american

Call for interest (sign-up below) in a Society for the Study of Unconventional Prose Fiction from the US, 1950-2001.

 We're creating a scholarly society for studying unconventional US fiction from the era usually called "postmodern" - sign up here - https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1_n10FmXmaJ1fNmIfzTlozM7udW4RgEMZcpWu4lGWIzs/ - and see below for more details...

ALA 2026: Society for the Study of American Travel Writing CFP

CALL FOR PAPERS – Deadline, January 21, 2026

Society for the Study of American Travel Writing

American Literature Association 37th Annual Conference

May 20-23, 2026, in Chicago, IL.

The Margaret Fuller Society invites proposals for a panel at ALA 2026 about teaching in difficult times. As we head into the spring 2026 semester—the mid-point in an academic year when students and educators read U.S. literature amidst rising book bans, closing degree programs and DEI offices, and even the dismantling of the Department of Education—many of us are facing existential crises about how to do what matters to us most. How to support our students? How to sustain our disciplines? How to teach in ways that do justice to our subjects? The most basic day-to-day parts of our teaching lives have never felt more vulnerable—or more urgent.

We invite faculty, advanced graduate students, and independent scholars to apply for a three-week National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on the New Deal era Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), taking place June 29–July 18, 2026. The institute will be conducted in a hybrid format, with the first and third weeks held virtually and the second week convening on site at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. for guided research in its extensive FWP collections. This interdisciplinary program offers participants the opportunity to deepen their understanding of the FWP and to develop hands-on experience using its rich documentation of American lives, communities, and cultures for teaching, research, and scholarship.

This special issue of Frontiers investigates how feminism, even as a discourse of resistance, participates in hegemonic projects. We invite papers that examine the connections between feminism, conservatism, and conservative ideologies during the long twentieth century within the context of the Americas (including North, Central, and South America, the Caribbean, as well as indigenous lands and communities). We welcome crosstemporal and transgeographic approaches, since we aim to put together a comparative, humanistic interdisciplinary analysis that explores how culture articulates and mobilizes notions of femininity, conservative politics, and complex ideological affiliations in transnational, local, border, and/or oceanic frameworks.

The Incredible Nineteenth Century: Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Fairy Tale (I19) seeks to publish the best scholarship on the century that was, in many ways, the time period in which the modern genres of science fiction and fantasy began, and in which the academic study of fairy tale and folklore has its roots. 

As part of the 10th International Conference on the State of Mark Twain Studies, the American Humor Studies Association (AHSA) invites proposals for either a panel or a roundtable discussion. The Elmira conference will expand its traditional focus on Mark Twain by including sister organizations such as AHSA. The conference theme is “Irreverence, Rebellion, and Resilience.”

Mimbres School Monsoon Session 2026, Aug 10-14.Slavery’s Domestic Economy

The Mimbres School for the Humanities invites applications to participate in our first in-person Monsoon Session Symposium. This symposium takes recent historical and theoretical work on slavery in the Americas as an occasion to ask what it would mean to take the family and the household, rather than labor or industrial profits, as the primary point of departure for understanding the slave power and its various afterlifes in the present.

CFP: E. E. Cummings Sessions at the American Literature Association’s 37th Annual Conference, Chicago, Illinois, May 20-23, 2026 

The E. E. Cummings Society will sponsor a session (or two) at the 2026 American Literature Association conference in Chicago [ https://americanliteratureassociation.org/ ]. We invite proposals for papers on any aspect of Cummings’ life and/or work. Proposals that touch upon the following topics will be especially welcome: 

Call for Papers.

Theatre and Performance Notes and Counternotes seeks short articles or extended essays (1,500-3,000 words) on American (US) theatre at the United States semiquincentennial (250th anniversary). 2-3 sentence abstracts should be submitted by February 2, 2026 and essays/articles before April 6, 2026 to Harvey Young (issue editor) at cfadean[at]bu.edu. 

American Literature Association

May 20-23, 2026

Palmer House, Chicago, IL 

The Richard Wright Society announces two sessions on Wright to take place at the 37th Annual American Literature Association Conference.

Rethinking Richard Wright’s Depiction and Analysis of Gender and Sexuality

Call for Papers: 

“How Children’s Culture Fights Adult Authoritarians; or, Improvising Against the Machine”

American Studies Association, Chicago, Oct. 22-25, 2026

Call for Proposals for Vol. 4, Issue 1–Jackson & Animality [deadline extended: Feb. 1, 2026]

American Literature Association

May 20-23, 2026

Chicago, IL

Thoreau and Abolition

This roundtable seeks to explore Thoreau’s relation to the abolitionist movement, whether through his antislavery writings, his biography, or the legacies and afterlives of some of his more famous essays such as “Civil Disobedience.” We are interested in papers that explore any aspect of his political and/or abolitionist thought, his political-economic critiques, or the intertwinement of Thoreau’s ecological and antislavery thinking. We also welcome papers that consider how turning to Thoreau or the politics of nineteenth-century abolition in these terrible times provides us with political paths forward.