modernist studies

20th Century Southern Women Writers Conference
presented by the Elizabeth Madox Roberts Society
​October 15-18, 2026Springfield, Kentucky 

Three peer seminars are lined up for the 2026 meeting of the International T. S. Eliot Society in St. Louis, from 25-27 September.

They are:

Four Quartets, led by Christina Lambert

James Kelman at 80

Conference, Spring 2027, Glasgow

Special Issue: The Subject and its Estrangements

‘The wounds of the Spirit heal, and leave no scars behind.’ Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit 

Abstracts are invited for a traditional panel session to be held at the annual meeting of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association, scheduled for 5-7 November 2026 at the Wyndham Atlanta Buckhead Hotel and Conference Center, Atlanta, GA, USA. 

This session intends to explore the theme of “hospitality” in the works of Joseph Conrad in order to highlight how Conrad’s relationships both reflected and influenced his literary output throughout his career. Some relationships were more enduring than others, but all had an impact, often a profound impact, on his life and writing.

CFP:

Actors, Acting, and Activism: Performing Eugene O’Neill’s Plays

Textual Embodiments: Remediating Meaning Across the Disciplines

Rome Link Campus University, September 11-12, 2026

Modernist Nationalisms Conference

St John’s College, University of Oxford

Thursday 10th September 2026

AbstractThis session welcomes contributions on the topic of literary, philosophical, or intellectual influences between any of the members of the Inklings, especially between J.R.R. Tolkien and Owen Barfield, and the robustness of those claims. Verlyn Flieger’s assertion in Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien's World, that the languages of Middle-earth developed just as Barfield says human languages do in real life, is perhaps the model of influence, and is well known, respected, and analyzed. But Flieger's argument remains almost entirely circumstantial.

1956 was a year of theatrical milestones. Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night was published posthumously while The Diary of Anne Frank won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. And, of course, the American Society for Theatre Research was founded. O’Neill’s meditation on troubled family dynamics and addiction would go on to win the Pulitzer in 1957. The previous year, the Pulitzer went to Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, a Tennessee Williams play about alcoholism and (potentially) sublimated queer desire. In 1959, Lorraine Hansberry became the first Black woman to have a play produced on Broadway when A Raisin in the Sun premiered.

How does the novel resist? Both as an action (movement, predicate) and as a form (structure, construction) how does the novel as a genre engage in resistance? Of what, too, is the novel resistant? Studies of the novel have long emphasized the genre’s capacity to control and coerce, as in the work of D. A. Miller and Nancy Armstrong, to name a couple. This panel instead invites papers that approach the novel as a resistant structure and a form of resistance. What might it mean to read the novel not as an instrument of control, but as a site of formal, aesthetic, or material resistance?

The Poetics of Liminality: The Poet and the State

Consciousness, War, Exile, and the In-Between

Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association (RMMLA) 2026
Conference Dates: October 8–10, 2026
Location: Marriott Courtyard, Ogden, Utah

Contact: stacy.stingle@gmail.com

Invitation to Publish 

in ACTA IASSYENSIA COMPARATIONIS no. 37 (2026)

Thematic issue:CITIES IN LITERATURE  / LA VILLE DANS LA LITTÉRATURE/ ORAŞUL ÎN LITERATURĂ

The deadline for the submission of articles and book reviews (in Romanian, English, French, German, Spanish or Italian) is September 01, 2026.

The final decision of the AIC Editorial Board will be passed on before December 15, 2026.

Corrections (if required) and comments by the authors expected between December 15, 2026 and January 15, 2027.

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.