travel writing

The Leon Edel Prize is awarded annually for the best essay on Henry James by a beginning scholar.  The prize carries with it an award of $300, and the prize-winning essay will be published in HJR.

The competition is open to applicants who have not held a full-time academic appointment for more than four years. Independent scholars and graduate students are encouraged to apply.

Essays should be 20-30 pages (including notes), original, and not under submission elsewhere or previously published.  Please send electronic submssions in Microsoft Word format and a current CV to hjamesr@creighton.edu.

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

The Maritime Literature and Culture special session at PAMLA 2026 seeks papers that engage broadly with human activity at sea, particularly as they relate to the conference theme, “Our Ruling Classes: Culture, Power, Conflict.” Who rules the sea? How should we navigate and care for our oceans and waterways? What changes—social, ecological, political, cultural—have naval conflicts, commercial ventures, and other maritime activity brought about? How does a ship crew grapple with problems of leadership, mutiny, and internal conflict? This session encourages papers on maritime literatures and media that engage with these and other related questions.

Potential topics include:

- Naval conflict

- Ocean borders and maritime law

African writers such as Chris Abani, Teju Cole, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, NoViolet Bulawayo, Biyanvanga Wainaina, Dinaw Mengestu and many others are committed to reimagining the concept of “home” and “what it means to be African?” in the era of mass globalization and “new” diasporic belonging.

The Eco-esotericism panel invites submissions that examine the intersection of esoteric thought and ecological consciousness as expressed in literature, cultural texts, and critical theory. Eco-esotericism encompasses approaches that unite spiritual or mystical understandings of nature with ecological critique and environmental activism. Engaging with PAMLA’s 2026 theme, “Our Ruling Classes: Culture, Power, Conflict,” this panel asks: How do esoteric ecological imaginaries reinforce, negotiate, or resist ruling ideologies? How have spiritualized visions of nature shaped elite cultural production, countercultural movements, or alternative political communities?

Call for Papers

Deadline for abstracts: March 31st, 2026

Journeying Between Thresholds and Metamorphoses

International Conference

May 8th-9th, 2026

Tallinn University, Narva mnt 29, Silva Building, Room S-529 (Tallinn, Estonia)

Existing scholarship in Asian (North) American Literature has long examined travel narratives about Asian travelers within immigrant or diasporic paradigms: Sau-ling Wong famously establishes the Necessity/Extravagance framework in understanding transpacific mobility by early Asian American immigrants (1993), whereas Chih-ming Wang reads the autobiographical travelogues by diasporic Vietnamese American writers as “homecoming stories” (2013), and Patricia Chu interprets them as “return narratives” deploying acts of countermemory and postmemory to address racial melancholia (2019).

“Global Early Modern Environmental Crises: Modes of Extraction, Settler Colonialism, and Empire” 

The Forum on Seventeenth-Century English Studies (LLC 17th-Century English) is putting together a guaranteed MLA panel for the 2027 Annual Convention in Los Angeles, CA, USA (7-10 January) on global early modern environmental crises with a focus on human interactions with the earth tied to imperial pursuits, settler colonialism, conflicts in worldviews, and methods of extraction. We hope to feature scholars with expertise in different linguistic traditions to foster cross-cultural discussions. 

Possible topics include but are not limited to: 

For the 150th anniversary of Harriet Martineau’s death, the Martineau Society will be hosting its annual conference in conjunction with the University of Cumbria, Ambleside Campus, in Ambleside, England. The Martineau Society conference is an interdisciplinary conference that focuses on the lives, work, and contributions of the Martineau family, including its two most famous and influential members, Harriet Martineau (1802-1876) and James Martineau (1805-1900). Harriet Martineau resided in the Lake District for much of her later years, from 1845 until her death in 1876.

Conference online (via Zoom): 12-13 March 2026

CFP:​

ATRAS Journal is now inviting scholars from around the globe to submit their unpublished manuscripts for publication. The journal aims to contribute to the body of knowledge by publishing original papers in the fields of literature, gender studies, cultural studies, linguistics, education, language studies, translation, social sciences, and the arts. Researchers are invited to submit their manuscripts in English, Arabic, and French.

Presentation 

ATRAS Journal is inviting researchers from the international academic community to submit their unpublished manuscripts for publication. 

Accepted papers after review will be published for volume 7, issue 2 on July 15th, 2026