modernist studies

Call for paper proposals - DEADLINE SEPTEMBER 30th

Please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words and a short (ca. 50 words) bio to the NeMLA portal at this link: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21839.

In periods of economic and cultural crisis, cui bono? Who benefits? How are accounts kept, and gains accounted for? Who is accountable and who is not? What forms does the balance sheet take? What is its narrative and who gets to construct it? How is creative accounting investigated?

Bureaucratic Modernism

Edited by Alexandra Irimia and Jonathan Foster

Both modernist literature and modern bureaucracy reshaped how societies imagined authority, individuality, and the written word. Modernist authors not only depicted bureaucracy—they absorbed and transformed its textual forms, procedural rhythms, and rationalized aesthetics. This volume takes that convergence as its starting point, asking how the rise of administrative culture in the early twentieth century influenced modernist style, and how modernist experimentation in turn reframed the experience of bureaucracy.

Call for proposals for the 35th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf 

Virginia Woolf and Sound

24-28 June, 2026

İstanbul Bilgi University

İstanbul,Turkey

“I always think of my books as music before I write them” 

Virginia Woolf to Elizabeth Trevelyan, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 6, September 4, 1940.

Melancholic Cosmopolitanism: On Alternative Temporalities as Decolonization

This conference aims to explore the literary, artistic, and cultural reception of ancient Greece through the prism of the relationships between texts and images in Europe from the 14th to the 16th century. How are the different visual and textual forms associated in this context? How was the alliance between text and image integrated into the processes of reception of ancient Greece, in the broad sense defined by Lorna Hardwick i.e., both the reception of its knowledge and texts, and the development of representations of ancient Greece? What does the collaboration between literary and visual creation bring to the various forms of reception of ancient Greece?

US Drama & Theatre Conference

Of Mutability and Malleability:

Re-imagining the Contours of US Theatre and Drama

10-13 June, 2026

University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès, France

The Other Sophie Treadwell

Back in the mid-twentieth century, the political novel used to be a respectable field of study, commanding the attention of influential critics like Irwing Howe. These days, not so much. In fact, most scholarly books with the phrase ‘political novel’ in the title published over the past three decades or so were not written by professional critics, but rather by historians and political scientists (including Christopher Harvie, John Uhr, and Stuart A. Scheingold).

In a 1918 speech at Munich University, sociologist Max Weber observed a widespread cultural loss of belief in magic and the supernatural: “the fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization, and above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world.’… the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life." Weber’s idea of disenchantment is borrowed from the Enlightenment-era playwright Fredrich Schiller's exploration of Entzauberung, the "de-divinizing" of art, literature, culture, and existence. As Richard Jenkins clarifies, Weber's disenchantment is “right at the heart of modernity,” a product of the world becoming “knowable, predictable, and manipulable by humans ...

CALL FOR CHAPTERS:  Fear as a Political Emotion: The Rise of New Violent Orders (Nova Science Publishers).

Maximiliano E Korstanje, University of Palermo, Argentina

Adrian Scribano, CONICET, University of Buenos Aires, Argentina

Literary criticism is often treated as a secondary act, the intellectual afterimage of the work it addresses. This seminar proceeds from the opposite premise: criticism can be understood as a compositional art, a practice that gathers elements from different media, genres, and historical moments in order to propose a world in which the work might live. The critic does not merely interpret but constructs, weaving together forms, narratives and temporalities to re-situate a work within a newly configured cultural space, animated by the critical desire to imagine and construct more just and inhabitable worlds. 

NeMLA 2026 will be held in Pittsburgh, PA from March 5-8

Special Issue of the William Carlos Williams Review: Williams’s Latin American and Caribbean Heritage

Material Poetics: Drafting, Duration, Form

One-day conference at Stewart House, Russell Square.

Event date: November 5, 2025.

The conference is jointly supported by Techne and the Poetics Research Centre, Royal Holloway, University of London.

Keynote speakers: Professor Cole Swensen and Professor Jeanne Heuving 

Academic Conference - Call for Submissions - Deadline Sept. 5, 2025

Entering the Zoraverse: People, Places, and Spaces
37th Annual Zora Neale Hurston Festival™ of the Arts and Humanities (ZORA!™ Festival)
Historic Eatonville, Florida
January 29-30, 2026