theory

This CfP contains two individual sessions grouped under the rubric 'Rethinking Ecotheory' for the 62nd International Congress on Medieval Studies. Please see information for both sessions and separate links to apply below! Both sessions are sponsored by Medieval Ecocriticisms. Abstracts for both sessions are due by September 15th, 2026. Please contact the organizers Hunter (hap48@cornell.edu) and Basil (basil.price@oneonta.edu) with any questions.

Overview

Skenè Research Centre
Interdisciplinary Theatre and Drama Studies
Università di Verona

as part of the agreement with

Dipartimento di Filologia, Letteratura e Linguistica
Università di Pisa

Theatre and Anthropology

Theoretical Approaches to Text, Performance,

and Theatrical Practices

Verona (IT), November 19-20, 2026

Conference venue  
Dipartimento di Lingue e letterature straniere,
Polo Zanotto, Aula Co-Working
via S. Francesco 22,
Verona, Italy

Disability and Horror: A Companion

Call for Chapters

*** FINAL MONTH ***

Media, Press Freedom, and Cultural Production in an Authoritarian Age (Submission Deadline Extended, Now July 19, 2026)

CFP: Media, Press Freedom, and Cultural Production in an Authoritarian Age

 Co-sponsored by the Union for Democratic Communications, Project Censored and the Park Center for Independent Media

Oct. 23-24, 2026

Ithaca College, Ithaca, NY

This virtual seminar takes its inspiration from Saidiya Hartman’s citation of the Greek etymology of the word chorus: “to dance within an enclosure.” For Hartman, the chorus also furnishes a paradigm for thinking—to play on Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion—Black (non)being singular plural. In Wayward Lives, Hartman suggests that any of the minor figures can stand in for the others, not as a claim of homogeneity, but rather as a contention that their singularity can be read as paradigmatic of waywardness—in its queer heterogeneity—in general. The chorus of black femme and queer youth is thus at once a singular plurality and a plural singularity as they make beautifully riotous lives within the enclosure of social death.

Due to the rhetorical challenges of sharing the unmentionable, infertility is often underdiscussed in both Early Modern society and today. It has discomforted and continues to discomfort theologians, medical practitioners, politicians, scholars, and everyday people trying to build identities through societies deeply founded on the structure of the family. The very concept of family is built around parents and children–what happens when a couple is childless, what happens when the children aren’t materially seen, only known to the parents that lost them before birth? It has historically forced thinkers to grapple with their understanding of life and death, grace and agency, reality and the supernatural.

Religion, Politics, and Cognitive Warfare: Information, Interpretation, Conspiracy, and the Struggle for RealityDetails

• When: October 1-3, 2026
• Where: Online
• Submission Deadline: July 15, 2026
• Sponsored by: The Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory (JCRT) in Collaboration with the University of Denver

Keynote Address: Militarizing the Mind: Cognitive Warfare from the Cold War to the Dark WebJason Ānanda Josephson Storm

Following the lead of activist and disabled writer Alice Wong, this panel “creates a

dialogue” and is, of itself, “an intimate act bringing us together across space and time”

(Disability Intimacy xx). It therefore invites papers engaged in the long genealogy of literary,

visual, and historical representations of a frequently overlooked, or gainsayed, symbiosis: that is,

between intimacy, broadly defined, and the disabled or “defective” bodymind in the early

modern archive. This might include considering how disability sparks desire, enhances pleasure,

The erotic is a point of infinite signification, a navel in humanity’s symbolic circuit. However, despite its resistance to formalization, it is always in the process of not being written. As Octavio Paz insists, the erotic is a metaphor indelible to the human. As such, it is unsurprising that the manifestations of the erotic in subjective embodied experience are variable and correspond to equally plural treatments of it across the academic panorama. This diverse archive is bound by certain distinguishable threads, in terms of the potentiality of the erotic, its singular relation to language, and to the sphere of sexuality.

“I must be mad!” cries Elizabeth Costello at the close of J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals (1999). An author and animal advocate, Costello cannot reconcile how the atrocities of factory farming that keep her awake at night do not likewise haunt her peers. When picking up the character again over two decades later in The Pole and Other Stories (2023), Coetzee presents Costello in the grips of early dementia, which has brought her into even greater communion with the suffering of animals. As she discloses to her son, “I can’t put the image out of my mind, John.

In her resolute commitment to telling stories about Black life without the white gaze, Toni Morrison articulated a model of community empowerment grounded in local knowledge, intra-communal collaboration, and the self-reflexive narration of Black worlds. While Morrison remains one of the most visible public advocates of this aesthetic and ethical orientation, practices of Black worldmaking across African and diasporic literatures have long exceeded mere response to anti-Blackness. Even under conditions structured by racial violence, coloniality, displacement, and social rupture, Black communities have continually generated modes of life, relation, memory, and imagination that assert the possibility of worlds otherwise.

Theme:                 Pentecostal Theology: A Discipline of the Future? Perspectives, Tensions, and Horizons

Date:                     October 30–31, 2026

Location:              Virtual (Zoom)

Time:                    09:00–17:30 EST

Languages:          Spanish and English

Host Institution:

The Passage of Time and Generational Conflict: Theory, Narrative, Thought

Submission deadline: Friday, 30th October 2026. We kindly invite prospective authors to register on the journal website some days ahead of the deadline.

Peer-review (est.): March 2027.

Publication date: 30 May 2027.

Editors: Alessandro Cifariello (University of Tuscia), Emanuela De Blasio (University of Tuscia), Giovanni Palilla (University of Tuscia), Roberto Romagnino (University of Tuscia), Victoria Almonte (University of Tuscia)

The ancient Greek concept of parrhesia, or “fearless speech,” examined by Michel Foucault in a series of later lectures, has generated a steady stream of scholarship from a variety of perspectives: philosophical, political, social, even personal. Considering instances of parrhesia in literary texts can help us understand the underlying tensions between oppression and resistance, especially for those figures whose parrhesia takes the form of refusal.