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FAQ changelog |
As we meet in Newport, an island at the edge of the Atlantic, this panel invites papers about ocean-based horror media. Oceans, seas, and other waterways have been central to human culture throughout history, offering both opportunities to build communities across the waves and the threat of lonely, painful death through drowning or isolation through shipwrecks.
Joyce Studies Annual invites submissions for a special issue featuring the topic of “Echo-Joyce: Reading Joyce in Relation” to be guest edited by Amadeo De La Pava, Faye Liu, and Jordan Smith.
Panel Proposal for the NeMLA Convention, Newport, RI, March 6–9, 2027
Planetary crises—climate change, toxic pollution, biodiversity loss, and energy transition—are profoundly uneven in their distribution. Their material consequences are shaped by infrastructures of class, race, colonial histories, state power, and global capitalism. Increasingly, literary, artistic, and cultural texts across the world foreground these asymmetries, framing ecological crisis not only as environmental catastrophe but as a question of justice: Who breathes polluted air? Who profits from green transformation? Who consumes melting ice? Who bears the social and environmental costs of planetary change?
Italian Teaching Symposium 2026 - II edition
“Creative Pathways in Italian Language and Culture Teaching”
September 25-26, 2026
St. Jerome’s University (University of Waterloo) & online
Call for Papers Extended: Edited Volume on Adoption in Popular Media
deadline for submissions:
July 31, 2026
full name / name of organization:
Stacy Fowler / St. Mary’s University
contact email:
The erotic is a point of infinite signification, a navel in humanity’s symbolic circuit. However, despite its resistance to formalization, it is always in the process of not being written. As Octavio Paz insists, the erotic is a metaphor indelible to the human. As such, it is unsurprising that the manifestations of the erotic in subjective embodied experience are variable and correspond to equally plural treatments of it across the academic panorama. This diverse archive is bound by certain distinguishable threads, in terms of the potentiality of the erotic, its singular relation to language, and to the sphere of sexuality.
How is everyone doing?
At a routine meeting of the Editorial Board of this journal in March 2026, this innocuous question erupted into disquiet, tension, unease. Speaking from vastly different parts of the world, there was an unmistakable sense of a planet slipping beyond available comprehension and unplugging us from work and life routines. As wars in the Middle East expand and fires spread from apartment blocks reduced to rubble to bombed oil refineries and shipping corridors, profound geopolitical, personal, even psychic rifts leave us grasping for the language and feel of the moment, the falling apart of things, the zeitgeist of an endangered now.
In Africa and the African diaspora, knowledge is often produced, circulated, and critiqued in “minor forms”—small-scale oral, visual, material, and digital ephemera such as proverbs, folktales, rites, images, social media, and other non-canonical modes of expression that structure everyday cultural life but are frequently marginalized within dominant academic and cultural hierarchies. While “major forms” such as the literary canon, the national archive, and peer-reviewed scholarship obscure the complexity and vitality of African cultural production, minor forms interact with, resist, coexist alongside, and reshape those dominant modes.
Cuteness is a twenty-first-century sensation—from the global expansion of Sanrio fandom to the rise of social capital around Labubu and Jellycat, from K-Pop stars (real or animated) to cute animals like the quokka and Fennec fox. This issue explores a “cuteness turn” found in many public realms around the world. The adoration of attractive or cheerful objects associated with childishness and youthfulness is part of the human experience. However, this issue does not examine cuteness as a transcultural aesthetic or psychological condition, but we focus on its larger political implications. Throughout history and around the world, this “universal” sentiment has often been manipulated for commercial and ideological purposes.
This special issue will explore current attacks on scholarship and scholars, and the multiple ways in which law, broadly conceived, is understood and deployed in these attacks with implications for who is allowed to shape and engage in the public sphere.
Call for Papers
The 2026 Multi-ConTEXT International Graduate Conference
“Interweaving Voices and Worlds:
English Studies in Transformative Contexts”
Historically, researching and teaching the different art forms took place in a well-sealed vacuum: for example, using literary theory to decipher one of the great texts, visual and compositional analysis to examine a sublime painting, or montage splicing to perceive the nuances of film. However, it is becoming more difficult to recognize the borders that separate cinema, literature, and the visual arts. Factors including the rise of globalized societies and the emergence of new technology have forced us to reconsider medium specificity and our relationship with creative expressions and works of art.
This panel explores how Latin American and Latine writers, filmmakers, and artists engage environmental elements as dynamic forces shaping human experience, identity, and social life. Grounded in the environmental humanities, the panel examines how cultural production renders visible the entanglements between ecological conditions and forms of movement, including migration, displacement, circulation, and transformation across human and more-than-human worlds.
“I must be mad!” cries Elizabeth Costello at the close of J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals (1999). An author and animal advocate, Costello cannot reconcile how the atrocities of factory farming that keep her awake at night do not likewise haunt her peers. When picking up the character again over two decades later in The Pole and Other Stories (2023), Coetzee presents Costello in the grips of early dementia, which has brought her into even greater communion with the suffering of animals. As she discloses to her son, “I can’t put the image out of my mind, John.
In bell hooks’ Belonging: A Culture of Place (2009), she posits that “many folks feel no sense of place” (1). She continues by explaining her personal experience with this spatiality, noting that, “Like many of my contemporaries I have yearned to find my place in this world, to have a sense of homecoming, a sense of being wedded to a place” (2). To that end, a commonality shared between all humans is a searching for a place in which we belong, and this is particularly evident in literature that is produced during times of major societal events.
The Global Asias Initiative (GAI) and Institute for Korean Studies (IKS) at the Pennsylvania State University (PSU), in partnership with UC-Irvine’s Center for Critical Korean Studies (CCKS), are conducting a mentoring project designed to foster a network of scholars working on Korean and Korean diasporic topics under the conceptual rubric of Global Asias. The goal of this project is to build a community of early-career scholars who are working at the intersections of Korean studies and Global Asias approaches; and to encourage intellectual exchange, collaboration, and the development of new critical approaches to Korean studies, Korean American studies, and Korean diaspora studies.
About the Book
Indian Cultural Heritage: Perspectives is an edited volume that invites interdisciplinary scholarship on the diverse and dynamic dimensions of India's cultural heritage. The volume welcomes original contributions exploring tangible and intangible heritage, indigenous knowledge systems, languages, literature, folklore, performing arts, architecture, material culture, cultural memory, museums, heritage conservation, digital heritage, and contemporary issues of identity, sustainability, and cultural preservation. By bringing together diverse academic perspectives, the volume seeks to advance critical understanding of India's rich cultural traditions and their continuing significance in a rapidly changing world.
About the volume
Nineteenth-century British literature frequently interrogates the boundaries of community dynamics, examining not only what the individual contributes to a collective and what it means to belong, but how communal engagement fundamentally reshapes the individual.
Consistent with the NeMLA 2027 theme, "Empowering Communities," this panel explores a vital dual imperative within the nineteenth-century British novel: the structural tension between individuals whose actions serve to empower their communities, and communities that conversely function to shield and empower otherwise fragile individuals.
Changeling Country: Neurodivergence, Disability and the Irish Imaginary
An edited volume proposed for Vernon Press, Irish Studies series Editor: Tess Ezzy — Director, Neurodivergent Creative Methods Lab; PhD candidate, University of New England
The 1st Annual Virtual Conference of The Joseph Conrad Society of America
CONRAD NOW! Joseph Conrad’s Global Crosscurrents
6 - 8 N O V E M B E R / 2 0 2 6
The Joseph Conrad Society of America (JCSA) invites proposals for our inaugural Annual Virtual Conference, to be hosted on an integrated web-based Zoom platform from 06 to 08 November 2026. The title, CONRAD NOW! speaks to the present state of Conrad scholarship, but also to the ways in which earlier critical debates on that author have shaped his place not only in literary reflection but, as suggested by our subtitle, with respect to the world’s changing cultural landscapes.
William Shakespeare's plays are replete with themes that resonate with contemporary ecological anxieties. From the imagery of nature in The Tempest to the exploration of human ambition and environmental limits in Macbeth, Shakespeare's works offer a rich terrain for ecocritical analysis. This volume seeks to uncover how Shakespeare's plays can inform our understanding of sustainability and inspire new perspectives on human-nature relationships.
International Conference at Le Mans University, France
in association with The Philip Roth Society
and The National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
April 7-8, 2027
Roth Unbound: Transcultural signposts from Goodbye Columbus to Nemesis
Roots and Routes in Philip Roth’s Works
In her resolute commitment to telling stories about Black life without the white gaze, Toni Morrison articulated a model of community empowerment grounded in local knowledge, intra-communal collaboration, and the self-reflexive narration of Black worlds. While Morrison remains one of the most visible public advocates of this aesthetic and ethical orientation, practices of Black worldmaking across African and diasporic literatures have long exceeded mere response to anti-Blackness. Even under conditions structured by racial violence, coloniality, displacement, and social rupture, Black communities have continually generated modes of life, relation, memory, and imagination that assert the possibility of worlds otherwise.
[Panel, Virtual]
Oceanography & the Blue Humanities: Literary Geographies of Islands and Water Bodies
December 09-12, 2026
Concept Note:
NeMLA 2027 annual convention - Newport, RI (March 6-9 2027)
Intimately Disconnected
4-5 December 2026 (Friday and Saturday)
The University of Sydney
This roundtable discusses the convergence of literary expression and digital activism as means of empowering a community. The shift of passive representation to active agency in the 21st century can be common in the digital space where the local knowledge is stored and disseminated. We discuss how marginalized groups, namely Dalit writers and activists, have used digital humanities to evade authoritarian gatekeepers and develop transnational solidarities. This session welcomes people to talk about how online spaces can be seen as a form of regenerative space where the testimonios of Dalit can be heard, transforming the world into a supportive space of collective action and literary insurgency.
Social Lens (ISSN: 3078-3941 (Online), 3078-3933 (Print) is an international, peer-reviewed, open-access scholarly journal committed to advancing innovative, interdisciplinary, and evidence-based research across the broad spectrum of the social sciences. The journal provides a global platform for researchers, academicians, practitioners, and policymakers to disseminate original research that contributes to contemporary academic discourse and informs policy and practice.
Themes of Interest
Submissions are welcomed in, but are not limited to, the following areas: