twentieth century and beyond

Current Keywords in Digital Literary Culture: “Slop” and “Nostalgia”

May 14th, 2026

Virtual Mini-Conference

https://dlcplus.org/ 

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. 

The Dos Passos Society has extended the deadline for its 2026 biennial conference in Posta do Sol, Madeira, by one week to February 8th. We do hope you will join us in Madeira this May for a celebration of the life and works of one of America's greatest chroniclers of the twentieth century. 

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The John Dos Passos Society is proud to announce its 2026 biennial conference in Ponta do Sol, Madeira Island, Portugal. The conference will be held at the John Dos Passos Cultural Center in the municipality of Ponta do Sol, the home of the author's Portuguese ancestors.

Miloš Forman: Between Europe and Hollywood

Symposium organized by the Department of Theatre and Film Studies, Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic
Friday, April 24, 2026
Univerzitní 3, Olomouc, Czech Republic

The Society for the Study of American Poetry invites proposals for a roundtable to be held at the 37th annual American Literature Association conference in Chicago, IL, May 20-23, 2026. 

Roundtable: “Teaching American Poetry Now”

This roundtable invites participants to reflect on the challenges, possibilities, and urgencies of teaching American poetry in the current moment. Across institutions, student populations, and media environments, instructors are rethinking how—and why—we teach American poetry now.

Announcing

The 2026 First Book Institute

May 31-June 6, 2026

Hosted by the Center for American Literary Studies (CALS) at Pennsylvania State University

Co-Directors

Priscilla Wald, R. Florence Brinkley Distinguished Professor of English, Duke University, and Co-Editor of American Literature

Sean X. Goudie, Director of the Center for American Literary Studies and Past Winner of the MLA Prize for a First Book

Greensboro, North Carolina, the host city for this year’s joint conference, is geographically, culturally, and historically a space between. Known as “Gate City” because of its key position on the rail network, it is not only a midpoint between the state capital, Raleigh, and North Carolina’s biggest city, Charlotte, but also an entrance to the South. At once an integral part of the region and open to the broader world, it has long exemplified the solidarities as well as the divisions that have marked the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Wallace Stevens’s poetry abounds with animals, from the bucks and firecat of “Earthy Anecdote” to the “gold-feathered bird” of “Of Mere Being.” This session invites papers on Stevens’s animals and animal imagery across his oeuvre. How do animals in Stevens’s poems reflect or complicate his sense of human perception, subjectivity, and the environment? In what ways do they trouble distinctions between the human and the nonhuman, the domestic and the wild, the material and the symbolic?

Proposals might consider individual poems or sequences, the wider bestiary of The Collected Poems, or Stevens’s animals in relation to earlier, contemporaneous, or later writers.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

CFP Journal of the European Association for Studies of Australia

Special Issue: Minding the Present. Bodies, Places, Matter in and between Australia and Europe

Deadline for proposals: 15 March 2026

Taking its cue from a very vibrant conference held in Padova (Italy) in September 2025, the Journal of the European Association for Studies of Australia is seeking articles that examine the shaping experiences, identities, and perceptions of the present as a catalyst to urgent action both in Australia—with a special alertness to the very rooted cultures of Indigenous Australia—and in the complex relations between Europe and Australia.  

(Extended Deadline)

MEMORY

University of Virginia Department of English Graduate Symposium

March 27 & 28, 2026

The Anaïs Nin Foundation and Nexus: The International Henry Miller Journal are pleased to announce the inaugural Anaïs Nin Essay Prize. We are seeking submissions of scholarly essays centered on the work, influence, relationships, or legacy of Anaïs Nin. Essays should aim to extend the academic conversation around her contributions to literature, art, and culture.

SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS

MLA Annual Convention 2027
Los Angeles, California | 7–10 January 2027

The journal Studies in Popular Culture publishes reviews of books in the field. If you are interested in reviewing a book submitted to the journal or would like to suggest one to review, please contact the Book Reviews Editor, Caesar Perkowski, at cperkowski@gordonstate.edu. If you have not already reviewed a book for the journal, please include either a CV or a brief description of your interests and qualifications in the email.

Members of the Popular Culture Association in the South who have published a book are encouraged to inform the Book Reviews Editor of that fact.

This edited volume aims to explore the concept of veleno, that is poison, in its material and symbolic
dimensions, examining how it functions as a cultural construct and/or a discursive category within
Italian literature—considered in dialogue with cultural practices and discursive uses of language—
from the Middle Ages to the contemporary period.
Across Italian cultural history, poison operates on a threshold between pharmakon (in its Derridean
sense) and toxin, between language that heals or contaminates, between scientific knowledge and
moral accountability. Far from being confined to medical or chemical meanings, poison emerges as a

Proposing a panel or panels on postmodern-era US Fiction for this year’s American Literature Association Conference, which will happen in Chicago from May 20-23.