theory

Literary Inspirations

(A Peer reviewed Journal of Research in English Language and Literature)

ISSN:3108-3269 (Print)

Call for Papers - Volume 2 (2026)

Guidelines for Contributors:

We warmly invite original, unpublished and high-quality scholarly articles in any area of English Language and

Literature, book reviews and creative writings for publication in the second volume of our journal . All submissions

CFP: The Midwest Modern Language Association (MMLA)

2026 MMLA Convention—12-14 November 2026—Chicago, IL

Convention Dates: November 12-14, 2026
Convention Location: voco Chicago Downtown-Riverwalk (350 W. Wolf Point Plaza Building 1, Chicago, IL 60654)

2026 Convention Theme: “After the Archive.”

Convention Panel: Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies Permanent Section

Theme: After the Archive: Archival Recovery, BIPOC Pedagogical Labor, and Lived Resistance

Have you marked your calendar for Atla Annual 2026? As announced in November, Atla signed a three-year agreement to co-locate the annual conference with the SBL/AAR Annual Meetings. This year, Atla Annual will take place November 20 through 23, 2026, in Denver, Colorado. 

Like the previous four iterations of the conference, Atla Annual 2026 will be a hybrid event. Regardless of your plan to join us in person or online, we hope you will consider submitting a conference proposal.

The Charles Olson Society will sponsor panels at the Re-Viewing Black Mountain College Conference, to take place in Asheville, North Carolina, October 2-4. 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.”

Deadline Extension: We are happy to announce that we continue to accept submissions until April 10, 2026. You may find further information on our website: www.thescatteredpelican.ca

University of Siedlce

Institute of Linguistics and Literary Studies

and

University of the Balearic Islands

Faculty of Philosophy and Art

would like to kindly invite all scholars from across the Humanities to take part in the

11th Annual Siedlce Forum for Contemporary Issues

in Language and Literature

Call for PapersLiterature-General Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA) 2026 SWPACA Summer Salon June 25-27, 2026Virtual Conferencehttps://swpaca.org/Submissions open on March 30, 2026Proposal submission deadline: April 27, 2026 Proposals for papers are now being accepted for the SWPACA Summer Salon. SWPACA offersnearly 70 subject areas in a variety of categories encompassing the following: Film, Television,Music, & Visual Media; Historic & Contemporary Cultures; Identities & Cultures; Language &Literature; Science Fiction & Fantasy; and Pedagogy & Popular Culture.

Edited by Giannis Stamatellos and Thorsten Botz-Bornstein

Pluribus (stylized as PLUR1BUS) is an American post-apocalyptic science fiction television series created by Vince Gilligan. It premiered on in November 2025, and a second season has been ordered. 

Humanity is infected by an extraterrestrial virus and has muted into a peaceful and happy “Hive Mind.” The Hive is the shared consciousness of the infected people. However, 12 people are immune and not affected by the virus and react in various ways to the new reality.

The short story has proven to be fertile ground for writers seeking to interrogate what the act of recording lives and the search for meaning entails, often through imagined renderings of the machineries of archive. In works such as Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Library of Babel,” Danilo Kis’s “The Encyclopedia of the Dead,” and Ivan Vladislavic’s “The Loss Library,” for example, writers engage with “the forces that govern preservation and erasure” in line with this year’s MMLA convention theme. 

This panel seeks papers that consider how these and other concerns find expression through the short story form.

The year 2026 marks the centenary of Michel Foucault’s birth, a milestone that invites a profound reassessment of a thinker whose "grey, meticulous" genealogies have fundamentally altered the landscape of the humanities. For the students of literature, Foucault remains an indispensable figure, not merely as a philosopher of the prison or the clinic, but as the premier architect of the "space of language." His move to dissociate the text from the sovereign "Author", famously articulated in his 1969 essay What is an Author?, transformed the literary work from a vessel of personal genius into a site of discursive struggle.

Please consider submitting an abstract to present in my conference panel. The conference is open to graduate students (MA and PhD-track), educators, practicing artists, and museum professionals. Details below:

Call for Abstracts – SECAC Panel

Immersive Threads: Narrative, Participation, and the Making of Experiential Worlds

How do narrative and participation become interwoven within immersive environments? How do we, as participants, become threads within experiential artworks, installations, museums, performances, digital platforms, or urban spaces?

Genre has traditionally been seen as a framework or series of frameworks for organizing texts (and other artworks) so they may be analyzed with some degree of precision, yet the meaning of the term has always been unstable. Disagreements arise around specific classifications, and the term has often been redefined or simply deployed, without explanation, in different ways. The novel, for instance, has been subject to numerous and diverging definitions, from (to name only a few) Gyorgy Lukacs to Mikhail Bakhtin to Ralph Rader to Priya Joshi.  Such classifications, no matter how numerous, are familiar.

In the late oughts and 2010s, critical and cultural theory across the humanities embraced the power of positive thinking. If we paid lip service to the determinations of (neo)liberal modernity, our thinking nonetheless gathered with feverish intensity around all that was said to escape or exceed its iron cage. Those of us tutored in assembling a historical ontology of ourselves turned to dreams of possible futures – or else to cultural practices and lifeways whose onto-epistemic difference enacted futurity in the midst of a seemingly endless now. This politics of utopian adjacency crystallized in a now-familiar set of keywords: affirmation, futurity, speculation, utopia, worldmaking, and (of course!) the ever-popular injunction to imagine otherwise.

Roundtable reflecting on impacts of disabilities on work life in graduate school, pre-tenure, post-tenure, among contingent faculty, and in leadership positions. Please send CV and 300-word abstract for 8- to 10-minute contributions to: Cassandra.falke@uit.no