popular culture

CFP: Heated Rivalry: The Phenomenon

An edited collection of essays on the television series that seduced the world

Heated Rivalry appeared simultaneously across screens in Canada, the United States (via HBO Max) and other countries in late November and quickly, if unexpectedly, became a worldwide phenomenon. Audiences were immediately hooked on the story of star hockey prospects Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) and Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie) and the sexual and romantic relationship that blossoms between them over a span of years.

How might theatre and performance come to confront the global rise of populism, while setting the stage for, and potentially provoking a reconceptualization of, emancipatory ways of being in the world? Please send 250-word abstracts and brief bios to Rüstem Ertuğ Altınay, University of Milan (ertug.altinay@unimi.it) and Sharon Lois Mazer, Auckland University of Technology (sharon.mazer@aut.ac.nz)

CALL FOR PAPERS: 15th Annual Harry Potter Academic Conference (HPAC) at Chestnut Hill College

Friday and Saturday, October 23–24, 2026 (Eastern Time)

In person at Chestnut Hill College, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

Deadline for proposals: April 10, 2026

Call for Papers

Deadline for abstracts: March 31st, 2026

Journeying Between Thresholds and Metamorphoses

International Conference

May 8th-9th, 2026

Tallinn University, Narva mnt 29, Silva Building, Room S-529 (Tallinn, Estonia)

Literature and Global Popular Music 2027 Modern Language Association Adaptation Forum Call for Papers How does literature travel through global popular music? How do novels, poems, plays, and other literary forms resonate when translated into sound, lyrics, stage performance, music videos, and media circulation across borders?This guaranteed session invites studies of musical adaptations that illuminate the cultural, social, and political resonances of literary works. How do literary forms find new life in global popular music? In what ways do these adaptations reshape questions of identity, memory, translation, and power across national and linguistic boundaries?Possible topics include (but are not limited to): 

Richard Linklater’s Slacker (1991) is a cult classic with a crucial role in the history of American cinema. The movie is unusual in many ways. It does not have a traditional narrative; it follows 100 characters around the UT Austin area in a way that seems completely random. There is no protagonist, no story, no thread to the individual events, yet somehow it is a completely coherent and engaging movie that sparks as many reflections as the number of scenes it has.

We are looking for chapter proposals in the form of abstracts. Topics already included are work, capitalism, Buddhism, film as a dream, narrative, episodic views of life, and absurdity. Possible topics for new chapters include:

Call for Abstracts!Elvis and Philosophy: Essays Concerning the King

Edited by Joshua Heter and Richard Greene

Abstracts are sought for a collection of essays on any philosophical topic related to Elvis Aaron Presley to be published with Wallace & Jacobs Press. We hope to receive a number of submissions concerning his music and movies as well as his persona, life, relationships, cultural impact, legacy, mythos, etc.

Journal of Anime and Manga Studies (JAMS) - Volume 7

Volume to be published in December of 2026

The Journal of Anime and Manga Studies (JAMS) is excited to announce the call for papers for our seventh volume, to be published December 2026.

The Journal of Anime and Manga Studies is a peer reviewed, open-access journal published by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. JAMS is dedicated to publishing scholarly works exploring anime, manga, and a broad range of related topics, such as methodologies, cosplay, fandoms, adaptations, and more. As an open-access journal, JAMS aims to reach a broad-ranging audience of scholars (both within and beyond the academy) and interested general readers.

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.

The Margaret Atwood Society invites paper proposals for an online panel on testimony and resistance in Margaret Atwood’s work. In keeping with the MLA 2027 presidential theme, this panel welcomes papers that examine how Atwood’s narratives represent coercion and constraint while also tracing the risk and agency at stake in claiming liberatory space. Possible topics include but are not limited to:

• Testimony, witnessing, and the politics of voice

• Surveillance, secrecy, confession, and the archive

• Gendered power, reproductive politics, and bodily autonomy

• Critical reception and adaptation

Educators, researchers, writers, and content creators are invited to submit proposals for presentations. Graduate student participation is welcome. Presentation types might include:

• traditional oral readings of papers (15 minutes)
• timed slide presentations
• roundtable presentations
• pre-constituted panels

ACLA 2027 Virtual Symposium: What We Are Going to Become?: Dysphoria Mundi, Weird , Excess

Contact Information

Elif Sendur, es1037@scarletmail. rutgers.edu

es1037@scarletmail.rutgers.edu

URL

https://www.acla.org/seminar/476406f6-1280-48ea-a968-33ae461c37d5

Announcement Type

Conference

Subject Fields

American Comparative Literature Association  IN-PERSON 2027 Annual Meeting (May 20-23, 2027), Houston, Texas

Organizers: Dr. Julia Chan (Lingnan University)

Fatma Betul Ciftci (Lingnan University)

One is not born a monster; the monster is produced. From Beowulf to Ruthven to Dracula to cyborgs, ‘monster’ is a cultural construction, a humanly-produced non-human. This seminar invites scholars to discuss the monster both as a literary figure and as the representation and construction of a cultural and political identity. Through this, it aims to explore the question of where, why, and how monsters are produced, and what these monsterized creatures "show" about the communities that "produce" them. 

Conference Call for Papers

The Star Wars 50 Years academic conference will be held by the University of Leicester and the Leverhulme Centre for Humanity and Space at Space Park Leicester on 21-22 May 2027 in anticipation of the 50th anniversary of the original release of the film on 25 May 1977 in the U.S. We are now inviting proposals for conference presentations.

Conference Organisers: