popular culture

While Los Angeles has regularly been called the “City of Angels,” historian Kelly Lytle Hernández has argued that a more appropriate epithet would be the “City of Inmates,” as Los Angeles has historically been a site for innovations in imprisonment, surveilling, policing, and oppressing various communities for their race, ethnicity, class status, sexuality, and other out-group identifications. Literature and cinema have long been fertile sites for examining the ramifications of police- and prison-centric ideologies within American society and culture, particularly for a city that defined itself by cinema.

Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU) Prague, Czech Republic

August 20–21, 2026

Call for Papers Deadline for proposals: April 1, 2026

Conference Directors: Petra Dominková (FAMU, Prague, Czech Republic), Thomas Ballhausen (Inter-University Organization Arts & Knowledges + Mozarteum University Salzburg, Austria)

The London Arts-Based Research Centre

Women who Create: The Feminine and the Arts
A Transdisciplinary Conference

Conference webpage: https://labrc.co.uk/2025/11/18/women-who-create-2026/

March 28-30, 2026

Where:
March 28-29: In person participation at Cambridge University and online
March 30: Fully online

Fees (for both presenters and attendees):        
195 GBP (in person)
100 GBP (Online)
Prices exclude eventbrite fees

Abstract: Deadline February 22, 2026

*EXTENDED DEADLINE FOR CHAPTER SUBMISSIONS*

Call for Papers (proposals)

CONTRIBUTION TO EDITED VOLUME (Please read the full CfP before sending a proposal)

Mediated Masculinities in European networks: Discourse and performativity in the Information Age 

NEW Deadline for abstract submissions: March 1, 2026 

Notifications of acceptance: March 10, 2026 

Deadline for first draft after notification of acceptance: April 30, 2026

Call for Papers: 

Listening to Possible Worlds 

Sound and Music in Speculative Literature and Culture 

22-23 October 2026, Leiden University, the Netherlands (in-person) 

Confirmed keynote speakers are Anna Snaith (King’s College London) and Chris Tonelli (University of Groningen) 

In an era marked by digital mediation, political polarization, and heightened ethical scrutiny, humour has become a high-stake cultural practice: jokes travel rapidly, provoke backlash, generate solidarity, and often become flashpoints for debates around offence, free speech, and accountability. In the twenty-first century, humour has emerged as one of the most powerful, contested, and ubiquitous modes of cultural expression. Circulating across literary texts, theatrical stages, digital platforms, popular media, and everyday social interactions, humour today functions not merely as entertainment but as a deeply performative, political, and ethical practice.

Wilde West Coast

The Oscar Wilde Society invites abstracts for a special session at the 2027 MLA (Modern Language Association) Convention in Los Angeles, January 7–10 2027.

The song lyric occupies little space in academia, where it is less studied, less appreciated, and perceived as less-than other kinds of writing. Despite music’s ubiquitous cultural presence, the song lyric—as creative work—suffers from what renown songwriter Jimmy Webb calls a “status problem”: songwriters do not enjoy the same standing as writers of other kinds of traditionally studied literature. The most common way that song lyrics have earned scholarly attention is by conflating the form with the poem. Goldstein’s (1969) The Poetry of Rock is one of the first books to attend to lyrics as poetry.

Call for Papers: Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds

Special Issue: ‘Video Games & Horror’

Abstract deadline: 1 April 2026
Full article draft deadline: 28 July 2026

View the full call here>>

https://www.intellectbooks.com/journal-of-gaming-virtual-worlds#call-for-papers

The Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds is excited to announce a call of content for an upcoming Special Issue focused on horror in video games. 

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 a 100-word biography to Jana Giles, giles@ulm.edu. Deadline: March 15, 2026.

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

‘A breeze in God’: The Spirituality of Music and Song

International Conference.

September 10th-11th 2026.

Parthenope University, Naples, Italy

Organised by Raffaella Antinucci (Parthenope), Adrian Grafe (Textes & Cultures research lab, Université d’Artois, France)

Evolutions in Cinematic Virtual Reality  

Symposium at The University of Hong Kong 

18. – 19. May 2026

Afrofuturism in African Literature
Edited Volume — Call for Contributions

This year’s MCLLM theme invites exploration of how literature, language, and performance illuminate intersecting dimensions of justice. How are inherited forms, genres, and rhetorical strategies reactivated in contemporary struggles for equity? In what ways do linguistic, literary, and artistic practices navigate, resist, and respond to the abuse of power while imagining alternative futures? 

MCLLM welcomes proposals from a wide range of disciplines and expression forms. The list below provides a sense of the topics the organizers are interested in seeing, but it is not an all-inclusive list. Please submit a proposal that represents your interpretation of our theme!