theory

Since September of 2025 the English Department at Carnegie Mellon University has housed a new publication called The Pittsburgh Review of Books (or PRoB), available at http://www.pghrev.com

Edited by author and Public Humanities Lecturer Ed Simon, PRoB is a home for engaged, creative, and interdisciplinary cultural criticism and analysis across the humanities. The tone of the publication is similar to other para-academic publications intended for both specialists and a general audience. Currently we are particularly interested in analysis that intersects with breaking news that can be produced by scholars quickly.

CONCEPT NOTE

How do South Asian literary traditions narrate, contest, and reimagine the relationship between human societies and their material environments beyond Western-centric ecocritical paradigms? What happens when rivers, mountains, soils, deserts, and elemental forces are read not merely as passive settings, but as vibrant, agentive forces entangled with colonial legacies, caste stratifications, and place-based epistemologies?

The Kate Chopin International Society is seeking individual proposals for two sponsored panels at the 2027 American Literature Association conference in Boston, Massachusetts, May 26–29, 2027

The first panel, a roundtable on “Teaching Kate Chopin,” seeks short (seven- to eight-minute) papers/remarks that address any aspect of or strategy for teaching Chopin’s life or work to today’s students—to students of any kind at any level using any materials or technology in any educational environment anywhere. Proposals should include a title, your name and affiliation, and a paragraph about your proposed remarks. Roundtable chaired by Heather Ostman.

Nocturnal Dissent: State Oppression, Control and Urban Resistance in Indian Literature and Cinema

(Call for Book Chapters)

Editors:

Subashish Bhattacharjee, Assistant Professor, Munshi Premchand Mahavidyalaya, University of North Bengal, India

&

Saikat Pradhan, Senior Research Fellow, University of North Bengal, India

To be published under a Book Series by a reputed international publishing house (Our first choices are Routledge and Bloomsbury)

About the book:

CfP Death in the Eyes 3 – The Iconographies of Death in Cinema: Personae, Representations, and ImaginariesUniversity of L’Aquila (Università degli Studi dell’Aquila), Italy, 24-25 June 2027 Keynote Speakers: Stacey Abbott (Northumbria University, UK) and Katarzyna Ancuta (Chulalongkorn University, Thailand) Few cinematic images have entered the collective imagination as profoundly as Death in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (Det sjunde inseglet, 1957).

Overview

Interpretation And Its Discontents

Texts, Complexity, and Cultural Discourses in Shakespeare Studies Today

18-19 May 2027

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.

The Journal for the New Narratives in the History of Philosophy (JNNHP) invites submissions for its special on Derrick Bell and the History of Africana Philosophy, to be published in Fall 2028. Derrick Bell, the founder of Critical Race Theory, produced one of the most innovative, insightful, and transformative ideas in the 20th century. His philosophical insights continue to challenge how western liberal nations contend with questions of civil rights, human rights, immigration, policing, and education.

Environmental Hope: Genres and Methods

Environmental humanists and literary scholars have many genres for theorizing environmental fear, injustice, despair, or pessimism. Environmental gothic, noir, picaresque, horror, and crime fiction are all genres theoretically defined by and committed to engaging with exploitation and terror in historically and formally specific ways. And the hermeneutic of suspicion, devoted to diagnosing and revealing obscured forces and causes, is especially attuned to those that produce systemic violence. We know how to read for necropolitics, colonialism and neocolonialism, anti-Blackness, objectification, and misogyny.

We would like to invite you to join and contribute to the 2nd Shapeshifters Symposium: Plasticity – Here, There, and Everywhere. This symposium brings together people interested in plasticity from a broad range of perspectives, from the natural and formal sciences to the social sciences, humanities, and art. During the symposium, we hope to further expand the concept of plasticity across disciplines.

Who are we? We are a group of interdisciplinary researchers working on the concept of plasticity, sponsored by the DutchCentre for Unusual Collaborations.

Date & Venue

19th – 21st November 2026, Utrecht, The Netherlands

International Workshop: Decolonising Utopia? Literary, Cultural and Theoretical Perspectives

5-6 February, Department of English Studies, University of Cyprus

Sonic mismatches in contemporary audiovisual media

Abstract 

From Christopher Strachey’s Love Letter Generator to today’s generative AI writing tools and multimodal models, AI technologies are reshaping how literary works are created, adapted, and circulated across media. Texts can now be generated, illustrated, voiced, animated, and transformed into comics, audiobooks, visual art, and video, prompting renewed questions about creativity, form, authorship, authenticity, and human agency.This seminar asks: Can AI-generated literature and art be understood as forms of artificial creativity? Does AI expand, automate, or redefine human creativity? How does human–AI collaboration challenge traditional ideas of authorship and authenticity?