ROUNDTABLE: Writing Communities in and Beyond the Classroom (PAMLA, Seattle, Nov 12-15, 2026)

Deadline for Proposals: May 15

This roundtable revisits writing as a fundamentally social, collaborative, and democratic act at a time when many writers and students experience it as isolated, pressured, and increasingly mediated by technology. Beyond offering emotional and peer support, writing communities in classrooms, online and social spaces, and professional and informal networks shape how writers see themselves, understand their audience, engage in metacognitive practices, and take creative and intellectual risks.

The advancement of artificial intelligence has transformed humanities research and education, deepening computation’s influence on scholarly practice and everyday life. From the early era of “humanities computing” in the 1970s to the rise of “computational humanities” over the past decade, this trajectory highlights the enduring—and expanding—role of computation in shaping inquiry across the humanities. These intersections are especially visible in interdisciplinary work. As T. S. Eliot observes, “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” The same spirit can illuminate how methods and tools migrate across fields.

Panel Stream: Early American Forms and Formalisms This panel stream interrogates formalism in early American literature following a postcritical turn in the field. One result of literary studies’ recent postcritical turn has been renewed attention to aesthetics, feeling, and form as essential aspects of literary analysis. In early American studies, this reassessment has taken a distinctive shape, particularly in work that foregrounds the formal and aesthetic dimensions of literary culture across the long eighteenth century — from special issues and essay collections (Looby and Weinstein; Cahill and Larkin; Pethers and Koenigs; Pethers and Couch) to monographs (Armstrong and Tennenhouse; Koenigs, Couch, Tawil, Gardner, Garrett).

Prosperity Fashion 
INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE 
9-12 February 2027
Università degli Studi di Firenze
Florence, Italy

Dowload the call for papers here https://riviste.fupress.net/index.php/fh/prosperity-fashion-2027 

The theme of beyond archives is an interesting one for a discipline that relies heavily on existing sometimes still only physical collections. This panel invites papers that explore any aspect of the archive in Old and Middle English literature.

Call for Papers

MeCCSA Postgraduate Network Conference 2026

Media and Sustainability

University of Reading,

Minghella Studios, Whiteknights Campus

Reading RG6 6BT

9th September 2026

Organising committee: Babsie Keulemans, Emir Anday and Elizabeth Heaney

Any questions about the conference or the submission process can be directed to:

Babsie Keulemans – e.l.keulemans@pgr.reading.ac.uk