Conference: “Now is the Winter of Our Discontent”: Shakespeare, Marlowe and Contemporary Politics.
Location and dates: “Dunarea de Jos” University of Galati, Romania, 6-8 November 2025.
Deadline for proposal submissions: 30 June 2025.
Venue details:
- Multimedia Hall, “Dunarea de Jos” University of Galati, Rectorate Building, 47 Domneasca St., Galati, Romania/
- “Dunarea de Jos” Cultural Centre
- Library of “Dunarea de Jos” University of Galati.
- + Online sessions – Zoom Meetings
Event description
This event is an interdisciplinary conference on literary relevance and political thought organised by the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Cross-border Faculty, “Dunarea de Jos” University of Galati, Romania.
In an age defined by populist movements, protest culture, and the reshaping of public discourse, William Shakespeare’s and Christopher Marlowe’s works still resonate with contemporary political concerns. Their plays, rich in explorations of power, authority, and resistance, offer ground for critical inquiry into the politics of our time. From Shakespeare’s nuanced depictions of sovereignty and dissent to Marlowe’s dramatisations of ambition, ideological conflict, and social transgression, early modern drama remains deeply relevant in interrogating the structures and crises of political life today.
This interdisciplinary conference seeks to explore how the political energies embedded in the works of Shakespeare and Marlowe can shed light on contemporary debates about power, protest, legitimacy, voice, and representation in an increasingly fractured public sphere. It aims to bring together scholars from across literature, political theory, media studies and performance studies to re-examine these canonical texts through the lens of contemporary politics, activism, and cultural discourse.
Conference themes may include (but are not limited to):
- Shakespeare and Marlowe on power, authority, and political legitimacy
- Protest, rebellion, and dissent in early modern drama and contemporary politics
- Public rhetoric, persuasion, and populism in Shakespeare and Marlowe
- Race, gender, and intersectionality in early modern political drama
- The politics of tyranny and ambition: from Tamburlaine to Macbeth
- Adaptations of Shakespeare and Marlowe in film, digital media, and activist theatre
- Religion, extremism, and ideological conflict in Doctor Faustus, The Jew of Malta, and Shakespearean drama
- Political performance: theatricality and rhetoric in power structures
- Shakespeare and Marlowe in the public sphere: representation, audience, and civic discourse.
Junior Scholar Spotlight Session: Emerging Perspectives on Early Modern Drama and Contemporary Politics
This session will feature early-career researchers (M.A. students and doctoral candidates) engaging with critical approaches to William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe in political and interdisciplinary contexts. It aims to provide them with increased visibility, scholarly dialogue, and professional encouragement within an international academic setting.
Suggested topics for Spotlight:
- Shakespeare and Marlowe in youth protest cultures and contemporary resistance/Gen Z political readings
- Digital activism, quotation, and remix culture in early modern political drama
- Post-pandemic politics in adaptations of Shakespeare and Marlowe
- Intersectional politics and outsider figures in Edward II, Othello, and beyond
- Creative-critical approaches: performative criticism, podcasting, visual art
- Marlowe’s radical ambition and Shakespeare’s populist rhetoric in today’s public sphere
- Early modern drama in the age of post-truth and political illusion
- Creative-critical approaches: performative criticism, podcasting, digital art, etc.
This section will be judged by experts in Renaissance Studies.
The best papers will be awarded prizes and published in the journal edited by the Cross-border Faculty, ACROSS – http://across.ugal.ro
“I understand a fury in your words. But not the words” (Othello IV.2) – Translating Shakespeare and Marlowe for contemporary staging
This section will feature a round table and a translation workshop dedicated to students in Translation and Interpreting Studies, conducted under the guidance of members of the team involved in the (re)translation of Renaissance drama into Romanian. With a particular focus on the works of Shakespeare and Marlowe, the sessions will explore strategies for rendering these texts not only accurate and faithful but also performable in contemporary Romanian.
Book launch:
Christopher Marlowe, Opere III (Tamerlan cel Mare [partea I]– translated by Oana Celia Gheorghiu and Evreul din Malta – translated by Florența Simion), București, Tracus Arte, 2025.
A stage! A stage! My kingdom for a stage!
Admitting that drama, however philological in nature, ultimately comes alive on stage, the conference will feature a dedicated performance section. Undergraduate and graduate students in Acting and Performance from the Faculty of Arts, “Dunarea de Jos” University of Galați, will bring selected soliloquies and dramatic excerpts to life. These performances, curated under the guidance of their mentor – Senior Lecturer, PhD, and actress Oana MOGOȘ (“Fani Tardini” Dramatic Theatre) – will underscore the pedagogical value of embodied practice, illustrating how performance deepens textual understanding and fosters critical engagement through artistic expression.
Submission Guidelines
- Please submit a 200-word abstract for a 20-minute presentation and a 100-word bio, including institutional affiliation, to oana.gheorghiu@ugal.ro by 30 June 2025. Please specify “spotlight” if you want to be considered for this section.
- Notification of acceptance: 10 July 2025.
A selection of papers will be proposed for inclusion in a special journal issue indexed by ERIH PLUS and Scopus.
Contact details: Associate Professor PhD Habil Oana-Celia Gheorghiu, oana.gheorghiu@ugal.ro
CFP
For further details, please check the original call inserted below.
CFP Shakespeare(Posted 30 March 2025)
Winter Doctoral Symposium.
Location and dates: NOVA University of Lisbon. 10 -11 November 2025.
Deadline for proposal submission: 30 June 2025.
Venue details: NOVA University of Lisbon School of Social Sciences and Humanities – Avenida de Berna, Lisbon.
Organised by The Centre for English, Translation, and Anglo-Portuguese Studies (CETAPS) – NOVA University of Lisbon School of Social Sciences and Humanities.
Event presentation
This symposium intends to bring together doctoral candidates and early-career researchers from various academic fields to discuss their work or other topics related to literatures and cultures in English. This Doctoral Symposium will serve as a platform for networking and sharing experiences as early career academic researchers in a supportive and collaborative environment.
We welcome paper proposals that explore a range of topics in the areas of literature and culture in the English language. Proposals for papers can relate, but are not limited, to the following topics:
- Contemporary British and American literatures and cultures
- Interdisciplinary approaches to literature and culture
- Anglo-Portuguese Studies
- Global literatures in English
- Postmodern and postcolonial perspectives on literature and culture
- Queer Studies and LGBTQ+ literature
- Ecocriticism and environmental humanities
- Intersections between science, literature, and culture
- African-American literature and culture
- Asian-American literature and culture
- Diaspora and migration in literature and culture
- Literary adaptations and transmedia narratives
- Intersections between videogames, literature, and culture
- Digital Humanities and literature
- Translation Studies
- Teaching English as a Second Language
- Literature and popular culture
Please note that this list is not exhaustive, and we welcome innovative and interdisciplinary proposals on any topic related to literatures and cultures in English.
Keynote Speakers:
- Jéssica Bispo (CETAPS – FCSH/NOVA)
- Joana Caetano (CETAPS – FLUP)
Contact details
Any inquiries should be sent to novadoctoralsymposium@gmail.com
CFP
For further details, please check the original call inserted below.
(Posted 24 May 2025)
International conference: Naming, Renaming: the Power of the Name in English-Speaking Cultures and Literature.
Location and dates: Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3, France. 13-14 November 2025.
Deadline for proposal submissions: 25 March 2025.
Naming is an act that first echoes Saussure’s question of the arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign (does a sign have meaning in itself or does it only designate a referent?), but also questions the performative power of language. If one can do things with words (Austin, 1962), then naming a place, a person, a community, an accent, an ethnic, political or social group contributes to granting it a linguistic reality and recognizing its extralinguistic existence. Paradoxically, naming or renaming shapes and orders the way we perceive the world, but it also entails exclusionary mechanisms (Bourdieu, 1980). Thus, the original act of naming constitutes a form of violence that imposes boundaries and attempts to define identities that are by nature fluid and multilayered (Derrida, 1987-1993; Bhatia, 2005), and the act of renaming can lessen or heighten this violence. These observations will lead us to consider several approaches.
Papers related to onomastics will be welcome; studies on the subject (Hough, 2016) examine the meaning and motive behind proper names, whether in toponomastics (place names), anthroponymy (personal names) or socio-onomastics (studies of proper names in social context). Sociology and history are also interested in the meanings and evolution of names of places, particularly in public spaces (Mask, 2020a). For instance, the Black Lives Matter movement has revived debates around these names, both in the United Kingdom and in the United States (Mask, 2020b).
From an applied linguistics perspective, attention could be paid to the coexistence of several signs for the same referent, such as a human referent in a sociocultural and interactional approach (coexistence of first and/or last names, nicknames, or even insults). We could also consider the creation, evolution, integration mechanisms and role of lexical or semantic euphemistic neologisms in language, as related to the concept of euphemism treadmill (Allan and Burridge, 2006).
Submissions in the field of English for Specific Purposes could focus on the terminology used to name objects, concepts and notions in a specific field, as well as the translation of these new terminological units. Moreover, researchers label and name certain concepts, behaviours or sociological and historical phenomena, which some political movements appropriate, hijack and distort in order to demonize them (critical race theory, intersectionality…) (May, 2014; Ray, 2022). This relationship between academia and political discourse is worth studying.
Sociologists analyse the evolution of identity markers (racial and gender categories, etc.). These names or labels (Becker, 1966) can be assigned, adopted, claimed and/or undergo a semantic shift: these changes reveal transformations in power dynamics and the acceptability of “deviant” behavior (Goffman, 1963). Naming can also reflect the agency of dominated
people and groups; it can constitute a choice and a statement about the way they want to present themselves and be perceived. A choice as personal as identity markers (first and last name) can
be a political act (Almack, 2005; Boxer, 2005; Benson, 2006; Edwards and Caballero, 2008; Patterson and Farr, 2017). It can also be a matter of reclaiming a term historically used as an insult in a perspective of self-affirmation and empowerment (Rand, 2014). In healthcare studies, presentations could examine the way “pathologies” and “disordered” are named and considered over time— those labels may be questioned or not by those they refer to, as is the case for addiction and trans identities among others (Stroumsa, 2014; Castro-Peraza et al., 2019).
Naming practices are also examined in literature, as authors have often explored the subtleties of identity and questioned the role of names in its construction. While names reflect character traits, histories and symbolic meanings, the process of (re)naming often implies the transformation or rejection of identities, as a result of personal or cultural struggles. The way characters grapple with their names reflects their journey of self-discovery, resistance or acceptance in the text. Literature thus reveals the act of naming as a complex, unstable process that resists definitive closure, between the desire for a fixed meaning and the reality of inherent fluidity or multiplicity. Through naming, we can open a debate on how readers are invited to explore the complex layers of meaning in a text, questioning and redefining notions of self, identity, society and reality. This exploration also raises the question of what is not named, of what is at stake in silence, or even silencing. This can be unveiled through stylistic and narratological choices, thus the choice to refuse or deny a name becomes central in the interpretative process.
Among the possible avenues of inquiry, we will consider papers that fall under the following themes:
- Naming, renaming people, characters and places: naming practices in immigrant communities and by transgender people; choice of family names, in particular in LGBTQ+ families; naming in the context of slavery; influence of religion on naming practices (parents, conversion…); (mis)pronunciation of foreign names; naming of communities; activism around names in public space: cities, schools, streets; onomastic and narrative analysis.
- Reclaiming names: reclaiming “insults” as a way of asserting an identity (queer, N-word, tranny…); political use or exploitation of scientific terms or concepts (freedom, critical race theory, intersectionality, etc.).
- Power dynamics at work in naming processes: who has the power to (re)name? What are the political, symbolic consequences of naming people and groups? Which factors influence the choice of a name? Renaming in order to politically demonize?
- Naming as classification: (re)defining literary and cinematographic genres; evolution of names for “medical disorder” between pathologization or empowerment; classifying acts and practices in order to forbid or punish them more or less severely (war on terror, war on drugs, “obscenity”…)
Proposals of around 500 words in English or in French accompanied by a short biography should be sent to namingconference@gmail.com before March 25th, 2025. We will consider proposals analysing any English-speaking country, or adopting a comparative approach. All approaches to the subject are welcome: historical, judicial, sociological, political, cultural (literary, artistic, cinematographic…), economic. We welcome proposals from experienced researchers, doctoral and other graduate students.
CFP
For further details, please check the original call inserted below.
(Posted 10 January 2025)
Conference: Materiality Matters: Figurations of Comic Bodies and Things.
Location and dates: Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI) Essen, Germany. 13-15 November 2025.
Deadline for proposal submission: 15 June 2025.
Organised by The Network Comic Literacies – Kulturtechniken des Komischen (Cultural Techniques of Comedy)
Keynote on Thursday, November 13, 2025: Oliver Double (University of Kent)
In comic figures such as clowns, amateurs, or spinsters, in the masks of the commedia dell’arte or in the pies thrown in slapstick, as well as in theatre, film, or text—comedy always manifests itself through bodies and things. The first annual conference of the network Comic Literacies – Kulturtechniken des Komischen (Cultural Techniques of Comedy) thus explores perspectives on the material dimensions of comedy and the comic. Discussing and comparing case studies from different contexts and disciplinary backgrounds, we aim to outline comic phenomena as constituted via cultural techniques that are shaped by the materiality of various cultural, corporeal, and media practices. In doing so, the conference draws special attention to acts of figuration: How can we conceptualize the staging of comic bodies and things as matters of design and formation?
When actions comically fail or take unconventional turns, relations between the ideal and the material are put to the test. It is also where the possibilities and the potential of bodies and things come into focus. Objects break, bodies lose control, they become “autonomous,” but then are subjected to centrifugal force and gravity—or somehow escape the laws of physics. The comic effects that erupt here point to comedy as a fleeting and dynamic event in space and time that is never repeated under the exact same conditions and that always arises in interaction with an audience (Müller-Schöll 2003; Roof 2018). Sometimes, just zooming in at the right moment to highlight materiality is enough to transform an object into a comic artifact. Much like social interactions that succeed not through rational decision-making but through the multisensory and material interplay of bodies and things (Alkemeyer 2008; Hirschauer 2015), comedy emerges through pre-reflective, embodied doing in actu.
In various ways, Cultural Studies have addressed how comedy is performed with and through bodies and things (Erdmann 2003; Müller-Kampel 2003; Lehmann 2011; Peters 2012; Velten 2017; Hennefeld 2018; Kling 2018). Expanding on this research, the conference will focus on the mediating functions of material corporeality and objecthood. It aims to respond to recent calls for a closer examination of comedy’s tacit knowledge (Wilkie 2020, xvii), i.e., the existence or lack of practically embodied sensory, experiential, and detail-oriented knowledge in the material production and figuration of comic bodies and things.
Whether the comic arises from a custard pie fight or a cacophonous honking concert (Krankenhagen 2024), we ask: What do materialities (fail to) express or process? Diabolical as it can be, comedy is often to be found in the details (Fluhrer 2015). How do bodies and things, by way of their quantity or quality, make themselves visible, audible, or tangible in comic ways? Comic techniques often directly (trans)form materialities, altering their semantic dimensions— e.g., when objects turn from commodities into tools, from fetishized objects into waste (Scholz/Vedder 2018), or when intense repetition shifts focus from content to form. Bodies and things may be recognized as comedic, they may prompt a knowing smile, but they may also be perceived as funny in the sense of strange, even uncanny, as cringeworthy, or simply as “too close”, thereby transgressing the boundaries of comedy (Lockyer/Pickering 2005).
The conference invites case studies that explore the mediating function of materialities with regard to comic effects. Relevant questions include: How can we reconstruct acts of figuration in the production of comic bodies and things? How does comedy as a cultural technique draw on historically situated materialities? How do comic figurations produce epistemological uncertainty, tipping points or loss of control? And how can focussing on comedy’s praxeological knowledge bring forth new approaches to comedy?
Submissions
Please submit abstracts (max. 500 words) and a short bio (max. 100 words) by June 15, 2025, to sarah.tober@kwi-nrw.de. The conference will be held on November 13–15, 2025, at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI) Essen (Germany).
Social event
Participants will also attend an artistic performance at PACT Zollverein (https://www.pact-zollverein.de/, Performing Arts Choreographisches Zentrum NRW Tanzlandschaft Ruhr).
CFP
For further details, please check the original call inserted below.
(Posted 17 May 2025)
Conference: Expressivity, Bodies and Language in the Twenty-First Century.
Location and dates: University of Montpellier – Paul Valéry, France. 20-21 November 2025.
Deadline for proposal submissions: 3 March 2025.
Organised by Sandrine Sorlin (University of Montpellier – Paul-Valéry /IUF – EMMA) and Julie Neveux (Sorbonne University – CeLiSo)
Presentation
That language can affect bodies is nothing new. In How to Do Things with Words (1962), Austin theorized “perlocution” as the effects generated by the act of saying something. Perlocutionary acts do imply the presence of the body. But the nature of these bodily effects has never been thoroughly analysed, remaining at an abstract level that made it difficult to think both the corporal impact of language and the corporality of language itself. The language of emotions and emotions in language, in their representational and expressive dimensions, have begun to attract the attention of linguists (Wierzbicka 1999, Fenigsen et al 2000, Majid 2012, Lüdtke 2015, Gutzmann 2019, Alba-Juez and Mackenzie 2019, Trotzke and Villalba 2021, Rett 2021, Cotte 2023) literary scholars and stylisticians who have embarked on the ‘affective’ or ‘emotional’ turn (Keen 2007, Burke 2010, Hogan et al. 2022) and, more recently, pragmaticists (Wharton and Saussure 2023, Alba-Juez & Haugh in press). But the concrete effects of emotions and expressive language on bodies – which can be immediate or long-lasting, have lingered in the shadows of analysis.
Grounded in a post-dualist approach, this conference aims to center the body in order to shed light on how language and bodies interact and “interaffect” beyond the mere perlocutionary act of language. One of the goals is to investigate the effects of insulting, racist, homophobic, xenophobic or transphobic discourse on its targets’ bodies (as well as those of the locutors). The Black-American novelist, Claudia Rankine, poignantly evokes the body fatigue provoked by implicitly racist remarks, making the “sigh” in Citizen, An American Lyric (2014) the mode of expression of an asphyxiated and powerless body in the face of invisible microaggressions. The impact of misgendering on gender non-conforming people, of certain discourses on neurodiverse people also deserves recognition from their own embodied perspective. A cultural politics of bodily affects from a linguistic point of view is overdue to uncover how emotions affect our bodies and language and what emotions make us do and say – a continuation of the work brilliantly engaged by Sara Ahmed in The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2014).
The body is not, of course, to be severed from the mind. Cognition and emotions have been shown to be inextricably linked (Damasio 2000) and cognitive linguists, in the steps of phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty (1973) have highlighted the embodied grounding of linguistic constructions. For Ruthrof (2000, vi) though, they have not gone far enough in reinstating the body “at the base of linguistic communication”. Human thought is now known to be indissociable from an organism’s embedded activity. According to enactivists indeed, we experience the world with our whole bodies, “enacting” the world in an interactive engagement with it (Noë 2004, Hutto and Myin 2013, Di Paolo et al 2023). The time has come for human sciences to embrace post-dualist approaches (Lüdkte 2015). One may therefore ask how cognitive, enactive but also pragmatic theories can concretely account for the way bodies are affected and exploited by and in language when it comes to responding to environmental causes for instance or, more insidiously, believing in conspiracy theories?
The year 2016 proved to be a turning point precipitating a renewed relationship to truth (see Frankfurt 2005 on bullshit and Neveux 2024 on satirist Stephen Colbert’s coinage of ‘truthiness’ in 2006 as harbingers of the phenomenon). While the lexical formations “post-truth” and “truthiness” account for a new, more subjective and emotionally-grounded relationship to truth, the way it acts and relies on bodies has yet to be fully interrogated. The populist rhetoric and style (Moffit 2016) as exemplified in pro-Brexit discourses, strived to elicit “gut reactions” against (im)migrants. They are construed as invaders intent on stripping residents bare, tapping into the ancestral “us versus them” mindset that Lahire (2023) has shown to be central to human evolution. Is it possible to assess the effects produced by linguistic choices regarding self and other presentation in terms of embodied cognition? Can we measure the bodily impact of Trump’s hyperbolic language on both his followers and anti-Trumpians when he claims that immigrants “are eating pets in Springfield” (during the Harris-Trump presidential campaign on September 10th, 2024)? Emotions seem to be central to polarizing discursive strategies and yet to have been mostly overlooked in politics (Wolak and Sokhey 2022, Shah 2022).
Body and therapy through language is another field welcomed by this conference as it will focus on the effects of language – in particular metaphorical devices – on bodies and also how pained/hurting bodies affect language in return (Steen 2022, Colston et al 2023, Liu et al. 2024, Lugea 2022, Semino 2023). Positive emotions (joy, gratitude, hope) as studied in psychology (see Fredrikson 2001 among others) also need further linguistic investigation. If psychology has long concentrated on negative emotions (fear, guilt, sadness, etc.), experimental research has demonstrated the benefits of activating positive emotions on health, cognitive abilities and well-being. The sciences of language would perhaps benefit from a cross-disciplinary perspective between language/interactions and positive emotions. This conference will thus seek to assess what this research can bring to pragma-linguistic and discourse analysis, by focusing on the bodily effects of certain speech acts (compliments, flattery, etc.), of polite and generous discourse on the bodies of those who receive them as well as those who produce them: how good can words make us feel? What kind of language triggers empathy, defined as perspectival alignment? Can empathetic language “take care” of bodies as it may have done during the Covid 19-related pandemic that compelled people to remain at a safe bodily distance?
This two-day event will consider all contributions addressing “in the flesh” effects and characteristics of language, highlighting the way bodies can be affected by – or pulled into – linguistic forms, whether negatively, positively, or else, with an eye to assessing in turn the impact of such bodily effects on decision-making and/or state of mind (Bottineau 2008). The sources of analysis need to be language-based (discourse of any genre or interactions of any kind) but the corpora can be found on a wide variety of media (online discourse, forums, interviews, fictional discourse, etc.).
Approaches from specialists of discourse analysis, pragmatics, stylistics, cognitive linguistics, but also enactivism, (social) psychology, sociology, anthropology, political science and philosophy in connection with discourse or interactions are all welcome.
Proposals and timeline
- Deadline for submission: 3 March 2025
- Notification of acceptance: 15 April 2025
Proposals of around 300 words to be sent to sandrine.sorlin@univ-montp3.fr and julie.neveux@sorbonne-universite.fr, along with a short bio.
Website address
Under construction on sciencesconf
Contact details
CFP
For further details, please check the original call inserted below.
(Posted 25 October 2025)
International Conference – “Monarch of All I Survey:” Literary Posterity and Cultural Legacies.
Location and dates: Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, France. 20-21 November 2025.
Deadline for proposal submissions: 15 April 2025.
Venue: ENS de Lyon, 15 parvis René Descartes, 69007 Lyon, FRANCE.
Event description
We invite submissions for an international conference exploring the literary posterity of the phrase “I am monarch of all I survey” from William Cowper’s 1782 poem. Cowper’s lines have echoed through centuries of literature and criticism, embodying themes of imperial control, sight, and isolation, while remaining notably ambiguous. How has this ambivalence been reinterpreted across different cultural contexts and literary genres, from British Romanticism to contemporary postcolonial discourse? This conference seeks to engage with the far-reaching impact of Cowper’s words across a wide array of literary and theoretical frameworks.
Keynote speakers: Julia Kühn (University of Groningen, The Netherlands) and Nicholas Spengler (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain).
Website address
https://monarch2025.sciencesconf.org/resource/page/id/1
Contact details
CFP
For further details, please check the original call inserted below.
(Posted 21 December 2024)
Conference: Humanities in Crisis.
Location and dates: Kodolányi University, Budapest, Hungary. 20-21 November 2025.
Extended deadline for proposal submissions: 10 June 2025.
Venue details: The conference is planned to be a mainly on-site personal event but with an option of online participation.
Event presentation
There may be a growing feeling that the humanities are becoming increasingly irrelevant to study in the face of modern scientific and technological progress. The humanities may even be downgraded in terms of their economic value. However, they cannot be called useless or irrelevant vocationally, and the advantages of a humanities education clearly extend well beyond securing employment. Humanities graduates benefit from their studies in all areas of their lives—from civic involvements to familial responsibilities to religious affiliations and beyond. In Permanent Crisis, Chad Wellmon lays out the following argument. We tend to understand the humanities under broad, theoretical definitions: the humanities are a set of disciplines that serve intellectual, cultural, and social functions in studying “the human.” However, the modern humanities serve a more specific, concrete purpose in the academic world.
Wellmon writes at the end of Permanent Crisis: “The humanities as institutionalised between the 1930s and 1950s remained largely intact and served analogous institutional and social functions.” Those institutional and social functions are a counterbalance against the natural sciences. Social trends and societal needs continually result in shifts in perceptions about the importance and relevance of the humanities, but the humanities continue to serve this structural role. Wellmon says, “The permanent crisis is precisely that: the possibility of multiple crises, sometimes overlapping, but always historically specific and contextual.”
Within the humanities, there is a crisis in the education of speaking and writing, too. In What can automation tell us about agency? Carolyn Miller (2007) states that “the death of the agent” (p. 143) signifies a crisis in rhetoric. Since teachers educating young people in expressing themselves fulfil an important role, as they prepare students to “perform their citizenship” (Hauser, 2004, p. 62, in Miller 2007, p. 144), this problem cannot be ignored in the time when LLMs (large language models) increasingly, and often illicitly, take over academic tasks (such as essay writing) from students.
Crisis, however, may be a force to new beginnings: for instance, to creating and building new channels that are an outlet for new forms of expression in education, the arts, media, literature, film, social sciences and linguistics. For instance, novels may be adapted to film, and filmic representations may influence novel writing. Likewise, people may become more aware of the value of soft skills such as the highly complex competence of working with foreign language texts even in the era of AI-powered translation software and text generators, seeing that the human touch is inevitable.
Relevant areas include but are not confined to the following topics:
- the perception of humanities amongst young people planning or involved in their higher education;
- the economic status of educators working within the humanities;
- world views typically developing via art and humanities education, such as reading literature, creating art (including writing), and understanding art, as threatened or dramatically changed by AI;
- soft skills and cognitive development, meeting in the teaching of academic writing, potentially threatened by AI;
- exploiting AI in teaching and sciences;
- new forms of education (literary studies as a requirement for students in sciences and engineering as a counterbalance);
- humanities sustained in the arts; storytelling, in its power to inform about the human condition, its power to heal, and its power to uncover truths;
- crisis in artistic representation;
- the power of humanities helping people through crisis – activating artists, writers, poets, and creative thinkers;
- satirical depictions of the humanities in literary works (e.g., the campus novel);
- worldwide disparagement of Humanities as fields producing little if any societal benefits, let alone economic ones;
- a global diminishing of attention span and growing anxiety in young generations, parallel with increasing internet and social media use, which seems to replace reading as a form of accessing information and keeping in touch with the world;
- the possibility, the existence, and changes of literature in a world in which reading has proportionally diminished or at least occupies a different place than it did even two decades ago;
- a shift in cultural representations: a shift of production and artistic representation from reading to films and series, from written text to oral-visual (multi-media) discourse, from a more time-consuming and immersion-requiring activity to a swift and perhaps less engaging form, which requires different skills to process;
- internet troll activity as a scene of extremely low-register, politically biased, and uncontrolled self-expression spreading as practices, which Humanities and general education could possibly help decrease.
All professionals within the humanities are invited, especially from the following disciplines:
- Literary theory
- Discourse analysis
- Applied linguistics
- Descriptive linguistics
- Intercultural rhetoric
- Cultural theory
- Language teaching
Abstract submission
Researchers are invited to submit a short bio (150 words) and abstracts of their papers on original and unpublished research work by 10 June 2025 to humanitiesincrisis@gmail.com. Abstracts should be written in English and should not exceed 250 words excluding title and keywords. Please observe the Guidelines for abstracts, given on the webpage: http://www.freesideeurope.com/submissions. The abstract is in the following format:
- Title of contribution
- Author name(s) and surname(s)
- Institutional affiliation
- Email address
- ORCID number (if there is one)
- A 250-word abstract followed by a list of five to eight keywords.
CFP
For further details, please check the original call inserted below.
(Posted 7 February 2025. Updated 4 May 2025)
Conference: Disruption(s): Experimental Texts and Multimodal Literacies.
Organiser and dates: The Tunisian Association for English Language Studies (TAELS), Tunis, Tunisia. 21-22 November 2025.
Deadline for proposal submission: 15 September 2025.
Event presentation
In literary studies, disruption is a critical strategy that challenges narrative conventions, destabilizes meaning, and resists linearity and closure. Literature has often used disruption, from modernism’s fragmented style and playful typography to postmodernism’s self-reflective breaks, to challenge mainstream beliefs and explore new ways of representing reality. In this context, disruption enables literature to embrace the illegible, the interrupted, and the experimental as sites of critical engagement and aesthetic invention.
In Cultural Studies, disruption reveals itself through dissonant voices, contested memories, and mediated identities. Disruptive cultural texts resist commodification and ideological containment. In this context, the Martinican poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant called for the right to opacity throughout his work by declaring that he “believe[s] in the production of “opaque” works. Being a disruptive right, opacity, according to Glissant, resists any form of transparency claimed by Western thought and becomes a powerful ethical stance against reductive interpretation.
In the same vein, linguistics has experienced significant disruptions driven by technological advancements, globalization, and evolving sociopolitical contexts. The rise of big data and computational tools has transformed traditional methods, enabling large scale corpus analysis, real-time language tracking, and the integration of machine learning in language modeling. Additionally, the dominance of English in global communication has sparked critical debates about linguistic imperialism and the need to preserve endangered languages.
In applied linguistics, digital communication platforms and social media have reshaped discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, and second language acquisition, requiring scholars to adapt frameworks to analyze multimodal, dynamic, and often non-standard forms of communication. These shifts have not only expanded the field’s methodological toolkit but also challenged long-standing theoretical assumptions, prompting a re-evaluation of how language functions across diverse, technology-mediated environments.
It is within this framework that the conference aims to bring researchers and academics together to critically engage with the theme of the conference from multiple perspectives and diverse standpoints. The steering committee would like to share a global call and invite participants to submit individual and panel proposals related, but not limited, to the following topics:
- Fragmented, hybrid, and nonlinear narrative forms
- Disruption in memory, trauma, or counter-historical texts
- Silence, omission, and the politics of erasure
- The politics of media manipulation and visual representation
- Visual and typographic experimentation in literature
- Semantic disruption and polysemy
- Code-switching and language interference
- Deviance and foregrounding in Stylistics
- Disruption as creative method in language or literature teaching
- Teaching experimental literature and fragmented texts
- Disability aesthetics and non-normative communication
- AI and the disruption of authorship
- Language digital spaces
- Language identity in online spaces
- Corpus linguistics and language change
- Language teaching in the digital age.
Submission and timeline
We welcome individual abstracts for 20-minute presentations and full panel proposals of four papers treating a similar theme or topic. Priority will be given to panel proposals. The conference is an on-site-only event. Individual participants and panel convenors are invited to submit 300-word abstracts and short bio notes to the following email address: disruptions.conference2025@gmail.com
- The deadline for abstract submission is September 15, 2025. Acceptance/rejection decisions will be sent by September 25, 2025.
TAELS editorial board will select a number of papers that will be published after peer-reviewing in a collective volume on the proceedings of the conference. - Registration Presenters of accepted papers will be required to deposit a registration fee of 150 TND (150 Euros for international participants) before October 05, 2025.
Website address
Contact details
- Ezzedine Saidi saidi@univgb.tn or
- Jawhar Ahmed Dhouib jawhar.dhouib@flshs.usf.tn
CFP
For further details, please check the original call inserted below.
(Posted 8 August 2025)
VAL Symposium 2025: Gender Anxieties? (Re-)Assessments from a Literary and Cultural Studies Perspective.
Location and dates: Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels. 28 November 2025.
Deadline for proposal submission: 15 June 2025.
Venue details: Hoek 38 – Leuvenseweg 38, 1000 Brussels, Belgium.
Event presentation
The annual symposium of the Vlaamse Vereniging voor Algemene en Vergelijkende Literatuurwetenschap (VAL) will take place on 28 November 2025 at Hoek 38, and is hosted this year by the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB).
For the thematic focus on “Gender Anxieties?”, we are pleased to welcome two distinguished keynote speakers: Teagan Bradway (SUNY Cortland, USA) and Hans Demeyer (University College London, UK).
We warmly invite proposals that engage with the symposium’s theme, but also welcome contributions related to ongoing research beyond this specific focus. Presentations should be 20 minutes in length. Please submit your abstract along with a short biography by 15 June 2025 via the online submission form. More information can be found on the conference website and in the attached Call for Papers.
We especially encourage PhD candidates and postdoctoral researchers to apply—those looking to receive feedback from fellow scholars in literary studies and to expand their academic network within the Flemish research landscape.
Submissions are welcome in Dutch, English, French, or German. We adopt a broad understanding of literary studies, welcoming perspectives from various national traditions, languages, and periods, as well as from cultural studies and translation studies.
All presented contributions will be eligible for publication in the peer-reviewed Cahier voor Literatuurwetenschap (CLW), which is published digitally in open access and indexed in the VABB.
Website address
Contact details
CFP
For further details, please check the original call inserted below.
(Posted 25 May 2025)
Workshop: Historical Fiction in / and the Anthropocene
Organizer and dates: Historical Fictions Research Network. 29 November 2025.
Deadline for proposal submission: 1 October 2025
The event is an one-day online workshop of the Historical Fictions Research Network, held on 29 November 2025 (online in Zoom) ca 8 am to 5 pm (GMT), involving 15 min talks.
Event presentation
The Historical Fictions Research Network, an interdisciplinary and international network of scholars examining historical fictions, i.e. narratives of the past in a variety of popular media, is happy to organise its third one-day winter workshop on the topic of “Historical Fiction in / and the Anthropocene”.
The ongoing environmental crisis is arguably the greatest political and social challenge of our time. Climate change dominates the political, social, cultural and academic discourses, as well as artforms such as film, video games, TV series, and literary fiction. The effect of the climate crisis on literature is illustrated by the many contemporary studies on so called “climate fiction” (sometimes “climate change fiction”) (Trexler 2015; Ghosh 2016; Bracke 2018; Mehnert 2016; Johns-Putra 2019; Andersen 2019). Others have studied how climate change and the Anthropocene challenge the way we think about history, time and narrative (Markley 2019; Chakrabarty 2021; James 2022; Hughes Warrington 2022). Still, the study of historical fiction rarely takes an ecocritical approach or examines representations of climate change or the Anthropocene in the genre. The ambition of this workshop is to open this door and explore what the emergence of the Anthropocene means for historical fiction.
For HFRN’s 2025 Winter Workshop, we welcome presentations that investigate historical narratives of e.g. environmental change, global warming, industrialism and nuclear power, human-animal relationships, urban development, as well as theoretical and methodological queries. The organizers are planning to publish an edited collection on the subject and plan to invite selected contributions from speakers who will present at the workshop. We welcome contributions from researchers at all career stages, as well as practitioners, and particularly from individuals working in the Global South. We accept submissions in English, French and Spanish. Please note that discussions at the workshop will take place in English.
Please send a 250-word abstract and a short biographical note via our website (https://historicalfictionsresearch.org/online-workshop-2025-winter/) by 1 October 2025 at midnight. They should consist of a title, an abstract of 250 words max., and a short bio (150 words max).
Event organised by Ingibjörg Ágústsdóttir, Jerome de Groot, Dorothea Flothow, Lisa Grahn, Siobhan O’Connor, and Stephanie Russo. https://brill.com/page/forthcoming_hifi
(Posted 8 August 2025)