Veterans Studies is a growing field of research that addresses the significant impact of military personnel and their families transitioning from active duty to civilian life with an emphasis on the veteran experience. This session invites papers that explore the many facets of military life exhibited in literature, theater, film, and poetry written by or about military veterans as well as scholarly explorations of the veteran experience.

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?

US Drama & Theatre Conference

Of Mutability and Malleability:

Re-imagining the Contours of US Theatre and Drama

10-13 June, 2026

University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès, France

The Other Sophie Treadwell

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.

Note on Publishing Opportunity:

We have been encouraged by the general editor of the Bloomsbury Ecocritical Theory and Practice series, Douglas Vakoch, to submit a proposal for an edited collection based upon this CFP. If you're interested in submitting your conference presentation as a proposed book chapter, please let us know in your submission. Bloomsbury requests chapters of at least 6000 words with at least one author with a PhD. More information on the series may be found here: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/series/ecocritical-theory-and-practice/ 

Panel CFP

We invite papers on the cerebral Dickens, but also on “the mind of the heart” (David Copperfield): on how Charles Dickens thought, but also how and what we think about him. Suitable topics might include:

• Dickens and philosophy, psychology, statistics, or the natural sciences

• Dickens and his intellectual friends and contemporaries, such as Thomas Carlyle and George Eliot

• How Dickens and his readers develop ideas through and by means of language

• Plotting, planning, and making connections

SUBJECT: Lorefest Call for Papers

Lorefest – Oct 29-Nov 01, 2025. Lorefest Conference 9am-5pm, Nov 01, 2025, Texas A&M University,

College Station, TX.

Lorefest is an annual festival combining scholarly research and creative practice

inspired by local and “glocal” (i.e. globally-inspired, locally-rooted) folklore. It brings together

the Texas A&M student body, their family and friends, and local Bryan/College Station

communities culminating in a four-day event in late October/early November. Its organizers

Weeks after the death of Nobel Prize-winning author Alice Munro last year, her daughter Andrea Skinner disclosed the sexual abuse she'd suffered as a child—abuse about which Munro had known and stayed silent. The disclosure is but one of many revelations in recent years to upend the legacy of a cultural icon. Neil Gaiman, Louis CK, Jean Vanier, and Avital Ronell are only a few public figures to be reassessed in the wake of accounts of sexual abuse. Similarly, disputed claims to Indigenous ancestry touted by artists including novelist Joseph Boyden and singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie have generated outrage and heartbreak among Indigenous groups and innumerable admirers, compounding generational traumas.

Mapping the Black Digital and Public Humanities formally invites Black Digital/Public Humanities project directors to submit their projects to our interactive map and searchable database of 650+ international Black Digital/Public Humanities projects.

Mapping BDPH is an interactive and searchable map of digital and public humanities projects related to Black history & culture. The goals of this project are threefold: 

• to help people find digital and public projects about Black history and culture by topic, type, location, contributors, and more.

In her 2006 book Queer Phenomenology: Objects, Orientations, Others, Sara Ahmed asks how we are oriented and how we come to find our way. Ahmed thus thinks across queer feminist theories of sexuality and traditional phenomenology, evaluating the latter’s efforts to bring what is commonplace or taken-for-granted into focus, and doing so through matrices of gender, race, and sexuality.

Odour and Order: Smell, Culture and Representation

Keynote: Jonathan Reinarz (University of Birmingham)

Call for Papers

SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY

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

The Mystery & Detective Fiction Area of the Popular Culture Association invites proposals for the 56th annual conference in Atlanta, Georgia, April 8-11, 2026, to be held at the Atlanta Marriott Marquis.

We seek proposals from researchers, academics, graduate students, and independent scholars for scholarly discussions on all aspects and periods of mystery and detective fiction. Interdisciplinary approaches are strongly encouraged.

We ask that proposals extend existing scholarship in new directions and avoid plot summary or review. Proposals should have a clear and focused argument that can be developed adequately in a 15-minute presentation.

Some possible topics for the 2026 conference:

Seminar title: The World of World Literatures: Practices, Pedagogies, and Possibilities

Organizers: Dr. Mir Islam, Nalanda University, India. Arunav Das, University of South Carolina, USA

American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), Annual Convention 2026, Montreal, Canada

Abstract Submission Deadline: October 2, 2025. Must be submitted through the ACLA portal. 

ACLA annual convention: February 26 - March 1, 2026. Montreal, Canada (In-person) 

More info: https://www.acla.org/annual-meeting