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FAQ changelog |
Step right up! Circus and sideshow have long occupied a distinctive place within popular culture, functioning as community sites for entertainment, business, logistics, spectacle, performance, and insider culture. Circus and sideshow continually shape how we view the extraordinary.
The organizers of the PCA’s special topic on UFOs, Cryptids, Conspiracies, and the Paranormal welcome proposals for papers and presentations from an interdisciplinary range of fields, including sociology, literature, media studies, anthropology, folklore, religion, history, political science, medieval studies, rhetoric, education, and bibliography. Papers in this area will not seek to prove or disprove the reality of any of the stigmatized subjects under discussion; instead, they will explore the cultural forces at work in their origin and development, their form and content, and the audiences that receive them.
Special call for specific chapters on the subject of Vampires and Fashion, for a volume under contract at Peter Lang.
For the last 100 years vampires have graced screens large and small, dressed in clothing that has become part and parcel of their appeal. From drab gray and black German frock coats to full formal tuxes, from diaphanous gowns to sleek, form-hugging dresses, from haute couture to jeans and leather jackets, and from wing-collared capes to Middle Eastern chadors, vampire fashion is varied and exciting, yet has, to date, received little academic attention.
Call for Papers | Chronologies
The Velvet Light Trap, Volume 100 (to be published fall 2027)
Submission deadline: September 20, 2026
What strategies can paper ephemera teach us in the digital age? This panel invites conversations by writing instructors, educators, poets, and artists exploring the work that happens at/within the margins of writing. Both literally and figuratively, we take an expansive scope to the term “margins,” imagining not only the writing that appears on the space of the printed page, but writing that would normally be scrapped, discarded, remixed, or ephemeralized. This can include digital ephemera, such as “disappearing” messages in Instagram or other communication services. At another angle: margins can also mean the liminality of writing, the furthermost edges of what’s often standard and visible.
Consuming US Popular Culture: Media Aesthetics, Ethics and Literacy
Virtual Conference | 27–28 November 2026
Call for Proposals: Sessions, Panels, Papers
Come join a vivid and diverse community of scholars and professionals to discuss the history and depiction of the sea through a popular culture perspective!
We are considering proposals for individual papers, panels, creative sessions, and roundtables. Sessions are scheduled in 1½ hour slots, typically with four papers or speakers per session. Scholars, undergraduate and graduate students, and working professionals are all encouraged to submit. Proposals may include (but are not restricted to):
Concept Note
Bengal as a cultural, social, and analytical territorial space carries a series of nuances that bear, directly and indirectly, on the processes of identity formation. While these processes may be read as organic phenomena in pre-colonial and undivided Bengal, they became a prominent aspect of colonial and national identity politics in post-Partition Bengal. This volume explores the spectrum of such processes as they unfold across the transition from the pre-colonial to the post-colonial cultural and political history of Bengal, from the eighteenth century to the present.
CFP for an in person session of papers at the International Cogress on Medieval Studies (ICMS) at Kalamazoo, MI, May 13-15, 2027
Session #8642: Intangible, Intelligible, Intractable: Unruly (Re)readings of the Medieval
ICAF is excited to announce its first conference outside of North America and invites proposals for scholarly presentations for its twenty-second meeting, to be held online and in person at Edinburgh Napier University in Edinburgh, Scotland.
In the introduction to the Fourth Edition of The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Valerie Smith emphasize the imitativeness of literature—Black literature, specifically. To them, literature begets newer literature. At the same time, readers have traced formal patterns of repetition and imitation in Black literature across centuries, dating back to the antebellum.
Submit abstracts at: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22314
Modality: Hybrid: The session will be held in-person but a few remote presentations may be included.
Food is simultaneously a cultural text and a political artifact — a site where identity, memory, power, and resistance converge. This panel invites world language educators and scholars to examine how food, as subject, medium, and metaphor, can transform the language classroom into a space of critical inquiry, developing not only linguistic proficiency but also intercultural communicative competence and critical citizenship.
Visual culture constitutes an interdisciplinary area flexible enough to facilitate discussion across the arts, media, and communication. Visual culture, broadly defined, exists at the intersection of the visual and the cultural. Distinct from film, television, animation, video game, media, literature and the arts, we study the cultures in which such media circulate. Yet common interests connect visual studies with material culture, digital culture, and media studies, among others, suggesting fertile opportunities for collaboration and crossover.
PCA/ACA Fat Studies 2027 Call for Papers/Presentations/Panels
Deadline: 10.31.26
PCA Fat Studies Area Call for Papers
Attention all Fat Studies academics, activists, and artists: Please join other Fat Studies scholars for the 2027 PCA/ACA National Conference in Boston, Massachusetts from March 24-27, 2027. Presenters must become members of the Popular Culture Association. Find more information on the conference and organization at https://sites.google.com/view/2026pcaconference/home.
PCA/ACA Fat Studies 2027 Call for Papers/Presentations/Panels
Deadline: 10.31.26
PCA Fat Studies Area Call for Papers
Attention all Fat Studies academics, activists, and artists: Please join other Fat Studies scholars for the 2027 PCA/ACA National Conference in Boston, Massachusetts from March 24-27, 2027. Presenters must become members of the Popular Culture Association. Find more information on the conference and organization at https://sites.google.com/view/2026pcaconference/home.
Black Performing Arts: Sound, Movement, Image, Text
Submission Deadline: October 31, 2026
The Black Performing Arts Area provides a scholarly forum to share research pertaining to Black performance across expressive forms. Broadly defined, the area focuses on all forms of performing and visual arts, including all musical genres, theatrical performance and performance art, performance elements in visual art, and connections between different Black expressive forms. In all these contexts we are interested in investigating where aesthetic technique and embodiment merge across Black diasporic expressivity.
CALL FOR PAPERS: The Post-apocalypse in Cinema and Television (edited book)
Edited by Christina Lee (Curtin University)
I am soliciting contributions for a scholarly, edited book that will explore representations of the post-apocalypse on-screen, specifically in cinema and television. While the “apocalypse” denotes a cataclysmic finale, what is left in its wake is an equally provocative thought experiment. To borrow from the seminal work of James Berger: what comes “after the end”?
This panel invites papers that offer provocative insights into the Korean concept of han (한/恨) across a wide range of cultural forms and genres. Echoing this year's conference theme, this panel asks: how might we recapture the magic of, and reinstill a sense of wonder and joy in, Asian Americanist work on han? Over the past decade, if not longer, han has arguably become one of the most revisited concepts among Korean American writers, artists, and thinkers. If these overlapping prisms of political, cultural, and academic representation have taught us anything, it is that han, at its best, is conceptually elusive.
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
The Vampire Studies Area of the Popular Culture Association welcomes papers, presentations, panels, and roundtable discussions exploring all aspects of the vampire throughout global culture.
Our theme for PCA 2027 is L.O.V.E.
L = Lust
O = Obsession
V = Vitality / Virility
E = Eternity / Exsanguination
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
Call For Papers
Issue VII: Reclaiming the City: Built Environment and Social Change
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.
Call for Abstracts!
’00s Alternative and Philosophy: Every Thought in its Right Place
Edited by Joshua Heter and Richard Greene
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:
Neurodivergent Studies – Popular Culture Association 2027
“Neurodivergent just means a brain that diverges.” – Kassiane Asasumasu, Radical Neurodivergence Speaking
Call for Papers: Dime Novels and Juvenile Series Books, PCA 2027
The PCA Dime Novels and Juvenile Series Books Area is accepting proposals for presentations at the next PCA/ACA annual conference, to be held in Boston, MA from March 24-27, 2027. See the PCA website for more information on the conference and submission guidelines.
Call For Papers
The Popular Culture Association (PCA) annual conference will be held March 24-27, 2027 at the Boston Marriott Copley Place in Boston, Massachusetts. Scholars from a wide variety of disciplines will meet to share their Popular Culture research and interests. The Libraries, Archives & Museums area invites proposals dealing with any aspect of Popular Culture as it pertains to libraries, archives, museums, or related areas.
Call for Papers
Title of the book: Necrocapitalism and Neoliberal Politics: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Responses in India Publisher: The contract has been signed with Springer Nature
Deadline for submission of full paper: 10 October, 2026
Volume editors:
Abhijit Maity
Assistant Professor, Lady Shri Ram College for Women
University of Delhi, India
Dr. Joydev Maity,
Faculty,
Department of English, Ravenshaw University, India
Maps, Mechanics and Mobilities: Landscape & the Geographic Imagination in Video Games27th & 28th May 2027 (In-Person, Newcastle University, UK) Since their inception, video games have been defined by, and grounded in, space and place: from the maze in The Temple of Rom (1982) to the Hyrulian depths in Tears of the Kingdom (2023), from the Holy Land of the Crusades in Assassin’s Creed (2007) to the noirish city of Detroit: Become Human (2018), and from the farms of Stardew Valley (2016) to the depths of Hell in Hades (2020), video games have been concerned with the relationship between the player-character, place, mobility, an