popular culture

In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, humans are conditioned to seek out human companionship and to despise being by themselves. Helmholtz Watson, a lecturer of Emotional Engineering, relates a story to Bernard Marx about being disciplined for sharing some of his poems with the students he was paid to indoctrinate. When asked what the poems had been about, Helmholtz tells a surprised Bernard, “They were about being alone.”

Workshop: ‘The Cultural Imaginary of the Cambridge Spies’

18 September 2026

The National Archives, Kew, London, UK

As part of the AHRC project ‘The Afterlives of the Cambridge Spies’ (2026-8), we will be holding a one-day workshop exploring the extensive cultural impacts of the Cambridge Spies. This will be an in-person event hosted by The National Archives, in Kew, London, on the day of 18th September 2026.

NeMLA's 58th Annual Convention March 6-9, 2027 | Newport, RI 

The Teaching with Media and Technology session welcomes proposals on any topic related to the use of media and technology in any modern language, composition, or literature classroom. Papers that engage with this year’s conference theme, "Our Ruling Classes: Culture, Power, Conflict," are welcome but not required.  PAMLA's annual conference is being held in Seattle, WA, 12-15 November 2026. 

 For submissions and more information, please visit https://pamla.ballastacademic.com/Home/S/20030

Congreso Estética(s) del Horror: Filosofía, Cine y Literatura.

Invitación a envío de propuestas. Congreso presencial

 (English version below)

En los últimos años, el terror ha experimentado una renovada visibilidad cultural. El éxito del cine reciente, la consolidación de una auténtica edad de oro de las series televisivas y la aparición de nuevas voces literarias, impulsadas también por el trabajo de editoriales especializadas, evidencian que el horror ocupa hoy un lugar central en el imaginario colectivo y mantiene una extraordinaria capacidad para dialogar con las preocupaciones estéticas, sociales y políticas de cada época.

The 98th annual SAMLA Conference is taking place Thursday, November, 5, through Saturday, November, 7, 2026, at the Wyndham Atlanta Buckhead Hotel & Conference Center in Atlanta, GA.  For more information, see https://southatlanticmla.org/.

Cuteness is a twenty-first-century sensation—from the global expansion of Sanrio fandom to the rise of social capital around Labubu and Jellycat, from K-Pop stars (real or animated) to cute animals like the quokka and Fennec fox. This issue explores a “cuteness turn” found in many public realms around the world. The adoration of attractive or cheerful objects associated with childishness and youthfulness is part of the human experience. However, this issue does not examine cuteness as a transcultural aesthetic or psychological condition, but we focus on its larger political implications. Throughout history and around the world, this “universal” sentiment has often been manipulated for commercial and ideological purposes.

About the Book

Indian Cultural Heritage: Perspectives is an edited volume that invites interdisciplinary scholarship on the diverse and dynamic dimensions of India's cultural heritage. The volume welcomes original contributions exploring tangible and intangible heritage, indigenous knowledge systems, languages, literature, folklore, performing arts, architecture, material culture, cultural memory, museums, heritage conservation, digital heritage, and contemporary issues of identity, sustainability, and cultural preservation. By bringing together diverse academic perspectives, the volume seeks to advance critical understanding of India's rich cultural traditions and their continuing significance in a rapidly changing world.

6/26/26 - 8/31/26: Subs are OPEN for our big 10th Issue: A Day In The Life.

… um, like The Beatles’ song?‍ ‍

YES!

We’re interested in the ways in which art like this exists in the world — with such wildly different fragments and contrasting energies not just coming together but overflowing with a vivid, mad, inventive creativity! (We do like this song.)

So, do we want poems and artworks about this song, or pieces about The Beatles? NO!

Location and Date: May 20-23, 2027 University of Houston 

In-person and Virtual: This panel will meet in-person

Public understanding of American cultures—peoples, neighborhoods, languages, foods, histories, arts, religions—has always been vulnerable to myth and misinformation, in particular from the far right. Collectively the humanities work to establish an ever-more accurate/inclusive lens on culture, but the (re)mainstreaming of far-right voices has dangerously distorted the diverse American story.

CFP: Handbook of the Cultural Legacy of 9/11. (under contract with Springer)

 Edited by:

 Marc A. Ouellette, Old Dominion University, (mouellet@odu.edu) and Peter Pericles Trifonas, University of Toronto

Between Screens: Video Games, Film, Television and Transmedia Exchange

Edited by Dr Michael Samuel and Dr Richard Cole

Adaptation is a dialogic process, a creative exchange across content production and context rather than an attempt at fidelity. Recent trends in adaptation studies reflect this complexity. Videogames exist within a vast ecosystem of transmedia storytelling and experiences, yet scholarship on adaptation and video games remains limited.

In this modern moment, there have been a myriad of proposals exploring the contours of “speculative fiction”—be that social, environmental, &c. This session seeks to deconstruct the ways in which the speculative shapes the contours of the “real” or realized. Though sensationalization can be found in works of fiction, the threads of one’s reality—intersectional as it may be—provides a rich narrative that encourages further exploration and the fears provided in what we would safely relegate to fiction. However, there remains a “seeping out” of those fears that can eerily be represented in the real world.