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

Be(Long)ing in Planetary Space

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.

Romancing the Gothic Talk Series

This talk series offers online talks each week and has a global audience and speaker pool. Talks are 40-45 minutes and are run (in real time) twice to catch different time zones. An honorarium is offered. Our categories, laid out below, allow for flexibility. Please contact me (details at the end) if you have any questions. We strongly encourage speakers to attend other sessions as well as there own and join in with the community!

We invite chapter proposals for an edited scholarly collection that critically examines the religious dimensions of Indian diasporic women’s literature, with a specific focus on conversion, resistance, and cultural memory. This volume will explore how women writers from the Caribbean, South Africa, Fiji, Mauritius, and other sites of indenture engage with Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam, addressing the gendered and ideological tensions of community rupture, religious fidelity, and transgenerational transmission in diasporic settings.

This roundtable will explore the theme of mad echoes within contemporary (re)generations of literature and her/their/history. The term (re)generation calls forth processes of renewing or restoring something that has been lost or damaged. Damage and loss have been ways of speaking about the lasting and ongoing violences against marginalized bodies that have been labeled as Mad, pathologized, or institutionalized, but the limits of these concepts have been contested, perhaps most notably in Eve Tuck’s “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities,” which interrogates the (un)helpfulness of damage-focused research to the pursuit of justice and wellbeing for members of marginalized communities.

FINAL CALL for papers: 1 spot remaining

This panel interrogates the title “The Uncanny and Sublime: The Liminality of Knowledge” by asking: what constitutes knowledge when it emerges from thresholds—moments of affect, disorientation, or aesthetic rupture? How does the liminal “unknowing” of the uncanny and sublime inform new modes of intellectual inquiry? Does this liminality reorient traditional ways of thought?

In the age of Artificial Intelligence, more accurately, the “age of AI Empire” (Tacheva and Ramasubramanian 2023), machines are no longer defined solely by their ability to process information. They are increasingly imagined as also capable of emotion, bodily awareness and interaction with the natural environment. This seminar examines the representation of embodied AI in literature and digital media focusing on the interrelationships between humans and the more-than-human alongside the growing emphasis on the body as a site of knowledge.

Call for Papers

Science, Technology, and Culture

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

I invite you to please consider submitting a abstract for the following panel to be hosted ASECS (American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies) at the 2026 Conference. This conference will be help April 9-11 in Philadelphia.

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 

We invite chapters for a multi-disciplinary edited collection exploring heavy metal and rock bands that use concealed identities, stage personas and masks as a substantial part of their performance and aesthetic. Hidden identities are not a new phenomenon in either popular music generally or heavy metal/hard rock music more narrowly, as performers obscuring their identity through face paint, masks, and wigs goes back over half a century and encompasses bands including Kiss, Slipknot, and Gwar. New masked bands, including Sleep Token and Ghost, have recently risen to widespread popularity.

Veiling obscures, but also reveals. It holds symbolic and aesthetic power that spans centuries, from the medieval and Victorian periods to contemporary expressions in visual, fashion, and social media culture. Further, it frames visibility itself and shapes how identity is hidden, controlled, surveilled, or disclosed. To veil is not only to conceal, but to shape what others are allowed to see and what they are left to imagine. Veiling shrouds, but also frames; withholds, but also invites interpretation. These tensions give veiling its interpretive depth, sustaining its power to provoke, unsettle, and reframe. 

Update: due date extended to Friday, Sept. 26, 2025

Following the highly successful panels at ALA 2025, the Edith Wharton Review is planning a special issue on Edith Wharton and Popular Culture.

This seminar reflects on the relationship between law and literature, particularly on how literary forms and narratives interact with political and social legal orders. Julie Peters credits the “antidisciplinarity” of both law and literature as central to the movement that emerged in the 1980s. Bringing this conversation to the 21st century, this seminar seeks to bring fresh perspectives on this interdisciplinary approach by expanding its theoretical scope. Sub-fields like trauma studies have long reflected on the challenges and possibilities of representing and aestheticizing atrocity and suffering.