International Symposium: Maps in American Literature, 15th–21st Century.
Host and dates: École normale supérieure de Lyon, France. 1-3 April 2026.
Deadline for submissions: 15 June 2025.
Keynote Speaker: Martin Brückner, Professor at the University of Delaware and Director of the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture (WPAMC).
We invite proposals for a symposium exploring the role of actual cartographic documents in American literary history from the 15th to the 21st century. Taking a hands-on approach, the symposium will feature interactive presentations with large-scale map reproductions, alongside an exhibition at the Diderot Library (ENS de Lyon).
Contact details
CFP
For more details and submission guidelines, visit the full CFP: 
https://maps2026.sciencesconf.org/resource/page/id/1.
(Posted 25 January 2025)
Reinventing Borderlines in a Transnational World.
Host and dates: Higher Institute of Human Sciences of Tunis, University of Tunis El Manar. 10-11 April 2026.
Deadline for submissions: 30 January 2026.
Venue details: Higher Institute of Human Sciences of Tunis & Bibliothèque Nationale de Tunisie.
Event presentation
Today’s transnational and “digitalized world” (Hayles, 2012) is marked by massive mobility, heavy border crossing, and the incessant negotiation of (and conflict over) frontiers (Appadurai, 1996). The current global shifts and border re-mappings, along with the radical digital transformations, have been strongly echoed in creative, critical, and philosophical productions. Traditional identity “boundaries” are now rethought through groundbreaking poetics, radical aesthetics and original interpretive methods, echoing what Paul Jay detects as a “transnational turn” in current literary and cultural studies (2010). Texts are reread in light of hybrid hermeneutics, multivocal expressions, cultural pluralities, and “non-mainstream” testimonies. The radical alterations that mark our age, along with the ‘maddening’ rise of Artificial Intelligence and digital technologies, have affected the very definition of literature itself. Old ‘truths’ about ‘pure’ literary texts, rigid generic boundaries, the ‘sacred’ canon, literary hierarchies, norms of reception, and conventional readings seem to hold no more (Braidotti, 2013 and Hayles, 2012) in a world whose borderlines are constantly redefined and reshaped. In such a digitalized world, and almost borderless world, our conference seeks to raise a number of questions: how do writers engage with borderlines, trans-nationalism, passage, transfer, migration, relocation, displacement, and other related subject matters? How do these profound changes in our “transnational” world require new literary expressions, narrative and critical paradigms that depart from traditional genre divisions, language hierarchies, regional cataloguing, racial tagging, and other forms of othering?
In cultural studies, transnationality has often been associated with cultural mobility, hence, the free circulation not only of people, but also of their ideas, traditions, and values across nations’ borders. Such a practice is not a modern phenomenon; it is as old as “traditional cultures, [which] are rarely stable or fixed” (Greenblatt, 2009), and even came to be understood as a component of globalization (Klingenberg et al., 2020). Conversely, re-inventing borderlines may invoke, particularly in our contemporary world, the re-mapping and re-arranging of space to assimilate new forms of expansionism and more complex frameworks of colonialism. From “consensual” agreements through “conflictual” interests and power relationships (Avelino, 2021) to Realpolitik and Machtpolitik or “power politics” (de Wijk, 2016), borderlines might, accidentally or systematically, morph within or across its imagined communities (Anderson, 1986) into more co-operative social organisms; or desperately disintegrate as entities. In this sense, transnational identities, understood as dialogical formations shaping power relations, serve as elements within what Mignolo (1998) describes as the “oppositional process of relocating cultures and identities in a conflictive dialogue with the colonial allocation of cultures.” Recent global migration flows and crises, perhaps more shockingly, in the Mediterranean, and the indifferent, at times, cynical reactions from Global North and even from Global South, may equally re-call, if not rebuke the validity of such many pre-established societal models, as cultural diversity, multiculturalism, and superdiversity (Meissner, Sigona, and Vertovec, 2022). Still, beyond the geo-political sphere, the recent global embrace of A.I. technologies have transformed national borders and borderlines into parallel worlds and multiple X spaces. Academically, one way to approach transnationalism and borderlines in cultural studies is to adopt a universal and transdisciplinary understanding, mitigating therefore borders/borderlines. We should move beyond Anderson’s “imagined communities”, and instead, call for de-westernizing academic production of geopolitical knowledge and reinforcing critical reflexivity (Fornäs, 2020). Practically as well as methodologically, in this conference, we urge participants to re(invent) borderlines by deconstructing, re-appropriating, negotiating, and de-colonizing transnational culture within and outside of academia.
Contact details
Please send your abstract to this email address: reinventingborderlines2026@yahoo.com
(Posted 25 November 2025)
Tennis in Literature and Film.
Host and dates: Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Brescia, Italy. 16-17 April 2026.
Deadline for submissions: 31 October 2025.
Event presentation
While Sinner-mania is steadily growing in Italy, a measure of the global hype surrounding tennis is the proliferation in the past few years of literary and cinematic representations of this game. From Andre Agassi’s bestselling autobiography Open to the recent success of Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers, tennis occupies a central place in contemporary pop culture. Yet these are only the latest expressions of an artistic tradition as old as the sport itself, encompassing film and theatre, ‘high’ literature (think of Giorgio Bassani’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis or David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest) and commercial fiction (such as Sophie Kinsella’s debut novel, The Tennis Party, and Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Carrie Soto Is Back), life writing and journalis – not to mention tennis fanatics like Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov, and Martin Amis.
This conference aims to investigate the forms and modes of representation of tennis – both in its modern version and in its early manifestations – in world literature, cinema, and TV series. It will also be the opportunity to promote the impressive tennis library and archive built by Italian TV commentator, journalist, and writer Gianni Clerici (1930-2022), now held at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Brescia (https://brescia-raccoltestoriche-gianniclerici.unicatt.it/).
We welcome 20-minute papers in English or Italian from academics as well as journalists and tennis experts. Topics may include, but are not limited to:
- literary narratives about tennis
- traces of tennis history in literature
- writers who play tennis and tennis players who write
- Gianni Clerici’s literary works about tennis
- tennis on stage
- cinematic representations of tennis
- tennis in TV series
- tennis (auto)biographies
- tennis biopics
- tennis and authorial journalism
- tennis in contemporary commercial fiction
The proceedings will be published in a volume of the double-blind peer-reviewed Quaderni delle Raccolte Storiche series of Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore.
Send an abstract of max. 300 words in the language of your proposed paper together with a short biographical profile to valentina.varinelli@unicatt.it and franco.lonati@unicatt.it. Submission deadline: 31 October 2025.
- Organising Committee: Giuseppe Cosio, Valentina Varinelli
- Scientific Committee: Pierangelo Goffi, Franco Lonati, Francesco Rognoni
Website address
Contact details
CFP
For further details, please check the original call inserted below.
CFP Tennis in Literature and Film_English(Posted 7 May 2025)
Seeing the Other Empire: British Travel Writing and Imperial Rivalry in Europe and the Near East, 1783–1914.
Host and dates: University of Strasbourg, 24 April 2026.
Deadline for submissions: 10 February 2026.
Venue details: MISHA – Salle de conference, 5 allée du Général Rouvillois, Strasbourg.
Event presentation
Though nineteenth-century British travellers could confidently claim their nation’s perceived superiority while in foreign lands, it was becoming obvious that other European nations were catching up. In particular, Russia and France, and, after 1870, Germany, started raising anxieties both for British politicians and travellers. On the other hand, the Ottoman Empire and Qajar Iran were believed to be declining and potentially destined for collapse.
This conference aims to interrogate some of the British visions of rival empires in Europe and the Near East in narrations written between 1783 and 1914. It would be interesting to analyse the practice of imagined colonialism, that is, how the British travellers cast a domineering gaze upon their imperial rivals when travelling in lands that were not colonies of the British crown. Travellers could project superiority while simultaneously revealing deep anxieties. At the same time, military, economic, industrial, cultural and religious rivalry could coexist with forms of cooperation.
We are looking for PhD students and early-career PhD researchers interested in an interdisciplinary approach to history. We ask that contributions engage with travel writings as primary sources. These must be written by British nationals about lands not under their colonial possession; we are particularly interested in contributions on British travel writing on France, Austria–Hungary, the Netherlands, Germany, Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and Iran, but other political entities in Europe and the Near East (but not the Far East) are welcome. Travel writings in British colonies like India are not included within the scope of this conference, and neither are books written by non-British travellers. While we encourage non-fiction travel books, discussions on fictional travel literature are also welcome, so long as the main angle of approach is historical and not purely literary. Relevant academic domains include world history, transimperial history, comparative empires, area studies, cultural studies and geopolitics.
Website address
https://search.unistra.fr/agenda/seeing-the-other-empire 
Contact details
- Arman Martirosyan a.martirosyan@unistra.fr
- Suheyla-Hacer Sahin suheyla.sahin@etu.unistra.fr
CFP
For further details, please check the event original call inserted below.
(Posted 24 November 2026)