twentieth century and beyond

Call for Contributions

Comics and (Eco)Social Justice - Graphic Narratives for Transformation

VII Jornadas ALCES XXI. Valencia. July 14-17, 2026

Comics and (Eco)Social Justice - Graphic Narratives for Transformation is a research seminar within the ALCES XXI Conference (Valencia, July 14–17, 2026) dedicated to exploring Spanish graphic narratives as a space for critical intervention and reflection on ecological and social justice. The seminar will be conducted in Spanish.

The D H Lawrence Society of North America and the Joseph Conrad Society of America are seeking panel papers on the themes of exile and emancipation in the works of both Lawrence and Conrad.  Proposals specialized on either author will be considered for inclusion, but we are especially interested in papers that address both of these important writers in a comparative or interdisciplinary manner.  In either case, early for Conrad and later for Lawrence, the author left his home country in the interests of a less constrained existence elsewhere, thereby raising the possibilities of exilic nostalgia and regret.  At the same time, both equally sought spaces of freedom and movement in expatriat

Seeking papers exploring how media forms (methods of inscription, technologies of reproducing text, sound, and image, digital platforms, archives, social media, AI, and beyond) shape the production, circulation, and reception of lyric.

250-word abstract, brief bio and CV by March 20, 2026: nskillma@iu.edu 

Papers on Joseph Conrad and reading, including close reading, book culture, intertextuality, Conrad’s own reading, Conrad’s global readers, and the challenges of reading Conrad in the age of artificial intelligence. This is one of several planned panels for the Joseph Conrad Society of America Allied Organization at the Modern Language Association Convention in January 2027. Email 300 word proposals and a 100-word biography to Jana Giles, giles@ulm.edu. Deadline: March 22, 2026.

For further information and to see the call posted on the MLA website, see: https://mla.confex.com/mla/2027/webprogrampreliminary/index.html.

The Activist Author: Contemporary Forms and Historical Precedents of Activist Literature

Dates and Location:

November 9th & 10th, 2026.

UCLouvain (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium).

Confirmed Keynote speakers:

Sara Dimick: Northwestern University; author of Unseasonable: Climate Change in Global Literatures.

Juan Meneses: UNC Charlotte; author of Resisting Dialogue: Modern Fiction and the Future of Dissent and editor of Postpolitics and the Aesthetic Imagination.

Throughout its consolidation as an academic discipline, museum studies have tended to gravitate around major national and international museums, their emblematic collections, and the management models they have established as standards. These institutions, mostly located in urban centers and supported by solid structures of funding, research, and public outreach, have shaped a “canon” that has influenced not only academic agendas but also collective imaginaries about what a museum is (and what it should be).

University of Siedlce

Institute of Linguistics and Literary Studies

and

University of the Balearic Islands

Faculty of Philosophy and Art

would like to kindly invite all scholars from across the Humanities to take part

in the International Conference

Thinking by Parts: Analogy, Fragmentation,

and the Search for Wholeness in Literature and Philosophy

This panel invites papers examining Italian American engagements with Hollywood and Los Angeles as a central locus of literary production, cinematic labor, and cultural myth-making. Long understood as a global factory of images, Hollywood has also functioned as a crucial site where Italian American writers, filmmakers, performers, and cultural workers shaped—and were shaped by—the American and transnational imaginarium.

C21 is inviting scholars and researchers to contribute book review essays for upcoming issues. We currently have a selection of titles published in 2025 available for review, spanning literary studies, film and media studies, cultural studies, and gender and sexuality studies. We invite prospective authors to submit ideas for review essays that discuss 2–3 recently published scholarly texts. For the full CFP, and to see our list of available titles, please visit: https://c21.openlibhums.org/news/923/.

Children and adolescents frequently appear in Doris Lessing's fiction, specifically in her African short stories. However, Lessing did not write these stories with a child audience in mind; rather, she used child and adolescent characters to dissect African colonial society in the aftermath of the break-up of the British Empire (García Navarro, 2021). We invite contributions to a co-edited collection exploring what it means to be educated and to grow up as a child in Lessing's African stories, particularly in the context of 20th-century African society ruled by white European colonists. 

This call invites the submission of proposals for a dossier that will be submitted for consideration to A Contracorriente: A Journal of Latin American Studies. The dossier will focus on the following theme:

Material Plots: Commodity, Capitalism, and National Imaginaries in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Latin American Culture

We invite papers on the literature of the Arctic. Especially welcome are proposals on texts and authors that connect the Arctic to contemporary issues of extractivism, securitization, and imperialism. Please send a 250-word abstract and short bio.

Call for Papers: Nature Remembers: War, Trauma, and Environmental Postmemory in Contemporary Anglophone Literature and Culture

War leaves lasting marks not only on people and communities, but also on the natural world that witnesses, and endures, its violence. Long after the fighting has stopped, landscapes shaped by destruction remain living archives, bearing the aftereffects of conflict: damaged forests, polluted rivers and seas, and disrupted ecosystems that continue to hold its traces. These "trauma ecologies" pass on the legacy of war from one generation to the next, forming what we call "environmental postmemory."

Current Keywords in Digital Literary Culture: “Slop” and “Nostalgia”

May 14th, 2026

Virtual Mini-Conference

https://dlcplus.org/ 

DLC+ is excited to announce the second installment of its Current Keywords in Digital Literary Culture series, mini-conferences devoted to studying the most pressing and emerging concepts actively shaping digital literary culture.