twentieth century and beyond

Many notable comic book scholars highlight Alan Moore as one of the most ambitious writers in mainstream American and British comics. Along with writers like Grant Morrison and artists like Dave McKean, Moore was part of the so-called “British Invasion” of the American comic book industry in the 1980s, and artists of this period are credited as bringing an air of credibility as well as transforming the artistic standards of the medium. Greg Carpenter, for instance, likens the work of these artists to “Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson, elevating the English language into a vehicle for poetic drama.

The Charles Olson Society will sponsor panels at the Re-Viewing Black Mountain College Conference, to take place in Asheville, North Carolina, October 2-4. 2026 marks the Centenary of poet Robert Creeley’s birth, and the Charles Olson Society will welcome abstracts pertaining to any aspect of Creeley’s life and work. Creeley was a central poet in the development of Black Mountain Poetry, and along with his life-long friend and companion in verse, Charles Olson, Creeley greatly influenced the development of American poetics after World War II. As he said, “I write to realize the world as one has come to live in it, thus to give testament. I write to move in words, a human delight. I write when no other act is possible.”

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"

Time, Memory and Forgetting in the Western

Two-Day Symposium | 10–11 September 2026 | University of Essex, UK

Deadline for submissions: 30th April 2026

To submit: 250 word outlines for all submission types via email to richard.parker@uc.cl

“There will come a time when you believe everything is finished; that will be the beginning.”— Louis L’Amour, Lonely on the Mountain.

Textual Bodies: Incarnation, Corporeality, and Affective Materialities through Literature
6th Meeting of Young Researchers of the SELGyC

Faculty of Philology — Complutense University of Madrid
September 16–17, 2026

«Write yourself: your body must be heard»
Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa

«The text you write must prove to me that it desires me»
Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text

Call for Book Chapters

From Page to Screen: An Examination of Comic Book to Television Adaptation

Edited by Ryan Twomey and Sebastian Sparrevohn

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.