Haunted Thresholds:

The Southern Gothic in Comparative Perspective 

South Atlantic Modern Language Association (SAMLA) 2026
Conference Dates: November 5–7, 2026
Location: Wyndham Atlanta Buckhead Hotel and Conference Center, Atlanta, Georgia

Contact: stacy.stingle@gmail.com

Haunted Thresholds: The Southern Gothic in Comparative Perspective

2026 Imagining Creative Worlds Online Symposium, 11–12 November 2026

We invite proposals for 2026 Imagining Creative Worlds, an annual online symposium in the Common Ground Imagining Futures Series, taking place 11–12 November 2026.

The symposium brings together scholars, researchers, artists, designers, educators, publishers, museum professionals, media makers, and cultural practitioners working across creative fields and practices. We welcome proposals that explore how creative worlds are made, shared, interpreted, circulated, and transformed.

For 2026, The Arts in Society Research Network serves as the host Network, helping shape the symposium’s emphasis within the wider theme of Imagining Creative Worlds.

2027 Imagining Social WorldsOnline Symposium, 17–18 March 2027

We invite proposals for 2027 Imagining Social Worlds, an annual online symposium in the Common Ground Imagining Futures Series, taking place 17–18 March 2027.

The symposium brings together scholars, researchers, educators, policy thinkers, practitioners, community leaders, organizers, and public-facing professionals working across social, political, civic, organizational, and global fields. We welcome proposals that explore how social worlds are formed, governed, connected, contested, sustained, and transformed.

The New Italians session explores contemporary Italian literature, culture, media, music, and film through the lens of migration, mobility, and evolving forms of Italian identity in a globalized world. In dialogue with PAMLA 2026’s theme, “Our Ruling Classes: Culture, Power, Conflict,” the session considers how cultural production engages structures of power shaping belonging, citizenship, linguistic authority, and cultural legitimacy in Italy and its diasporic contexts.

Conference Details

We are seeking papers for the "Kafka Studies" panel at the 57th annual Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA), which will be held between March 6-9 in Newport, RI. You can find more information about the event on NeMLA's website: https://www.nemla.org/convention.html

Modality

Hybrid: The session will be held in-person but a few remote presentations may be included.

Panel Abstract

We invite you to submit an abstract and bio for the panel “Yesteryear: Cultural and Literary Possibilities”. We are seeking papers that address Caro Claire Burke’s breakout debut novel Yesteryear and its implications on literature and current American culture. How does Burke address established literary conventions? How might one conceive of the evocative narrative style of this novel? How does Burke conceptualize the conscription of motherhood, suppressed queerness, and conservative Christianity? How might the work fit into literary genealogies of sanity, purity, racial prejudice, and womanhood? Proposals should include a title, abstract,  your name, and affiliation.

The Southeastern Renaissance Conference (SRC) invites submissions for presentation at our 83rd Annual Meeting, which will be hosted by the University of Tennessee Knoxville and its Marco Institute, to be held from Friday, October 23 to Saturday, October 24, 2026.
The organizers will consider papers on any topic related to the Early Modern / Renaissance period.

Call for Papers

BROLLY. Journal of Social Sciences

Vol. 7, No. 2, August 2026 (General Topic)

Submission Deadline: August 15, 2026 

No processing or publication fees. 

Peer-reviewed.

#openaccess

ISSN 2516-869X (Print)

ISSN 2516-8703 (Online)

Web:https://www.journals.lapub.co.uk/index.php/Brolly

Email: brolly@journals.lapub.co.uk

The 1995 film Smoke, directed by Wayne Wang, features characters who band together by frequenting a corner cigar store in Brooklyn. Paul Auster, who wrote the screenplay, once described the community his characters created as a “little universe for themselves that is not determined by blood or the past.”

Following Yiyun Li's May 2026 Pulitzer Prize win, this session is a critical reception of her memoir as an emancipatory narrative: a descriptive and agential act that represents the unrepresentable experience of maternal grief/trauma. Welcome papers that are interdisciplinary/inter-textual dealing with themes of maternal loss, grief, growth, birth/death, nature/unnatural, death by suicide. Mail 150-200 word abstracts to Dr. Anhiti Patnaik at apatnaik@cascadia.edu Submission Deadline:Monday, August 17, 2026Type:Just-in-Time Session, Modern Language Association Conference 2027Venue:Los Angeles

While tragedy and horror are often treated as distinct genres, both traditions ask audiences to look steadily at what ordinarily repels them. From unburied corpses and undead monsters to violated kinship and failed agency, these spectacles produce fear, pity, disgust, and sorrow alongside fascination. This session explores what might be understood as a tragedy–horror continuum, examining the aesthetic, affective, and ritual overlaps between tragic and horrific representation across historical periods and media.

This panel proposes a revaluation of boundary-making between early modern and modern generic and affective registers in South Asia. While there is a consensus that genres of composition and cultural sensibilities did not change radically with the coming of print—“print did not so much produce new books as more old books” (Blackburn, 2002)—the precise sites of continuity/rupture differed widely based on the region and language in question.

58th NeMLA Convention
Newport, RI

Format: In Person Only

This panel builds off feminist science fiction studies’ investigation of the role of gender in speculative texts by expanding the field of inquiry to the role of nonbinary characters and even nonbinary worldbuilding in contemporary speculative fiction. It asks how both science fiction as a genre and feminist science fiction as a field have transformed with the emergence of new gender subjectivities. How do these fictions empower trans and nonbinary communities?  How must the methodological tools for studying SF change to meet this moment?

Still Screaming: An Online Conference Celebrating 30 Years of Scream

2026 marks the 30th anniversary of Wes Craven’s Scream (1996), which has had a profound impact on horror films and the slasher subgenre specifically. In the past three decades, Scream has become a franchise of seven films and a television series (2015-16, 2019). Scream has also expanded beyond the screen, reverberating throughout the popular culture landscape and serving as the foundation for a game, collectible figures, multiple Ghostface mask variations, and an entire collection of merchandise at Spirit Halloween (and elsewhere). 

Update: The deadline for submissions have been extended to Sunday, October 11, 2026 to submit for the 2027 conference.

Call for Papers: Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture

Special Issue: 'Forms, Limits and Future Directions of Storytelling in Migration Research'

Issue editors: Lena Englund (University of Eastern Finland) and Kaiju Harinen (Migration Institute of Finland, University of Turku)

View the full call here>>

https://www.intellectbooks.com/crossings-journal-of-migration-culture#call-for-papers

What is the real difference between speaking with nature and speaking for it? Is eco-centric thought a universally shared ideology, or does it develop in reaction to historical, philosophical, and socio-cultural contexts? In what way do the fundamental principles of Indian ecology vary from prevailing Western structures? These essential inquiries delineate the parameters of Ramachandra Guha’s Speaking with Nature: The Origins of Indian Environmentalism (2024), which effectively contests the notion that environmentalism is a unidirectional phenomenon dictated by Western influence. This view posits that the rest of the world, particularly the Global South, lacks eco-conscious awareness because it is ‘too poor to be green’.

In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, humans are conditioned to seek out human companionship and to despise being by themselves. Helmholtz Watson, a lecturer of Emotional Engineering, relates a story to Bernard Marx about being disciplined for sharing some of his poems with the students he was paid to indoctrinate. When asked what the poems had been about, Helmholtz tells a surprised Bernard, “They were about being alone.”

The guiding thread of this panel develops around a curious remark by Jacques Rancière that would seem to amend a classically Aristotelian thesis: “man is a political animal because he is a literary animal,” the fundamental condition of which is the “excess of words” constitutive of the human animal’s politicalness. Literature (or poetry) has long been placed in close proximity to politics, as we find in Plato’s Republic, where philosophy and literature—and, more generally, philosophy and politics—turn out to be perennial adversaries.

How do female characters employ their bodies to navigate, process, and challenge the cultural and socioeconomic structures of their times? Under the antagonistic system where the pursuit of “good life” is no longer plausible, how do women across different cultures, historical periods, and geopolitical contexts respond by utilizing their bodily autonomy and agency? This panel invites papers that critically investigate female bodily representation in the context of empowerment and change. In particular, this panel is interested in literary analyses that focus on the subtle yet tangible (dis)orientation of female bodies in and out of public spaces.

We are pleased to announce an open call for bids to host the 2027 Post45 Graduate Symposium. The Post45 Graduate Symposium is a two-day event, typically held in Spring, which brings together graduate students and faculty members working on post-1945 arts, literature, media, and culture. Around fifteen graduate students each submit a work-in-progress and convene in a workshop-style setting along with faculty respondents to discuss each participant's work. 

RISING ASIA JOURNAL is a peer reviewed journal published three times a year in January, May, and September. 

Reviewers are welcome to submit book reviews on any aspect of Asia, covering India's Northeast, Southeast Asia, and East Asia (China, Japan, the Koreas, and Taiwan). 

For details on our book reviews and manuscript preparation guidelines, please go to SUBMIT ARTICLES in our website www.rajraf.org 

Send your reviews to Professor Tuan Hoang at tuan.hoang@pepperdine.edu and to the Editor Dr. Harish Mehta at hmehta76@yahoo.ca

In keeping with the theme of Empowering Communities, this panel looks at the ways in which scholarship can make visible the previously obscured agency of women and other historically marginalized groups. Invisible labor is a concept frequently applied to the domestic sphere to describe the work women do to maintain households. In the literary world, too, women have shaped the canon in ways that have been overlooked.

2026 Dress and Body Association Conference

CALL FOR PAPERS

The Dress and Body Association invites submissions for the organization’s seventh annual conference, which will be held on November 7-8, 2026. Consistent with our long-term goals for inclusivity and sustainability, all activities will be 100% online.

Join our Google Group to learn about opportunities and converse with members of the DBA year-round! Email to request membership: dress.body.assoc@gmail.com.

Opening the Archives of Dress and the Body