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Beside You in the C19:
Elizabeth Freeman’s Legacies
The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists Biennial Conference
March 12-14, 2026, Cincinnati, OH
ACLA 2026: Marxism & Lyric
This seminar examines the lyric as a central and contested form in Marxist literary theory. Often viewed as the genre most resistant to historical materialist analysis—associated with interiority, formal autonomy, and expressive immediacy—lyric has nonetheless emerged, across multiple Marxist traditions, as a nexus for theorizing the contradictions of subjectivity, value, and mediation under capital.
The last decade of the Twentieth century witnessed a drastic shift from a ‘Bipolar’ to a ‘Unipolar’ world including the definition of the power politics and the diplomatic, economic and military status quo of the cold war era. Now the geographies of the globe had to shape the historical predictability, literary upsurges, socio-economic developments and psycho-cultural practices within the communities including the entire ecosystem of the various ecosophical narratives of climate change. In this context, ‘Geopolitics’ proved to the most apt term that invokes many things simultaneously. Political tussle and dominance is the most obvious meaning of the term that implicitly implies its global extent.
Global South is a phrase often heard in the academic parlance to categorise a group of nations which have been broadly classified in economic terms by the United Nations Trade and Development (UNCTAD) based on certain defining characteristics (socio-economic and political factors). The countries or continents which come under this category are Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia (excluding Australia and New Zealand). However, to classify economic grounds poses severe questions about factors contributing to the dissemination of this inequality. This unevenness as one suspects can be a major reason for armed conflicts often leading to tensions and permanent war zones.
A trace evokes the marks, remnants, and residues of the past. Rather than static records, trace embodies the temporal and spatial dimensions of the actions that produced them, representing intersections of movement, perception, and interaction. A trace can be the smallest and subtlest thing–a memory knot, a mark left by animals, travelers, or strangers, or can be the space between the lines of historical texts. A trajectory, on the other hand, is the path of movement that implies direction, growth, narrative, discourse, coming into an account, taking shapes, and becoming present. What is the dynamic tension between trace and trajectory? How do trace and trajectory translate and communicate with each other?
The Charles Olson Society will sponsor panels at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture, to take place in Louisville, Kentucky, February 16-21. 2026 marks the Centenary of poet Robert Creeley’s birth, and the Charles Olson Society will welcome abstracts pertaining to any aspect of Creeley’s life and work. Creeley was a central poet in the development of Black Mountain Poetry, and along with his life-long friend and companion in verse, Charles Olson, Creeley greatly influenced the development of American poetics after World War II. As he said, “I write to realize the world as one has come to live in it, thus to give testament. I write to move in words, a human delight. I write when no other act is possible.”
Literary criticism is often treated as a secondary act, the intellectual afterimage of the work it addresses. This seminar proceeds from the opposite premise: criticism can be understood as a compositional art, a practice that gathers elements from different media, genres, and historical moments in order to propose a world in which the work might live. The critic does not merely interpret but constructs, weaving together forms, narratives and temporalities to re-situate a work within a newly configured cultural space, animated by the critical desire to imagine and construct more just and inhabitable worlds.
The forthcoming non-thematic issue proposes to engage in an interdisciplinary manner with the varied
ways in which women continue to face discrimination and marginalisation in the socio- economic, cultural
and political arena. Around the world, millions of women, irrespective of their age groups, social classes,
locations or cultures face a series of risk factors ranging from physical and psychological violence, sexual
abuse and coercion to human trafficking. Women’s vulnerability is little addressed in the developmental
policies of governments and the capitalist expansion of market economies. We invite papers that critically
At a time when any strides that may have been made towards reproductive rights have been thrown into serious question, motherhood—its lived reality, its spectre, and its implications for theory—remains a fraught and undertheorized field. As Adrienne Rich put it in 1976, “we know more about the air we breathe, the seas we travel, than we do about the nature and meaning of motherhood”—and this statement continues to be true nearly fifty years later despite the proliferation of media, both fictional and nonfictional, that takes motherhood as its object. The very definition of “motherhood” continues to be contested even as its boundaries expand and encompass an increasing number of subject positions and relational modes.
To bend a phrase by Fredric Jameson, narrative is a historically symbolic act. Literary
scholars and historians have long argued that not only are texts implicated in the time, place,
political events, and economic forces in which they get produced, but they also produce their
own ideas of and uses for history. Indeed, for Marxist, psychoanalytical, and deconstructive
critics (among other schools of thought), a text’s historical contingency needs to be rigorously
elaborated to determine how it works across varied sites (from social to political) and
contexts (from academic to public); moreover, to differing degrees, they all agree that it is
Book Chapters on Severance for Edited Collection on Neoliberalism and Affect in Twenty-First Century Culture contact email: neoliberalismandaffect@gmail.com
“We’re people, not parts of people. Even with what little they gave us these are our lives. no one gets to just turn you off” - (Severance, S1.8)
RSA 2026
San Francisco - February 19–21, 2026
Reimagining Disability through “Disability Intimacy”
“Hush! Practicing Silence in Literature and Culture”
University of Freiburg, Germany | April 15-17, 2026
Deadline for Submission: September 15, 2025
Relatable! Exploring Difference & Relationality in Creative Writing Studies (CFP)
Proposal Deadline: September 5th, 2025
Conference Dates: November 7th & 8th, 2025
The Creative Writing Studies Organization is now accepting proposals for our online fall conference, to be held the weekend of November 7, 2025. In holding our conference virtually in alternating years, we hope to continue building Creative Writing Studies scholarship across borders and time zones while maintaining the felt benefits of in-person gatherings. This year, the CWSC seeks proposals that help us expand and refine our understandings of relationality.
Telangana Journal of Higher Education (TJHE)
Call for Papers
Volume 1 Issue 2 (July-December 2025)
‘Theory Today’ working group [USC] is organizing an Online theory workshop on the theme of contemporary fascism with one of the most insightful thinkers on the topic―Alberto Toscano. The workshop will take place on October 17, 2025 via Zoom, and will have the following schedule:
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October 17, 2025
Session 1 | Toscano: Contours of Contemporary Fascism [10 am to 1 pm PST]
- Workshop session focused on reading and discussing primary texts, including Marx, Badiou, Negri, et al.
Theory Today [USC] is organizing a two-day theory workshop with one of the preeminent and prolific theorists of our time, Prof. Todd McGowan. The workshop will take place on March 12-13, 2026, at the University of Southern California (Los Angeles), and will have the following schedule:
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Day 1 : March 12, 2026
Session 1 | McGowan: Foundations of Thinking [10 am to 1 pm]
- Workshop session focused on reading and discussing primary texts, including Hegel, Kant, Marx, and Lacan.
Dear friends, colleagues, and students,
We are excited to announce the Call for Papers for the third issue of the NEW BENJAMIN STUDIES yearbook, centred around the theme “Walter Benjamin in Times of Crisis”.
The editorial collective of NBS is pleased to welcome Anna Migliorini (Florence) and Ana María Miranda Mora (Utrecht) as guest editors for the issue.
This CFP is now live on the Journal of Postcolonial Writing website.
Blue Humanities and the Indian Ocean: South Asian Literary and Cultural Representations
Edited by Jih-Fei Cheng, Cati Connell, and Gowri Vijayakumar
“There is a project that I’ve had in the back of my mind for several years. Not a solo project, but one that D and I envisioned as collective and that we thought to call “The Dictionary of Untranslatable Blackness.” Our imagined Dictionary was inspired by a read one: the dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, by Barbara Cassin [….]
EXTENDED DEADLINE: September 15, 2025
November 6-7, 2025
Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, as part of the FORTHEM Alliance, invites scholars, researchers, and practitioners to submit proposals for the upcoming Cultural Heritage Lab International Conference, dedicated to exploring cultural heritage within, across, and beyond the European Union’s borders. This year’s theme investigates the dynamics of intercultural, interethnic, and social interactions—especially in regions where boundaries (geographical, political, linguistic, or symbolic) are fluid and contested.
It is our conviction that existing models of criticism privilege and sustain prevailing hegemonies—and thus that critical form is in urgent need of intervention and innovation.
— Jenny Cookson and Emma Gomis
The conference is co-organized by Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski", Samarkand State University "Sharof Rashidov" and Bukhara State University.
The main goal of the international forum is to give a new impetus to the development of science and education through a new reading of the scientific heritage of ancient philosophical treatises from the perspective of modern discussions and dialogue between the East and the West.
Main thematic areas:
1. Historical context and cultural influences - Eastern and Western perceptions
2. Contemporary problems and future prospects. East-West interdisciplinary approaches.
3. Classification of sciences - synergy of scientific knowledge
Ekphrasis and the Music of Literature: Music, Literature, and the Visual Arts
This session invites proposals that explore the intersection of visual, aural, and verbal frontiers. Although ekphrasis and musical form mirror words, they directly affect the emotions at a primordial level not available to verbal articulation. Ekphrasis translates words into visual images, whereas musical form translates them into sounds and rhythms. What are the differences between these modes of expression and how they affect their audiences?
This session is part of NeMLA’s 57th Annual Convention, March 5-8, 2026, Pittsburgh, PA.
Hobhouse's career was ultimately marked by his election as a Fellow of the British Academy a hundred years ago, in 1925.Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse (1864-1929) was an extremely dynamic scholar and journalist, who wrote prolifically on a wide variety of subjects that were invariably closely related to the political and social reality of his time. Politics and sociology were, in fact, the two great fields that inspired most of the author's writings. Besides being a vigorous political thinker, Hobhouse was also one of the founding fathers of sociology in England and held the first Professorship of this discipline in the country. In fact, within the ideological sphere, L. T.
RADIATION
Material Connection Across Distance
A Trans-Disciplinary Conference
Dundee, Scotland, 3 – 4 December 2025
Photography / Intensity / Measure
Call for Book Chapters
Questions of measurement, and how it shapes or is problematized by photography, have become increasingly important in recent years. This has been provoked by the development and consolidation of digital networked imaging technologies, the massive expansion of social media, advances in machine learning, the sheer scale of image datasets, and the development of AI imaging platforms. Novel forms such as Point Cloud, Giga-pixel and Light-Field imaging, to mention just a few, have challenged accepted ideas of measure and how they structure the visual.
Eighty years after the end of WWII, questions remain about the adequacy, let alone possibility, of language to convey the "limit-experience." Yoko Ota, writing City of Corpses [shikabane no machi] just days after surviving the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, acknowledges that the writer’s challenge is nearly impossible in the face of such an unprecedented weapon. Nevertheless, she still responds to the intense urgency to write.