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2026 Meeting of the Society for Comparative Literature and the Arts
October 29-31, 2026
Embassy Suites Austin Central
Austin, TX
“Justice”
Keynote Speaker: TBA
Literature and Global Popular Music 2027 Modern Language Association Adaptation Forum Call for Papers How does literature travel through global popular music? How do novels, poems, plays, and other literary forms resonate when translated into sound, lyrics, stage performance, music videos, and media circulation across borders?This guaranteed session invites studies of musical adaptations that illuminate the cultural, social, and political resonances of literary works. How do literary forms find new life in global popular music? In what ways do these adaptations reshape questions of identity, memory, translation, and power across national and linguistic boundaries?Possible topics include (but are not limited to):
Call for Papers
Deadline for abstracts: March 31st, 2026
Journeying Between Thresholds and Metamorphoses
International Conference
May 8th-9th, 2026
Tallinn University, Narva mnt 29, Silva Building, Room S-529 (Tallinn, Estonia)
Australia from Below: Lived Histories and Material Cultures of Everyday Life
The editors of Australia from Below: Lived Histories and Material Cultures of Everyday Lifeareinviting you submit a research article, essay, creative work, poetic or other creative work reflecting the diversity of ways in which lived experience and material culture can be explored.
Call for Book Chapters
Heated Rivalry: Queer Joy and Intimate Masculinity on Television
This edited book collection invites scholarly contributions on Heated Rivalry (2015-). Adapted from Rachel Reid’s romance novel, the Canadian Crave original series system became an unexpected global success via HBO. Set in professional ice hockey, Heated Rivalry is propelled by queer characters and the sustained pleasures of their relationship. Its defining contribution is not exposure or transgression, but queer joy: intimacy, desire, humour, trust, and emotional safety enacted within demanding institutional and work settings.
2026 Conference New Orleans, LA October 15th- 17th
The Popular Culture Association in the South and the American Culture Association in the South meet annually to present and discuss ideas about popular culture, American culture, and culture world-wide. This year we meet at the The Royal Sonesta in New Orleans located in the center of the French Quarter.
Literature and Global Popular Music 2027 Modern Language Association Adaptation Forum Call for Papers How does literature travel through global popular music? How do novels, poems, plays, and other literary forms resonate when translated into sound, lyrics, stage performance, music videos, and media circulation across borders?This guaranteed session invites studies of musical adaptations that illuminate the cultural, social, and political resonances of literary works. How do literary forms find new life in global popular music? In what ways do these adaptations reshape questions of identity, memory, translation, and power across national and linguistic boundaries?Possible topics include (but are not limited to):
This panel examines how literature circulates beyond fixed ethnic identity by bringing together the work of John Fante and Charles Bukowski as a case study in Italian American literary afterlives. While Fante is firmly situated within Italian American literary studies and Bukowski is more often framed within postwar American counterculture, this panel argues that reading them relationally reveals how Italian American literary aesthetics travel, mutate, and endure beyond explicitly ethnic frameworks.
CALL FOR PROPOSALS: THE SOUTHERN GOTHIC AT PCAS/ACAS 2026
The Southern Gothic is not merely a regional offshoot of the Gothic tradition—it is a dynamic cultural mode shaped by the histories, violences, mythologies, and contradictions of the American South. Rooted in hauntings both literal and structural, the Southern Gothic interrogates race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, ecology, labor, memory, and the ongoing afterlives of history. Its borders—like its landscapes and bodies—are unstable, porous, and contested.
Richard Linklater’s Slacker (1991) is a cult classic with a crucial role in the history of American cinema. The movie is unusual in many ways. It does not have a traditional narrative; it follows 100 characters around the UT Austin area in a way that seems completely random. There is no protagonist, no story, no thread to the individual events, yet somehow it is a completely coherent and engaging movie that sparks as many reflections as the number of scenes it has.
We are looking for chapter proposals in the form of abstracts. Topics already included are work, capitalism, Buddhism, film as a dream, narrative, episodic views of life, and absurdity. Possible topics for new chapters include:
New Literaria: An International Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Humanities
CALL FOR PAPERS
Vol. 8 No.2
Special Issue on “Popular Literature: Culture, Power, and the Politics of the Popular”
Concept Note
This guaranteed panel (in-person at the Modern Language Association in Los Angeles, California; January 7-10, 2027) takes a cue from the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of African American Humor Studies and seeks 250-word proposals that discuss how African American humorists eschew "just jokes" to articulate personal and collective selfhood and freedom. Please submit abstracts by Monday, March 16 to dmorgan@scu.edu. This panel is sponsored by the Screen Arts and Culture Committee.
Accepted presenters must be MLA members by April 1, 2026.
Call for Abstracts!Elvis and Philosophy: Essays Concerning the King
Edited by Joshua Heter and Richard Greene
Abstracts are sought for a collection of essays on any philosophical topic related to Elvis Aaron Presley to be published with Wallace & Jacobs Press. We hope to receive a number of submissions concerning his music and movies as well as his persona, life, relationships, cultural impact, legacy, mythos, etc.
Evolutions in Cinematic Virtual Reality
Symposium at The University of Hong Kong
18. – 19. May 2026
Strangeness and Oddity:
Embracing the Extraordinary in Arts-Based Research
Conference Webpage: https://labrc.co.uk/2025/12/08/strangeness-and-oddity-2026/
A Transdisciplinary Conference
March 10-11, 2026
Online
Abstract Submission Deadline: February 17, 2026
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”
Journal of Anime and Manga Studies (JAMS) - Volume 7
Volume to be published in December of 2026
The Journal of Anime and Manga Studies (JAMS) is excited to announce the call for papers for our seventh volume, to be published December 2026.
The Journal of Anime and Manga Studies is a peer reviewed, open-access journal published by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. JAMS is dedicated to publishing scholarly works exploring anime, manga, and a broad range of related topics, such as methodologies, cosplay, fandoms, adaptations, and more. As an open-access journal, JAMS aims to reach a broad-ranging audience of scholars (both within and beyond the academy) and interested general readers.
ACCSFF ‘26
Call for Papers
The 2026 Academic Conference on Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy will be held Saturday and Sunday, May 30-31, 2026, in Toronto, Ontario, at York University, Canada.
This year's author GoH keynote speaker is the Nebula Award winning Premee Mohamed.
We invite proposals for papers in any area of Canadian science fiction and fantasy, including:
-studies of individual works and authors;
-comparative studies;
-studies that place works in their literary and/or
cultural contexts.
JAMS@AX26
Want to present your work at the one-and-only Anime Expo? The Journal of Anime and Manga Studies(JAMS) and Anime Expo have once-again teamed up to give you the JAMS@AX26 academic symposium, July 2-5, 2026 at the Los Angeles Convention Center. This symposium presents an incredible opportunity to connect fans of all ages directly to scholars researching and writing about the medium we all love.
The JAMS@AX26 welcomes all papers taking a scholarly perspective on anime, manga, cosplay, and their fandoms.
Current Keywords in Digital Literary Culture: “Slop” and “Nostalgia”
May 14th, 2026
Virtual Mini-Conference
DLC+ is excited to announce the second installment of its Current Keywords in Digital Literary Culture series, mini-conferences devoted to studying the most pressing and emerging concepts actively shaping digital literary culture.
While Los Angeles has regularly been called the “City of Angels,” historian Kelly Lytle Hernández has argued that a more appropriate epithet would be the “City of Inmates,” as Los Angeles has historically been a site for innovations in imprisonment, surveilling, policing, and oppressing various communities for their race, ethnicity, class status, sexuality, and other out-group identifications. Literature and cinema have long been fertile sites for examining the ramifications of police- and prison-centric ideologies within American society and culture, particularly for a city that defined itself by cinema.
The International Vladimir Nabokov Society seeks paper proposals for presentations on the following themes for the Modern Language Association’s Annual Convention (January 7-10, 2027, Los Angeles):
Nabokov in the ‘70s / Nabokov’s Afterlife
Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU) Prague, Czech Republic
August 20–21, 2026
Call for Papers Deadline for proposals: April 1, 2026
Conference Directors: Petra Dominková (FAMU, Prague, Czech Republic), Thomas Ballhausen (Inter-University Organization Arts & Knowledges + Mozarteum University Salzburg, Austria)
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
The London Arts-Based Research Centre
Women who Create: The Feminine and the Arts
A Transdisciplinary Conference
Conference webpage: https://labrc.co.uk/2025/11/18/women-who-create-2026/
March 28-30, 2026
Where:
March 28-29: In person participation at Cambridge University and online
March 30: Fully online
Fees (for both presenters and attendees):
195 GBP (in person)
100 GBP (Online)
Prices exclude eventbrite fees
Abstract: Deadline February 22, 2026
*EXTENDED DEADLINE FOR CHAPTER SUBMISSIONS*
Call for Papers (proposals)
CONTRIBUTION TO EDITED VOLUME (Please read the full CfP before sending a proposal)
Mediated Masculinities in European networks: Discourse and performativity in the Information Age
NEW Deadline for abstract submissions: March 1, 2026
Notifications of acceptance: March 10, 2026
Deadline for first draft after notification of acceptance: April 30, 2026
Call for Papers:
Listening to Possible Worlds
Sound and Music in Speculative Literature and Culture
22-23 October 2026, Leiden University, the Netherlands (in-person)
Confirmed keynote speakers are Anna Snaith (King’s College London) and Chris Tonelli (University of Groningen)
Opening Sequences: The Narrative Architecture of TV Titles
This edited volume proposes the first critical anthology devoted to television title sequences as a distinct and influential mode of visual storytelling. By treating opening titles as complex aesthetic and narrative artefacts, this volume seeks to establish a new interdisciplinary space for the study of title design, inviting scholars to rethink how beginnings shape meaning, memory, and emotional architecture in serial television.
In an era marked by digital mediation, political polarization, and heightened ethical scrutiny, humour has become a high-stake cultural practice: jokes travel rapidly, provoke backlash, generate solidarity, and often become flashpoints for debates around offence, free speech, and accountability. In the twenty-first century, humour has emerged as one of the most powerful, contested, and ubiquitous modes of cultural expression. Circulating across literary texts, theatrical stages, digital platforms, popular media, and everyday social interactions, humour today functions not merely as entertainment but as a deeply performative, political, and ethical practice.
Wilde West Coast
The Oscar Wilde Society invites abstracts for a special session at the 2027 MLA (Modern Language Association) Convention in Los Angeles, January 7–10 2027.