gender studies and sexuality

Archives are valuable sites of memory and knowledge, as well as sites of violence and power. In a hyper-saturated world of post-truth and fake news, archives provide a powerful tool to understand the past, interpret the present and imagine better futures. Following Walter Benjamin’s saying, scholars have a responsibility to “brush history against the grain” when delving into archival documents, to find what is absent or hidden and make it speak again. This conference presents scholars with the opportunity to explore various questions that arise when facing archives as dynamic sites of memory: How do we challenge and deal with archives as sites of power? How can queer and marginal subjects be found or salvaged in archives that erase their presence?

The Brain and the Body: the Love Affair of the Cognitive and the Corporeal
in Literature
GWU English Graduate Student Association Symposium
March 2025

Keynote Address by Dr. Evelyn Tribble

 Women in German ConferenceNovember 6-9, 2025University of Massachusetts Amherst – Amherst, MA As part of the 50th anniversary of Women in German, this panel is interested in how the material of the past can be transformed into an unexpected, whimsical, and radical future(s) by feminist intervention. It is about past things created anew with revolutionary consequences. We are interested in papers discussing literary adaptations from, between, and into film, television, theater, and other ‘modern’ media which provide a feminist or queer lens to the source text. Feminist and queer adaptations can both enrich an existing text while rejecting to utilize heteronormative, patriarchal, colonial languages that uphold oppressive institutions.

Fifty years ago Hélène Cixous inspired women to be courageous, expressive, and vocal. Since the publication of her groundbreaking article, ‘The Laugh of Medusa,’ we have undoubtedly made great strides in encouraging women from around the globe to tell their stories in literature, art, academia, film, television, and via a great many of new media. Women’s writing has blossomed, challenged, rebelled, and gained much more visibility as a form of expression, a creative force, and a field of research, giving us many reasons to celebrate this moment in history, even if the current political climate sometimes limits our feelings of hope. 

Book proposals are invited for a series called Gender and Culture in the Romantic Era, published by Anthem Press (http://www.anthempress.com/). Gender and Culture in the Romantic Era is a series of scholarly monographs and edited collections devoted to the topics of gender and culture in British poetry, fiction, and drama from roughly 1780 to 1830. In terms of gender, the series encompasses scholarship related to the lives and works of women writers but also includes studies that address broader constructions of gender identity and sexuality.

2026 MLA Convention in Toronto, Canada, January 8-11, 2026

Special Session Title: Women and Physical Objects

We invite proposals exploring women’s encounters and interactions with physical objects in all literary and cultural products across history and regions. Comparative, interdisciplinary, and transnational approaches are welcome.

Email your 250-word proposal and a 150-word cv to Haihong Yang, hyang@udel.edu and Wanming Wang, wanming.wang@mail.mcgill.ca, by 3/15.

Deadline for submission: March 15, 2025.

The Fifteenth IASEMS Conference

University of Salento (Lecce), 16-17 May 2025
Convenors: Maria Luisa De Rinaldis, Maria Renata Dolce and the IASEMS Executive Board

The Fifteenth IASEMS Conference in Lecce, University of Salento, 16-17 May 2025, will investigate the imaginary of waters in Shakespeare and early modern texts, aiming at the exploration of notions of fluidity and crossing. The conference wishes to investigate what meanings, both personal and collective, circulated around ‘water’ in early modern culture, but also to discuss the water-related relevance and value of the ideas of shapelessness and transformation, mutability and sea change as opposed to fixity, solidity, and normativity.

The editors invite proposals for book chapters for a planned edited collection on teaching Parable of the Sower. 

Cultural Texts and Contexts in the English-Speaking World (IX)

2025 Theme: “History Claims Everybody”

Online Conference – March 28th, 2025

Hosted by the English Department of the Faculty of Letters, University of Oradea

Conference Scope

This is a Call for Papers for a special issue of the online open-access double-blind peer-reviewed journal [Inter]sections, titled Laughing in the Face of Evil: Humorous Perspectives on Perpetrators in Contemporary American Literature and Popular Culture. We invite papers that ask what humor can contribute to our understanding of perpetrators by examining a selection of works from contemporary American literature and popular culture. Does humor help demythologize certain perpetrators whose international fame turned them into quasi-mythical figures? Can the ownership of humorous content about a traumatic situation or process endured by a specific marginalized community be transferred to other communities?

This panel will examine the ongoing catastrophe and accelerating devolution of medicine and its attendant practices in contemporary America. How late-stage America undermines health humanities keywords such as empathy, care, healing and the like are appreciated. What ways of "doing otherwise" are becoming evident in terms of medicine and health systems? What does this moment reveal in larger discussions of medicine, national affiliation, individual survival, and neoliberal, anti-democratic empire?

A popular t-shirt claims the first Pride was a riot.

During a police raid on the Stonewall Inn on 28 June 1969, some customers fought back. Resistance continued for several nights. Whilst this may have inspired the first Pride march, it was not the first LGBT+ protest.

CFP for ASAP/16, convening in Houston, TX, 22-25 October 2025

https://www.artsofthepresent.org/conference/asap-16-worldmaking-worldbre...

A black box is an abstraction. In systems theory, it names a model for complex exchanges in which mysterious, secret, or unknowable processes alter input stimuli and produce output reactions. The black box’s inner workings cannot be observed directly, only inferred through hypotheses about causes and effects.

The Queerness and Games Conference (QGCon) is now accepting submissions for presentations at its sixth conference, which will be held on September 26-28, 2025, in Montreal, Quebec. Proposals for talks, pre-constituted panels, workshops, roundtables, and post-mortems are due on April 13th, 2025.
Submit your proposal using this form. Do not use our contact email for submissions.