Recent scholarship in autobiography and life writing has expanded beyond traditional literary forms to encompass a wide range of practices through which individuals narrate, perform, and negotiate their identities. As scholars such as Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson have argued, life writing constitutes not merely the representation of a life but a dynamic process through which identities are constructed, mediated, and made visible within specific social and cultural contexts. Consequently, autobiography has evolved into an interdisciplinary field of inquiry encompassing visual art, graphic narratives, performance, body art, digital media, and other forms of self-representation.

“To be or not to be”—Hamlet’s timeless question of existence—resonates with a gendered undertone that continues to echo through literature and culture. This panel asks a related question: what does it mean to be (or not to be) a man, and how do literary texts help illuminate that question across genres, periods, and geographies?

Call fort submissions

"Conversations with the Dead: Excavation as Re-vision"

Chair: Edvige Giunta, Kean University
The session invites presentations of prose, poetry, and/or hybrid writing that “turn” to the dead—not for the purpose of elegiac reminiscence but to unsettle or dismantle notions of chronology, inheritance, and other forms of linear, unidirectional connection between the living and the dead. Writers who turn to the dead find that that past transforms the present through the very process of excavation: communities are remade in the turning. This session will examine what that practice looks like across genres such as intergenerational memoir, speculative memoir, investigative essays, and personal rewritings of myths.

CFP: “Bookstore Communities”

Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) annual convention

Newport, RI

March 6-9, 2027

In keeping with the NeMLA 2027 theme of “Empowering Communities,” the purpose of this panel is to explore the role of bookstores in imagined, fictional spaces. What does a bookstore signify? What’s the symbolic difference between a bookstore and a library? How do fictional bookstores create and foster community? What magic, literal or figurative, is inherent in a shop that sells physical, printed texts? What do these commercial spaces represent as far as identity, belonging, or culture?

The editors are seeking 750-word abstracts of talks for a symposium at UCLA, February 5, 2027, on “The Great American Novel: A Twenty-First-Century Reckoning.” Early-career scholars as well as tenured faculty are encouraged to apply. Transportation and lodging costs will be provided. While there is a long and thriving history of debates about the GAN, we favor topics and approaches that highlight theoretical and critical concerns that reach beyond the discussion of any single text to consider broader theoretical, political, and aesthetic stakes.  Accepted speakers will be asked to revise and expand their presentations into articles to be considered for publication in a special issue of ALH.

Full cfp here: https://www.sal.org.uk/2026/07/crd-cfp/

Decadence: Rhetoric and Aesthetics of Decline from Ancient Empire to the Age of Polycrisis

Conference open to scholars of all stages

Venue: British School at Rome, Rome

Dates:21-22nd January 2027

Following a successful symposium in 2025 on the subject of civilisational origins, we are delighted to announce our next event, Decadence, a conference about what happens to civilisations, societies, and cultural movements when they reach and then exceed their peak.

An Edited Volume by
Ruchika Hooda
Assistant Professor at Maharishi Markandeshwar (Deemed to be University), Ambala

Ms. Diksha
Assistant Professor in the Dept. of English at Chandigarh University, Chandigarh

A Volume

Editors
Dr Swastick Sen Chowdhury
Assistant Professor & Head in the Department of Economics, Bhatter College, Dantan (Autonomous)

Dr Supratik Guha
Assistant Professor, Department of Economics at Shahid Matangini Hazra Government General Degree College for Women
 

To be published under the book series

About the Volume

Cognitive Ecologies: Thinking With, Through, and Against Environments
A Special Issue of The Apollonian: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies

Complete articles of up to 5,000 words due 30 September 2026. Personal essays, photo essays, poetry, and translation also invited.

Summon the muse!

The Faculty of Arts and Humanities at Netrokona University, Bangladesh is delighted to inform that it is going to publish its double-blind peer-reviewed academic journal Sphaira: Journal of Arts and Humanities, volume 2, in December, 2026. Scholarly articles in English addressing contemporary issues within the fields of literature, linguistics, language teaching, education, fine arts, performance studies, folklore studies, cultural studies, literary theory, and history and archeology are called for publication in its second volume.

Manuscript development guidelines:

The Société Rencesvals, Pan-American Branch, wishes to honor Lynn T. Ramey in celebration of 25 years since the publication of her first monograph, Christian, Saracen, and Genre in Medieval French Literature. We invite proposals that engage directly with the central ideas, arguments, and/or methodologies explored by Ramey in her work, and which discuss the representation of Muslims by Romance language authors c. 1100-1500 (Italian, Old Occitan, Old French, Medieval Castilian, for instance). We are especially interested in papers that give particular attention to themes of gender and race as they relate to epic depictions of Muslim-Christian relations in chansons de geste, chivalric romances, and lyric poetry.

The advancement of artificial intelligence has transformed humanities research and education, deepening computation’s influence on scholarly practice and everyday life. From the early era of “humanities computing” in the 1970s to the rise of “computational humanities” over the past decade, this trajectory highlights the enduring—and expanding—role of computation in shaping inquiry across the humanities. These intersections are especially visible in interdisciplinary work. As T. S. Eliot observes, “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” The same spirit can illuminate how methods and tools migrate across fields.

Panel Chair: Noah Gallego, M.A.Contact: noahrgallego@gmail.comDates: March 6 - 9, 2027Location: Salve Regina University, Newport, Rhode Island While the exact calendrical origin of punk rock is nebulous, many credit 1977 as year zero. 1977 saw the release of the eponymous debut album of “the only band that matters,” The Clash, among several other iconic releases, including but not limited to: The Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, The Ramones’ Rocket to Russia, Talking Heads' Talking Heads: 77, The Damned’s Damned Damned Damned, and The Runaways’ Queens of Noise.

Abstract

Demanding that student writers maintain an objective, third-person stance when writing academic essays persists in the academy. However, we hold that providing students with strategies that help them develop a hospitable mindset in the writing process, one in which they aim to make a meaningful connection with their readers through the use of both first person and personal experience, does not diminish the scholarly rigor of college-level work. Moreover, by adopting the attitude that student writing is not immediately designed for publication, educators can focus on helping students find ways to connect with readers while cultivating their own writing styles.

Description

CFP: 3rd International Interdisciplinary Conference of the Department of English, University of Zululand and the Department of English and Literary Studies, Federal University Wukari, Nigeria

28-30 September 2026

Ongoye, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

Re-imagining Language, Writing, and Literature in English in a Fast-Changing World

I want to be accepted by society…live in a world I don’t have to hide in…make choices without being in constant fear of them destroying me or the ones I care about.” (Ada, liberated TanakX5 robot, on her hopes and dreams. Alex + Ada, Book 11)

Dystopian fiction is having a moment. Classic dystopian fiction like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1986) have renewed relevance since the election of Donald Trump in the U.S., while more recent novels like Ali Smith’s Gliff (2024), Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song (the Man Booker winner in 2023), and John Lanchester’s The Wall (2019) describe worlds sliding into totalitarianism post-Brexit. This panel seeks to raise questions about how contemporary Anglophone speculative fiction addresses the current cultural moment and issues like artificial intelligence, immigration and the internet’s dissolution of privacy. Formally, how do 21st century dystopian novels connect science fiction with realism? With magical realism?

“It is worse, much worse, than you think” states David Wallace-Wells at the opening of his The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (2019). “When do we start physically attacking the things that consume our planet and destroy them with our own hands?” asks Andreas Malm in How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2021). “I don’t think about hope much anymore. But I do think about imagination,” writes Terry Tempest Williams in an interview contained in A voice in the Wilderness: Conversations with Terry Tempest Williams (2006). In the spaces between these statements we encounter a range of reactions to our warming condition, from blunt pessimism, to righteous anger, to nuanced reframing.

This in-person roundtable will take place at NEMLA 2027 (March 6-9) at Salve Regina University in Newport, RI. 

Abstract:

Call for Chapters – Edited volume

The Cultural Life of Beds: Interdisciplinary Perspectives of Materiality, Bodies and Power

University of New England, Australia

For publication with an international publisher

Call for Book Chapters

Expected Publisher: De Gruyter Brill (Scopus Index)

Recovering Marginalised Theatre, Folk Epics and Songs beyond Literary Canons

Kashyap Deepak
Mahatma Gandhi Central University

Using Comics to Build Community: Approaches to Teaching Comics (Roundtable) (Virtual)

Co-organizers Michael A. Torregrossa and Carl B. Sell

Sponsored by Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture

Call for Papers - Please Submit Proposals by 30 September 2026

58th Annual Convention of Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)

Salve Regina University (Newport, RI)/Online.

Hybrid event: 6-9 March 2027

This session’s modality is Virtual Only, meaning all presentations will be delivered via Zoom regardless of whether the presenters are in-person.