childrens literature

Host Institution: Sapienza University of Rome (Scientific Director: Prof. Federico Batini)

Conference Dates: December 2–3, 2026 (Rome) & December 4, 2026 (Perugia, Italy)

Official Website: www.sharedreadingaloud.com

Childhood is often imagined as a period of innocence, protection, and dependence. However, across many historical and contemporary contexts, children experience various forms of violence, including interpersonal abuse, structural inequality, displacement, war, and environmental harm. Recent scholarship in childhood studies has challenged the tendency to view children solely as vulnerable victims, emphasizing their capacity for agency, resilience, and political engagement. Understanding how cultural narratives represent these experiences is essential for examining broader questions of justice, rights, and social belonging.

CALL FOR PAPERS

International Research in Children’s Literature

Special Issue: Global Perspectives in Queer Children’s and Young Adult Literature

Guest Editor: Cheeno Marlo Sayuno, PhD

The twenty-first century has seen a world-wide immigration crisis to which Children and YA authors have responded with a wonderful explosion of literature capturing immigrant  and refugee experiences. From picture books to YA novels, authors present stories about immigrants from South America, the Caribbean,  Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. Each author explores the reasons for leaving “Home” (politics, economics, religious oppression, adoption, etc.) and youths’ experiences adjusting in their new “homes.”  These writers present readers with stories concerning the joys and sorrows that immigrants experience, challenge dehumanization, and deepen reader empathy. 

April 2-3, 2027

University of Notre Dame

Notre Dame, Indiana USA

Call for Papers

Extended deadline for chapter proposals: 10 June 2026.

Humans have long believed we are distinct from other animals in our rationality, self-consciousness, and use of language. Why, then, do writers, artists, and even scientists so often use anthropomorphism to interpret the behaviors of animals, plants, and even nonliving things such as trains, teapots, and toys? What are the repercussions of this tendency to understand the world in terms of human social and cultural identities?

This edited volume explores the interrelations between disability and addiction within Japanese literary literature. By focusing strictly on literary representations—and excluding media studies—this collection aims to examine how embodiment, social normativity, and deviance are negotiated through culturally specific frameworks.

The editors invite contributions for the following four sections

1. Disability in Japanese Literature (3 Articles)

Novitas-ROYAL is an open-access, peer-reviewed, international journal of the Children’s Research Center. It is devoted to promoting scholarly exchange among researchers who are academically interested in the education of youth, with a focus on the teaching, learning, acquisition, and use of second/foreign languages, as well as issues related to linguistics and language sciences, cultures, and literatures. The primary aim of the journal is to help accumulate knowledge about how foreign languages, cultures, and literatures can change students' lives. The journal is only electronic (no print version). It is biannually published in April and October.

At a time when some are attempting to rewrite the Humanities, it might be questioned as to how archives can not only be preserved but also utilized to fight for the future. Children’s and Young Adult Literature and Culture are deeply shaped by questions of memory, authority, and cultural transmission. Contributors are encouraged to consider the archive as an ever-evolving site of power that governs inclusion, exclusion, and interpretation. One might posit questions such as How do archival practices shape the stories available to young readers, and how might authors, educators, and scholars work against inherited silences and erasures?

Call for Proposals for
Easy and Early Readers in Children’s Literature and Culture: New Approaches to Theorizing Books for Beginning Readers (tentative title)

deadline for submissions: 

August 1, 2026 

full name / name of organization: 

Jennifer Miskec, Longwood University and Annette Wannamaker, Eastern Michigan University

contact email:

miskecjm@longwood.edu

Aims and Objectives

Aims and Scope of the Journal

Please consider submitting a short (250 word) proposal for this guaranteed panel sponsored by the Robert Graves Society.

In “Narrating the Past,” British historian Alun Munslow defines “history as a ‘literature of fact’” (23), “an aesthetic undertaking” (17), and a “storied form of knowledge” (17). Continuing the conversations related to “Times and Places,” to be held at the 17th International Robert Graves Conference in Palma, Mallorca, Spain (July 2026), this panel deliberates Graves’s and his literary associates’ historical, geographic, and historiographic legacies.