cultural studies and historical approaches

The year 2027 will mark the 50th anniversary of the controversial publication of Robert Coover’s The Public Burning. Both to celebrate the event and question its legacy, an international symposium will take place on 10-11 June 2027 in Paris, at Campus Condorcet. The call for papers is available here: https://publicburning50.sciencesconf.org/

Abstracts (300 to 350 words) together with a short biographical note should be sent by October 1st 2026 to the following address: publicburning50@sciencesconf.org

Keynote speakers: Alexandra Kleeman and Mark Doten

In her foundational text Immigrant Acts, cultural theorist Lisa Lowe argues that the Asian immigrant exists as a “perpetual foreigner within the body politic,” a figure through whom the nation-state defines its own boundaries and citizenship. For Lowe, Asian American cultural production emerges precisely from this “distance from the national culture,” serving as a site that critiques the state’s false promises of universal inclusion.

The Odyssey by Homer is one of the foundational texts of Western culture and has, since antiquity, served as a narrative and symbolic model of the human journey. Odysseus’ long nostos—his return to Ithaca after the Trojan War—is not merely a sequence of mythical adventures but rather a complex process of knowledge, transformation, and the recovery of identity. Already in the ancient world, the poem was interpreted on multiple levels—epic, ethical, and symbolic—and this layering of meanings has contributed to its extraordinary reception in the modern era.

Skenè Research Centre
Interdisciplinary Theatre and Drama Studies
Università di Verona

as part of the agreement with

Dipartimento di Filologia, Letteratura e Linguistica
Università di Pisa

Theatre and Anthropology

Theoretical Approaches to Text, Performance,

and Theatrical Practices

Verona (IT), November 19-20, 2026

Conference venue  
Dipartimento di Lingue e letterature straniere,
Polo Zanotto, Aula Co-Working
via S. Francesco 22,
Verona, Italy

2027 Imagining Human Worlds Online Symposium, 27–28 January 2027

We invite proposals for 2027 Imagining Human Worlds, an annual online symposium in the Common Ground Imagining Futures Series, taking place 27–28 January 2027, online on CGScholar.

The symposium brings together scholars, researchers, educators, humanities scholars, learning specialists, technologists, practitioners, and community-engaged professionals working across questions of culture, learning, identity, meaning, communication, ethics, and human development. We welcome proposals that explore how human worlds are formed, interpreted, taught, experienced, mediated, and transformed.

2027 Imagining Sustainable Worlds Online Symposium, 12–13 May 2027

We invite proposals for 2027 Imagining Sustainable Worlds, an annual online symposium in the Common Ground Imagining Futures Series, taking place 12–13 May 2027, online on CGScholar.

The symposium brings together scholars, researchers, designers, planners, educators, policy thinkers, practitioners, health and care professionals, environmental researchers, and community-engaged professionals working across questions of sustainability, climate, infrastructure, food systems, mobility, aging, health, wellbeing, and the built environment. We welcome proposals that explore how sustainable worlds are designed, inhabited, maintained, challenged, and transformed.

We invite you to submit an abstract and bio for the panel “Yesteryear: Cultural and Literary Possibilities”. We are seeking papers that address Caro Claire Burke’s breakout debut novel Yesteryear and its implications on literature and current American culture. How does Burke address established literary conventions? How might one conceive of the evocative narrative style of this novel? How does Burke conceptualize the conscription of motherhood, suppressed queerness, and conservative Christianity? How might the work fit into literary genealogies of sanity, purity, racial prejudice, and womanhood? Proposals should include a title, abstract,  your name, and affiliation.

Call for Chapter Proposals for an Edited Book

Digital Precarity and Speculative Narratives in the South Asian Context

Labour is deeply intertwined with caste, gender and class in the socioeconomic fabric of India. However, caste and gender are the two factors that remain ignored in this discourse. In the Hindu social order, the caste system assigns vocations through arbitrary hierarchy, producing pernicious structures of marginalisation. Labour performed by Dalits is often stereotyped through casteist assumptions that naturalise certain kinds of work as “belonging” to these peripheral communities. These stereotypes that are perpetuated historically, culturally and socio-politically, are furthered through mechanisms of caste that operate in the material and affective realms. 

Following Yiyun Li's May 2026 Pulitzer Prize win, this session is a critical reception of her memoir as an emancipatory narrative: a descriptive and agential act that represents the unrepresentable experience of maternal grief/trauma. Welcome papers that are interdisciplinary/inter-textual dealing with themes of maternal loss, grief, growth, birth/death, nature/unnatural, death by suicide. Mail 150-200 word abstracts to Dr. Anhiti Patnaik at apatnaik@cascadia.edu Submission Deadline:Monday, August 17, 2026Type:Just-in-Time Session, Modern Language Association Conference 2027Venue:Los Angeles

While tragedy and horror are often treated as distinct genres, both traditions ask audiences to look steadily at what ordinarily repels them. From unburied corpses and undead monsters to violated kinship and failed agency, these spectacles produce fear, pity, disgust, and sorrow alongside fascination. This session explores what might be understood as a tragedy–horror continuum, examining the aesthetic, affective, and ritual overlaps between tragic and horrific representation across historical periods and media.

This panel proposes a revaluation of boundary-making between early modern and modern generic and affective registers in South Asia. While there is a consensus that genres of composition and cultural sensibilities did not change radically with the coming of print—“print did not so much produce new books as more old books” (Blackburn, 2002)—the precise sites of continuity/rupture differed widely based on the region and language in question.

Masculinity in Crisis: Hegemony, Marginality, and Aesthetics of Failure in the Arts

In recent decades, the paradigm of masculinity has been increasingly problematized and challenged in the fields of social sciences, cultural studies, gender and queer studies (Connell 1995). Far from being stable or universally applicable, the colossal stature of masculinity has emerged as a space traversed by tensions, counter-narratives, fractures, and processes of symbolic delegitimization.

What is the real difference between speaking with nature and speaking for it? Is eco-centric thought a universally shared ideology, or does it develop in reaction to historical, philosophical, and socio-cultural contexts? In what way do the fundamental principles of Indian ecology vary from prevailing Western structures? These essential inquiries delineate the parameters of Ramachandra Guha’s Speaking with Nature: The Origins of Indian Environmentalism (2024), which effectively contests the notion that environmentalism is a unidirectional phenomenon dictated by Western influence. This view posits that the rest of the world, particularly the Global South, lacks eco-conscious awareness because it is ‘too poor to be green’.