Endnotes is the annual graduate conference of the Department of English Language & Literatures at the University of British Columbia-Vancouver, which is located on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Musqueam First Nation. The English Graduate Caucus invites proposal submissions for presentations, panels, and creative or multidisciplinary works on the theme of Environment, Extraction, Evolution. 

 
“What do I want from literature, anyway? 
A new way of living, a new way to talk  
About the trees that doesn’t endanger them” 
- Billy-Ray Belcourt, “Endnotes” 

29th Southern Writers/Southern Writing Graduate Student Conference 

University of Mississippi

August 8th—9th, 2026

Call for Submissions

Supernatural South(s): The Monstrous, The Fantastic, The Grotesque, The Speculative and So On…

The Southern Writers/Southern Writing Conference (SW/SW) is an interdisciplinary conference, welcoming graduate students, creative writers, activists, and community members with interest in the U.S. or Global South from all departments and fields of study. The 29th meeting of SW/SW will be held at the University of Mississippi from August 8th-August 9th, 2026. 

“Channels and Chokepoints: Tracing the Pathways of Long Nineteenth-Century Indian Fiction”

Sponsored by the NAVSA Empire & Colonialism Caucus

Leonard Cohen 2026

Global Perspectives on a Multi-disciplinary Artist

Ghent University, Belgium

Oct. 6-8, 2026

https://cohen2026.ugent.be/en

Victorian popular fiction is replete with animals – racing horses, loyal dogs, caged birds, exotic creatures, and anthropomorphic companions. These beings carried immense symbolic significance: they could function as status symbols, metaphors for the body or soul, expressions of sentiment, or instruments of moral instruction. Animals also frequently offered a lens through which Victorians addressed issues surrounding empire, industrialisation, science, social mobility, and domesticity. In popular fiction, animals were not merely background – they were moral barometers, class indicators, narrative devices, and symbols of broader anxieties regarding industrialisation, gender roles, and empire.