We invite additional submissions for Lands of the Lost, an edited collection that explores extinct animal parks real, imagined, unrealized, or yet to be. Our goal is to bring together multi-disciplinary perspectives to examine parks across time and space, across fact and fiction. We seek to understand how these projects, which reconstitute and enclose long-extinct life forms, intersect with histories of science, capitalism, imperialism, environmental change, and more.

The Margaret Atwood Society invites paper proposals for an online panel on testimony and resistance in Margaret Atwood’s work. In keeping with the MLA 2027 presidential theme, this panel welcomes papers that examine how Atwood’s narratives represent coercion and constraint while also tracing the risk and agency at stake in claiming liberatory space. Possible topics include but are not limited to:

• Testimony, witnessing, and the politics of voice

• Surveillance, secrecy, confession, and the archive

• Gendered power, reproductive politics, and bodily autonomy

• Critical reception and adaptation

We invite papers on automobility and/or transportation infrastructure in any aspect of literary and cultural studies. We are particularly interested in exploring how representations of vehicles address questions of social and environmental justice.

This is a proposed special session for the 2027 MLA convention in Los Angeles, 7-10 January. We plan to hold the session in person.

Please email abstract (250 words) and author bio (100 words) by March 3 to both organizers:

Govind Narayan Ponnuchamy, Northwestern University (gnarayan@u.northwestern.edu )Ben Jamieson Stanley, University of Delaware (bstanley@udel.edu )

Call for Papers — MLA 2027 (Los Angeles)

Black Motherhood in the African Diaspora: Narrating Care, Resilience, and Futures

Across African diasporic literary traditions, Black motherhood emerges as a crucial site through which histories of slavery, empire, migration, and racial capitalism are negotiated and reimagined. Literary representations of motherhood register both the intimate labor of care and the broader structural pressures shaping diasporic life, often producing alternative temporalities, ethical frameworks, and speculative futures.

CALL FOR PAPERS

vol. 7/2026

Forum for Contemporary Issues in Language and Literature (e-ISSN: 2719-8111)  is an international multidisciplinary periodical that welcomes for review any innovative and challenging research article encroaching upon the fields of literature, linguistics, philosophy and cultural studies.

The editorial board encourages researchers and young scholars to submit their article proposals that  comprise with the profile of the journal. The proposals can be sent in English, German, French, Spanish, Catalan and Polish. The manuscript submitted for publication is to be original and unpublished. It should not have been simultaneously submitted for review in any other journal.