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Special Issue: The Subject and its Estrangements
‘The wounds of the Spirit heal, and leave no scars behind.’ Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit
This year, the Center for 21st Century Studies aims to activate “Slow Care”—a practice that places deliberate attention on the beings, things, and sites, which together foster long-term visions of collective life across generations and communities of humans and non-humans, as well as ever-evolving technologies and ecologies. In line with this theme, the Digital Cultures Collaboratory are excited to announce the 4th event in its annual online symposium series, organised around the theme of “Time & Digital Relations.”
What makes literary collaboration unexpected, difficult, or strange? How have authors transcended barriers – national, social, ideological, religious, temporal – in the collaborative production of texts?
For the upcoming EGO conference at Oxford University, we invite students to write on the prismatic theme of “strange bedfellows”. From plagiarism of unusual sources to fraught collaboration between literary “frenemies” to allyship across religious and political lines, this theme lends itself to discussions of the way literature is shaped by the collaboration of radically different perspectives and interests.
2nd CISMA 2026: International Conference on Technology and Corpora in Discourse, Translation and Interpreting
Khazar University, in collaboration with Shanghai International Studies University (SISU), is pleased to announce the 2nd CISMA 2026 International Conference on Technology and Corpora in Discourse, Translation and Interpreting, which will be held on April 30, 2026, at Khazar University, Baku, Azerbaijan.
Children and adolescents frequently appear in Doris Lessing's fiction, specifically in her African short stories. However, Lessing did not write these stories with a child audience in mind; rather, she used child and adolescent characters to dissect African colonial society in the aftermath of the break-up of the British Empire (García Navarro, 2021). We invite contributions to a co-edited collection exploring what it means to be educated and to grow up as a child in Lessing's African stories, particularly in the context of 20th-century African society ruled by white European colonists.
This special section of Whatever: A Transdisciplinary Journal of Queer Theories and Studies will function as a critical retrospective on Robert Eggers’s 2015 film The Witch. While much has been written on the film in relation to feminist theory, this special section seeks to excavate the queer possibilities of Eggers’s now iconic film. Taking a broad view of queer theory, we imagine queerness as that which challenges binaries and hierarchies. In this way, The Witch might be understood as queer in terms of the challenges it poses to heteronormative, patriarchal structures, as well as through its dismantling of the boundaries between self and other, human and animal, nature and culture.
We are delighted to announce the return of the Raymond Williams Society postgraduate essay competition for its 12th year. The deadline for entries is Friday 3 April 2026.
The prize for the winning entry is £250 and a year’s subscription to the Society. The winning essay will be considered for publication in the academic journal Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism (subject to peer review). The competition aims to encourage a new generation of scholars working in the tradition of cultural materialism, especially those whose research is rooted in the work of Raymond Williams.
Twelfth International Iris Murdoch Conference CFP University of Chichester, 14-16 August 2026: First Call for Papers The Twelfth International Conference on Iris Murdoch studies will take place at the University of Chichester in 2026. The conference will showcase ongoing, and published, Murdoch scholarship with a particular focus on ‘Influences and Inspirations’. Panels should not be confined by this focus, however, and all researchers currently working on Murdoch’s fiction, philosophy, theology, personal journals, letters and poetry – and/or the political and cultural significance of any of these ¬– are invited to submit proposals.
Liverpool John Moores University, UK
6-8th July 2026
Confirmed keynotes:
Melissa Gustin (National Museums Liverpool), with guided tours of the Walker Art Gallery
Tara MacDonald (University of Lethbridge, Canada) “Public Institutions, Private Care: Sex Work and Care Work in Victorian Popular Fiction”
Designed by Jean-François Vernay, the Routledge Literary BRAIN (Brain-Related Academic Investigations of Narratives) Focus Series combines the language of literary criticism with neurocognitive and health humanities methodologies or explanatory frameworks, providing an innovative way of blending literary analysis with health humanities and neurocognitive approaches.
This exciting BRAIN series is designed to convene conversations across interdisciplinary knowledges, covering all fiction and nonfiction sub-genres such as poetry, drama, novels, short-stories, memoirs, (auto)biographies, essays, etc.
War leaves lasting marks not only on people and communities, but also on the natural world that witnesses, and endures, its violence. Long after the fighting has stopped, landscapes shaped by destruction remain living archives, bearing the aftereffects of conflict: damaged forests, polluted rivers and seas, and disrupted ecosystems that continue to hold its traces. These ‘trauma ecologies’ pass on the legacy of war from one generation to the next, forming what we call ‘environmental postmemory.’