american

In the light of girl-centric third-wave feminism and critical regionalism, contemporary American and Canadian literary and cultural texts present innovative girlhoods enabling expansive and emancipatory processes. Please submit an abstract (250 words) and a short bionote.

Deadline for submissions: Friday, March 20, 2026

Mercedes Albert-Llacer, Universitat Jaume I (mllacer@uji.es)

https://mla.confex.com/mla/2027/webprogrampreliminary/Paper33899.html

Hi all,

See the below CFP for a panel on Pacific early American literature for next year’s MLA. Please circulate to anyone you think might be interested!

This issue of Ampersand: An American Studies Journal invites submissions that take up the concept of the “American assemblage”. 

Two conferences, one in Halle (Saale) and the other in Atlanta (Georgia), aim to bring together researchers interested in the Francke Foundations in Halle, the English missionary societies, and the founding of the colony of Georgia. While the conference in Halle will focus on a systematic comparison between these institutions, the conference in Atlanta will address the social consequences. The main question is what types of social order the Protestant reform movements in Prussia, England, and Georgia promoted.

 Renewing Faith, Improving Society. A Comparison of Protestant Reform Movements in Prussia, England, and Georgia (first half of the 18th century)

This panel examines how literature circulates beyond fixed ethnic identity by bringing together the work of John Fante and Charles Bukowski as a case study in Italian American literary afterlives. While Fante is firmly situated within Italian American literary studies and Bukowski is more often framed within postwar American counterculture, this panel argues that reading them relationally reveals how Italian American literary aesthetics travel, mutate, and endure beyond explicitly ethnic frameworks.

Richard Linklater’s Slacker (1991) is a cult classic with a crucial role in the history of American cinema. The movie is unusual in many ways. It does not have a traditional narrative; it follows 100 characters around the UT Austin area in a way that seems completely random. There is no protagonist, no story, no thread to the individual events, yet somehow it is a completely coherent and engaging movie that sparks as many reflections as the number of scenes it has.

We are looking for chapter proposals in the form of abstracts. Topics already included are work, capitalism, Buddhism, film as a dream, narrative, episodic views of life, and absurdity. Possible topics for new chapters include:

In the introduction to the Fourth Edition of The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Valerie Smith emphasize the imitativeness of literature—Black literature, specifically. To them, literature begets newer literature. At the same time, readers have traced formal patterns of repetition and imitation in Black literature across centuries, dating back to the antebellum.

This panel invites papers that offer provocative insights into the Korean concept of han (한/恨) across a wide range of cultural forms and genres. Echoing this year's conference theme, this panel asks: how might we recapture the magic of, and reinstill a sense of wonder and joy in, Asian Americanist work on han? Over the past decade, if not longer, han has arguably become one of the most revisited concepts among Korean American writers, artists, and thinkers. If these overlapping prisms of political, cultural, and academic representation have taught us anything, it is that han, at its best, is conceptually elusive.

We may imagine the act of hospitality benign: to open a door, to welcome another across a threshold, or to make an offer to a guest. Rooted in such acts, however, is an ethics of how we engage with another, whether friend or stranger. Acts of hospitality contain their own contradictions, as to serve as host is to hold power, to set terms, to guard thresholds and entry points. For this year’s SAMLA conference, we invite papers, panels, and creative works that consider the many meanings and complications of hospitality—as practice, metaphor, ethics, affect, and structure.

This MLA just-in-time panel explores the evolving status of non-binariness in trans studies and beyond. Following Marquis Bey’s Nonbinary Life, we ask: Is non-binariness an emancipatory narrative? What are its critical potentialities and limitations? Send 150-200 word abstracts + bio to m.stekl@colostate.edu by 8/21. (The MLA will take place in Los Angeles from 7 to 10 January 2027.)

CALL FOR PAPERS — NeMLA 2027 Seminar

Salve Regina University, Newport, RI | March 6–9, 2027

Can Literary Criticism Break Free of the Silos Trap — and Carry Literature Along?

In the early 1950s, Lacan admonished psychoanalysts for operating within Newtonian epistemology fifty years after Einstein and Heisenberg had dismantled it. It may be worth asking ourselves whether we, literary critics, 125 years later, have adjusted our analytical machine — or, at least, whether it is necessary that we do.

The American Humor Studies Association (AHSA) invites submissions for a proposed panel for the American Literature Association (ALA) 2027 symposium “Music and the American Literary Imagination,” to be held January 28-30, 2027, in Nashville, TN.

38th Annual Conference of the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Society

May 7-8, 2027

Gainesville, Florida

The Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Society, an organization of 200+ members worldwide, invites paper proposals on topics related to Rawlings’ life and works. Papers should be 20-30 minutes.

Topics related to rawlings may include:

This roundtable will examine Asian American representation in 21st-century television and film, to engage in conversation on if or how films or TV shows that feature or foreground Asian American characters have realized the aspiration of a more authentic, nuanced, and diverse representation.