twentieth century and beyond

RAILIMAGE Conference, 1-3 April 2027, Turku, Finland

Call for Papers

Imagining Railways from 1900 to the Present: Places, People, Infrastructures, Texts

The project ‘Twentieth-Century Railway Imaginations: Building the Mobility and Infrastructural Humanities’ (RAILIMAGE) invites scholars from all backgrounds to submit paper proposals for its 2027 conference. We also warmly encourage early-career researchers to apply.

The Spanish and Portuguese (Latin American) session is open to all papers exploring some aspects of Latin American Spanish and Portuguese literature and cultures. It is a dynamic forum for scholarly exchange, collaboration, and engagement with these interconnected regions' rich cultural heritage and diverse perspectives.

We are particularly interested in papers that touch on:

• Contemporary Literature and Culture

• Cultural Studies

• History and Culture

• Literature, Arts, and other Media

• Visual and Performing Arts

• The conference theme, "Our Ruling Classes"

The 21st century has been defined by large-scale global change driven by migration, exile, border reconfigurations, political upheaval, and shifting power dynamics – all of which have profoundly shaped debates surrounding human rights, identity, culture, and belonging. Furthermore, as digital platforms collapse geographic distance and intensify new forms of surveillance, nationalism, and exclusion, diasporic subjects must navigate complex landscapes of memory, language, race, gender, and political belonging.

This panel seesion for the 2026 RMMLA Conference to be held Ocober 8-10, 2026 in Ogden, Utah, seeks papers that explore all aspects of English literature of the twentieth century to present, namely proposals that look at British or ex-patriot artists and/or works by those authors whose English Commonwealth residency influenced their art since 1900. Interdisciplinary approaches to anlyses of the literature are welcome.

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

I am seeking short (3,500-word) chapters for The Works of Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, which will be an edited volume dedicated to Didion and Dunne’s lives in film.

The American couple were a prolific and popular screenwriting team despite being much better known for their respective novels, memoirs, and journalism. Accordingly, the volume will take into account both their produced and many unproduced screenplays—the latter of which are held in Didion and Dunne’s papers at the New York Public Library.

Abstract

To be published in the world of contemporary creative writing likely means passing through one exclusive gate or another—even writers once able to make it through are losing access. What are these publishing gates, and who are their keepers? What are they trying to keep in—and out? Perhaps more productively, how might those of us who are passionate about creating a progressive, inclusive, and radical body of literature break down—or go around—or ignore those gates of exclusivity and begin to build new, ungated communities?

Description

The session “Women in Literature” includes papers dealing with any aspect of women in literature or literature by women. The session may contain essays on a wide variety of topics related to literature by and about women, including essays engaging with a wide variety of critical or theoretical approaches. Presentations might include consideration of women/women writers in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and geographical region. Papers may engage with the conference theme, “Our Ruling Classes: Culture, Power, Conflict," but doing so is not required. Additional topics might include:

The volume Women's Autobiographies and Memoirs 1920-2025: Precarity, Resistance and Selfhood attempts to look into the dialectics of identity and writing - the compulsion to respond to the other inhabiting the self, which provokes in her something peculiar and singular - a text of one's own. The self-authenticated narratives are often haunted by many an unsubduable voice that breaks open the self-centred finitude of living and dying.

Late Bowie: Legacy, Mortality and the Archival Impulse

Call for Papers

Kingston University, Tony Visconti Studio, 11-12 September 2026

This roundtable, inspired by the 2026 PAMLA conference theme “Our Ruling Classes: Culture, Power, Conflict,” invites short (5-minute) presentations on possible approaches and challenges to teaching figures who have been rejected by cancel culture for their harmfully dated representations of marginalized figures and communities or their creators’ mistreatment of other people or toxic attitudes: writers like Mark Twain, Vladimir Nabokov, and J.K. Rowling; filmmakers from Alfred Hitchcock to Woody Allen; and performers like Kevin Spacey and Louis C.K. Possible approaches might include:

The Comparative American Ethnic Literature session at the 2026 PAMLA Conference in Seattle, WA seeks proposals for papers (about 15-20 minutes in length) related to a wide variety of topics regarding multi-ethnic texts, relationships between multi-ethnic writers, and/or connections among ethnic and religious communities. While proposals may engage with this year's conference theme of “Our Ruling Classes: Culture, Power, Conflict," the session is open to broad interpretations and explorations of the field, including considerations of historical period, geographic area, genre (including film and music), gender and sexuality, bi- and multi-lingual texts, and so on.

Interdisciplinary Symposium

GORDON PASK 1928 - 1996 - 2026 — CYBERNETICS, CONVERSATION, INTERACTION & AI
University of Vienna, Austria.  Thursday 17 September 2026.

Experience shows that unless you are against something, nobody takes the slightest notice of what you say. On this occasion, the most obvious target for anti-sentiment, is a conference; so I am against conferences, today. Not against this one, for that would be rude, and not against any in particular, for that would be overly general. Taken as a social occasion, as a surrogate for learned society, a conference is a capital affair. (G. Pask, addressing the Society for General Systems Research, 1979)

To mark the eightieth anniversary of the Partition of India, we invite submissions for a Special Issue of Sikh Formations to be followed by an edited book volume. The issue will explore the past, present, and future legacies of the Partition in South Asia and beyond with special reference to the Sikhs.

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.