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Call for Papers for the Samuel Beckett Working Group at the IFTR World Congress in Melbourne, Australia, 6–10 July 2026
‘Nothing to be done’: What Samuel Beckett’s Theatre Does and What We Do with It
Conference Details
We are seeking papers for the "Kafka's Fiction" panel at the 57th annual Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA), which will be held between March 5-8 in Pittsburgh, PA. You can find more information about the event on NeMLA's website: https://www.nemla.org/convention.html
Modality
Hybrid: The session will be held in-person but a few remote presentations may be included.
Panel Abstract
Melancholic Cosmopolitanism: On Alternative Temporalities as Decolonization
The 2026 Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association will be held in person at the Palais des congrès de Montréal, February 26 - March 1, 2026.
In moments of rupture—whether personal, political, or planetary—narratives frequently stage ethical crises that challenge and destabilize established frameworks of responsibility, relationality, and judgment. How do literature and film illuminate the fragile, often invisible networks of moral obligation that bind us to one another, particularly when these ties are strained by trauma, contingency, or crisis?
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?
The reception of ancient Greece in Europe through the dialogue between texts et images inside and outside the book (14th-16th century)
International conference - ERC AGRELITA
June 18-19, 2026 at the University of Caen Normandie
Call for papers
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
Paper Pushers and Ink Suckers: Objectifying the Administrative Subject in Bureaucratic Fiction
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).
ACLA 2026: Marxism & Lyric
This seminar examines the lyric as a central and contested form in Marxist literary theory. Often viewed as the genre most resistant to historical materialist analysis—associated with interiority, formal autonomy, and expressive immediacy—lyric has nonetheless emerged, across multiple Marxist traditions, as a nexus for theorizing the contradictions of subjectivity, value, and mediation under capital.
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
The Charles Olson Society will sponsor panels at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture, to take place in Louisville, Kentucky, February 16-21. 2026 marks the Centenary of poet Robert Creeley’s birth, and the Charles Olson Society will welcome abstracts pertaining to any aspect of Creeley’s life and work. Creeley was a central poet in the development of Black Mountain Poetry, and along with his life-long friend and companion in verse, Charles Olson, Creeley greatly influenced the development of American poetics after World War II. As he said, “I write to realize the world as one has come to live in it, thus to give testament. I write to move in words, a human delight. I write when no other act is possible.”
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.
NeMLA 2026 will be held in Pittsburgh, PA from March 5-8
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.
Special Issue of the William Carlos Williams Review: Williams’s Latin American and Caribbean Heritage
CALL FOR PAPERS
13th International George Moore Conference
May 5-7, 2026
at
Atlantic Technological University, Mayo
&
Moore Hall
George Moore: Landscape and Memory
“A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.”
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
CFP: Proposals Requested for Modernism in British & World Literature: A (Re)consideration (updated)
Deadline for submissions:
October 1, 2025
Note on Updated Proposal:
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
Abstract
Anne Tyler has won the Pulitzer Prize (Breathing Lessons, 1988), the Kafka Prize (Morgan’s Passing, 1980), the National Book Critics Award (The Accidental Tourist, 1985), and been shortlisted for the Booker Prize (A Spool of Blue Thread) and while the subject of scholarship and dissertations, analysis of her work has been infrequent since the 1990s. This panel welcomes papers on any of her twenty-five novels that discuss Tyler's contribution as a modernist or postmodernist observer of the American family.
Mary Jacobs Memorial Essay Prize 2026
The Sylvia Townsend Warner Society is pleased to announce the Mary Jacobs Memorial Essay Prize 2026. The aim of the Prize is to encourage further study of the writings of Sylvia Townsend Warner, in honour of the distinguished work of Dr Mary Jacobs.
Lolly Willowes at 100: Sylvia Townsend Warner, Religion, and the Supernatural
IAS Common Ground, University College London, 29-30 May 2026
‘She, Laura Willowes, in England, in the year 1922, had entered into a compact with the Devil. The compact was made, and affirmed, and sealed with the round red seal of her blood’.
Hemingway in Toronto
July 20-25 2026 | Toronto, Canada
The Hemingway Society invites proposals for the 21st International Hemingway Conference, exploring Hemingway’s ties to Toronto and his broader literary legacy.
Toronto was a pivotal stop in Hemingway’s early career—a place where he honed his craft as a journalist, earned his first bylines at The Toronto Star, and briefly settled to welcome his first child in 1923. The 2026 conference offers an opportunity to revisit these formative years and discuss Hemingway’s impact from multiple perspectives.
W.B. YEATS: DUBLINER30 October to 1 November | Trinity College Dublin
SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS
Modernism upturned the critical as well as the artistic conventions, spanning the
period from the last quarter of the 19th century in France and from 1890 in Great Britain and
Germany to the start of the Second World War. The feeling that a new start ought to be made,
in politics and society as much as in art, was accentuated by the War and its immediate
aftermath. In the opening phase of the modern movement the centre was Europe. Partly as a
result of the political disorder and the discarding of Modernism by the Bolshevik regime in
the Soviet Union, it tended to move westward; and America’s social and technological
modernity also matched the art’s novelty. We are still influenced by modernism, and
South Atlantic Modern Language Association conference, November 6 - 8, 2025, Atlanta, GA.
Located at the juncture of philosophy and the arts, mimesis is one of the most ancient concepts of literary theory and may not initially appear new, let alone original. It was indeed marginalized and forgotten in the Romantic and modernist periods haunted by the myth of originality. Yet, in recent years, scholars across the humanities, social sciences, and even the neurosciences, have returned to the ancient, yet strikingly contemporary, realization that humans are an imitative species, or homo mimeticus (www.homomimeticus.eu).