Publication and issue: From the European South, no. 19, Fall 2026. Special Issue: Dark Tourism in Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Contexts: Topographies of Suffering, Narrative Constructions and the Consumption of Place(s).
Deadline for proposal submission: 1 October 2025.
Issue edited by Eleonora Federici (University of Ferrara) and Marilena Parlati (University of Padova)
Publication presentation
From the European South invites submissions for a special issue dedicated to exploring dark tourism in colonial, postcolonial and decolonial contexts, with a particular focus on the role literature, language, museum culture and storytelling in general may have in representing, but also cordoning off, global topographies of suffering, such as sites of catastrophes, genocide, environmental change and neocolonial exploitation. The editors of this issue aim to critically examine the complex relationships between dark tourism and colonial legacies, postcolonial realities and imagined communities, and also the possibilities entailed by decolonization processes. We specifically seek contributions that analyze how dark tourism sites are experienced, consumed and represented, especially in relation to the Global South.
With reference to publications about dark tourism (Lennon and Foley, Dark Tourism the Attraction of Death and Disaster 2000; Sion, Death Tourism Disaster as Recreational Landscape 2014), we wish to analyse how sites associated with death and disaster (assassination, slavery, genocide, war, tragic events) become tourist attractions. Linguistic, visual and multimodal elements help to create a representation of these sites as places of memory, education, but also, quite controversially, leisure.
We are also interested in the ways in which the consumption of ‘shadow zones’ shapes these processes, both in the present and in a future-oriented perspective. We are aware that no singling out of ‘one’ memory is less than intensely debatable, since any past idea about national memory as cohesive and intrinsic has luckily often – although not everywhere – been dismantled. Thus, we would also welcome papers that help usher in discussions on the risk that memory sites (dark, in particular) may serve to reinforce overpowering ‘invented traditions’ and monolingual master narratives (see Derrida, The Monolingualism of the Other 1998).
Timeline
- Deadline for abstracts (500 words) and a brief bionote by Wednesday 1 October 2025
- Notification of acceptance will be communicated by Monday 1 December 2025, with completed papers due 1 March 2026.
- FES 19 will be published in Fall 2026
Contact details
Please write to both:
- Eleonora Federici (eleonora.federici@unife.it) and
- Marilena Parlati (marilena.parlati@unipd.it),
with subject heading “FES Dark Tourism Fall 2026”.
CFP
For further details, please check the original call inserted below.
FES 19 Fall 2026 Special Issue Dark Tourism in Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Contexts.docxDownload(Posted 29 May 2025)
Volume: Caring for the Other/ the particular others in 21st-century narratives.
Deadline for proposal submission: 10 November 2025.
Edited by:
- Iwona Filipczak, Assistant Professor of Literary Studies, University of Zielona Góra; i.filipczak@in.uz.zgora.pl
- Joanna Klara Teske, Associate Professor of Literary Studies, The John Paul II University of Lublin; jteske@kul.pl
Publication presentation
Care is fundamental to the development and well-being of any being as well as to fostering a compassionate and equitable world. Care as value serves as a moral compass guiding us toward respect and attendance to others. Going beyond personal relations and the household, care is a value also for society in which human relations may be thinner. Indeed, as ethicists of care suggest, the ethics of care can be a fundament on which morally satisfactory societies might hopefully be built. Care helps bridge gaps created by differences − whether cultural or biological − foster understanding and develop harmonious societies.
In contrast to focus on the human being’s autonomy and independence typical of Western culture, care ethics claims to give primacy to human relationality and interdependence. As argued by Virginia Held, “the ethics of care values interrelatedness and responsiveness to the needs of particular others” (16), it “provides a way of thinking about and evaluating both the more immediate and the more distant human relations with which to develop morally acceptable societies” (43). Recognizing the needs of others and attending to them is at the core of the ethics of care, as is the assumption that we can never live in a void, that we need others to live and to thrive – as persons and as societies. Indeed others contribute to our identity, help us become who we are.
Caring might be one of the most meaningful actions – actions that make life meaningful. It might also be under some circumstances for beings capable of moral discernment a moral obligation. Caring actions may take various addressees – one can care for oneself, for one’s family and friends, one’s animal companions as well as the other. Various problems are involved in these variants of caring. Is self-care to be condemned as egoistic or is it a sine-qua-non condition of one’s ability to care for beings other than oneself? Is caring first of all for one’s family and friends morally acceptable, or should we care for all beings to an equal extent regardless of how we relate to them, regardless of whether they are human or non-human? Is caring for the other possible, given that the other is unlike oneself, along some authors (cf. Levinas) beyond one’s cognitive capacities? There are further issues here: on relationality, if two beings are related to the extent that they constitute each other, is the notion of caring (in a caring relationship) for the other tenable? In other words, can the care ethical view of human relationality be reconciled with the Levinasian notion of the Other?
Introducing his concept of the Other, Emmanuel Levinas focused on another human being in their fundamental alterity, their irrefutable difference from the self, the Other’s transcendence of the self. Most significantly, the face-to-face encounter with the Other creates an ethical obligation to protect them. Outside Levinasian discourse, the concept of the other has been used to denote the inferiority of those who are considered different, resulting in their marginalization and mistreatment. Determined historically and geographically, the concept assumes hierarchies and distance between humans rather than their community; it expresses the attitude of indifference and oppression rather than care and responsibility. Consequently, there appears another set of issues concerning the caring for the rejected other of the feminist, post-colonial, post-humanist and the like discourses. Caring for the rejected other has its own social and political dimensions. Can commitment to caring (practiced in and beyond the sphere of family and personal relations) help dismantle systemic inequities and lead to more equitable societies? Furthermore, care has been typically associated with the female sphere; are practices of care still riddled with the injustices of gender? Also, do our academic practices manifest the stance of caring for the other: respecting their rights and contributing to their liberation?
In the proposed volume we would like to explore various aspects of caring for the other in 21st– century fiction and film. We thereby wish to explore contemporary fiction and film – their potential to delve into moral issues, develop the reader’s empathy, challenge and re-design societal norms, exert political impact.
The editors invite chapters that one way or another consider 21st-century literary and film representations of the theme of care and caring for the other/the particular others. We welcome texts which respond to, among others, the following questions:
- How does fiction problematize the other in the context of care; is it a being that transcends me (as in Levinas’s texts), is it the other who is marginalized and discriminated, is it another human or any cognitive being (animals, androids)?
- How does caring for the other/the particular others expose issues/problems of inequality and injustice: the need to redress the imbalances and harms?
- Is caring for the other/the particular others always beneficial to them or can it be abusive (domineering or demeaning)? Can such harmful effects be prevented?
- How does caring relate to responsibility for the other (all the others, the dependent others, the significant others)?
- Is caring for the other an antithesis to harming them; also, may caring involve violence and, if so, under what constraints?
- How does caring for the other today differ from caring for them in the past (cf. humans caring for the planet)?
- What new literary and cinematic techniques help to foreground or reconceptualize the issues of care, othering and caring for the other?
- How can contemporary fiction and film (re)configure the politics of caring for the other?
Held, Virginia. The Ethics of Care. Personal, Political, and Global. Oxford UP, 2006.
Timeline
- Please send your abstracts of 300-500 words and short bios for consideration by November 10, 2025 to the editors: i.filipczak@in.uz.zgora.pl and jteske@kul.pl.
- Notification of acceptance will be sent by December 10, 2025.
- The final version of the full article of c. 6,000–8,000 words will be expected by March 30, 2026. Before publication, the contributions will undergo a double-blind peer review. Anticipated publication date: 2027
Please follow the MLA stylesheet (9th edition) and use British English spelling.
CFP
For further details, please check original call inserted below.
(Posted 9 September 2025)
Publication: Frankensteinian Resonance: Transtemporal Reanimations in Fiction, Film, and Video.
Deadline for proposal submission: 30 November 2025.
Edited by:
- Assoc. Prof. Ela İpek Gündüz, Gaziantep University, Turkey
- Dr. Ercan Gürova, Ankara University, Turkey
Publication presentation
The proposed edited volume, Frankensteineian Resonance: Transtemporal Reanimations in Fiction, Film, and Video, seeks to provide a rigorous, interdisciplinary exploration of how the Frankenstein mythos continues to evolve, adapt, and resonate across contemporary media landscapes. The volume thus proposes Frankenstein as a transtextual and transtemporal entity, a metaphorical conduit through which trauma, memory, identity, and otherness are endlessly renegotiated. It examines how contemporary rewritings and adaptations, spanning various genres and platforms, reveal the persistence of Frankensteinian concerns with artificial life, the ethics of creation, and the blurred boundaries between human and nonhuman. By assembling approximately 20 original chapters that analyse iconic novels, films, video games, and theatrical adaptations through transtemporal lenses, this collection aims to contribute to Gothic studies, adaptation theory, science fiction criticism, and broader discussions on the posthuman condition. Contributions will be selected through an open international call targeting scholars in literature, film, and cultural studies with PhDs or equivalent credentials.
Please choose one of the topics listed below as the focus of your chapter. Proposals should clearly identify the selected work (novel, film, or media) and your theoretical framework.
Part I – Literary Re-Visitations/ Rewritings
- Frankenstein Unbound (1973) by Brian W. Aldiss
- The Frankenstein Papers (1986) by Fred Saberhagen
- Poor Things (1992) by Alasdair Gray
- The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein (1995) by Theodore Roszak
- The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein (2008) by Peter Ackroyd
- Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013) by Ahmed Saadawi
- Frankissstein: A Love Story (2019) by Jeanette Winterson
- Heart of a Dog (1925) by Mikhail Bulgakov
- Golem (1915) by Gustav Meyrink
- The Sandman (1816) by E.T.A Hoffmann
Part II– Movie/ Theatre/Video Game Adaptations
- Frankenstein (1931) & Bride of Frankenstein (1935) – Dir. James Whale
- The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) – Dir. Terence Fisher
- Young Frankenstein (1974) – Dir. Mel Brooks
- Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994) – Dir. Kenneth Branagh
- Frankenstein (2004) – Dir. Marcus Nispel
- Victor Frankenstein (2015) – Dir. Paul McGuigan
- Frankenstein (2015) – Dir. Bernard Rose
- The Frankenstein Chronicles (2015–2017) – ITV Series
- Frankenstein (1981) – by Victor Gialanella
- Frankenstein – Playing with Fire (1988) – by Barbara Field
- Frankenstein (2007) – by Nick Dear, directed by Danny Boyle
- Frankenstein (2017) a musical theatre adaptation by Eric B. Sirota
- Frankenstein: Through the Eyes of the Monster (1995)
- Frankenstein: Master of Death (2015)
- Frankenstein: Beyond the Time (2016)
- Frankenstein Wars (2017)
- Poor Things (2023)
Timeline
- The abstract submission deadline is November 30, 2025.
- Submission of Complete Chapters (for selected abstracts): March 30, 2026.
- The book is expected to be published in late 2026, following peer review and editorial revisions.
Website address
Contact details
Please send a 300–500 word abstract describing the proposed chapter’s theory/framework, contributions, and structure, and a brief bio (100–150 words) to frankensteinianresonance@gmail.com
(Posted 19 August 2025)
Publication: Bloomsbury Handbook to Kurt Vonnegut.
Deadline for proposal submission: 1 December 2025.
Edited by Susan Farrell (College of Charleston)
Publication presentation
Call for proposals for articles and essays to be included in the forthcoming Bloomsbury Handbook to Kurt Vonnegut. The book will include 25-35 new essays of about 5,000-6,000 words each. No previously published work will be considered.
Topics may include Vonnegut’s novels, short fiction, and other works; Vonnegut and culture/philosophy/war/science; teaching and adaptations of Vonnegut’s work; and Vonnegut’s influence. Proposals on other Vonnegut-related topics will be considered as well.
Timeline
- Abstracts of approximately 200 words are due on December 1, 2025.
- Final papers will be due sometime in late August/early September, 2026.
Contact details
Please send all abstracts and questions to Susan Farrell, at farrells@cofc.edu.
Website and CFP
For further details, please check the publication website inserted below.
Web 
(Posted 28 August 2025)
Publication and issue: Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai Philologia, Irish Studies: Legacies and Futures. Special Issue 3/2026.
Deadline for proposal submission: 15 December 2025.
Guest editors
- Brian Ó Conchubhair (University of Notre Dame), boconch1@nd.edu;
- Erika Mihálycsa (Babeș-Bolyai University), erika.mihalycsa@ubbcluj.ro.
In December 2024, a group of international Irish Studies scholars gathered in Cluj, Romania to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Babeș-Bolyai University’s MA programme in Irish Studies – to this day the only postgraduate degree offering a cross-disciplinary perspective on Irish culture, literature and history at any Central/Eastern European university. When the MA programme, initially designed as Irish Writing and Its Contexts, was created in 1999, Ireland and Central/Eastern Europe were entering a decade of hopes for deeper European integration and democratisation in their regions and worldwide. It was a time that witnessed the rapid globalising of Irish Studies, backed by Celtic Tiger optimism. However, that decade would also bring in far-reaching changes that prompted, in our domains of knowledge and across the humanities, a thorough overhaul of ways of seeing and framing difference. At the start of the Cluj ISMA, global Irish Studies was dominated by postcolonial rehistoricising and recontextualising approaches pivoting on rigorous archival studies. Importantly, the early 2000s saw a definite decline in the understanding of literary culture as part of the anthropological program of “inventing Ireland”, to quote the title of one of Declan Kiberd’s seminal books that to this day underpins our discipline; a transition from culture understood as projecting a shared sense of identity and future, to “after Ireland” (to quote another title by Kiberd), that is, to an understanding of literature as operating in a planetary field, fully enmeshed with other forms and modes of imagining personhood, creaturely life and vulnerability.
Lego, legare: as the Latin etymon of the first word in our title implies, “legacies” translates as chords binding future developments or meshing their potential unfoldings with that which the past bequeaths, in the sense of both an alignment with existing lines of research and an opening up of fields of inquiry towards future possibilities. In fact, in the quarter century since the Cluj ISMA started, literary and cultural studies – Irish Studies included – have shown a pervasive preoccupation with questions of ethics and biopolitics that cut across lines of gender, class, ethnicity, human and nonhuman geographies and habitats. Consequently, the curriculum taught today is informed by corporeal studies, trauma studies, new materialism(s), different posthumanisms, animal studies, and ecocriticism, whose investigations as a rule reveal the ontological and ethical tangle of literary phenomena with earthly life.
Irish culture has often been forced by history to experiment with modes of being, ways of transmission and aesthetic forms that widely deviated from established norms and genres, received notions of the status and social role of culture, and canonical aesthetics. Given the rapid, dramatic changes Ireland underwent since the millennium turn, to the exceptionally progressive post-Celtic Tiger state, Irish culture is again among the “first respondents” to the multiple, intersectional crises affecting all earthlings. Irish culture’s public framing has similarly continued to change. An almost symbolic illustration could be the transition from the “greening” of the towering modernist self exiles, whose names came to adorn Dublin’s contemporary architectural landmarks (the “James Joyce” and “Samuel Beckett” bridges across the Liffey designed by international star architect Santiago Calatrava) to the naming of an offshore patrol vessel participating in UN humanitarian missions after the latter: the LÉ Samuel Beckett, which rescued around 1,000 refuges in the Mediterranean before the pandemic.
Twenty-five years since the founding of ISMA in Cluj, we invite proposals for essays on any aspect that perspectivises these legacies anew, for a retrospective and prospective re-threading of our thoughts on Irish culture. We seek papers that explore Irish literature and its modes of questioning and provoking putative certainties, of subverting established norms and forms that corresponded to social, political and cultural power structures. Proposals related to these and any other aspects of the multifarious “tense future” ahead of us are also welcome.
Submission deadline of completed essays: December 15, 2025.
Articles should adhere to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the journal’s stylesheet: https://studia.reviste.ubbcluj.ro/index.php/subbphilologia/article/view/6341/6042
and should be sent to the following addresses:
CFP
For further details, please check the original call inserted below.
(Posted 23 August 2025)
Publication: Reading for Institutions: Literary Studies after the Institutional Turn. An edited volume in the series REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature.
Abstract Deadline: 15 December 2025.
Manuscript Deadline: 30 September 2026.
Edited by: Florian Sedlmeier and Alexander Starre.
Publication presentation
In the twenty-first century, Anglophone literary institutions have come under pressure from many sides. Novel digital devices destabilize the cultural protocols of paper-based reading in favor of a screen-based visual culture attuned to ever-refreshing content. Even as elegies to the cultural technique of reading still sound from academic journals and newspaper opinion pages, political and economic threats abound: cultural journalism and literary reviewing are slowly dying in understaffed newsrooms; humanities departments are in existential crisis; right-wing agitators attempt to ban books and sabotage public opinion; all while public funding for the arts and humanities is kidnapped by the executors of authoritarian Trumpism. “We live in destructive times,” writes Anna Kornbluh, “on an incinerating planet, over institutional embers, around prodigious redundancy between the plunder of the commons and the compulsive echolalia ‘Burn it all down’” (Kornbluh 2019).
In this dire scenario, a new brand of literary criticism has recently started to reassess the posture of humanist thought vis-à-vis institutionality. Where leftist critique in the wake of thinkers such as Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault has long construed institutions as coercive, pervasive, and disciplinarian forces, the increasingly obvious fragility of cultural institutions has led to renewed interest in the generative, stabilizing, and benign aspects of institutional formations. In the wake of the canon debates of the 1980s and 90s and their attendant critical histories of the institution of literary studies (Graff 1987, Guillory 1993), a tranche of recent scholarship has re-examined the modes of literary production and reception in a field loosely termed the “new sociology of literature” (English 2010) or the “new institutionalism” (Murray 2025). A broad “institutional turn” in the field (Rosen 2019, Liming/Sedlmeier/Starre 2024) has generated multifaceted inquiries into institutional imaginations with specific structures and individual players.
Against this background, we invite contributions to the edited volume Reading for Institutions that reconsider the study of British and American literatures in relation to political, legal, and social institutions and/or the formation of institutional structures in the name of literature, from publishers and periodicals to writers’ groups and the networks of the digital literary sphere. On the one hand, this dual focus has historical and transhistorical relevance. While it prompts questions about the specific conditions of an institutional imagination at distinct historical moments, it also invites exploration of the shifting long durée of such an imagination in Anglophone literary history, from the centers of a “world republic of letters” (Casanova 2004) to its peripheries. On the other hand, the relays between literature and institutions spark a set of methodological and theoretical questions. By default, the study of these relays is an interdisciplinary project, involving fields such as cultural/literary sociology, social theory, book history, publishing studies, law and literature, as well as multiple methods from archival research to statistical work, from ethnography to politically and socially inflected close reading. In fact, some of the most institutionally minded critics in this larger conversation – Sarah Brouillette, Anna Kornbluh, Mark McGurl, Kinohi Nishikawa, Dan Sinykin – are simultaneously invested in close reading as the core humanistic method of knowledge production.
In accordance with Simone Murray’s vision of the “meso space” as a promising future for literary studies and with Kornbluh’s call for a socially attuned reading practice that illuminates and potentially (re)creates new collectives, this edited volume will explore multiple pathways to “read for institutions.”
We seek essays that address topics including, but not limited to the following:
- Theories of institutionalization at the intersection of literary studies and sociology (systems theory, field theory, reflexive sociology, discourse analysis, archaeology of knowledge, actor-network theory)
- Methodological concerns traversing the micro / meso / macro levels alongside close reading systematics
- Institutionalizing class, race, region, and gender, e.g. along genre categories (chick-lit, romance, Black historical fiction, flyover fictions, etc.)
- Historical case studies encompassing both mainstream literary institutions as well as independent, sub-cultural, or radical counterinstitutions
- Relationships of literature to political, legal, and economic frameworks within and beyond national borders
- Literature and shifting conceptions of the public sphere
- Contemporary literature in the marketplace (neoliberalism, platform capitalism, gig economies, precarious authorship)
- Literary institutions and the threat of alt-right / authoritarian governance
- Practicing literary criticism in an institution-building form
We invite short proposals (250 words) for chapters in this volume to be submitted by December 15, 2025. The deadline for finished chapter drafts is September 30, 2026 (max. 10,000 words, incl. bibliography and footnotes). The volume is slated for publication in 2027 in the book series REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature.
Please send your abstracts and a short bio blurb to
- alexander.starre@fu-berlin.de.
- florian.sedlmeier@uni-hamburg.de and
CFP
For further details, please check the publication original call inserted below.
(Posted 20 Septemebr 2025)