twentieth century and beyond

Call for Proposals

Fan Studies Network North America Conference 2026 (virtual)

October 22-25, 2026

THE BOUNDARIES OF FAN STUDIES AND FANDOM

Guest Editors:  

Prof. Om Prakash Dwivedi, Director, Faculty of Humanities and Liberal Arts, Chandigarh  University Uttar Pradesh, India 

Dr. Aditya Anshu, Chair, Department of Social Science, Faculty of International Relations,  Abu Dhabi University, U.A.E.  

Dr. Madhurima Nayak, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Humanities and Liberal Arts,  Chandigarh University Uttar Pradesh, India 

                                  National Identities (Taylor and Francis), Scopus Q1

Concept Note 

At its third edition, in 2026 the Entanglements summer school is centered on Postcolonial Horrors and aims to explore horror as an aesthetic, political, and epistemological symbol through which postcolonial literatures stage the traumatic memories of colonization, identity tensions, diasporic movements, and the re-emergence of the spectral within global modernities. The goal is to interpret horror not only as a genre, but as a critical and deconstructive tool capable of destabilizing ethnocentric categories of subjectivity, body, sovereignty, and knowledge. 

Call for Contributions

Comics and (Eco)Social Justice - Graphic Narratives for Transformation

VII Jornadas ALCES XXI. Valencia. July 14-17, 2026

Comics and (Eco)Social Justice - Graphic Narratives for Transformation is a research seminar within the ALCES XXI Conference (Valencia, July 14–17, 2026) dedicated to exploring Spanish graphic narratives as a space for critical intervention and reflection on ecological and social justice. The seminar will be conducted in Spanish.

The D H Lawrence Society of North America and the Joseph Conrad Society of America are seeking panel papers on the themes of exile and emancipation in the works of both Lawrence and Conrad.  Proposals specialized on either author will be considered for inclusion, but we are especially interested in papers that address both of these important writers in a comparative or interdisciplinary manner.  In either case, early for Conrad and later for Lawrence, the author left his home country in the interests of a less constrained existence elsewhere, thereby raising the possibilities of exilic nostalgia and regret.  At the same time, both equally sought spaces of freedom and movement in expatriat

Seeking papers exploring how media forms (methods of inscription, technologies of reproducing text, sound, and image, digital platforms, archives, social media, AI, and beyond) shape the production, circulation, and reception of lyric.

250-word abstract, brief bio and CV by March 20, 2026: nskillma@iu.edu 

Papers on Joseph Conrad and reading, including close reading, book culture, intertextuality, Conrad’s own reading, Conrad’s global readers, and the challenges of reading Conrad in the age of artificial intelligence. This is one of several planned panels for the Joseph Conrad Society of America Allied Organization at the Modern Language Association Convention in January 2027. Email 300 word proposals and a 100-word biography to Jana Giles, giles@ulm.edu. Deadline: March 22, 2026.

For further information and to see the call posted on the MLA website, see: https://mla.confex.com/mla/2027/webprogrampreliminary/index.html.

Conference Call for Papers

“Navigating Global Governance in a Multipolar World”

 (28-29 May 2026)

Cergy, France

The Faculty of the Anglo-American Legal Program at the Faculté de droit de l'Université CY Cergy Paris is proud to organize this conference in collaboration with the Laboratoire d'Études Juridiques et Politiques (LEJEP) and the newly formed Institute for Multipolar Governance.

CALL FOR PAPERS: 15th Annual Harry Potter Academic Conference (HPAC) at Chestnut Hill College

Friday and Saturday, October 23–24, 2026 (Eastern Time)

In person at Chestnut Hill College, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

Deadline for proposals: April 10, 2026

In 1966, Seamus Heaney published Death of a Naturalist, the collection that would launch his career and establish him firmly in the public eye as a poet of place whose local accents and autobiographical bent marked a new direction in twentieth century Irish poetry. In the same year, Heaney accepted a lectureship at his alma mater, Queen’s University Belfast, and made his first appearance on Ireland’s Late Late show, reading Blackberry Picking and gaining a mass audience thanks to the power of broadcast media. 

The 21st century has been defined by large-scale global change driven by migration, exile, border reconfigurations, political upheaval, and shifting power dynamics – all of which have profoundly shaped debates surrounding human rights, identity, culture, and belonging. Furthermore, as digital platforms collapse geographic distance and intensify new forms of surveillance, nationalism, and exclusion, diasporic subjects must navigate complex landscapes of memory, language, race, gender, and political belonging.

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.

Existing scholarship in Asian (North) American Literature has long examined travel narratives about Asian travelers within immigrant or diasporic paradigms: Sau-ling Wong famously establishes the Necessity/Extravagance framework in understanding transpacific mobility by early Asian American immigrants (1993), whereas Chih-ming Wang reads the autobiographical travelogues by diasporic Vietnamese American writers as “homecoming stories” (2013), and Patricia Chu interprets them as “return narratives” deploying acts of countermemory and postmemory to address racial melancholia (2019).

Twelfth International Iris Murdoch Conference CFP University of Chichester, 14-16 August 2026: First Call for Papers The Twelfth International Conference on Iris Murdoch studies will take place at the University of Chichester in 2026. The conference will showcase ongoing, and published, Murdoch scholarship with a particular focus on ‘Influences and Inspirations’. Panels should not be confined by this focus, however, and all researchers currently working on Murdoch’s fiction, philosophy, theology, personal journals, letters and poetry – and/or the political and cultural significance of any of these ¬– are invited to submit proposals.