cultural studies and historical approaches

Call for Articles:

Word and Text – A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics, XVI (2026)

Edited by Stefan Herbrechter and Ivan Callus

(De)Constructions of the Future

Abstract

Queer palimpsests are texts from which queerness has been erased – but only on the surface. Scholars, therefore, are invited to reinvestigate these texts and their underlying queerness. This project includes books, movies, songs, fashion, artifacts, architecture, archives… a queer excavation in order to indicate the traces, specters, echoes, or presences of the past that remain even as many past narrative elements, structures, or tropes are forgotten.

Description

We are currently seeking contributions from the humanities and social sciences for a scientific network that explores ephemerality in both its material forms and theoretical conceptualizations. This interdisciplinary network aims to bring into dialogue various questions about ephemerality, specifically examining how different fleeting forms of expression are implicated in the continual making and unmaking of proximities, both human and non-human, producing “a matter of temporary intensities and pacts amongst people” and other entities (Vélez-Serna, 14).

The 122nd annual conference of the Pacific Ancient & Modern Languages Association (PAMLA) will be held in San Francisco at the InterContinental Hotel San Francisco, from Thursday, November 20, to Sunday, November 23, 2025. 

Cultural History 

All photography takes place somewhere, but only some photography makes that place the focal point. From its conception, photographers have used the medium to document places, ranging from specific sites to regional and national landscapes, with the aim to educate, archive, preserve, and critique. Photographs of home and the local allow for reflections on belonging, community, and personal identity, whereas images taken elsewhere, perhaps in foreign lands, suggest an anthropological drive to capture (the essence of) the unfamiliar.

The Academic Association for Doctoral Students & Students of English (Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń) is pleased to announce the call for papers for the 11th issue of Currents, on the themes of adaptation and innovation within Anglophone language, culture and literature.

‘Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature’s inexorable imperative.’~ H.G. Wells Mind at the End of Its Tether

PAMLA 2025 Annual Conference

We invite paper proposals for an accpetd panel titled “Queer Temporalities, Memory, and Resistance in Asia,” to be held at the 2025 Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA) Convention in San Francisco (November 20–23, 2025), complementing the broader conference theme of “Palimpsests: Memory and Oblivion.”

This panel explores how non-normative experiences of embodiment, temporality, spatiality, and memory practices intersect with acts of resistance across diverse Asian contexts. We invite submissions that examine these themes across Asia and its diasporas. 

Call for papers Heteroglossia 21 (2025)

The Journal of Children in Popular Culture is an open-access, online, international, interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal that provides a forum for scholars and professionals to interrogate  representations of the child in popular culture. JOCPC facilitates an international dialogue among scholars and professionals through vigorous discussion of the intersections between the child, the conception of childhood, children's material culture, children and politics, the child body, and any other interactions with the child in the context of popular culture.   

The American Studies Program at the University of Bucharest

invites proposals for its annual student conference on the topic

Perspectives on the Media in American Culture and Society

to be held in person and online

 on May 17, 2025.

In-person panels will be held in Martin Luther King Hall

1st floor, 7-13 Pitar Moș St., Sector 1, Bucharest.

Sacred Arts 2025:
Exploring the Spiritual Dimensions of Artistic Expression and Ritual

University of Oxford (and online)

May 10-11, 2025

Conference webpage: https://labrc.co.uk/sacred-arts-2025/

Call for Papers: Giovanni Boccaccio’s One Hundred Tales

In honor of the 650th year of Giovanni Boccaccio’s passing, the Giovanni Boccaccio’s One Hundred Tales project is accepting papers on individual tales of The Decameron. We welcome papers and proposals from students!

About the project

In a 2022 article, one of a number of related works, and drawing on the work of Didier Deleule and François Guéry (2014)– the late art theorist Marina Vishmidt critiqued the manner in which an analysis of ‘bodies’ seemed to be overly focused on the register of vulnerability, or the post-structuralist, discursive, or psychoanalytic dimensions, thus relegating bodies excessively to the realm of the abstract, to the exclusion of the concrete. Anatomy, with regards to both its aesthetic and scientific purposes, also has abstract and concrete dimensions – as innovative recent works analyzing anatomy within its broader social and historical contexts demonstrate.

CFP: PAMLA 2025 

Seriality, Repetition, and Adaptation in 21st-Century Storytelling  

Special Session for Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association

Location: San Francisco, California at the InterContinental San Francisco Hotel

Conference: Thursday, November 20 through Sunday, November 23, 2025. 

Abstract Submission Deadline: May 15, 2025

Presiding officer: 

Mavis Tseng, 

Associate Professor, Director of the Language Center

Taipei Medical University

mavistseng@tmu.edu.tw

Abstract