“American Shorts 2026” will take place on October 29-31, 2026, at the School of Arts & Humanities of the University of Lisbon, Portugal.

American Shorts 2026 webpage: https://sites.google.com/view/americanshorts2026

Submission deadline: 10 June, 2026

Conference: 29-31 October, 2026

Location: Lisbon, Portugal

The contemporary American short story lives in a context where ‘short’ has tended towards the increasingly economic. In our new attention economy, brief forms thrive. We will be inquiring into how US short fiction has integrated and contended with, reacted to and against, different narrative forms. We are eager to discuss, in a setting welcoming to researchers, independent scholars, students, and professionals, not only the traditional American short story but also how it has been morphing, or can be revisited, through the useful and more encompassing umbrella-term of the ‘short form’.

We (non-exclusively) accept perspectives on:

Broadly understood:

• Critical new readings on American short stories and flash fiction

• The American short story in its relation to other compact forms (e.g. micro-essays,

anecdotes, maxims, song lyrics, poems, aphorisms, spoken word music, jokes, video

clips in social media and digital platforms, fragments, video games, graphic

adaptations, comics, riddles, multimedia, etc.)

More specific relations (always on American short narrative):

• Historical comparisons between past and recent American short stories and short forms
• New voices and incursions in American short forms
• Attention studies
• Reception/Reader Response
• (Neo-)Formalist approaches to short forms (from Jolles to Caroline Levine)
• New aesthetic categories (Sianne Ngai)
• Praxeological approaches (Florian Fuchs)
• The digital age and its impact on the short story/form
• (and more: see full CfP)

Confirmed Keynote: Dr. Michael Collins (King’s College, London), Chair of the British Association for American Studies, co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to the American Short Story (2023).

We welcome proposals for individual submissions or thematically aligned panels of speakers (20-minute presentations). Abstracts (max. 250 words) and brief biographical note (max. 150 words) should be submitted by no later than 10 June 2026. We will respond to applications by the end of 10 July 2026.

All submissions must be made through the designated platform available on the conference website. Submissions will be open as of early November 2025. 

Please find the full CfP and more info on our website, here