world literatures and indigenous studies

While the Gothic has long been associated with monsters, haunted houses, unstable hierarchies, and hidden knowledge, the servant's specific connections to the genre's core dynamics of space, affect, and plot have been critically undertheorized. Yet Gothic narratives fundamentally depend upon servant figures to produce narrative tension, mediate hidden knowledge, and expose the instability of domestic, social, and political order. This panel therefore positions the Gothic servant not as a supplementary character but as a central Gothic mechanism and epistemological problem worthy of scholarly attention and analysis.

Postcolonial thinking has often been defined by questions of cosmopolitan and pluralist living in the decolonizing world: through figurations of exile and unrootedness (Edward Said, Eqbal Ahmad), poetics of identity, hybridity, and relation (Frantz Fanon, Homi Bhabha, and Édouard Glissant), intimacies across racial and colonial differences (Lisa Lowe, Leela Gandhi, Rahul Rao), or the territorial and planetary entrapments of multiculturalism and globalization (Rey Chow, Sylvia Wynter, Gayatri Spivak). We ask, how do postcolonial and subaltern subjects excluded by global elites make claims of cosmopolitan (non/)belonging?

As human rights institutions and legal frameworks are discredited, defunded, dismantled, and openly ignored across multiple national contexts, the question of what literature has to do with rights returns with new urgency. This moment demands new ways of thinking about these problems. This seminar responds by turning to the many literary traditions from the Global South and postcolonial contexts in which writers have narrated human rights and personhood on their own cultural terms and grounds.

56TH ANNUAL COLLEGE ENGLISH ASSOCIATION CONFERENCE
CEA 2027/GATEWAYS
WESTIN HOTEL/ST. LOUIS, MO.
APRIL1-3,2027

CONFERENCE THEME:GATEWAYS
PAPERS ON GENERAL TOPICS ALSO WELCOMED

For its 2027 annual conference,the College English Association (CEA) invites proposals for papers and panels that explore the theme of “Gateways” and their significance in literature, criticism, and pedagogy.

In what ways can literary mobilities provoke questions about social movements and forms of resistance in the current global order?

Mobility is not simply the physical navigation of spaces, but an embodied and affective act with deep socio-cultural and political significance. Literary and cultural work that represents varied forms of mobility can reveal contradictions between the exercise and assumption of agency and uneven historical and social conditions of restriction. Whether mobilities are framed as environmental, diasporic, colonial, or decolonial, they pose questions about material and symbolic conditions of power that dictate who can move and in what ways.

In his book, Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species (2016), Neel Ahuja’s theory of “the body as a transitional theater of imperial warfare” explores how the control of human and nonhuman bodies proliferated the expansion of empire over the 19th century to the present. Despite the growing hegemony of biomedical control, there have always been and continue to be significant moments of resistance and agency in which marginalized (colonized/Indigenous) communities have challenged or reformulated/redefined the concepts of body, disease, and health.

The Department of English and IQAC, Ramananda Centenary College, are pleased to announce the International Conference 'Margins of the Anthropocene: Waste, Bodies, and Decolonial Futures' to be held on 2–3 September 2026. The conference brings together scholars, artists, filmmakers, activists, and community practitioners to examine how ecological crises are experienced through waste, caste, labour, toxicity, disability, indigeneity, and more-than-human relations while imagining decolonial ecological futures.

AIYA: Artificial Intelligence and Young Adult Studies [working title]

Edited by Sidney I. Dobrin and Kenneth B. Kidd, University of Florida

Deadline for proposals: November 1, 2026

CALL FOR CHAPTER PROPOSALS

Seminar Title:
Based on a True Story: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Retelling What Really Happened

Organizers:
Dr. Priscilla Charrat Nelson, Providence College
Dr. Claire Rodan, University of Maryland

Paper submissions are currently open.

Primary Area / Secondary AreaGlobal Anglophone ModalityIn Person Only: The session will be held fully in person at the hotel. No remote presentations will be included. Chair(s)Roma Lucarelli (University of Minnesota Twin Cities) Abstract

This seminar convenes Cuban, Mexican, and U.S. Gulf South scholars to theorize the Gulf of Mexico as a transnational zone of ecological entanglement, rather than a set of discrete national environments. Although the Gulf’s waters, storms, labor histories, and extractive infrastructures circulate across borders, scholarship often remains siloed within national or linguistic frames. This seminar asks how environmental humanities approaches might illuminate the Gulf as a shared, relational ecology shaped by movement, sedimentation, and uneven histories of extraction.

Despite possessing intersecting histories and languages, Latin American studies and Latinx studies have historically been treated as separate fields of study. This panel seeks to spark a dialogue between fields by exploring themes of transhemispheric and archipelagic solidarity in Latinx and Latin American literature and media. Throughout the past and present century, how have Latinx and Latin American media—literature, film, art, or other forms—constructed expressions of community in dialogue with each other? How do works from Latin America reverberate in Latinx cultural productions, and how do Latinx cultural productions influence Latin American media?

CALL FOR PAPERS — NeMLA 2027 Seminar

Salve Regina University, Newport, RI | March 6–9, 2027

Can Literary Criticism Break Free of the Silos Trap — and Carry Literature Along?

In the early 1950s, Lacan admonished psychoanalysts for operating within Newtonian epistemology fifty years after Einstein and Heisenberg had dismantled it. It may be worth asking ourselves whether we, literary critics, 125 years later, have adjusted our analytical machine — or, at least, whether it is necessary that we do.

Every act of communication, interpretation, and representation is an act of framing. In literary analysis, a “frame” might define genre, direct narrative perspective, or position a text within a historical moment. In linguistics, frames organize semantic understanding, govern pragmatic interaction, and underpin metaphor. In translation and interpreting, frames are negotiated, shifted, and sometimes shattered in the movement between languages and cultures. They are the selective filters that highlight certain elements while relegating others to the background, the conceptual structures that allow us to categorize, interpret, and communicate complex realities.