world literatures and indigenous studies

  Culinary Traditions of Northeast India: Culture, Identity and Literature 

Download the full CFP: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WRJ9nKuKoOIJUgqCaQFUVl_T3bfI_JfZ/view?u...

Concept Note

Call for Papers | International Conference on Canadian Studies

The Centre for Canadian Studies, Jadavpur University is delighted to invite papers for its upcoming International Conference:

"Medical Humanities in the Anthropocene: Indigeneity, Borders and Justice through Indo-Canadian Perspectives"

 3–4 February 2027

Deadline for abstract submissions: 15 November 2026

Animals, Animalities, and Ecocriticisms in Hagiography 

Modality: Hybrid 

Sponsor: Hagiography Society, Medieval Ecocriticisms 

Organizers: Julia Salkind (julia.salkind@marquette.edu) Grace K. DiModugno (gd69@fordham.edu) 

Although internet culture may have brought about the hashtag #WeirdGirlLit,” women authors have long used writing to explore taboo and forbidden topics deemed beyond the purview of polite/patriarchal society. While Heather Colley of Writers Digest has noted that “Women in literary fiction are becoming murderers, cannibals, psychopaths, and stalkers,” we contend that female protagonists have long been unhinged both across time and space. Historically, freaky (anti)heroines have served as a release through which women readers could escape the restrictive confines of ideal femininity and instead probe hidden desires and other illicit aspects of their identities. 

On the occasion of the  135th  birth anniversary of Pearl  S. Buck, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1938), this international symposium seeks to revisit her life and  writings   from   the   perspective   of  exchanges   and   mutual   learning   among civilizations. Hailed as “the most influential Westerner to write about China since the 13th  century’s Marco Polo”, Pearl  S. Buck not only introduced Chinese literature and culture to global readers through her literary writings, but also participated actively in transnational   cultural   dialogue,   humanitarian   engagement,   and   the   shaping   of international understandings of China.

CRITICAL MYSTERY STUDIES

An Interdisciplinary Symposium

Call for Papers

In-Person + Online                

The University of New Mexico

November 16-17, 2026

Co-Organizers: Matthew David Goodwin, Sarah Hernandez, Nahir Otaño-Gracia

Since the publication of Derrida's Specters of Marx (1993) and the resulting growth of Spectrality studies in the past twenty years, much attention has been devoted to literary works that portray a spectral entity that reconfigures the more traditional gothic vision of the ghost, especially in Western Literature. However, in recent years, literary works and scholars alike have responded to this Western bias by envisioning Hauntology as a method for recuperating the stories of marginalized groups. In this view, spectrality can also be employed as a metaphor for social invisibility, a model first expanded by Esther Peeren and Maria Blanco. 

Captivating Criminality 14: Methods of Murder The International Crime Fiction Association is delighted to announce the fourteenth Captivating Criminality conference, to be held at the conference’s home venue, Bath Spa University, Corsham Court, UK, from 24-26th June 2027. There will also be an Early Career and Postgraduate Research workshop on the afternoon of 23rd June – which this year is open to all. This conference marks ten years since the inception of the journal Crime Fiction Studies (Edinburgh University Press).

LAST CALL! EXTENDED DEADLINE! This panel examines how writers challenge dominant structures of authority in/through narratives of sexual violence. Legal and cultural frameworks often dictate how sexual violence is recognized, narrated, and believed, shaping whose stories are legible and whose are dismissed. This session explores how survivors and writers resist these constraints through alternative narrative strategies, fragmentation, silence, poetic form, visual storytelling and more. It attends to how narrative operates as a site of power, shaping not only representation but the conditions under which sexual violence is acknowledged, legitimized, or denied.

Jordan Peele’s Us is a critically acclaimed horror original about government-manufactured clones that are forced to mimic the lives of the people who live on the surface like stringless puppets. While Peele focuses more on a physical tethering, there is a psychological tethering that can be gleamed from this piece, specifically as it relates to the idea of double consciousness. In his work “The Striving of the Negro People,” W.E.B. Du Bois describes this idea as “this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt or pity.

Beyond the Ocean: Maritime Infrastructure and Hydro-Narratives of Indians under the Raj (Tentative Title)

Concept Note

The imperial ships of the British Raj bore millions of Indian migrants across waterways just the way Charon ferried souls across the river Styx to an irreversible fate. Nonetheless, the Indians transformed the vicious vessels into spaces of radical rebirth and enduring kinship.

Over the last two decades, we have seen a surge of scholarship at the intersection of Food Studies and New Materialist theory. Thinkers like Elspeth Probyn (2000; 2016), Jane Bennett (2010), Annemarie Mol (2021; 2024), and Kyla Wazana Tompkins (2024) explore the diverse ways in which edible matter acts on our bodies, wills, and dispositions, in multilayered entanglements that involve water, minerals, fungi, bacteria, plants, as well as human and nonhuman animals. These material-discursive networks urge us to rethink not only our notions of agency but also our ways of being, knowing, and relating.

Inspired by the emptiness of the National Mall celebration of America’s 250th, we invite 300 word abstracts that consider enclosure and vacancy in Americana and its related aesthetic categories, like the Western and Southern Gothic.

Presenters might engage with a variety of fields, especially black, feminist, and indigenous studies, and take up media across time periods, including contemporary art by Bisa Butler and Jeffrey Gibson, Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter, Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, Aleshea Harris’ Is God Is, and many more.

https://mla.confex.com/mla/2027/webprogrampreliminary/Paper36527.html 

CFP: 3rd International Interdisciplinary Conference of the Department of English, University of Zululand and the Department of English and Literary Studies, Federal University Wukari, Nigeria

28-30 September 2026

Ongoye, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

Re-imagining Language, Writing, and Literature in English in a Fast-Changing World