twentieth century and beyond

The short story has proven to be fertile ground for writers seeking to interrogate what the act of recording lives and the search for meaning entails, often through imagined renderings of the machineries of archive. In works such as Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Library of Babel,” Danilo Kis’s “The Encyclopedia of the Dead,” and Ivan Vladislavic’s “The Loss Library,” for example, writers engage with “the forces that govern preservation and erasure” in line with this year’s MMLA convention theme. 

This panel seeks papers that consider how these and other concerns find expression through the short story form.

William Faulkner and Louise Erdrich

A Conference Sponsored by the Center for Faulkner Studies

Southeast Missouri State University

Cape Girardeau, Missouri

October 22-24, 2026

Narratives of Resistance and African Literature: Articulating Dissent, Disobedience and Pluriversal Futures

Special issue of English Academy Review (Taylor and Francis)

Link: https://think.taylorandfrancis.com/special_issues/narratives-of-resistan...

Special Issue Editor(s)

Goutam Karmakar, University of Hyderabad, India
goutamkarmakar@uohyd.ac.in

Trans Studies, a book series published by Bloomsbury Academic, is seeking proposals for books that provide leading-edge scholarship on transgender and nonbinary topics from any discipline in the humanities, social sciences, and biological sciences. Bloomsbury’s Gender & Sexuality Studies list pioneers the publishing of innovative scholarly research from the Global South, and from marginalized gender identities and sexualities across global and transnational contexts.

Call for Papers: MLA 2027 - Los Angeles

The William Morris Society in the United States is soliciting proposals for two panels at next year's MLA (January 7-10, 2027 in Los Angeles). You are warmly invited to submit proposals for either session. Please submit your proposals to the email addresses listed with each CFP. Submissions must be received by March 22.

William Morris, Labor & the Nineteenth Century

See below for a call for papers to the upcoming ASAP (Association for the Arts of the Present), which takes place in Madison, WI on October 15-17, 2026. We invite contributions on the narrative dimensions of any contemporary "brainrot" or "slop" media- with particular interest in genre, grand narrative, minimal narrative, short form, segmentivity, seriality, plot, character, etc.

Please consider submitting a short (250 word) proposal for this guaranteed panel sponsored by the Robert Graves Society.

In “Narrating the Past,” British historian Alun Munslow defines “history as a ‘literature of fact’” (23), “an aesthetic undertaking” (17), and a “storied form of knowledge” (17). Continuing the conversations related to “Times and Places,” to be held at the 17th International Robert Graves Conference in Palma, Mallorca, Spain (July 2026), this panel deliberates Graves’s and his literary associates’ historical, geographic, and historiographic legacies. 

I am creating a panel for the OAH 2027 conference in San Francisco. Its focus will be women's engagement with the lived and natural environment, indigeneity, and ecofeminism. My paper will also include women's photography from México and the U.S. in the 19th century. I am open to any theory or topics while maintaining a focus on women and the environment. I'm presenting at OAH 2026 in Philly if you'd want to meet up and chat about 2027. tmorgan@ccp.edu

Guest Reviewers

​New Writing: the International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creaive Writing (Taylor and Francis / Routledge) seeks guest reviewers with the requisite expertise​ to join its international Guest Reviewer pool. Reviewers should have knowledge of contemporary creative writing studies. Some understanding of current critical discussions in Creative Writing Studies, Literary Studies or related fields would be well-received.

​New Writing is one of the world's leading journals in Creative Writing and Creative Writing Studies.

The journal can be found here: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rmnw20/current

This year’s convention theme, “After the Archive,” lends itself well to the study of Religion and Literature. The cultural importance of folklore and sacred stories means that keeping an archive of them for posterity through written and oral storytelling is imperative. However, the nature of that archive is unique in that these stories are ever-changing as they are retold and adapted over the generations.

"I don't know what Christmas is, but Christmas time is here": Santa Claus, Christmas, and Implicit Religion in SFF 

Abstracts (250 words) are invited for papers exploring Santa Claus and/or the Christmas holiday in science fiction, speculative fiction and fantasy literature, film, and graphic novels.  Considerations of the interrelation of secular and religious themes in SFF Christmas, implicit religion, and contemporary ritual welcome. 

MLA '27 held in LA in January; for more information on the conference see https://www.mla.org/Events/2027-MLA-Convention  

Deadline:  March 25, 2026

Modernist Nationalisms Conference

St John’s College, University of Oxford

Thursday 10th September 2026

The International T. S. Eliot Society

The 47th Annual Meeting of the International T. S. Eliot Society

25-27 September 2026

St. Louis, Missouri, USA

 Contribute to a Special Issue of the Pop Culture Studies Journal on TOYS!

Volume Editor: Jonathan Alexandratos

Abstract: ~500 words due by April 25th to the editor via email at jsalexan@gmail.com.

Overview:

Paper. Film. TV screen. Sound recording. Internet. These are common ways popular culture reaches us. However, while scholarship around comics, movies, TV shows, music, and online media expands, one pop culture area too often remains under-explored: toys.