twentieth century and beyond

Consuming Serialized Fiction in the US, from 1800 to Today

updated: 
Saturday, July 4, 2026 - 5:01pm
Amanda Louise Johnson / Pitzer College
deadline for submissions: 
Sunday, July 19, 2026

Panel topic: "Consuming Serialized Fiction in the US, from 1800 to today.”

Venue: American Literature Association Symposium, Santa Fe, NM; Nov. 5-7, 2026

Note: as indicated here, ALA does not require presenters to be paying members of the organization

Workshop: ‘The Cultural Imaginary of the Cambridge Spies’

updated: 
Saturday, July 4, 2026 - 4:14am
‘The Afterlives of the Cambridge Spies’ AHRC project
deadline for submissions: 
Tuesday, July 21, 2026

 

Workshop: ‘The Cultural Imaginary of the Cambridge Spies’

 

18 September 2026

The National Archives, Kew, London, UK

 

As part of the AHRC project ‘The Afterlives of the Cambridge Spies’ (2026-8), we will be holding a one-day workshop exploring the extensive cultural impacts of the Cambridge Spies. This will be an in-person event hosted by The National Archives, in Kew, London, on the day of 18th September 2026.

 

Litera: Journal of Language, Literature, and Culture Studies 37/1&2

updated: 
Friday, July 3, 2026 - 8:17am
Litera, Istanbul University Press
deadline for submissions: 
Monday, November 30, 2026

Call for Papers – Volume 37, Issue 1 & 2 (2027)

Dear Colleagues,

Litera: Journal of Language, Literature and Culture Studies – Dil, Edebiyat ve Kültür Araştırmaları Dergisi, the official publication of the Department of Western Languages and Literatures at Istanbul University, invites submissions for its 2027 issues (Volume 37, Issues 1 & 2).

Alizés n°47 Special Issue: "Discursive Resistance in Contemporary Anglophone Literature and Public Discourse"

updated: 
Friday, July 3, 2026 - 6:22am
Alizés (University of Reunion Island)
deadline for submissions: 
Tuesday, September 1, 2026

Call for Papers: Alizés 47 (2027)

Special issue edited by Talal Hochard (University of Reunion Island) and Zuzana Fonioková (Masaryk University)

 

Discursive Resistance in Contemporary Anglophone Literature and Public Discourse

 

Abstract submission deadline (400 words) and short biographical notes (150 words): September 1, 2026

Notification of acceptance: October 1, 2026

Full draft papers submission: February 15, 2027

Final papers submission: June 30, 2027

T. S. Eliot's Engagements with Music

updated: 
Thursday, July 2, 2026 - 11:56pm
The American Literature Association (International T. S. Eliot Society panel)
deadline for submissions: 
Tuesday, September 15, 2026

The International T. S. Eliot Society invites you to propose a conference paper for a guaranteed member society panel at The ALA (American Literature Association) Winter Symposium--"Music and American Literature" Jan 28-30 in Nashville, TN

Poets' Novels

updated: 
Thursday, July 2, 2026 - 8:57pm
American Literature Association -- American Poetry and Poetics Association
deadline for submissions: 
Sunday, July 19, 2026

I'm seeking participants for an APPA panel on "Poets' Novels" at the upcoming ALA symposium "The American Novel: Forms, Genres, Traditions," to be held at the Drury Plaza Hotel in Santa Fe, NM, 5-7 November 2026.

Proposals on novels or experimental prose forms by writers who primarily identify or are recognized as poets will be welcome for this session. Our definition of "novel" can be as broad as your claims for it will support. 

For best consideration, please send a precis of no more than 500 words to mrh@unm.edu by Sunday, 19 July  

 

The Poet in the Novel

updated: 
Thursday, July 2, 2026 - 8:53pm
American Literature Association -- American Poetry and Poetics Association
deadline for submissions: 
Sunday, July 19, 2026

I'm seeking participants for an APPA roundtable discussion on "The Poet in the Novel" at the upcoming ALA symposium "The American Novel: Forms, Genres, Traditions," to be held at the Drury Plaza Hotel in Santa Fe, NM, 5-7 November 2026.

Proposals on novels or experimental prose forms that feature a poet as protagonist will be welcome for this session. Our definition of "novel" can be as broad as your claims for it will support. Samuel R. Delany is likely to feature significantly.

For best consideration, please send a precis of no more than 500 words to mrh@unm.edu by Sunday, 19 July  

Violence, Political Becoming, and Resistance in Childhood

updated: 
Thursday, July 2, 2026 - 4:34am
NeMLA
deadline for submissions: 
Wednesday, September 30, 2026

Childhood is often imagined as a period of innocence, protection, and dependence. However, across many historical and contemporary contexts, children experience various forms of violence, including interpersonal abuse, structural inequality, displacement, war, and environmental harm. Recent scholarship in childhood studies has challenged the tendency to view children solely as vulnerable victims, emphasizing their capacity for agency, resilience, and political engagement. Understanding how cultural narratives represent these experiences is essential for examining broader questions of justice, rights, and social belonging.

Pacific Northwest Literatures (PAMLA Seattle Conference 12-15 Nov. 2026)

updated: 
Wednesday, July 1, 2026 - 7:03pm
PAMLA
deadline for submissions: 
Wednesday, July 15, 2026

Past and present, the Pacific Northwest has functioned in literature as a dynamic space defined by transition, ecological precarity, and socio-political friction. This panel explores writers of fiction, poetry, memoir, and non-fiction whose work investigates the unique sense of place, history, and culture defining the region. We welcome papers that engage with the tensions between industry and preservation, indigenous sovereignty, labor movements, and the mythologies of the western wilderness.

True Crime CFP - MAPACA Annual Conference

updated: 
Wednesday, July 1, 2026 - 1:43pm
Mid-Atlantic Popular and American Culture Association
deadline for submissions: 
Tuesday, July 7, 2026

Mid-Atlantic Popular & American Culture Association (MAPACA) 2026 Annual Conference, November 5-7, 2026 in Baltimore, MD

The Rewritten Self: Counter-Narratives and Resistant Aesthetics

updated: 
Wednesday, July 1, 2026 - 9:32am
Northeast Modern Language Association
deadline for submissions: 
Wednesday, September 30, 2026

On January 19, 2022, Sheila Heti published the first of ten weekly installments of “A Diary in Alphabetical Order” in The New York Times. Each installment included an author’s note explaining that Heti had “loaded all 500,000 words of [her] journals into Excel to order the sentences alphabetically,” hoping to “see the self in a new way.” Over time, the project “grew into something more novelistic,” and the note concludes that “the self’s report on itself is surely a great fiction.” Heti is hardly the first author to challenge or destabilize autobiographical conventions.

Rethinking M.R. James: Antiquarianism, Horror, and the Supernatural

updated: 
Wednesday, July 1, 2026 - 9:30am
Dr. Sakti Sekhar Dash
deadline for submissions: 
Tuesday, September 15, 2026

Call for Chapters
Edited Volume: Rethinking M.R. James: Antiquarianism, Horror, and the Supernatural

Editor: Dr. Sakti Sekhar Dash, Fellow of Social Science Research Council

Introduction

SAMLA 2026 Panel: Post-American Hospitalities

updated: 
Wednesday, July 1, 2026 - 9:14am
SAMLA - South Atlantic Modern Language Association
deadline for submissions: 
Tuesday, September 1, 2026

The 98th annual SAMLA Conference is taking place Thursday, November, 5, through Saturday, November, 7, 2026, at the Wyndham Atlanta Buckhead Hotel & Conference Center in Atlanta, GA.  For more information, see https://southatlanticmla.org/.

Echo-Joyce: Reading Joyce in Relation

updated: 
Wednesday, July 1, 2026 - 8:43am
Joyce Studies Annual
deadline for submissions: 
Monday, August 31, 2026

Joyce Studies Annual invites submissions for a special issue featuring the topic of “Echo-Joyce: Reading Joyce in Relation” to be guest edited by Amadeo De La Pava, Faye Liu, and Jordan Smith.

A New Existentialism?

updated: 
Tuesday, June 30, 2026 - 4:56am
Public Humanities - Cambridge University Press
deadline for submissions: 
Friday, January 1, 2027

How is everyone doing?

At a routine meeting of the Editorial Board of this journal in March 2026, this innocuous question erupted into disquiet, tension, unease. Speaking from vastly different parts of the world, there was an unmistakable sense of a planet slipping beyond available comprehension and unplugging us from work and life routines. As wars in the Middle East expand and fires spread from apartment blocks reduced to rubble to bombed oil refineries and shipping corridors, profound geopolitical, personal, even psychic rifts leave us grasping for the language and feel of the moment, the falling apart of things, the zeitgeist of an endangered now.

The Politics of Cute

updated: 
Tuesday, June 30, 2026 - 4:53am
Public Humanities - Cambridge University Press
deadline for submissions: 
Tuesday, December 1, 2026

Cuteness is a twenty-first-century sensation—from the global expansion of Sanrio fandom to the rise of social capital around Labubu and Jellycat, from K-Pop stars (real or animated) to cute animals like the quokka and Fennec fox. This issue explores a “cuteness turn” found in many public realms around the world. The adoration of attractive or cheerful objects associated with childishness and youthfulness is part of the human experience. However, this issue does not examine cuteness as a transcultural aesthetic or psychological condition, but we focus on its larger political implications. Throughout history and around the world, this “universal” sentiment has often been manipulated for commercial and ideological purposes.

Scholarship Under Attack

updated: 
Tuesday, June 30, 2026 - 4:51am
Public Humanities - Cambridge University Press
deadline for submissions: 
Friday, December 18, 2026

This special issue will explore current attacks on scholarship and scholars, and the multiple ways in which law, broadly conceived, is understood and deployed in these attacks with implications for who is allowed to shape and engage in the public sphere. 

Marianne Moore: An International Conference (15-17 April 2027)

updated: 
Monday, June 29, 2026 - 7:45am
Faculty of English, University of Cambridge
deadline for submissions: 
Tuesday, September 1, 2026

Marianne Moore 2027, hosted by the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge, will follow the highly successful formats of previous Moore conferences (Penn State 2003, Houston 2015, Buffalo 2020, Stanford 2025) with a schedule of panels, round tables and Q&As for a single audience over two and a half days. Exactly 100 years after Moore herself visited Cambridge, the purpose of the conference is to bring together an international and various group of readers with a strong predilection for thinking and writing about poetry, and put them to work newly and again on this singular, difficult, and discriminating poet. The schedule will take shape around readings between Marianne Moore and other writers.

“I overstand you, you understand”: Joyce and the Nightmare of Interpretation

updated: 
Monday, June 29, 2026 - 5:39am
The James Joyce Italian Foundation
deadline for submissions: 
Monday, November 9, 2026

Call for Papers“I overstand you, you understand”: Joyce and the Nightmare of Interpretation

 

Conference Dates:

4–5 February 2027

Deadline for Abstracts:

9 November 2026

Successful Applicants Will Be Notified By:

30 November 2026

Keynote speakers:

Sara Sullam, University of Milan

Kris Peeters, University of Antwerp

 

Organisers:

Franca Ruggieri,

Fabio Luppi,

Enrico Terrinoni,

Serenella Zanotti

 

Communal Narrative Forms in South Asian Fiction and Indigenous Traditions (Panel-NeMLA 58th Annual Session March 6–9, 2027)

updated: 
Sunday, June 28, 2026 - 5:41pm
Ghulam Yaseen/Ohio University
deadline for submissions: 
Wednesday, September 30, 2026

Beecroft argues in The Cambridge Companion to the Novel that, if we understand the novel as storytelling in any narrative form indigenous to a particular culture or people, then we must acknowledge the existence of multiple novels, each with distinct temporal and spatial origins. He maintains that storytelling traditions are embedded in every society, and that many of these traditions have complemented, intersected with, or diverged from Western narrative forms (46–48). However, the narrative form canonized as the “novel” in the Western literary tradition has a specific historical and aesthetic origin in ancient Greece.

Reading Chaucer outside the Anglophone World

updated: 
Sunday, June 28, 2026 - 8:54am
Sophia Yashih Liu / National Taiwan University
deadline for submissions: 
Tuesday, June 30, 2026

Reading Chaucer outside the Anglophone World: Receptions, Translations, and Traditions
Date: March 12–13, 2027
Venue: National Taiwan University, Taiwan

Conference website: https://readingchaucer.com/

 

“Historical Short Fiction in Britain and Ireland”

updated: 
Saturday, June 27, 2026 - 11:58am
Armelle Parey
deadline for submissions: 
Tuesday, September 15, 2026

Historical fiction is generally associated with the novel (see Green [2011] and Young [2018]). Yet the historical short story was significant before WWI: “from 1901 to 1914, over 1200 works of historical fiction were issued, of which nearly a quarter were short-story collections” (Cox and Adrian 1994, xiv). We may wonder if and how the genre has been impacted by the renewed interest in the past and history in fiction over the past 30 years.

National Narratives of the Far Right: (mis) Representing Culture

updated: 
Friday, June 26, 2026 - 8:12pm
Laura Jeffries / South Atlantic MLA
deadline for submissions: 
Tuesday, September 1, 2026

 

Public understanding of American cultures—peoples, neighborhoods, languages, foods, histories, arts, religions—has always been vulnerable to myth and misinformation, in particular from the far right. Collectively the humanities work to establish an ever-more accurate/inclusive lens on culture, but the (re)mainstreaming of far-right voices has dangerously distorted the diverse American story.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Journal of Florida Literature

updated: 
Thursday, June 25, 2026 - 9:56pm
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Society
deadline for submissions: 
Friday, November 27, 2026

Call for Papers and Creative Submissions

Deadline: November 27, 2026

The Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Journal of Florida Literature publishes articles, book reviews, notes, fiction, poetry, and other creative work in the spirit of or regarding the life and work of Rawlings, her circle, and other authors and artists inspired by Florida.

The journal welcomes submissions from various approaches focusing on Rawlings and Florida in broader contexts, including these topics: 

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