Voices: Representation, Recognition, Resistance. Annual Postgraduate Symposium of the Department of English at the University of Malta.
Host and dates: University of Malta. 5-6 June 2026.
Deadline for submissions: 7 March 2026.
Event organised by The Department of English at the University of Malta
Event presentation
Voice is generally thought of as the ability to express thoughts, emotions, and experiences through language. It is not merely a means of communication, but a marker of individuality and agency. In today’s world, there is a sense of urgency to hone one’s voice, to master it, to manipulate it skilfully so as to assert identity and ensure recognition and acceptance. More than ever, it is crucial that our identity be known, primarily to ourselves, so that we can then make our way into the world. What better way to do this than through our voice?
Such an emphasis on voice, however, opens up a host of questions about who and what can have agency and what can indeed be recognised as voice. Is voice necessarily and solely human? Can other voices be heard if we listen closely enough? What might it mean to lend a voice to someone or something, and what might the ethics behind this be? How and why are voices silenced, and how do the hegemonic voices of power speak to us?
While voice denotes the singular, ‘voices’ signals a collective force larger than any one person. It can connote a convergence of individual expressions into a unified frequency that contains difference, be it a social movement, an artistic endeavour, or even a choir. Voices in dialogue create new opportunities for expression and can empower communities through pluralities of understanding. But differences can also be discordant, standing in tension with one another, representing fractures that might remain irreconcilable, always fundamentally at odds.
We are at a point in time where voices can be heard from across the globe, and yet we have never felt so starved for communication. Although voice is commonly understood as a bridge between individuals, it can also be an instrument of isolation and disconnection. Digital platforms enable this proliferation, shaping how expression is produced, circulated, and controlled. As certain voices are amplified and others are marginalised, exploring the theme of voice becomes essential for understanding how power operates in contemporary society.
As AI systems grow more sophisticated in replicating human expression, this exploration becomes even more urgent since the boundary between authentic and synthetic voices is blurred, raising questions about authorship, style, originality, and the preservation of human subjectivity. While AI can enhance communication, its proliferation risks diminishing the value placed on genuine human perspectives and the lived experiences that shape them. Therefore, exploring voice today becomes an essential inquiry into what distinguishes human expression from artificial reproduction, and how society can safeguard the integrity of human creativity in an era where technological imitation is becoming increasingly pervasive.
This urgency is heightened by the fact that, historically, the loudest voices belonged to those with privilege. While the value of the underrepresented voice has been growing steadily since the mid-twentieth century, new forms of censorship and surveillance have intensified the silencing of already marginalised communities. Moreover, there is a persistent tension between speaking authentically and responsibly; to assert a voice without regard for harm is not neutral, and to self-censor for safety may amount to acquiescence.
Attending is an ethical act of rebalancing power, making the unheard audible, and interrogating the structures that determine who and what may speak and who and what must remain silent. This is why when speaking about voice, it is necessary to also attend to its possible inverse: silence. The spaces where voice is absent, forbidden, lost or unrecognised are as powerful as any soliloquy, and the question of how to engage with such absences thus becomes important. Language, literature and art can represent all manner of silences, giving weight to unspoken trauma, registering the deliberate erasure of historical pasts and the systemic silencing of marginalised groups. Attending to such erasure involves an act of witnessing, of ethically listening to a voice even when it might not have the power to make itself heard, exploring its resonances through different uses of language, modes of expression and media.
Hosted by the Department of English at the University of Malta, this Postgraduate Symposium invites us to engage in this urgent exchange: to hone our voices, to attend closely to others, and to critically examine the very fabric of human expression in a world where it is simultaneously amplified, diluted, and surveilled. We invite you to let your own voices be heard, to listen to others, and to critically examine various aspects of human and nonhuman experience as expressed through language, text, film and other forms of expression.
We invite speakers to present a 20-minute paper at our 2026 Postgraduate Symposium. We seek papers that interrogate the literal, metaphorical, and theoretical dimensions of ‘voice’ across language, literature and other forms of artistic expression. We also welcome interdisciplinary submissions that explore the theme in different literary, cultural, philosophical, historical, and digital contexts. Possible avenues include, but are not limited to:
- Voices in non-textual arts and media
- Literary voices; literature and voice
- Textual approaches that are sensitive to voice, style, tone, the auditory
- Voice and authenticity in the age of AI; transhuman and posthuman voices
- Nonhuman and non-anthropocentric voices; ecocriticism and the Anthropocene
- Voices in children’s literature
- Silence as resistance, trauma, or erasure; censorship and autocensorship
- The ethics of listening and representation
- Collective voice in social movements, historical events, and/or digital spaces
- Linguistic approaches towards voice and speech utterances
- Voices lost/gained in translation, adaptation, remediation
- Geographical voice in the Mediterranean context and beyond
- Marginalised and/or fragmented voices; race, disability, gender, orientation, ethnicity
- Authorial voice vis-à-vis cognitive bias; enduring/non-enduring voices
- Voiceless utterances
- Controversial voices
Submissions
The deadline for submissions is the 7th of March 2026. Submitted abstracts should be no longer than 250 words and should be accompanied by a brief biographical note. Please send abstracts to
The symposium will take place in Malta on the 5th and 6th of June, and is open to postgraduate students following courses at M.A., M.Phil., and PhD levels. Accepted speakers will be notified within a fortnight of the submission closing date. This symposium will accommodate both in-person and online speakers – please indicate your preference in the submission email.
(Posted 20 January 2026)
International Conference: Elizabeth von Arnim and Pomerania.
Host and dates: Institute of Literature and New Media, University of Szczecin, Poland. 6-7 June 2026.
Deadline for submissions: 12 January 2026.
Event presentation
The writing of Elizabeth von Arnim (1866-1941, born Mary Annette Beauchamp) was as much a literary outcome of the author’s creative potential as it was a reflection of her individual life story, which in many ways can be seen as a sensitive reflection of the times and places in which she lived. Although Elizabeth von Arnim’s oeuvre is rich and multifaceted, we would like to focus mainly on the first period of her writing. After arriving in Great Britain from Australia, she married the Prussian Count Henning August von Arnim-Schlagenthin at the age of 24; soon afterwards, she left the German Reich’s capital Berlin and moved to her husband’s estate in the small Pomeranian town of Nassenheide near Stettin (now: Rzędziny near Szczecin). In 1910 the estate had to be sold, and the marriage broke up. Elizabeth later remarried, lived in many countries on several continents, and died in the USA. Almost always drawing literary inspiration from the places she lived in and the people she met, including during her stay in Pomerania between 1896 and 1909, Elizabeth wrote works directly set in realities familiar to her. These became the inspiration for her first bestselling novel, Elizabeth and Her German Garden (1898), but also for other works, such as The Solitary Summer (1899) and The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rugen (1904).
We would like to invite you to take part in this conference, which we sincerely hope will bring together different perspectives on Elizabeth von Arnim’s literary works, with a particular focus on regionalist themes, literary geography, geopoetics, and approaches that highlight spatial aspects. We invite abstract submissions for conference presentations and panels. We propose, as a certain conceptual framework, the following topics for papers:
- the work of Elizabeth von Arnim, thematically linked to Pomerania, in a Pomeranian context;
- the literary works of other authors thematically linked to Pomerania around 1900, in the context of Elizabeth von Arnim’s work and the themes she addresses;
- writers writing in Pomerania (around 1900) in the context of Elizabeth von Arnim’s work,
- geopoetics; places, spaces and journeys in von Arnim’s work;
- cultural aspects of women’s literary output in the Pomeranian province around 1900,
- landed estates of the von Arnim family in Pomerania,
- Polish translations of the works of Elizabeth von Arnim,
- reception of the works of Elizabeth von Arnim in Poland,
- reception of the works of Elizabeth von Arnim in Pomerania.
Website address
https://vonarnim2026.wordpress.com 
Contact details:
CFP
For further details, please check the event original call inserted below.
Von Arnim and Pomerania CFP(Posted 11 Decemebr 2025)
Behind the Cloak of Anonymity: Ethical Agency and Cultural Narratives in the Age of Digital Innovation.
Host and dates: Université Côte d’Azur, Nice, France – 1-2 June 2026 / Université Paris-Panthéon-Assas, Paris, France – 8-9 June 2026.
Deadline for submissions: 15 December 2025.
Venue
The conference will take place in two phases:
- the first on June 1 and 2, 2026, at the Carlone Campus of Université Côte d’Azur in Nice; and
- the second on June 8 and 9, 2026, at the Assas Center of Université Paris-Panthéon-Assas in Paris.
Event presentation
This interdisciplinary conference project, led by Suhasini VINCENT (LIRCES) and Daniel HOTARD (CERSA, Paris-Panthéon-Assas), explores the cultural, ethical, and narrative dimensions of digital anonymity. At the intersection of narratology, cultural studies, media ethics, and surveillance, it analyses how anonymous narratives — whether in the form of collective voices, online practices, or whistleblower testimonies — shape and reflect cultural, political, and identity transformations.
Given the complexity that characterizes anonymity in practice, it is worth exploring further the particularities of its narration, its staging, and its political and organizational instrumentation. What conditions make anonymity necessary for expression, cooperation, and judgment? The cultural, ethical, and narrative dimensions of “anonymity” in contemporary digital environments affect both administrative and creative life. With a perspective that combines the techniques of law with those of sociology, political science, cultural studies, and narratology, this project seeks to uncover the cultural transformations that underpin “anonymity’ in practice, through its new or emerging instruments and narrative features.
Websites
https://lirces.univ-cotedazur.fr/manifestations-scientifiques/appels-a-communication https://www.assas-universite.fr/fr/evenements/lanonymat-lere-digitale
CFP
For further details, please check the event original call inserted below.
(Posted 5 November 2025)
Fourteenth Biennial MESEA Conference: Cultural Environments: Spheres, Ethnicity, Corporeality.
Host and dates: Ionian University, Greece. 11-13 June 2026.
Deadline for submissions: 15 November 2025.
Venue details
The conference will be arranged as an onsite conference at Ionian University, Department of Environment, Zakynthos Island Campus, Greece. Located off the west coast of the Peloponnese and south of King Odysseus‟s legendary Ithaca, Zakynthos (also called Zante) is the third-largest of the Ionian islands. With a distinct triangular shape, the island offers visitors the chance to see diverse landscapes: the mountainous north, the fertile plain in the central area with olive groves and vineyards, and the south-east region with sandy beaches and nesting grounds for the loggerhead sea turtle. Celebrated by Homer in The Iliad and The Odyssey, Zakynthos has a complex geopolitical history with the most significant cultural and architectural influence being the Venetian rule (1484-1797), during which the island was called “Fiore di Levante” (“Flower of the East”). The disastrous earthquake of 1953 almost erased the original beauty of “Chora” (central town) while the only areas that escaped destruction are the villages on the northern side. As a popular and budget-friendly travel destination, Zakynthos can be reached by plane and intercity buses from Athens or by ferry from the port of Kyllini in the Peloponnese. In June, there are numerous daily connections (low-cost flights) with major European airports. For further information on Zakynthos Island, please visit: Zakynthos.
Event presentation
The MESEA 2026 conference invites contributions that address the interconnections of Earth’s five spheres – geosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere and cryosphere – from the perspectives of ethnicity, culture, and corporeality. As a response to the current global crises and related historical conditions, the conference brings together and creates a dialogue between anthropocentric and ecocentric perspectives and approaches in multiethnic cultural environments. This includes interdisciplinary discussions of topics such as cultural representation, oceanic/island studies, space and affect, mobilities and borders, bodies and knowledge, patterns of racialization, extractivism, non-human agency, (de)materializations, ecomedia narratives, environmental politics, and many more.
The 2026 MESEA Conference seeks to explore the diversity of cultural environments in the nexus of nature and spatiality, ethnicity, history, and geopolitics. Potential paper and panel submissions can address but are not limited to topics such as the following:
- In what ways does the materiality of Earth create cultural representations in the context of the five spheres? Similarly, how does non-material, digital technology represent nature?
- What kinds of imaginaries and dreamscapes result from the contacts between culture and the natural environment? What kinds of emergent and/or alternative cultural practices are involved in such encounters?
- What is the role of preservation and restoration of culture in diverse spatial environments? How do the tangible and the intangible interlace in the construction of cultural identity?
- How are narratives of culture and the physical cosmos formed and articulated historically in the Anthropocene?
- How does non-human agency figure in cultural narratives?
- What is the role of (trans)corporeality and the material in the making of the new cultural environments?
- How are ethnicity and “race‟ represented in the culture/environment nexus? How do they challenge dominant notions of identity and belonging?
- How do labor histories and narratives of mobility generate new cultural environments?
- In what ways are individual and collective memories of cultural environments (re)framed in ethnic narratives?
- How is ecojustice vocalized and performed in Indigenous and ethnic narratives?
- How do geopolitical changes, crises, and conflicts affect cultural environments?
Confirmed Keynote Speakers:
- Professor Juan Ignacio Oliva (University of La Laguna)
- Associate Professor Christos Karydis (Ionian University)
- Atlantic Studies Lecture TBC
Abstracts submission
Abstracts should be submitted via our website at https://mesea.org/ between August 15 and November 15, 2025. Submitters will receive notification of acceptance by January 10, 2026. Preference will be given to complete panel proposals with an inter/transdisciplinary and/or transnational focus. Panels may not include more than 2 participants from the same institution. Presenters are expected to be members of the association in 2026. MELUS members can also present their papers at the conference. Previous MESEA Conferences have led to high quality publications (https://mesea.org/publications/). As in previous years, this MESEA Conference will generate publications in respected publication venues.
Honoring its commitment to the furthering of early-career scholars, MESEA will again award at least one Young Scholars Excellence Award.
Website address
https://mesea.org/zakynthos-2026
Contact details
Dr Sophia Emmanouilidou, MESEA Programme Coordinator 
emmanofia@gmail.com
CFP
For further details, please check the event website (above) and original call inserted below.
(Posted 17 September 2025)
XXX International James Joyce Symposium: ‘This is Dyoublong’.
Host and dates: The Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland. 15–19 June 2026.
Deadline for paper or panel submissions: 2 February 2026.
Event presentation
The theme for this symposium is doubling/doubles.
We will be delighted to receive proposals about any aspect of James Joyce’s work, his life and legacy, but are keen to read proposals that explore the theme above, or Irish-Polish and Irish-East-European coincidences.
If he could get to the heart of Dublin, Joyce ventured, then he could get to the heart of all cities of the world. This suggests that all cities are potentially doubles of each other. Dublin could find its essence doubled elsewhere: Trieste, Zurich, Paris, Lublin. Or Krakow.
In the 19th century Poland may have seemed like a double of Ireland: a Catholic country in which powerful nationalist feelings and histories expressed a longing for freedom from the rule of dominant neighbours. Krakow, like Dublin, was a lapsed capital city. Indeed, the name of ‘Stanislaus’, the patron saint of Krakow, was popular amongst Irish nationalists, including Joyce’s father and his brother. When Joyce was living in Trieste, Krakow was part of the same Austro-Hungarian Empire. The disintegration of this empire seemed to be reflected in the revolutionary forms now associated with modernism and the avant-garde. How might doubles contribute to the disruption and the shaping of these revolutionary forms?
As a concept, ‘doubles’ effortlessly spawns further considerations as:
mirrors and cracked mirrors, nature and art, reflection and mimesis; inversion and reversal; growth, accumulation, and reproduction (‘doubling their mumper all the time’); the aesthetic technique of extension: repetition, echo, rhyme, copying, repetition; the double entendre; adaptation and translation (‘transluding from the otherman’); the spirit and the letter; duals and dialectic, thesis-antithesis, master and slave; twins and döppelgangers, Siamese twins and double acts, uneasy identifications, uncanny recognitions: Philip Sober and Philip Drunk, Jim and Stannie, Mutt and Jeff, sosie sesthers, Nuvoletta-Nuvoluccia; double vision, double crossing, leading a double life, double or quits.
Presentations and papers, however, need not be restricted to such topics, and speakers at ‘This is Dyoublong’ are invited to explore further new encounters within Joyce’s works and beyond. As well as being a scholarly occasion, the symposium will offer a programme of cultural events designed to show the city at its vibrant and diverse best.
Plenary Speakers
The following scholars and writers have accepted our invitation to address the conference as plenary speakers:
- Joshua Cohen (Pulitzer prize winning author of Witz, Book of Numbers, The Netanyahus)
- Mary Costello (Irish short story writer and novelist, the author of The River Capture and Academy Street, winner of the Irish Novel of the Year award)
- Dr Valérie Bénéjam, University of Nantes
- Dr Julie Weng, Texas State University
Proposals
The deadline for paper or panel proposals is 2 February 2026. Proposals should be sent (as attachments: doc, docx, or pdf) to the academic committee at
To propose an individual 20 minute paper (approx. 2,600 words), please submit a 250-word abstract that includes:
- the speaker’s name and academic affiliation (if applicable) alongside
- the paper title.
To propose a panel, the chair should submit a 500-word abstract for the panel as a whole that includes:
- the names, academic affiliations, and email addresses of all participants;
- the title of the panel as well as the titles of each individual paper;
- the name and affiliation of the panel chair and respondent (if any)
Please also include any access or scheduling requirements in your submission.
Please note that participants are limited to one paper and one non-paper panel appearance (e.g. as panel chair or respondent).
Proposed panels may have a maximum of four speakers, in which case papers should be 15 minutes (approx. 1,950 words). The panel chair may also give a paper, in which instance it is customary for the panel chair to be scheduled last.
CFP
For further details, please check the event original call inserted below.
(Posted 14 November 2025)
46th APEAA Conference: The Times They Are A-Changin’.
Host and dates: University of Lisbon. 18-19 June 2026.
Deadline for submissions: 15 April 2026.
Event organised by The Department of Modern Languages, Cultures and Literatures at NOVA School of Social Sciences and Humanities (NOVA FCSH)
Event presentation
The Department of Modern Languages, Cultures and Literatures at NOVA University of Lisbon – School of Social Sciences and Humanities (NOVA FCSH) invites proposals for the international conference The Times They Are A-Changin’, to be held on June 18-19, 2026, in Lisbon, Portugal.
The motto, borrowed from Bob Dylan’s iconic song, foregrounds the idea that the fields of American and English Studies are undergoing profound transformations. Shifting political realities, technological change, global crises, evolving cultural forms, and new critical frameworks are reshaping how literature, language, history, and culture are studied, taught, and understood. This conference invites scholars to reflect on moments of change—rupture, transition, resistance, and reinvention—within American and English Studies, past and present.
The conference seeks to explore how change, transition, and transformation shape texts, discourses, identities, and methodologies across periods and disciplines.
Suggested Topics Include (but Not Limited To):
Literature and Cultural & American/English Studies
- Literary canons in transition
- Periods of crisis and cultural change
- Contemporary British and American literature
- Marginalized, forgotten, and emerging voices
- Literature and social justice
- Climate fiction, pandemic narratives, and crisis writing
- Changing concepts of identity, race, gender, and class
- Popular culture and social transformation
- Media, technology, and cultural production
- Memory, history, and cultural trauma
- Postcolonial, transnational, and comparative perspectives
Politics and Power in Changing Times
- Literature and culture as responses to political crisis, reform, and revolution
- Democracy, populism, nationalism, and authoritarianism in Anglophone contexts
- Empire, colonialism, and postcolonial political imaginaries
- The politics of race, citizenship, borders, and belonging
- Protest writing, dissent, and activist cultures
- Cold War, post–Cold War, and contemporary geopolitical narratives
- Political rhetoric, discourse, and ideology in literary and cultural texts
- Neoliberalism, capitalism, and class politics
- Surveillance, state power, and individual freedoms
- War, terrorism, and political violence in American and British literature and media
- Identity politics and culture wars
- Political satire, parody, and resistance
Linguistics and Translation
- Language change and variation
- Global Englishes and World Englishes
- Language contact, migration, and multilingualism
- Digital communication and new media discourse
- Sociolinguistic perspectives on change
- Translation and cultural mediation in times of social and political change
- Translation, ideology, and power
- Literary translation and canon formation
- Postcolonial, feminist, and decolonial approaches to translation
- Translation and global circulation of Anglophone texts
- Audiovisual translation, subtitling, and media localization
- Translation technologies and AI-assisted translation
- Retranslation, adaptation, and intersemiotic translation
- Translator agency, ethics, and visibility
- Translation in educational and institutional contexts
Pedagogy & Methodology
- Teaching English and American Studies in changing times
- Digital humanities and innovative research methods
- AI, technology, and the future of the humanities
- Curriculum development and academic practice
Interdisciplinary approaches and comparative perspectives are especially welcome. Papers and panel proposals on any subject that falls under the remit of English and American Studies are also welcome.
Submission Guidelines
- Abstracts of 250–300 words
- Please include a short biographical note (50–100 words)
- Individual papers, panels, and roundtable proposals are welcome
Abstracts should be sent to:
Timeline
- Abstract submission deadline: April 15, 2026
- Notification of acceptance: April 30, 2026
- Conference dates: June 18-19, 2026
Selected papers may be considered for publication in a peer-reviewed volume or journal. We warmly welcome contributions from established scholars, early career researchers, and doctoral students, and look forward to engaging discussions on how the times are—and have always been—a-changin’.
For more information, check the conference website:
https://apeaa2026.wordpress.com
Conference Languages
English/Portuguese
Contact details
(Posted 31 January 2026)
35th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf: Virginia Woolf and Sound.
Host and dates: İstanbul Bilgi University, Turkey, 24-28 June 2026.
Extended deadline for submissions: 15 January 2026.
Venue details: İstanbul Bilgi University, Santral Campus.
Event presentation
The organizers of the 35th Annual International Virginia Woolf Conference warmly invite proposals for individual papers, panels, workshops, and exhibitions that engage with the theme “Virginia Woolf and Sound.” This year’s conference seeks to explore the rich and varied dimensions of sound in Woolf’s writing, her historical and cultural milieu, and the broader literary and artistic landscapes that shaped and were shaped by her work.
As sound studies continue to expand the boundaries of how we understand sensory experience, media, and cultural production, its intersection with Virginia Woolf studies offers rich terrain for rethinking literary form and perception. From the rhythmic structures of her prose to her representations of listening, voice, and acoustic space, Woolf’s work engages with sound not only as aesthetic texture but as a means of exploring subjectivity, embodiment, and social experience. Her experimental prose resonates with the concerns of sound studies: the politics of listening, the materiality of voice, and the acoustic dimensions of space and time. Engaging Woolf through the lens of sound studies not only deepens our understanding of her modernist aesthetics but also opens new interdisciplinary pathways for exploring how literature listens, performs, and constructs meaning through sonic texture.
Proposals are welcome for panels, roundtables, workshops, and exhibitions that take innovative, interdisciplinary, transhistorical, or collaborative approaches to the theme of ‘Virginia Woolf and Sound’. We encourage contributions from scholars at all career stages, independent researchers, students, artists, and readers with a deep interest in Woolf’s work.
Keynote speakers are Anna Snaith, Elicia Clements, and Emma Sutton.
Website address
https://www.bilgi.edu.tr/en/academic/virginia-woolf-conference-2026/call-for-papers
Contact details
CFP
For further details, please check the event original call inserted below.
(Posted 8 November 2025. Updated 16 December 2025)
Representations of Home in Literatures and Cultures in English Sanctuaries and Displacements: Negotiating Home, Refuge, and Belonging.
Host and dates: School of Arts and Humanities, University of Lisbon, 25-26 June 2026.
Extended deadline for submissions: 15 January 2026.
Event organised by The University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies (CEAUL/ULICES).
Event presentation
The RHOME 2026 international conference explores the shifting meanings of home against the backdrop of forced migration, environmental crisis, conflict, and unstable borders. Building on the RHOME project (since 2013) and its 2023 conference on (Dis)locations, this edition examines how home is imagined, remembered, contested, and reconfigured in contemporary Anglophone literatures and cultures. Taking inspiration from Marina Warner’s Sanctuary: Ways of Telling, Ways of Dwelling (2025), the conference asks how notions, such as sanctuary, harbour, and homeland operate today, and how literary and cultural texts negotiate the tensions between exile and return, estrangement and rootedness, presence and absence. The idea of sanctuary – and sanctuary cities in particular – is framed as a liminal, contested space where belonging and non-belonging are negotiated and where dominant power structures may be challenged, drawing on theorists such as Bhabha, Anzaldúa, de Certeau, Lefebvre, and Foucault (especially biopolitics and the politics of visibility, care, and security).
The organisers invite 20-minute papers that critically engage with home in its material, symbolic, affective, and imagined dimensions, with particular emphasis on representations and redefinitions of sanctuary and displacement in English-speaking contexts. Possible topics include:
- Home and (non)belonging
- Sanctuary and the limits of refuge
- Sanctuary cities
- Displacement, exile, and return
- Home and the poetics of memory
- Imaginary homelands and imagined communities
- Home, conflict and war
- Home and the Anthropocene
- Narratives of migration and hospitality
- Un-homing and precarious domesticities
- Language, identity and the construction of home
- English in contexts of refuge and displacement
- The embodied experience of home and displacement
- Topophilia, nostalgia, and affective geographies
- Indigenous homes
- Nature as sanctuary
- Home and spiritualities
- Ageing in Place
- Homes, impairment and disability
- Home and care
- Surviving “homelessness”
- Ecological belonging
- Ecological refugism
Proposals from scholars at all career stages and from creative practitioners are welcome. Abstracts (max. 300 words) should be accompanied by a short biographical note (50 words), the author’s name, institutional affiliation, and five keywords.
Website addresses
Call for papers:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wuFTMGEDBoB0vCEOhnZI7BNCO-b8G-gX/view
Conference website:
https://www.rhome.letras.ulisboa.pt
Contact details:
(Posted 24 November 2025. Updated 8 January 2026)
PASE 2026 Conference. Temporal Matters: Time in Narrative and Linguistic Structures.
Host and dates: University of Rzeszów, Poland. 24-26 June 2026.
Deadline for submissions: 31 March 2026.
Venue details: Onsite venue: University of Rzeszów, Faculty of Philology, Al. Kopisto 2B, 35-315 Rzeszów, Poland.
Plenary speakers
• Lieven Buysse (KU Leuven – Brussels, Belgium)
• Vassiliki Markidou (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece)
• Rafał Molencki (University of Silesia in Katowice)
Event presentation
Time is one of the most fundamental dimensions of human experience. It structures perception and cognition, organizes linguistic systems, and underpins narrative and cultural forms. At the same time, it resists stable definition, being constantly reinterpreted through historical, social, and technological change.
Our conference will explore the multifaceted role of time in textual, linguistic, and cultural production, bringing together scholars from literary studies, linguistics, translation studies, and related disciplines to reflect on how temporal frameworks inform meaning-making, identity, and communication. The conference aims to foster dialogue between different approaches to time: theoretical and empirical, diachronic, and synchronic, human and more-than-human, as well as local and planetary.
How do languages encode temporal relations, and how do these linguistic patterns shape our understanding of the world? In what ways do literary and cultural narratives manipulate, compress, or expand time to produce particular aesthetic, emotional, or ideological effects? How do translation and interpretation negotiate temporal distance between texts, contexts, and audiences? In an era marked by ecological crisis, digital acceleration, and historical revision, questions of temporality have gained renewed urgency. The 2026 PASE Conference will provide a space for reflecting on these issues and for examining the diverse temporal dimensions of linguistic, narrative, and cultural practices.
We welcome contributions from a broad range of perspectives, including literary analysis, theoretical approaches, stylistics, sociolinguistics, discourse studies, and historical linguistics. Possible topics may include, but are not limited to:
In Literary and Cultural Studies:
- Narrative time in fiction, poetry, drama, and interactive media (e.g., video games)
- Temporal poetics and genre: historical fiction, modernist time, speculative time, dystopian futures
- The politics of time and identity: colonialism, modernity, trauma studies, queerness
- More-than-human temporalities: vegetal, animal, and fungal time in literature
- Temporality in critical theory (e.g., Bakhtin’s chronotope, queer temporality, deep time, planetary time)
- Representations of memory, nostalgia, and anticipation
- Time and affect: boredom, urgency, waiting, and crisis
- Non-linear storytelling and disrupted chronologies
- Indigenous ways of timekeeping
- Temporal aesthetics in film, media, and digital literature
- The Anthropocene and geological time in ecocriticism
In Linguistics:
- Tense, aspect, and modality across languages
- The linguistic encoding of time in narrative and conversation
- Historical change and language evolution
- Temporal expressions in pragmatics and semantics
- Cognitive approaches to time in language
- Sociolinguistic perspectives on time (e.g., temporality in online discourse, workplace communication)
- Time in metaphor, idioms, and conceptual grammar
- Temporal perspectives on language acquisition constructs
- Temporal dynamics of teacher development
In Translation Studies:
- Translation across historical periods
- Translation as historical intervention
- Retranslation as a response to temporal change
- Evolution of translation norms over time
- Temporal fidelity in translation
- Temporal ethics in translation practice
- Translation reception and temporal context
- Temporal aspects of the translation process
- Time constraints and translator decision-making
- New translations of literary works updated to suit contemporary conventions
- Reception of translation over time: revision and obsolescence
- Temporal distance between the source text and the target readership involving cultural explicitation
- Concepts of cyclical, linear, or fragmented time in literature and their translatability
- Comparative studies of translations across decades or centuries
We also welcome proposals for presentations and panels on a variety of topics, including those not directly related to the main theme of the conference, as long as they align with the broader goals of the event.
Submissions
A 300-word abstract and a brief bio note, including your affiliation, should be submitted by March 31, 2026 as an email attachment to
Timeline
- Deadline for submission: March 31, 2026
- Notification of acceptance: April 10, 2026
Website and CFP
For more information, please visit
https://www.ur.edu.pl/pl/konferencje/pase-2026-temporal-matters
Please also check the event original call inserted below.
(Posted 9 November 2025)
International Interdisciplinary Conference Speculative Narratives Beyond Consensus Reality: Navigating the Senses from Wonder to Horror.
Host and dates: University of Aveiro, Portugal. 29-30 June and 1July 2026.
Deadline for submissions: 15 April 2026.
Event organised by
- Culture Popular Group
- Maria Sofia Pimentel Biscaia
- António Monteiro de Oliveira
Event presentation
This event will explore the transformative potential of speculative narratives – across literature, film, visual arts, and other media – in breaking free from the boundaries of “consensus reality.”
“No Martians”, explains Margaret Atwood in In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination on what separates her writing from science fiction (2011: 6). Instead, locating herself in the sphere of speculative fiction, she describes it as the narrative of “things that really could happen but just hadn’t completely happened” (2011: 6). Promoted by Marek Oziewicz as a “meta-generic fuzzy set supercategory”, speculative fiction sets itself against “consensus reality” as a cultural and literary tool of investigative exploration which rejects mimetic approaches (2017: 1).
Despite their conceptual slipperiness, the term and field of speculative fiction are now mature. The term “speculative fiction” itself made its first appearance in Robert A. Heinlein’s “On the Writing of Speculative Fiction” in 1947 and today the umbrella of speculative fiction covers a wide variety of literary traditions from which various hybrids have emerged and continue to do so. Feminist speculative fiction, like other types of spec-fi, thrives in the undecidability of its identity, taking advantage of the porous boundaries between fields such as science fiction, fantasy, and horror. In the Introduction to Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology (2015) by Ann Vandermeer (editor of the horror magazine Weird Tales) and Jeff Vandermeer, with whom she has co-edited recognised collections such as the Steampunk series (2008, 2010 and 2012) and The New Weird (2007), promote what they describe as “an ongoing conversation” which is fraught with contradictions (2015: 1). Speculative fiction’s political value has proven to be immense, and it has been making contributions not only to feminist literature but also to indigenous literature, refugee and migration fiction, cli-fi, and anti-globalisation writing. Dwelling in a cultural cross-genre third space, speculative work uses gothic elements, re-animating vampires, ghosts and zombies; it creates dystopian post-apocalyptic futures, fractures fairy tales, revises the past through alternate/alternative histories (e.g. Winepunk on Port wine powering a monarchy in the North of Portugal), and materialises trans and posthuman aspirations. Speculative fiction embodies a worldwide political response of human creativity, attempting to imagine potential futures during a significant shift towards a globalised human experience. In imagining/making these futures the responses navigate between anxiety and hope (Braidotti 2011, 2019), but the urge to create these speculative imagined communities cannot be repressed.
Themes
- The Limits of Reality: Horror, Weird Fiction, Slipstream, and Magical Realism
- Feminist Pasts, Feminists Futures in Speculative Fiction: Gender, Power, and Liberation
- Brighter and Darker Futures in Punk Nations: Steampunk, Biopunk, Dieselpunk, Solarpunk, Winepunk, and others
- Cybercultures and Futurisms: Digital Futurism, Retrofuturism, Afrofuturism
- Superheroes in the Age of Crisis: A Cultural and Critical Approach
- Alternate Histories and Reclaiming the Past: Identity, Memory, and Power
- Critical Animal Studies and Speculative Narratives
- Care and Social Justice in Cli-fi and Crip Theory: Ecoability and the Intersection of Disability, Critical Animal Studies and Environmental Futures
- Globalisation and Mobility in Speculative Fiction: Transnational Identities and the Politics of Movement
- Economic, Social and Eco-Sustainability in Speculative Fiction: Post-Capitalist Speculative Economies
- Intersectionality in Speculative Fiction: Navigating Race, Gender, and Power
- (Post)-Apocalyptic Narratives: Survival, Ethics, and the End of the World
- Dystopia and the Politics of Control: Visions of Totalitarian Futures
- Speculative Fiction as a Reflection of Technological Anxiety: From Cybernetics to Artificial Intelligence
- Radical Futures and Dys/Us/Utopian Thought in Speculative Narratives
- Speculative Fiction and the Ethics of Posthuman Life
- Posthumanities and the New Frontiers of Medical, Environmental, and Digital Futures
Keynote speakers
- Ana da Silveira Moura/AMP Rodriguez, author, founding member of Invicta Imaginaria, cocoordinator of the Creative Europe project Hypothesis You Preserve (Portugal, Spain and France), University of Vigo
- Camilla Grudova, author of The Doll’s Alphabet (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017), Children of Paradise (Atlantic Books, 2022), The Coiled Serpent (Atlantic Books, 2023)
- Michael Lundblad, Professor of American Literature and Culture, University of Oslo
- Nelson Zagalo, Professor of Multimedia, University of Aveiro
Website address
Under construction
Contact details
cllc-speculativeconference.aveiro@ua.pt msbiscaia@ua.pt ajmo@iscap.ipp.pt
CFP
For further details, please check the event original call inserted below.
(Posted 21 January 2026)