Joan is Awful is the first episode of season six of Netflix’s Black Mirror that talks about the impact of artificially generated content on the lives of citizens, taking their mundane lives and turning them into a streaming special on ‘Streamberry’ for everyone to watch. The titular character Joan (played by Annie Murphy), is subjected to this midway through the episode when she sits to watch a curiously titled episode on the Streamberry streaming service that uses her name, Joan is Awful and has the actress Salma Hayek playing re-enacting her life.

Eudora Welty Society Call for Papers at

American Literature Association 2026 Conference (May 20-23, 2026 at the Palmer House Hilton, Chicago)

 Minor Characters in Welty’s Fiction

Call for Papers:  

Rendering Violence in Textual and Visual Media 
24-25 April, 2026
Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 

Keynote Speakers: 
Seth Kim, Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies, Colby College 
Pedro Inock, Filmmaker and PhD candidate, NOVA University of Lisbon 

Call for Papers 

Writing and Social Justices: Praxis, Aesthetics, Pedagogies 

Special Issue, University of Toronto Quarterly 

Co-editors: Julia A. Boyd, Corrine Bent-Womack, Sheliza Ibrahim, Megan Janssen-McBride, Iona Lister, Nelesi Rodrigues, and Clare Warner 

Advisory Editor: Leticia Ridley 

Special Call for Papers, Issue 11.1 (Sprıng 2026)

For its forthcoming issue, Mise-en-scène: The Journal of Film & Visual Narration (MSJ)

Contributions on varied dimensions of Popular Literature in the Nineteenth Century are invited for Volume XIII of Critical Imprints (ISSN: 2319-4774), the annual peer-reviewed journal of the Department of English, Loreto College, Kolkata.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

New Directions in Early American Poetry Studies

A panel organized and sponsored by the Society of Early Americanists as part of "American Poetry: A Symposium," sponsored by the American Literature Association and the Society for the Study of American Poetry, to be held March 26–28, 2026 at the Hawthorne Hotel in Salem, MA. For more information: https://americanliteratureassociation.org/ala-conferences/ala-symposia/a...

The DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND AMERICAN STUDIES AT MASARYK UNIVERSITY, Brno, is pleased to announce the Brno Graduate Conference in English Studies, to be held on NOVEMBER 20-21, 2025.

This year's theme – "CULTURAL MEMORY: REMEMBERING THE FORGOTTEN" – invites doctoral students to explore numerous ways in which literary, cultural and linguistic practices contribute to the construction, preservation, and transformation of cultural memory.

The confirmed keynote speaker of the conference is prof. Dr. Volker Depkat from University of Regensburg.

SILENCES
Northeast Victorian Studies Association
Cornell University April 10-12, 2026
Keynote Panel with Rachel Ablow, Jason Camlot, and Priya Joshi

View the full call here >> https://northeastvictorianstudies.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/...

Call for Papers and Workshops: “History up for Debate: Literature, Storytelling and the Imagined Past” 

1-2 July 2026, University of Salzburg, Department of English and American Studies, UniparkNonntal 

Conference within the Framework of the Salzburg Conferences on English Literature and Culture (SEC) 

Organisers: Dorothea Flothow, Julia Hartinger, Sarah Herbe, Christopher Herzog, Eva-Maria Kubin, Markus Oppolzer, and Elisabeth Schober 

Call for Articles - The Politics of Emotion: Affect, Identity and Power

IDEA – Interdisciplinary Discourses, Education and Analysis launches its new issue on the topic The Politics of Emotion: Affect, Identity and Power.

Emotions shape the way individuals and communities navigate their personal and collective lives, influencing decisions, relationships and the structures that govern societies. They are deeply embedded in social, cultural and political contexts, acting as both a personal experience and a force that drives public action.

I’m reaching out regarding a proposed forthcoming academic volume titled Other(ed) Worlds: Transgender Representations in Lusophone and Portuguese-Based Creole Societies, which I will be editing. This volume will be part of Trans Studies, a book series published by Bloomsbury Academic and edited by Dr. Douglas Vakoch (General Editor) and Courtney Morales (Senior Acquisitions Editor).

This proposed volume will bring together interdisciplinary essays exploring transgender narratives, identities, and resistances in the Lusophone World (from Portugal and Brazil to Lusophone Africa and Asia) / regions shaped by Portuguese colonial legacies (Africa, Asia, and the Americas).

Conference at the University of Bonn, 18-20 May, 2026

The AI revolution has accelerated in recent years, propelled by the widespread use of large language models (LLMs). Today, AI systems are not only transforming technical environments but also shaping our thoughts, emotions, and everyday linguistic practices. Increasingly, AI research and industry are shifting their attention from rational problem-solving toward aspects of human life once considered the last bastions of humanity. We can contrast this approach to AI as a simulation of ‘rationality’ with the expansion of applications into the realm of the expression of emotions and other aspects of human life often seen as ‘irrational’.

We are pleased to announce that the International Conference The Prism of Festivals and Performance Studies: Open Historiographical Questions, organized within the framework of the PRIN 2022 project – Theatre of Festivals between the Local and the Global. Rethinking the Italian Stage between the 1950s and the 1970s, involving the Universities of Rome “Tor Vergata” and Parma, will take place in Rome, at the University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, on 9–10 October 2025.

All details, including the full program and the Book of Abstracts, are available on the dedicated page of the MAP – Interuniversity Research Centre for the Memory of the Performing Arts website at the following link:

Deadline: Submissions due has been extended to October 15, 2025 to invisible.culture@ur.rochester.edu. 

It feels only appropriate, given the recent UR graduate worker strike, that Issue 41 of InVisible Culture focus on the problem of labor. Amid the erosion of labor protections in academia, increasing challenges faced by immigrant workers in the US, and global labor conflicts in fields like healthcare and agriculture, this moment calls for a reconsideration of what labor is and how its value is structured.

The Music Graduate Student Organization at the University of Pittsburgh welcomes proposals for 20 minute paper presentations, performance demonstrations, or work that integrates research and practice for its 2026 conference, “Sonic Power: Speculation, Surveillance, and Strength.” We invite students, researchers, musicians, sound artists, and practitioners from diverse disciplines to consider how sound organizes power and how people reorganize power through sound. Sonic life shapes worlds, whether in the hush of archival erasure, the loudness of protest, or the sorting of listening within media infrastructures.

Call for Papers
Coming of Age, Coming Undone: Abortion, Adolescence, Teen Pregnancy, and Reproductive Justice in Global Popular Culture

Audience: Media Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, Youth Studies, Reproductive Justice, Popular Culture, Girlhood Studies, Global Health, Queer Studies

Do Humans Also Dream of Electric Sheeps?
Technoscientific, Cultural, and Cognitive Challenges of AI

International Conference – Rome, February 27-28, 2026

Organized by:

• University of Rome Tor Vergata
• Res Viva – Interuniversity Research Center on the Epistemology and History of Life Sciences
• Italian Society for the History of Science (SISS)
• With the support of CNR – Institute for the History of Philosophical and Scientific Thought in Modern Age (ISPF), Naples

Conference theme

The Center for the Advancement of Women at Mount Saint Mary’s University, Los Angeles

Collectif Research and Writing Anthology 2027 Call for Papers

Do you want to forge community and ignite your scholarship? Connect with scholars, activists, artists, and others passionate about the advancement of women? Impact a wider audience? By publishing in Collectif, Mount Saint Mary’s University’s interdisciplinary journal of research, writing, and art, you will reach 50,000 potential readers. To celebrate the issue’s release, The Center for the Advancement of Women will host a salon, where contributors can share their work and connect with the Center community.

2027 Theme and Call

CFP: Sensation Fiction and the Health Humanities

A VPFA Study Day

Loughborough University, 27 March 2026

“When seeking knowledge of a work of art or an art form, it never proves useful to take the receiver into account”: thus begins Walter Benjamin’s foundational essay on the study of translation. This seminar proceeds against Benjamin’s injunction, paring translation studies with recent inquiries into reading practice and readerly attention to ask how modernist writers use translation to modulate readerly difficulty. How do modernist translators adjust difficulty both to safeguard and to enhance the reader’s imagination of an original text from which they are withheld? Do moments of difficulty in translated modernist texts – whether Victorian archaisms in C.K.

In a recent article (2021), Sue-Im Lee observes a rising phenomenon in Asian American formal criticism: the proliferation of aesthetic concepts such as “opaque, transparent, fragmented, linear, nonlinear, discordant, or lyrical” (690).

Call for Papers for the 15th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Music, Sound, Art and Design (EvoMUSART) · Please distribute · Apologies for cross-posting
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The 15th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Music, Sound, Art and Design (EvoMUSART) will take place on 8–10 April 2026, in Toulouse, France, as part of the evo* event.

South Atlantic Review Special Issue

In The Time of Man and Beyond:

Rethinking Elizabeth Madox Roberts for the 21st Century

Proposals due November 21, 2025

Guest Editors:

James Stamant, Agnes Scott College

Amanda M. Capelli, New York University

Goretti Benca, Marist College