenous literary studies has grown substantially over the past several decades, comparative approaches that place Indigenous texts, traditions, and intellectual frameworks in conversation with one another remain relatively rare. Too often, Indigenous texts are incorporated into comparative, world, or global literary frameworks without meaningful engagement with Indigenous studies scholarship, or are read primarily through the organizing categories of nation, region, empire, or postcoloniality. This seminar seeks to create a space for comparative Indigenous literary inquiry that centers Indigenous texts, epistemologies, and methods on their own terms.

How do we study reading practices of the modernist era? After the development of what Richard Altick (1957) famously called the “democracy of print” in the nineteenth century, and the move toward mass literacy in the Anglophone world, how did  the act of reading and readership get transformed? Virginia Woolf’s 1926 essay, “How Should One Read a Book?” called reading the “most arduous and exhausting of occupations” and made the case for a discerning reader who would give the writer the “benefit of every doubt.” While the modernist era championed close reading with the evolution of New Criticism and I.A.

Sensory Aesthetics Beyond the Five Senses Paradigm

Call for Submissions for 15-20 minute presentations--virtual conference session at the American Comparative Literature Association, May 15-16, 2027

Movie Monstrosities: Framing Interracial Desire and Difference Across the Global Contexts is under contract with an established and reputable academic publisher.  We are seeking 2 additional chapters by 11/1/26.  Contributors are encouraged to send an email proposal asap to monstrositystudies@gmail.com

Below is a full description of the book:

This panel, Sounding Resistance: African American Voices and Affective Communities, examines how African American cultural production constructs forms of resistance through voice, affect, and relationality. Bringing together approaches from Black studies, feminist theory, and affect theory, the session investigates how literature and contemporary narrative media articulate alternative modes of community formation under conditions of racialized power structures. Rather than treating representation as a static reflection of social realities, the panel foregrounds the dynamic and embodied dimensions of Black expressive culture.

This seminar is interested in non-anthropocentric or even anti-anthropocentric understandings of gender-sexuality arrived at through transdisciplinary conversations between feminist theory, queer studies, the philosophy of biology, multispecies ethnography and environmental humanities. It posits that such understandings can emerge as accurate and effective translation practices across the material-semiotic continuum of multispecies worldmaking. In addition, it argues for aesthetic and affective valuations of multispecies desires, intimacies and sociosexual infrastructures.

La Roche University in Pittsburgh, PA, is pleased to announce its conference on Artificial Intelligence and Faith, to be held on campus November 6, 2026. The conference will feature keynote speaker Dr. Noreen Herzfeld, Professor Emerita and Director of the Program in Benedictine Spirituality and the Environment at Saint John's School of Theology and Seminary, and Senior Research Associate at the Institute for Philosophical and Religious Studies (ZRS) in Koper, Slovenia. Dr.

Buddhadev Bose, the Bengali poet, critic, and academic, set out to write his ideas behind introducing comparative literature in India. He posits comparative literature as a discipline of non-specialization, “an eclectic study.” It is a “corrective to the excess of esoterism which now prevails in academic circles.” Although Comparative Literature “needs the knowledge of languages,” it is “not a language school.” Bose’s idea of comparatism as a method was centred on translation. Although the initial impulse was to study Indian classical and native languages alongside other literatures, one of the most important outcomes of the comparative method was the conceptualization of the idea of Indian literature.

April 2-3, 2027
University of North Carolina at Greensboro

The UNCG Videogaming and Esports Studies (VES) program, with support from UNCG’s 
ARCADE (Applied Research in Computer Arts, Digitization, and Esports), invites proposals for
our third annual game studies conference!

This year’s theme explores navigation as a capacious term — how do we navigate or not 
navigate in a game (walking, running, jumping, climbing, warping, fast traveling, etc.), what 
choices do we have regarding navigation, and what affordances do games offer for navigation?

Comparative Legal Imaginaries

The Victorians Institute Journal (VIJ) is now accepting submissions for Volume 54. The VIJ is an award-winning scholarly journal of Victorian and Edwardian literary and cultural studies. We publish a variety of pieces, including articles, reviews, and rare texts. For further details, visit https://vijournal.org/.

Article submissions should be between 7K-9K words, and are welcome to address any aspect of Victorian and Edwardian literature, art, and culture. If you would like to submit a review for consideration, contact us directly through our email: victoriansinstitutejournal@gmail.com.

This seminar examines performance as a multilayered concept that is continually reshaped through travel and other mobilities. Performance, in this context, can be understood in its broadest sense as a dynamic practice through which identities, relationships, meanings, and experiences are negotiated and transformed. By bringing performance and mobilities into conversation as mutually illuminating frameworks, the seminar seeks to explore how their intersection creates new critical possibilities. 

CFP: IRCL Special Issue on Energy Perspectives on Children’s and YA Literature  

Have you ever paused to consider the energy infrastructure supporting the adventures of Anne in Lucy Mongomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908)? As an avid walker, Anne probably has a relatively low carbon footprint. Over a century later, in Maja Lunde’s The End of the Ocean (2017), struggles over energy development has become a central literary topic, underscoring the message of the UN Secretary General António Guterres, who at COP 30 urged that “The fossil fuel age is ending. Clean energy is rising. Let us make the transition fair, fast, and final" (United Nations, 2025).   

***Please use this link to submit your proposal: https://www.acla.org/seminar/e8248863-9bba-4144-b079-9c355f34a4f7***

American Literature Association

May 26-29, 2027

Boston, MA

Oceanic Thoreau

CALL FOR PAPERS

Disposable Bodies and the Aesthetics of War: Representations of Vulnerability, Violence, and Resistance in Literature and Culture

Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai. Philologia

3/2027

Guest Editors:

Dr. Andrea Roxana Bellot

Associate Professor, Department of English and German Studies

Rovira i Virgili University (URV), Tarragona, Spain

andrearoxana.bellot@urv.cat

India's civilizational ethos is deeply rooted in its multilingual and multicultural fabric, where translation has enabled the circulation of ideas, texts, and knowledge across regions and traditions. Etymologically understood as "carrying across," translation in the 21st century extends beyond linguistic transfer to become a critical and interpretive practice.

Asia in the Caribbean 

Virtual seminar at the

American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting

May 15, 16 2027

Apologies for crossposting!

Call for New JCMS Editor(s)

Editor(s), JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies

The Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) seeks a new Editor or Co-Editors and a new institutional home for its scholarly publication, commensurate with the 5-year term of the Editor(s), for its scholarly publication, JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies.

Review the full Call for Editor(s) and apply by Friday, September 18, 2026: https://www.cmstudies.org/general/custom.asp?page=JCMSCallNewEditor

This panel aims to explore the political, social, and economic significance of community in the works of John Steinbeck. Steinbeck’s works reflect a deep concern over the sicknesses of the United States—racism, economic inequality, and political upheaval to name a few—that were causing its people to be increasingly more isolated from one another. As Charles Johnson notes, “homelessness and loneliness… shape and direct the speech and actions of every character and situation that Steinbeck presents.” In both his fiction and non-fiction narratives, Steinbeck laments the wounds left by social and economic systems whose persistence hinges upon isolation and discord.

62nd International Conference on Medieval Studies, May 13-15, 2027

Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo

Organizers: Logan Spencer (Binghamton Univ.), Taryn DeLeon Mendiola (Boston

College)

Sponsor: Society for Queer Medieval Studies (SQMS)

Call for Chapters

Body-Worn Cameras and the Visual Politics of Violence: Embodied Witnessing

Edited by Lewis Rarm (Victoria University of Wellington) and Federico Selvini (IULM University)

Abstract This panel explores Love as a counter‑epistemology that challenges technocratic definitions of intelligence. Drawing on Marguerite Porete’s Mirror of Simple Souls and contemporary critiques of AI, the session examines Love—grounded in the heart—as a heart‑intelligent mode of knowing that resists domination and rehumanizes communities. The panel invites interdisciplinary work on affective intelligence, mystical epistemology, communal subjectivity, heart‑brain research, and alternative modes of cognition.