modernist studies

Modernist Nationalisms Conference

St John’s College, University of Oxford

Thursday 10th September 2026

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS

A Cultural History of the Avant-garde in East Asia

Part of: Cultural Histories of the Avant-Garde: A Companion Series (www.brill.com/CHAG)

The companion series is part of an ongoing, large-scale project launched by De Gruyter Brill (a merger of two international publishing houses) that uncovers the cultural history of the avant-garde in major regions of the world. The series on East Asia consists of four volumes, each dealing with specific decades and topics as follows: 

Building the Avant-Garde Abroad: East-Central European Artists in Paris

18–19 September, 2026, Institut Bibliothèque Polonaise de Paris 

Seminar for Modernist Studies Association Conference

How text appears on the page has been of periodic interest to poets for centuries. This interest grew in late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century poets as shown by the work of Stephane Mallarmé and by artistic movements such as Dada. Concrete poetry, a style of poetry mostly from Germany and Brazil in the 1950’s (Thomas) adhered to this interest. Other types of experimental poetry have worked on the liminal edges between text and image, where the appearance of the text supersedes its content, as in more recent work by Susan Howe. Generally speaking, as Greg Thomas argues, this poetry is “concerned with complicating or undermining linguistic sense” (Thomas 4) in its turn to the visual.

Vulnerability has become a key term in contemporary critical theory, ethics, trauma studies, gender studies, disability studies, postcolonial studies, and affect theory. But fiction has long engaged with vulnerability – not necessarily as weakness or exposure, but as a condition of relationality, openness, resistance, and change. From tragic protagonists to marginalized bodies and precarious subjectivities, literary texts have repeatedly returned to fragility, dependency, and risk.

Seeking papers exploring how media forms (methods of inscription, technologies of reproducing text, sound, and image, digital platforms, archives, social media, AI, and beyond) shape the production, circulation, and reception of lyric.

250-word abstract, brief bio and CV by March 20, 2026: nskillma@iu.edu 

Papers, delivered in English, on adaptations of works by Joseph Conrad, in any form and language, including film, television, games, opera, theatre, musical compositions, and graphic novels. This is the planned guaranteed session for the Joseph Conrad Society of America Allied Organization at the Modern Language Association Convention in January 2027. Email 300 word proposals and 100-word biography to Jana Giles, giles@ulm.edu. Deadline: March 22, 2026.

For further information and to see the call posted on the MLA website, see: https://mla.confex.com/mla/2027/webprogrampreliminary/index.html.

Let’s call it “time work”: Those practices that negotiate the relations between the living and the dead. Time work is not merely conducted by archivists and historians, but by grave diggers and undertakers, documentary filmmakers and memoirists, politicians, war journalists, practitioners of living traditions, speakers of dead languages, as well as by any and all who keep something – a story, a trinket, an heirloom, a song – holding onto it to remember. Time work is not easily done without feeling; It is driven by the weight of mattering, it is attention called by the fact that now – this, ‘our’ now – is in-part composed by the shadows of what and who came before.

Call for Book Proposals: Secrecy in Literature and Culture Secrecy in Literature and Culture (Edinburgh University Press) Series Editors: Simon Cooke (University of Edinburgh) and Natalie Ferris (University of Bristol) We invite proposals for critical studies exploring the pivotal role of secrecy in literature and culture, with interdisciplinary, international and transhistorical scopeThe ‘secret’ is a concept of pivotal importance across a range of disciplines – from political studies of espionage and the ethics of intelligence work to law, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and literary and cultural studies – inflected by diverse cultural and historical contexts, and in terms of gender, sexuality, race and cla

Deadline extended

Concorde: Literary, Linguistic and Sustainability Studies International Conference

Date: 22-23 April, 2026

Venue: Department of English, Netrokona University, Netrokona, Bangladesh

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:

Professor Dr Anirudra Thapa, Central Department of English, Tribhuvan University, Nepal

Professor Dr Shamsad Mortuza, Department of English, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh

Professor Dr Shaila Sultana, Institute of Modern Languages, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh

Memory, Myth, and Meaning: Cather in Dialogue with America 250

Willa Cather Spring Conference | Thursday, June 4 - Saturday, June 6, 2026 

This year marks the centennial of My Mortal Enemy, one of Cather’s least affirmative works and one not produced in the Cather Scholarly Edition (translation: much important work remains to be done!)  We invite papers on new approaches to My Mortal Enemy, including but not limited to the following considerations of style, form, provenance, and themes:

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

I am seeking short (3,500-word) chapters for The Works of Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, which will be an edited volume dedicated to Didion and Dunne’s lives in film.

The American couple were a prolific and popular screenwriting team despite being much better known for their respective novels, memoirs, and journalism. Accordingly, the volume will take into account both their produced and many unproduced screenplays—the latter of which are held in Didion and Dunne’s papers at the New York Public Library.

Call for Articles: Cultural Materialism, Fascism and the Far Right 

A Special Issue of Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism

Please note this is a call for potential SITE AND PROGRAM DIRECTORS to organize the 2028 Hemingway Society Conference. We are not accepting individual paper or panel proposals at this time.

The Hemingway Society Welcomes Preliminary Site Proposals for 2028 Conference

The executive board of the Hemingway Society (hemingwaysociety.org) welcomes preliminary proposals for our 2028 international conference. Please share this call widely with your professional networks.

Teams wishing to be considered should submit to Hemingway Society President Verna Kale (vlk123@psu.edu) a letter of interest that includes the following information: