world literatures and indigenous studies

The 2026 International Postgraduate Comparative Literature Conference (IPCLC 2026), hosted by the Master of Arts in Literary and Cultural Studies (MALCS) at The University of Hong Kong (HKU), brings together postgraduate students and emerging scholars from Hong Kong and beyond for a day of cross-cultural conversation. Taking place in person at HKU on May 26, 2026, the conference offers a supportive forum for sharing work in progress, building scholarly networks, and testing new comparative methods across literary, cultural, and media studies. Featuring themed panels, a keynote lecture, and Best Paper Award(s), IPCLC 2026 invites participants to consider how comparison can sharpen our understanding of urgent questions in the humanities.

Concept Note

Research Scholar’s National Conference CFP – 22nd and 23rd April 2026

New Paradigms, New Epistemes: Literature and Criticality in the 21st Century

Guest Editors:  

Prof. Om Prakash Dwivedi, Director, Faculty of Humanities and Liberal Arts, Chandigarh  University Uttar Pradesh, India 

Dr. Aditya Anshu, Chair, Department of Social Science, Faculty of International Relations,  Abu Dhabi University, U.A.E.  

Dr. Madhurima Nayak, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Humanities and Liberal Arts,  Chandigarh University Uttar Pradesh, India 

Concept Note 

Call for Paper

The Politics of Ableism: Gender, Sexuality, and Disability in Literature and Media

Edited by Habib Tekin & Nizara Hazarika

Afrofuturism in African Literature
Edited Volume — Call for Contributions

One Hundred Years of Gabriel García Márquez

Proposed Dates: 1-2 May 2026

Proposed Venue: SRM University, Sikkim

Organized by: MELOW (The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the World)

Gabriel García Márquez, born in Columbia in the year 1927, is acknowledged as one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. As we head towards his birth centenary, it is time to look back at this literary giant, reassess his contribution and its impact on literary history.

This session ignites conversation about teaching feminist and queer studies amid moral panic, exploring how desire, rage, and care become radical tools—keeping classrooms alive, embodied, and defiantly political in the face of ideological chill. (Virtual Session)

Deadline: Monday, March 23, 2026

Send proposals of 200-words with a shot bio to Ryan Calabretta-Sajder (rcalabretta@gmail.com) and Victoria Muñoz (vmunoz@adelphi.edu) 

Aural Reorientations, or Sound Studies as Listening Otherwise

MLA Sound Forum, 2027 Guaranteed Session

MLA annual conference, Los Angeles, California, January 7-10, 2027. 

Aural Reorientations, or Sound Studies as Listening Otherwise

Seeking 250-word proposals examining feeding and nourishment as maternal practices that shape care, embodiment, and power, through literary, cultural, and medical humanities approaches in contemporary Hispanic and Lusophone contexts. Deadline: March 2

Perpetrators of genocide destroy people as well as their cultural legacies, including formal archives, libraries, privately held records, and culturally significant texts and other print objects. Colonial occupation both historically and currently consolidates power through destroying records of occupied peoples to deny their past, present, and future. Resistance, in turn, may take the form of preserving such records through smuggling, hiding, converting, memorizing, digitizing, translating, and reconstituting. Inspired by the Phoenix Library in Gaza, the MLA Forum on Book History, Print Cultures, Lexicography seeks papers on preserving books, print materials, and other textual records (broadly understood) in contexts of genocide.

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 Aquatic Presence-Absence in World Literatures

Critical Language and Literary Studies (CLLS) invites original, unpublished research articles for a themed issue to be published in Fall 2026. The theme is examining aquatic presences and absences in world literatures.

Let’s call it “time work”: Those practices that negotiate the relations between the living and the dead. Time work is not merely conducted by archivists and historians, but by grave diggers and undertakers, documentary filmmakers and memoirists, politicians, war journalists, practitioners of living traditions, speakers of dead languages, as well as by any and all who keep something – a story, a trinket, an heirloom, a song – holding onto it to remember. Time work is not easily done without feeling; It is driven by the weight of mattering, it is attention called by the fact that now – this, ‘our’ now – is in-part composed by the shadows of what and who came before.

Concept Note

Two-Day International Conference (likely to be ICSSR Sponsored) on  “Loss of Indigenous Knowledge in the Age of Digital Humanities: Preservation, Power, and the Politics of Representation” (Hybrid Mode)