theory

Historically, disabled people have relied on community care for kinship and survival in an unaccommodating, if not hostile, world. These communities of care allowed disabled individuals and their allies to scaffold support structures outside of social services that demanded compliance and relied on charity. Disabled communities have often coalesced at the fringes of society in asylums, freak shows, and other institutions. Even so, the stereotypical understanding of disability is that of passivity, isolation, and dependence rather than action, community, and interdependence.

Amidst the collective and intimate violations of authoritarianism (and its contemporary attendants like neoliberalism, genocide, and geocide), devotees of poetry and the arts face pressures to justify the value of their study. This pressure comes not only from the regimes that depend on circulating demonizing platitudes and the profit-oriented institutions that host our studies, but also from the telescoping scales of suffering itself. To what extent can poetry actually “empower communities”? What fantasies do academics often indulge about the “power” of their work, and how might poetry help us experience ways of being and valuing that scramble binaries like power/weakness, large/small, global/local, innocence/irony?

The relation between a theory and its so-called “object” always poses the danger of reducing an art form (in this case film) to a mere instance testifying to the validity of the theory. In this way, the theory provides the “genus” of which a given film will be a mere “species”. The application of psychoanalytic ideas or Marxist concepts to film would therefore run the risk of depriving the specificity and singularity of the object in favour of the hegemony of the theory. Here, theory would truly live up to its theological vocation (the “theo” in theory refers to God) standing transcendentally above its “object” upon which it would cast its daunting shadow.

Procedural Poetry Now: Precedents, Tools, Goals

ACLA 2027 Annual Meeting
University of Houston: May 20–23, 2027
Proposal deadline: September 22, 2026

TIDEL Scholarly Symposium Faith, Ethics, and Digital Transformation

Join TIDEL for a two-day convening exploring the ethical, theological, social, and institutional implications of technological change in an era of rapid innovation and profound social transformation.

Founded in 2022, TIDEL is a Union Theological Seminary–based initiative that brings together faith leaders, scholars, technologists, nonprofit practitioners, and public leaders to explore ethical, justice-centered, and collaborative approaches to technology, innovation, and digital engagement.

Thursday, October 1, 2026 Union Theological Seminary

1:45 PM -- 5:45 PM Boxed lunch available at 12:45 PM

$100 until September 1 $150 after

Bulgaria-based (or Bulgarian-abroad) scholars of literature, reading and/or writing in English, are invited to a one-day conference in Blagoevgrad on October 10th 2026, to present projects-in-progress to an audience of interested peers from around the country. 

Hosted at the American University in Bulgaria, by the Department of Literature, Theatre, and Film, the conference will provide a hub for colleagues from across the nation to gather together, showcase and discuss each other’s work in progress, and chart the future of English-language literary study in Bulgaria. Papers will be combined into themed panels, with plenty of time in each panel dedicated for questions, discussion, and feedback.

How does a society remember, preserve, and narrate its past? This proposed two-day
international seminar, “Myth, Orality, and History: Conceptualizing the Past through the Arts
and Cultural Texts,” organised by the Department of English, Panchla Mahavidyalaya in
collaboration with the IQAC, Panchla Mahavidyalaya is a scholarly expedition at exploring
this Daedalian phenomenon. As contemporary interdisciplinary studies have begun to move
beyond conventional archival approaches, this international seminar emphasizes the myriad
of ways in which the past of a nation, culture, group, etc. can be conceptualized, stored, and
reimagined through different mediums such as myths, oral narratives, scriptures, paintings,

Jordan Peele’s Us is a critically acclaimed horror original about government-manufactured clones that are forced to mimic the lives of the people who live on the surface like stringless puppets. While Peele focuses more on a physical tethering, there is a psychological tethering that can be gleamed from this piece, specifically as it relates to the idea of double consciousness. In his work “The Striving of the Negro People,” W.E.B. Du Bois describes this idea as “this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt or pity.

The rise of the superhero is one of the most significant cultural developments of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Since the debut of Superman in Action Comics #1 (April 18, 1938), superheroes have evolved from colorful comic-book figures into powerful global symbols that shape conversations about politics, morality, identity, technology, gender, race, mythology, trauma, and resistance. What began with the imaginative vision of Jerry Siegel (writer) and Joe Shuster (artist) has expanded into a worldwide phenomenon spanning comics, film, television, literature, gaming, digital media, and academic discourse.

Changeling Country: Neurodivergence, Disability and the Irish Imaginary

An edited volume proposed for Vernon Press, Irish Studies series Editor: Tess Ezzy — Director, Neurodivergent Creative Methods Lab; PhD candidate, University of New England

The Faculty of Arts and Humanities at Netrokona University, Bangladesh is delighted to inform that it is going to publish its double-blind peer-reviewed academic journal Sphaira: Journal of Arts and Humanities, volume 2, in December, 2026. Scholarly articles in English addressing contemporary issues within the fields of literature, linguistics, language teaching, education, fine arts, performance studies, folklore studies, cultural studies, literary theory, and history and archeology are called for publication in its second volume.

Manuscript development guidelines:

Call for Papers 

dialog Special Issue No. 48

Theme: Truth in Question: Literature, Narrative, and the Politics of Knowing

dialog, a fully peer-reviewed, bi-annual international journal of the Department of English and Cultural Studies, Panjab University, Chandigarh, invites submissions for its forthcoming special issue (No. 48) on “Truth in Question: Literature, Narrative, and the Politics of Knowing.” The journal provides a forum for interdisciplinary research engaging literature, culture, and critical theory.

40th INTERNATIONAL D. H. LAWRENCE CONFERENCE

March 18-19, 2027

L'Université Paris Nanterre

D. H. Lawrence and French literature, philosophy and theory

The ambition of this conference is to explore various kinds of connections between D. H. Lawrence’s oeuvre and French theory, philosophy and literature.

Call for Proposals

Special Issue of Philosophy, Politics and Critique