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“The desire for transcendence is the longing for something that breaks this cycle of means and ends and enables us to escape the everydayness of the everyday.”
— John Lachs, “Transcendence in Philosophy and in Everyday Life” (1997)
Literature and Taxonomy
Taxonomy is a fraught word in literary studies. As a regime of classification descended from the Euro-American scientific tradition, taxonomy encourages the organization of biological life on earth based on hard distinctions or similarities between groups. This practice appears to endorse essentialist and deterministic paradigms that scholars in literary and cultural studies typically eschew—and for good reason. Taxonomic modes of thinking are allied with racial, medical, and sexual ideologies that have fueled historical and contemporary efforts to police the categories of race, gender, ability, and desire.
Call for Papers: Edited Volume on “Writing under Duress in Anglophone Arab Literature in the Diaspora: The Articulation of a Coerced Imagination”
Editors: Dr. Hamida Riahi, Prof. Mounir Triki, and Dr. Saud Enazi
Publisher: This volume is being prepared for submission to Palgrave Macmillan for consideration.
Overview
C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists seeks submissions for its eighth biennial conference, which will take place March 12-14, 2026, at the Hyatt Regency in Cincinnati, Ohio. We invite individual papers and group proposals on literature and culture in the United States, the Americas and beyond during the long nineteenth century.
Inviting papers on 21st century reconstructions of the HIV/AIDS crisis. What is created/erased in these productions? Possible topics: teaching the HIV/AIDS crisis to a post-covid generation; reading race in the HIV/AIDS archive; recent literature/film/tv productions. 250-word abstracts.
Call for Papers:
The Interdisciplinary Witch Conference: Witches in Culture, History, and Society
Friday 20th June 2025
York St. John University
Submission Deadline: 1st April 2025
MLA 2026 – Toronto
Early American Literature LLC
Declaring Dependence
Short Description:
What happens when we center dependence, interconnection, and shattered subjectivities in the literary cultures that have been used to mark or substantiate figments of agency surrounding the early United States?
Long Description:
CFP Contemporary Feminism and the Politics of Emotion
Proposed Panel Submission for NWSA 2025 Conference dates: Nov. 13th-16th, 2025
Submission Deadline: March 15th
For the first time since its inception in 1993, the Lesbian Lives Conference is crossing the Atlantic to New York City! The conference is hosted by the Journal of Lesbian Studies, Sinister Wisdom, and CLAGS: the Center for LGBT Studies at the City University of New York. Lesbian Lives brings together academics, artists, writers, and activists to showcase, enjoy, and critically analyze lesbian culture.
Rooted in an ethos of inclusivity, dialogue, diversity, and accessibility, the conference welcomes people of all sexualities and genders.
Lesbian Lives 2025 will be held on October 24 and 25 at the Graduate Center CUNY, 365 Fifth Avenue, NY, NY 10016.
Last year marked the centenary of both the Republic of Turkey and James Baldwin, yet Baldwin’s time in Istanbul (1960–71) remains an understudied period in his literary and intellectual life. This panel seeks to explore Baldwin’s "Turkish decade" beyond exile narratives, and focuses on how his engagement with Istanbul’s artistic, literary, and queer communities shaped his work and political thought. How did Baldwin’s experiences in Turkey influence his evolving critique of race, sexuality, and transnational belonging? How might we rethink Baldwin’s literary and activist legacy through the lens of his Istanbul years?
Deadline for submissions: May 5th 2025
Date of seminar: November 19th 2025
Full name/name of organizations
Contact email:masculinitieseurope@gmail.com
Planned platform: MS Teams
Oscar Wilde, French by Sympathy?
The Oscar Wilde Society invites abstracts for a special session at the 2026 MLA Convention in Toronto, Jan. 8-11 2026.
DEADLINE EXTENDED TO MARCH 15 2025
IAAS Annual Conference
Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin
24-26 April 2025
Conference Theme: “We the People”
CALL FOR PAPERS
“It is certain in Theory, that the only moral Foundation of Government is the Consent of the People. But to what an Extent Shall We carry this Principle?”—John Adams, 1776
Deadline Extended!
Abstract Deadline: Tuesday, April 15, 2025
Chapter Drafts Deadline: December 15, 2025
Essays sought for a peer-reviewed edited collection focused on Brian De Palma’s film, Phantom of the Paradise.
The maternal figure has long been central to literary imaginings of the nation-state, shaping narratives of belonging, exile, and inheritance. As both metaphor and material reality, motherhood is entwined with national reproduction, kinship structures, and the regulation of bodies, often reinforcing but sometimes resisting dominant ideologies. At the same time, motherhood is a site of labor—both reproductive and economic—raising questions about care work, migration, and the feminization of labor within and across borders. Maternal grief, loss, and displacement further complicate the imagined continuity between mother and motherland, exposing fractures in nationalist and colonial narratives.
‘Body horror,’ a subgenre devoted to corporeal transgressions, is undergoing a rebirth with films like Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (2024)—a cautionary tale challenging the beauty industry and the gendered double standards of ageing. This emerging biopolitical discourse concerned with body dysmorphia, loss of control, abjection, susceptibility to illness and mutation is not limited to film. From classics like Frankenstein to Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the Grand Guignol ghastly extends its arms to the literary sphere with emerging works like Mona Awad’s Rouge or Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation.
Conference Dates: October 22-25, 2025
Venue: Hilton Cincinnati
This panel examines how contemporary artistic practices—including monumental, visual, and performing arts—engage with memory-making processes. By focusing on the interconnection between material experiences and memory, the panel explores how artists embody and reimagine memory while challenging traditional approaches. For instance, activist artists push the boundaries of memory work by challenging conventional notions of archives and historical narratives, positioning artists as critical contributors to understanding how societies remember and forget.
MELUS Call for Papers
Modern Language Association 2026
January 8-11, 2026
Toronto, ON (Canada)
Description:
III CIMCiH - "Dissidences" - October 24-25, 2025 - Clark University (Worcester, MA)
Submission call:
https://epitaphs-magazine.weebly.com/
For the second issue of Epitaphs, we invite writers, artists and academics to submit their short form Gothic or Horror work on the following theme:
Beaten Hearts.
The theme can be understood as literally or as figuratively as needed. We encourage contributors to think about the many meanings of hearts within a Gothic/Horror context. Works can relate to:
Call for Papers: Special Issue of Porn Studies
Political Theory, Sexuality Studies, and the Politics of the Body: Honouring the Legacy of
Shannon Bell
300-word abstract and a bio by April 15, 2025
Porn Studies invites submissions for a special issue honouring the intellectual legacy of Shannon
Bell (Professor of Politics, York University)—a brazen feminist scholar whose work has
redefined feminist political theory, cyberpolitics, and sexuality studies. From her radical
Call for Papers
The Journal of Consent-Based Performance invites artists, educators, and scholars engaged with consent-based performance—in theory or in practice—to interrogate our existing practices and propose new ideas in pursuit of increasingly more equitable, ethical, anti-oppressive, and effective consent-based practices within our field. In our endeavor to promote the work of all individuals engaged in improving the intimacy specialization fields, we invite authors to submit any writings centered upon consent-based performance practices. We encourage authors to submit essays that do the work of:
Call for Proposals
Editors:
Whitney Hardin & Julia E. Kiernan
Narratives of persistence and survival: At the intersection of neurodivergence, academic identity, and systemic ableist structures
The Journal of the Wooden O (JWO) is a peer-reviewed academic publication focusing on Shakespeare studies. The editors invite papers on topics related to Shakespeare, including Shakespearean texts, Shakespeare in performance, the adaptation of Shakespeare works (film, fiction, and visual and performing arts), Elizabethan and Jacobean culture and history, and Shakespeare’s contemporaries.
This proposed panel will address intersections between carceral studies and literary studies, with a focus on modernist literature and art and their contemporary legacies.
Call for Papers
2025 EALA Annual Conference
Disease and Death
Conference Co-organizers:
English and American Literature Association (EALA, Taiwan), National Taipei University of Education and University of Taipei
Date: October 18, 2025
Venue: National Taipei University of Education
The deadline for abstract submission is extended to February 25, 2025
We hereby invite proposals of original articles related to the general theme of Cultural Intertexts, an academic journal of Literature and Cultural Studies, ISSN 2393-0624, E-ISSN 2393-1078.
The editors will consider for publication papers which tackle strategies of representation and of (inter)textual construction emerging from the dialogic relation between:
- literature and the historical and cultural context of text production;
- distribution and consumption;
- literature and other arts (music, film, visual arts, etc.) or sciences (linguistics, psycholinguistics, psychology, history, sociology and political sciences, internet and new technologies, etc.);
Abstract
This collection seeks essays on paleontologists in film, literature, and contemporary media. The Jurassic Park franchise solidified the presence of paleontology in the pop cultural imagination, but there have been other media and portrayals that have captured the public's imagination. Topics can include, but are not limited to:
-Studies of specific films
-Studies of specific novels
-Studies of fictional and/or real-life paleontologists in modern media
Chapters will be due in September 2025. Chapters should be approximately 5,000 to 7,000 words, with Chicago-style endnotes and a bibliography page.
Call for Papers Home: The Space We Claim March 14-16, 2025
University of Ottawa, English Graduate Student Association 2025 Conference
“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition” - James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room.