travel writing

The figure of the woman traveler has long occupied a distinctive place in the cultural imagination. At once celebrated and contested, she has been represented as explorer, observer, adventurer, ethnographer, journalist, tourist, and pilgrim—but nearly always an antidote to feminine domesticity.

We are currently seeking contributors from across the disciplines for a proposed collection of essays on “the woman traveler.” This volume will explore the enduring and evolving cultural figure across genres and media—from travel writing and photography to film, blogs, Instagram, and TikTok.

The idea of hospitality as a simple, symmetrical exchange of welcome becomes fraught in the context of travel to the various places associated with the African Diaspora. For example, in Lose Your Mother, Sadiya Hartman considers the symbolic loss of a homeland and the sense of relation between her and the people of Ghana. Like many other African Americans, she questions whether a connection to Africa is real or just a necessary fiction. Her narrative marks the loss of identifiable origins or homeland as the primal loss for African Americans. The loss of this connection creates issues of subjectivity for the African diasporic community in general and for individuals who intimately feel this loss.

For Reference:

https://europe.umgc.edu/content/dam/umgc-europe/documents/upload/cultura...

Cultural Constellations:  A Journal of Literature and Art

Women and/of the Empire(s): On the 150th Anniversary of Queen Victoria’s Proclamation as Empress of India (1876-2026)

29-30 October 2026

An international conference hosted by the Faculty of Arts and Humanities (Faculdade de Letras), University of Porto, Portugal

Confirmed keynote speakers:
Ana Cristina Mendes (Professor of English Studies, University of Lisbon, President of the Association for Cultural Studies)
Martin Hewitt (President of the British Association for Victorian Studies, Visiting Professor of English, University of Leeds, Editor of the Curran Index)

The 1st Annual Virtual Conference of The Joseph Conrad Society of America

CONRAD NOW!  Joseph Conrad’s Global Crosscurrents

6 - 8  N O V E M B E R  /  2 0 2 6

The Joseph Conrad Society of America (JCSA) invites proposals for our inaugural Annual Virtual Conference, to be hosted on an integrated web-based Zoom platform from 06 to 08 November 2026. The title, CONRAD NOW! speaks to the present state of Conrad scholarship, but also to the ways in which earlier critical debates on that author have shaped his place not only in literary reflection but, as suggested by our subtitle, with respect to the world’s changing cultural landscapes.

Brief Synopsis: 

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed profound political, social, and cultural transformations across Asia. This edited volume, Emergence of New World Imagination in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Asia: Understanding Asian Colonial Countries through Travelogues, Memoirs, Testimonies and Archival Documents, seeks to examine how autobiographical narratives, letters, memoirs, travelogues, oral narratives, and archival documents written in various Indian languages engage with the colonial and postcolonial histories of East Asia, Southeast Asia, West Asia, and South Asia.

We invite chapter proposals for an edited collection of essays based upon our split-panel session, Adventures in Ecocriticism, at SAMLA 97. We plan to propose this collection for the Bloomsbury Ecocritical Theory and Practice Series, at the encouragement of the series editor, Douglas Vakoch.

Call for Contributions

IV. International Symposium on Clothing Culture in Social Sciences btw. 21.–23.10.2026 at the Marmara University, Istanbul

Planned as a continuation of the SOBİTÜRK Symposium, the SOBİTÜRK 2026 themed around Clothing Culture aims to examine the phenomenon of clothing from a multidisciplinary social sciences perspective. Among the primary objectives of the symposium are to investigate the transformations of clothing culture throughout cultural geography from past to present and to discuss the interaction between traditional clothing patterns and modern/global fashion understandings.

Conference online: 20-21 August 2026

ABOUT THE CONFERENCE: 

Abstracts are invited for a traditional panel session to be held at the annual meeting of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association, scheduled for 5-7 November 2026 at the Wyndham Atlanta Buckhead Hotel and Conference Center, Atlanta, GA, USA. 

This session intends to explore the theme of “hospitality” in the works of Joseph Conrad in order to highlight how Conrad’s relationships both reflected and influenced his literary output throughout his career. Some relationships were more enduring than others, but all had an impact, often a profound impact, on his life and writing.

University of Surrey

27-28 September 2026

Editors: María Eugenia Crusetand Aleksander Bednarski

Proposals (500 words): May 15, 2026

Completed chapters (7,000 words): September 15, 2026

Languages: English and/or Spanish

International Conference, 16-18 August, 2027, Vaxjö, Sweden

Nostalgia has become one of the defining cultural affects of the twenty-first century. It permeates politics, popular culture, social media, environmental discourse, memory practices, heritage industries, and everyday life. While nostalgia is often discussed as a feeling directed towards a lost past, it is always encountered through acts of mediation. Memories, desires, identities, and imagined pasts are shaped, transformed, communicated, circulated, and shared through media technologies, aesthetic forms, communicative practices, and intermedial relations.

CFP: ARIEL Special Issue, “Displacing Diasporas: How Diasporas Make and Unmake Empires and Nations”

Guest Editors:

Amrita Mishra, Berea College; Chienyn Chi, Bethany College; Nicholas Bloom, Harvard University