international conferences

Technological futures are not given. They are made, and they can be made differently. EMERGE 2026: Contested Futures takes place at a moment when AI systems have become central to the organization of economic power, political control, and social sorting, while democratic institutions struggle to keep pace and ecological costs mount. Rather than treating technological change as inevitable or neutral, the conference invites critical reflection on how emerging technologies are developed, governed, narrated, and contested.

The Historical Fictions Research Conference 2027 will take place at Amsterdam University from 4th February to 5th February.

For the 2027 conference the HFRN will engage in scholarly discussions on the topic of ‘Power and Politics in Historical Fictions’

The 2027 conference in Amsterdam will continue to critically interrogate one of HFRN’s longstanding lines of enquiry: that historical fictions are anything but a banal engagement with the past, but explicitly and implicitly shape and propel political claims, identities and agendas.

Keynote speaker: Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (Central Michigan University)

May 20-21st 2027, University of Zadar (Zadar, Croatia)

5th Annual UC Irvine Global Asias International Conference

February 18–19, 2027
UC Irvine

Keynote Speaker:
Paul Nadal, Princeton University

Early Career Publishing Workshop:
Tina Chen, Penn State

CFP: https://sites.uci.edu/globalasias/ga27/
Proposal Form: https://bit.ly/ga27cfp/

CALL FOR PAPERS

Background

The Just Transition Knowledge Network (JETNET), an initiative of the Just Transition Research Centre at IIT Kanpur, invites national and international participants to its Annual Conference 2026.

Welcoming submissions for a free scholarly conference on scary literature to be hosted online from October 22nd-24th, 2026 by graduate student, Anais Shelley.

Research may draw inspiration from (but is not limited to) these prompts:

• Supernatural themes

• Domestic horror

• The role of setting within scary stories

• Frightening myths and folklore

• The gothic novel and short story

• Monsters and the monstrous

• Multicultural superstition and regional ghost stories

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the literatures of the Spanish State have witnessed a remarkable proliferation of Bildungsroman-inflected narratives, testimonial accounts, and coming-of-age fictions that fundamentally interrogate received models of subjectivity, identity formation, and social progress. This international congress invites critical engagement with a corpus of works — spanning authors such as Najat El Hachmi, Marta Sanz, Belén Gopegui, and Alana S. Portero — that contest hegemonic discourses of selfhood and becoming from positions of social, gendered, and cultural marginality.

The Animal Studies standing session seeks papers broadly related to the intersection of literature or media and animal studies, across genres and national literatures, with a special—but not exclusive —interest in proposals that engage with the 2026 PAMLA conference theme, "Our Ruling Classes: Culture, Power, Conflict." As such, it aims to enliven the conversation surrounding the conference theme through animal studies and literature, while making cross-disciplinary pathways with science, conservation, and public policy.

I am pleased to announce that registration is open for the 18th annual hybrid conference of the Victorian Popular Fiction Association (VPFA) on the topic of 'The Victorians and Their Publics'. You can access the VPFA conference registration page here.

Covid Legacies: Long-Term Social and Cultural Effects

International Conference // Koç University & Sabancı University, Istanbul, October 9–11, 2026

Deadline for abstracts: 30 June 2026 (via covidlegacies@gmail.com)

2026 Dress and Body Association Conference

CALL FOR PAPERS

The Dress and Body Association invites submissions for the organization’s seventh annual conference, which will be held on November 7-8, 2026. Consistent with our long-term goals for inclusivity and sustainability, all activities will be 100% online.

Join our Google Group to learn about opportunities and converse with members of the DBA year-round! Email to request membership: dress.body.assoc@gmail.com.

Opening the Archives of Dress and the Body

Motion Lines: Depicting movement in the early 20th century

18 Nov. 2026, Université Paris Nanterre

This interdisciplinary seminar/workshop will bring researchers, academicians, professionals, and students to explore the transformative role of artificial intelligence in sustainable agriculture, environmental resilience, ecological humanities, and contemporary education. The presentations on AIGS-2026 will focus on emerging themes, including:
·      AI and Smart Technologies for Sustainable Agriculture
·      Climate Resilience and Water Sustainability
·      Sustainable Agriculture in Hilly Regions
·      Emerging Pollution and Environmental Monitoring
·      Citizen Science and Big Data Analytics
·      Indigenous Knowledge and Rural Sustainability
·      AI in Education and Digital Pedagogy

Over the last years, there has been a burgeoning debate about the Eastern multicultural space, ranging from Eastern Europe, Middle East and South Asian countries to the Far East, which has been intrinsically coupled with significant cultural and economic dynamism; however, such diverse and multi-layered areas have also been the subject of all sorts of misrepresentations and misinterpretations. Future trajectory of the Eastern mind-set might provide a basis for the emergence of new civilizations in this new century and new millennium. This section attempts to explore the outcomes of the various encounters between Eastern and Western cultural conventions in relation to literature, arts, social sciences, media studies and other fields, by carefully examining