Calls for papers for conferences taking place in October 2025

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International Conference “Flux and Flow in Irish and Scottish Literatures (late-19th century to present)”.
Location and dates: ULCO, Université du Littoral Côte d’Opale, Boulogne-sur-Mer, 9-10 April 2026.
Deadline for proposal submission: 1 October 2025.

Event presentation

Keynote Speaker: John Brannigan, University College Dublin

This conference seeks to explore the pervasive influence of the flux and flow of seas, oceans, rivers and other waterways on Irish and Scottish literatures from the late 19th century to the present. The rise of the “blue humanities” as part of what is often referred to as an “oceanic turn” in the humanities has turned critical attention towards the centrality of seas and oceans in the shaping and understanding of our real and fictional worlds. As Blum and Brannigan have argued, thinking from the vantage point of the sea invites an alternative epistemology that flows beyond landlocked and nation-bound frameworks, to embrace the connective, plural and interwoven currents of oceanic and riverine dynamics. Indeed, while initially blue humanities were mainly interested in oceans and seas, critics such as Steve Mentz have recently called for a more “inclusive” approach to the field, which would be open to multiple forms of water such as rivers, ice, vapor but also coastal spaces, islands and archipelagos (2023b, 143), encouraging the development of a “poetics of planetary water” (140).

We invite contributions that explore the multiple ways Irish and Scottish writers have perceived and addressed the perpetual flux and flow of aquatic worlds, from the late 19th century to the present, and the poetic modes and aesthetic principles that have emerged from this engagement. Contributions might address, but not be limited to, the following topics: 

  • Comparative studies of Irish and Scottish aquatic literatures 
  • Coastal, maritime and archipelagic imaginaries in Irish and Scottish fiction, poetry and drama.
  • Material perspectives and metaphorical modes of representation of oceanic currents and river flows 
  • Modernist legacies in contemporary representations of the sea and the ocean
  • Maritime flow and material textuality 
  • Flux, flow and new energies in literature
  • The archipelago and the poetics of relation 
  • Flux and flow and generic boundaries: hybridity, experimentalism, intermediality
  • Narratological perspectives on flux and flow
  • The flux and flow of language in Irish and Scottish literature
  • Flux and flow and transnational poetics

Contact details: 

CFP

For further details, please check the original call inserted below.

CFP – Flux and Flow in Irish and Scottish Literatures – final versionDownload

(Posted 30 May 2025)

Conference: Hotels, Motels and Inns : Transient Spaces of Hospitality in English-Speaking Cultures.
Location and dates: University of Toulouse. 2-3 October 2025.
Deadline for proposal submissions: 20 January 2025.

Venue: University of Toulouse, Research Center CAS.

Presentation

The “Hotels, Inns and Motels” International Conference in Toulouse invites scholars to reflect upon the way places of temporary hospitality have structured space and displacements in English-speaking countries and therefore reveal the stakes and forms of hospitality. From British 19th-century inns to the motel chains dotting the endless US interstate landscapes, these spaces offer a temporary home to their dwellers, and perform commercial, social, political and symbolic functions that so far have not been studied thoroughly. The aim of the conference is to explore how these places, and the people who designed them, work or live there, can reflect or create conceptions of hospitality that provide insight into a given society or a period.

The variety of temporary lodgings (from cheap inns or roadside motels to luxury hotels in capitals or resorts) offers many perspectives to be explored from historical, sociological, economic, literary and artistic viewpoints. As a literal topos, a common place, the hotel can be viewed as a metonymy of the society or area it is set in, from the corporeal to the global level. As such, hotels have been chosen as the setting of numerous creative works, be it in literature (Daphne du Maurier, Herman Melville, Henry James, Edith Wharton, E.M. Foster, Elizabeth Bowen, Agatha Christie, Vladimir Nabokov, Stephen King, John Irving, Sam Shepard, Russell Banks, Don Delillo…), in art (Edward Hopper, Mark Rothko, John Register, Robert Mapplethorpe…), or in film (Grand Hotel , Psycho, The Night Porter, The Shining, Barton Fink, Mystery Train, Lost in Translation, The Grand Budapest Hotel …). Hospitality venues are social microcosms that embed the power, gender, class and race relations of a given community. For instance, it is nowadays common to see hotels used as emergency lodgings for displaced, migrant, or homeless persons and families, transforming a temporary lodging into a permanently precarious home. Some hotel jobs are particularly gendered or racialized (innkeeper, waitress, concierge, chambermaid, bell boy…) and therefore duplicate the power structures and the spatial segregations at work. This aspect has been studied from a contemporary sociological point of view, but rarely from a historical perspective, nor within literary or film representations.

The hotel can be seen as the very locus of the Unheimlich, with its anonymous rooms which are magically appropriated by their dwellers, transformed into homes once the key worked the door open. Hotels can fascinate because of their uncanny ordinariness, and their capacity to produce intimate spaces where the customers feel at home even though they never lived there before. The liminal positioning of the hotel, on the threshold between the familiar and the strange, make them the ideal place for a fresh perspective on the quotidian, for a unique angle from which one can take in the complexity of the ordinary, as philosopher Bruce Bégout underscores in Common Place: The American Motel.

The isolation of the hotel room can also oblige its dwellers to face their own self, accentuating the ontological solipsism of individuals (see Bégout 34), and causing experiences of depersonalization, or dereliction. And as a space successively dwelled in by a multitude of guests, the hotel room is a palimpsest of ghostly presences.

The motel, contrary to the luxury hotel, seems to encompass many of the paradoxes of temporary hospitality, because of its architecture and its marginal location on roadsides. According to Bégout, motels symbolize a place in which “the center no longer holds, but has given way to a transitive and mobile space in which a connection to the world has been lost” (Common Place 12).  However motels also imply the concrete, personal, and corporeal engagement of their dwellers, loaded with symbolic meaning.

Hotels also make business with intimate spaces, revealing and defining a system of norms and transgressions. The hotel is the epitome of transience and anonymity, and it henceforth allows for illicit or immoral relationships, and encourages furtive encounters that leave no trace. Owing to the poor quality of the building materials used in many hostels and motels, spaces meant to be private and intimate are made visible and audible. The hotel is thus inherently hospitable to stories of desire and death.

Hotels have also shaped, inspired and defined the topoi and characteristics of certain literary genres (the travelogue, the realistic novel, the road novel, the detective story) or cinematographic genres (the road movie, the horror film). A specific aesthetic, rooted in a dialectic of fear or horror and wonder, or disenchantment and re-enchantment, has developed over the centuries and in literature and works of art that have chosen the hotel as their setting. Many authors have written their books and artists have created their works of art in hotels (e.g. Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Agatha Christie, Vladimir Nabokov, Tennessee Williams, Andy Warhol …) and so have film personalities while shooting major movies.

As a privileged setting for social structures and art (narrative and figurative), conceived both as a place of passage and as a closed space, the liminal, public, anonymous and intimate space of the hotel is conducive to the exploration of

  • Themes of isolation, solitude or introspection (Edward Hopper), personal narratives (Sophie Calle, Nan Goldin)
  • The intersection between the outer and inner worlds
  • Redefining identities, distancing, escape and psychological transformation or depersonalisation
  • The hotel as a place of transit during journeys, or transitions: pivotal moments, places where artists create and authors write;
  • Away-from-home encounters of characters in search of meaning 
  • Transgressions of social, realistic and moral norms;
  • The exploration of anxiety, the blurring of reality in oppressive, ghostly atmospheres where social order and normality can break down, allowing horror to unfold 
  • Hotels as microcosms: at once public and intimate spaces, places that market confinement, they epitomize social tensions and human behaviour (from luxury hotels to emergency shelters).

Plenary lectures will be given by:

  • Barbara Black, Skidmore College, USA, author of Hotel London. How Victorian Commercial Hospitality Shaped a Nation and Its Stories (Ohio State Press, 2019)
  • Anna Despotopoulou, National University of Athens, Greece, leader of the research project ‘Hotels and the Modern Subject, 1890-1940’ (Hotels and the Modern Subject: 1890-1940).
  • Andrew K. Sandoval-Strausz, Penn State University, USA, author of Hotel: An American History (Yale University Press, 2007).

Contact details

Proposals for papers must be submitted no later than 20 January 2025. Each proposal must include a 300-word abstract of the paper and a short biography.

Proposals should be sent to the following addresses : 

(Posted 16 December 2025)

Conference: More Pride, Less Prejudice: Jane Austen at 250.
Location and dates: University of Porto, Portugal. 2-3 October 2025.
Deadline for proposal submissions: 16 May 2025.

Venue: University of Porto, Faculty of Arts and Humanities.

Keynote speakers 

  • Fiona Stafford (University of Oxford)
  • John Mullan (University College London)

On Jane Austen’s 250th anniversary we invite scholars/enthusiasts to join us at the University of Porto for a two-day celebration of both her literary genius and enduring legacy. As an inescapable figure in the English literary canon, and a popular cross-generational phenomenon, Jane Austen has always been the subject of the most diverse and innovative academic approaches. Scholars have explored various aspects of her work, from the ways in which her novels negotiate femininity (Cho 2006; Steiner 2012) and subvert prevailing notions of masculinity during the Romantic era (Ailwood 2019; Woodworth 2024) to the deep psychological complexity of her characters (Mullan 2005). Additionally, research has examined Austen’s engagement with the medieval tradition of courtly love (Schubert 2023) and the significance of garden landscapes within her narratives (Bending 2024). Uncountable cinematographic and television adaptations, as well as retellings of Austen’s novels have catalyzed the development of studies concerning the intermediality of her work (Martin 2007; Cartmell 2010; Sutherland 2011; Ursa 2018). These varied lines of enquiry underscore the enduring relevance and complexity of Austen’s contributions to literature. Her works being products whose critical fortunes inevitably surpass the author’s own time and geography, it is the aim of this conference to foster new and thought-provoking (re)interpretations of the Austenian corpus – namely the novels that brought her fame – and the lenses through which it can be revisited in our day and age.

We thus welcome papers on all aspects of the author’s life, and encourage contrasting perspectives on her oeuvre. Possible topics include (but are not limited to) the following:

  • Afterlives: translations, adaptations, transmediations (e.g., films, TV/streaming series, retellings, video games, fanfiction, etc);
  • Global Austen;
  • Jane Austen’s life (family, education, juvenilia);
  • The rise of the novel: books and reading practices;
  • Landscape(s) and travelling;
  • (Re)Defining masculinities;
  • Womanhood, girlhood & rebel women (or not so much);
  • Regency life: fashion, manners, sociability;
  • Economy: love and the marriage market;
  • Language, style and structure;
  • Critical responses (early and recent);
  • Literary scene: from sentimental to gothic;
  • Nationalism, war and empire;
  • Digital Humanities;
  • Conventions and transgressions.

We welcome 250-word proposals for 20-minute presentations in English at morepridelessprejudice@letras.up.pt. Please include a short bio (max 150 words, including the author’s academic affiliation). The deadline for abstract submission is 16 May 2025. 

The standard conference fee is 80 euros. A reduced fee of 30 euros is available for students. The conference will be held in person at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Porto. All delegates are responsible for their own travel arrangements and accommodation.

More information available in due course at https://sites.google.com/view/morepridelessprejudice/.

CFP

For further details, please check the original call inserted below.

More Pride Less Prejudice_ Jane Austen at 250 CFPDownload

(Posted 18 January 2025)

International conference: East – West: Synergy of Scientific Knowledge.
Location and dates: Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, Sofia, Bulgaria. 6–8 October 2025.
Deadline for proposal submission: 31.08.2025.

Event organised by Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, Samarkand State University “Sharof Rashidov,” and Bukhara State University.

Event presentation

The main goal of the international forum is to give a new impetus to the development of science and education through a new reading of the scientific heritage of ancient philosophical treatises from the perspective of modern discussions and dialogue between the East and the West.

Main thematic areas:

  1. Historical context and cultural influences – Eastern and Western perceptions
  2. Contemporary problems and future prospects. East-West interdisciplinary approaches.
  3. Classification of sciences – synergy of scientific knowledge
  4. Religion, politics and science – problems and solutions in Europe and Asia 

Working languages: Bulgarian, English, Russian

Your application for participation should include the following information:

  • Title of the paper
  • Author’s full name, academic degree, academic position, university, faculty, department, and email
  • Abstract (maximum 1,000 characters, including spaces)
  • Keywords

Timeline

  • Applications should be sent to: anipetrova1201@gmail.com
  • Submission of applications: by 31.08.2025.
  • Participants who have applied will be notified of the decision of the Scientific and Organizing Committee by 08.09.2025.

Contact person: Ani Petrova, anipetrova1201@gmail.com

CFP

For further details, please check the original call inserted below.

East-West Synergy Conf.cfp.SU.Download

(Posted 20 July 2025)

Conference: The Politics of Emotions, 2025. Discourse – Media – Digital Spaces.
Location and dates: Lyon (France). 9 and 10 October 2025.
Deadline for proposal submissions: 20 October 2024 to 15 March 2025.

An international conference organised by the Centre d’Études Linguistiques – Corpus, Discours et Sociétés (CEL) of Jean Moulin Lyon 3 Université and the Centre Interlangues: Texte, Image, Langage (TIL) of the Université de Bourgogne, as part of an annual research project entitled “La politique au prisme des émotions” (The Politics of Emotions).

Emotional dynamics are omnipresent in today’s political and social processes—from the rise  of populism to the crisis of representativeness, but also within many questionable democratic  innovations and the uncertain renewal of civic engagement. These dynamics underpin the  crystallisation of identity building in our ever-changing societies (Cilia & Wodak, 2021). The  analysis of emotional drivers is therefore necessary to explain the political phenomena that  characterise the contemporary public sphere. It also represents a fruitful field of study for  understanding the changes associated with the widespread use of social media platforms.  Digital tools have an impact on the publicité (publicness and publicity) of political discourse  and on the new repertoires of action put in place by engaged citizen groups through the creation  of digital platforms, the broadcasting of videos, etc. 

This interdisciplinary conference aims to reflect on the use of emotions in political discourse, be it in actual legislative assemblies, among the “chattering classes” on conventional media, or  on digital platforms. The objective is to explore the discursive and visual dimensions of  emotional levers that drive political dynamics and the practice of citizenship in today’s world.  The ambition is to compare methodologies and corpora from different linguistic and cultural  areas in order to understand, for example, the role of emotions in the emergence of new forms  of protest and in the communication strategies of current forms of populism. How do emotional structures inform group identities? To what extent do they shape collective representations?  What discursive and rhetorical devices are used to convey emotions in politics, and is it possible  to measure their influence? These avenues for reflection invite us to also analyse the interactions  between institutional and non-institutional players.  

Academic studies of emotions have long emphasised the pivotal role of language, which is  considered a key factor in explaining human behaviour (Coppin & Sanders, 2010). The  theoretical and methodological tools of linguistics and discourse analysis, together with the  contributions of political science and the sociology of social movements, provide fertile ground for studying the role of emotions in the contemporary public sphere and their impact on the  construction of political ideologies. Focusing on the 21st century, several research topics can be  envisaged. A non-exhaustive list would include the following: 

  • The role of emotions in political discourse, against the backdrop of a crisis of  representativeness. What are the emotional drivers used by institutional players to  persuade citizens? How are conflicting emotions incorporated into the communication  strategies of populist and extremist parties? Applied linguistics is particularly relevant
    • for highlighting the importance of certain markers, lexemes and morphemes  traditionally associated with emotions in political communication. Proposals can also  focus on rhetoric in general – and the fundamental contribution of pathos (Amossy  2016) – but also on certain emotionally-loaded research fields, such as metaphor studies 
    • or the narrative analysis of political storytelling. Also relevant would be a critical  approach to discourse aimed at deciphering the way language is used for purposes of  domination and manipulation by certain political actors. 
  • The emotional strategies of citizen protest or disobedience movements in  contemporary public spaces. To what extent do collective emotions help build the  identity of protest movements and establish new collaborative practices and forms of  political engagement? Proposals could also focus on the study of the semiology of  demonstrations, including the choice of slogans, symbols and set designs, as well as the  demonstrators’ physical postures, which might convey emotions. One leading  interrogation could be: if anger is a driver of protest, how is that anger staged? 
  • The role of emotions in traditional media and digital media discourse. The aim is  to explore the link between emotional dynamics and the construction of identity through  the analysis of the digital and visual strategies implemented by political actors and/or  protest movements. What are the new emotional markers in the digital sphere – hashtags,  emoticons, short messages, videos, etc.? How do they contribute to the formation of  emotional communities? How can digital tools reinforce or reduce emotional  polarisation? The contribution of multimodality seems fundamental, and semiotic  studies – as well as studies of images and other visual representations – will be more  than welcome. 

Submissions should include an abstract (up to 500 words, excluding references) as well as a  short biography and should be sent to: 

Keywords: emotions; digital media; critical discourse analysis; political communication;  speech; metaphors

Key dates: 

  • Submission: 20 October 2024 to 15 March 2025; 
  • Notification of acceptance: 15 May 2025; 
  • Registration: June 2025;
  • Conference: 9 and 10 October 2025.

CFP

For further details, please check the original call inserted below.

CFP Politics of Emotions 2025 – English-1Download

(Posted 22 October 2025)

Conference: Food and Identity in 21st-Century Children’s Stories.
Location and dates: Valencian International University, Valencia and the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain. 9-10 October 2025. An online event.
Deadline for proposal submission: 30 May 2025.

Organised by the Research Groups “Cultura, Crítica y Textos (CCyT)” from Valencian International University, and “Pensamiento, Creación y Representación en el ámbito de los Estudios Culturales” (PeCRaEC) from the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.

Event presentation 

We invite proposals for papers that explore some of the multiple representations of food and its relationship with identity as portrayed in 21st-century children’s stories. While the primary focus is on the Hispanic world (Latin America and Spain), we also welcome proposals for papers addressing other geographical areas that are in some way connected to Hispanic culture. Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Food as a symbol of identity
  • Food as metaphor
  • Food rituals as spaces of construction and transmission
  • Migration and diaspora through food
  • Globalization, glocalization, and food cultures
  • Food, sustainability, and the environment
  • Food and ecofeminism
  • Food and memory
  • Food, gender, and dissidences
  • Food and violence
  • Food and animal ethics
  • Food and health
  • Food and rewritings of children’s literature
  • Food, children’s literature, and other arts

Website address 

https://humaviu.com/eventos/congreso-comida-e-identidad

Proposals

Proposals must include a 300-word (maximum) abstract and a short bio-bibliographical note, around 10 lines, with title, name of participant, e-mail address, academic position, institution and latest publications. Submissions are accepted in Spanish and English. Please send proposals to: comidaeidentidad@gmail.com

Timeline

  • Notification of acceptance: June 15th, 2025
  • Abstract submission deadline: May 30th, 2025

CFP

For further details, please check the original call inserted below.

INTERN_1Download

(Posted 1 May 2025)

The Good Life beyond Optimism and Pessimism: Philosophy –– Ideology –– Affective Materialities.
Location and dates: University of Augsburg, 9-11 October 2025.
Deadline for proposal submissions: 20 December 2024.

Confirmed keynote speakers:

  • Joshua Foa Dienstag (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
  • Katrin Röder (TU Dortmund)

Presentation

Pandemics, wars, climate change, austerity, the rise of right-wing totalitarianism across the world – the present offers plenty to be pessimistic about. This sentiment seems to be confirmed by recent surveys of the outlook of today’s youth, who is often labelled as the most pessimistic generation in decades. Moreover, the seemingly widespread pessimist affect is also reflected in the continuing popularity of apocalyptic and dystopian narratives in popular culture such as the TV shows The Handmaid’s Tale (2017–), The Purge (2018-2019), Black Mirror (2011–) etc. This pessimist affect can be, in turn, connected to a distinct pessimist tradition in philosophical thought – a “nightside of thought”, which emerged as a branch of modern Western post-Enlightenment philosophy. Within the British context, in fact, the very word ‘optimism’ originated in 1759, stemming directly from Gottfried-Wilhelm Leibniz, in particular, his famous dictum that we are living in “the best of all possible worlds” (Essais de Theodicee, 1710). This relatively passive view of optimism, relying on the notion of a preestablished harmonical order, was accompanied by a more active conception as for instance Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s writings, Thomas Jefferson’s famous (active) “pursuit of happiness” and, not least, British hedonistic moral philosophy of the time (e.g., Jeremy Bentham, Anthony Earl of Shaftesbury, David Hume etc.) reveal. Throughout its ongoing evolution towards the 21st century, “optimism” along with its underlying notions of “happiness” reappeared in countless manifestations in society, culture and literature. Despite their heterogenous conceptions, though, optimism and happiness largely coincide in their temporal-teleological structure; that is, a positive outlook towards a future (optimistically perceived to be) “more likely than not to materialize”. Pessimism, on the other hand, is in many ways a response to the Enlightenment inasmuch as it constitutes a “doppelganger” of progress that radically questions such teleological narratives of modernity.

In recent years, both optimism/happiness as well as pessimism have become flourishing fields of study. To the same extent that we can speak of a “happiness turn” in the humanities from the 2000s on, pessimist philosophy has likewise diversified into “micro-pessimisms”, including afropessimism, queer pessimism, ecological pessimism and antinatalism. What unites these new pessimisms is not only their particular focus on specific identities and how these constitute a being-in-the-world that can be grasped with pessimism as an epistemological perspective, but also their grappling with questions of “the good life.” 

While it might seem counterintuitive to consider pessimism as a starting point for eudaemonia, pessimism indeed provides new perspectives on optimism as well as on happiness. It questions teleological narratives of collective cultural and social progress as much as narratives of individual happiness. In other words, it challenges the ideological functions of the “cultures of optimism”, which, however, appear to be crucial for the stability of the state, community and the subject. Pessimism can thus be a tool to interrogate what Lauren Berlant has called “cruel optimism” – the demand for toxic positivity and individual responsibility for one’s personal success that is at the heart of current late-capitalist ideologies. We, indeed, witness the rise of multiple forms of self-optimization embedded in a literal “happiness industry” in recent times. Thus, pessimism might certainly prove liberating for individuals tired of the demand for positive “self-actualization” – and it is an affect that results as a negative image from the “positive culture of emotions” that the sociologist Andreas Reckwitz has identified as central to the affective life of late modernity.At the same time, as philosophers like David Benatar and Mara van der Lugt have demonstrated, pessimism can account more accurately for the inevitable facets of human life often neglected in cultures of positivity and optimism: in facing suffering, pessimist philosophy offers modes of empathy and compassion (Mit-Leiden) and debunks the “promise of happiness” by articulating the position of the “affect aliens” – those left behind by narratives of the good life. Pessimism and optimism, then, are not necessarily entirely separable, but constitute complementary epistemological approaches to existential question of eudaemonia. 

This conference seeks to explore the relationship between optimism and pessimism (including their implicit notions of un/happiness) by focusing on their underlying philosophical histories from Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thought (from Voltaire to Schopenhauer and Adorno/Horkheimer and beyond) to the “new” pessimisms of the present (Eugene Thacker, Joshua Foa Dienstag, Sara Ahmed, Frank B. Wilderson III and others). The conference wants to scrutinize optimism and pessimism along with their potentials for cultural, literary and media studies, sociology and related subdisciplines (such as futures studies) in theory and practice. 

We invite papers of 20 minutes that examine philosophical issues of optimism and pessimism as well as the cultural and aesthetic representations of these philosophies, materialities and affects. Papers can address the following aspects:

  • The pessimism of optimism and the optimism of pessimism
  • (Beyond) optimism and/or pessimism in (meta-)theory and practice
  • Optimism/Pessimism: diachronic and synchronic perspectives
  • Textual and cultural practices of optimism/pessimism (literary and cultural case studies)
  • Genres of optimism and pessimism (e.g. utopia/dystopia) 
  • The aesthetics of optimism and pessimism
  • Optimism/Pessimism and affect
  • Optimism/Pessimism and materiality
  • (un)happy objects
  • Melancholia and optimism/pessimism
  • Ideologies of optimism/pessimism
  • The ethics of optimism and pessimism
  • Pessimism as deconstructive force
  • Optimistic and pessimistic temporalities
  • Futures Studies
  • …..

Abstracts (max. 300 words) for papers proposed should be accompanied by a short biographical note, plus full address and institutional affiliation.

Please send your proposals to both organisers:

  • Mark Schmitt (mark.schmitt@hu-berlin.de) and
  • David Kerler (david.kerler@uni-a.de)

Deadline: 20 December 2024

CFP

For further details, please check the original call inserted below.

Optimism Pessimism CfP_Univ of AugsburgDownload

(Posted 16 November 2024)

Conference: US-UK Transatlantic Crossings in the Arts and Literature from 1823 to Today.
Location and dates: Université de Lorraine (France), 16-17 October 2025.
Deadline for proposal submissions: 31 January 2025.

Venue: CLSH, Nancy (France).

Presentation

The conference will deal with different issues (click on the website address for more details) about transatlantic crossings in the arts and literature from 1823 to today. It will therefore address, but not exclusively, the following themes:

  • Myths and realities of transatlantic relations
  • Cultural economics of transatlantic transfers
  • Influence of transfers on American or British language
  • Transfers and translation
  • Aspects of mutual influence/fascination
  • Why and how this fascination leads writers, poets, filmmakers, and artists from the USA or the UK to live and work in the United States or the United Kingdom (Henry James, T.S. Eliot, Scott Walker, Jacob Epstein, W.H. Auden, Alfred Hitchcock, Charles Chaplin, Gervese Wheeler, to name just a few) or to be influenced by one of the two countries, as illustrated in literature, with some English authors who write “American” novels (Lee Child, for example) and vice versa (we can also mention Elizabeth George (“Inspector Lynley”) or Diana Gabaldon, who writes Scottish novels like the Outlander series).
  • Perceptions and receptions in transcultural exchanges
  • The role and form of parody and pastiche in these transfers? For example, A Spinal Tap is an American parody of an English rock band
  • In music, how American rock influences / has influenced English rock and vice versa; what about musicals? etc.

Website address 

https://relationstransatlantiquescom.wordpress.com

Contact details

Proposals (in English or French; maximum 300 words) should be sent to:

  • Jean-Philippe Heberlé (jean-philippe.heberle@univ-lorraine.fr),
  • Claire McKeown (claire.mckeown@univ-lorraine.fr), and
  • Céline Sabiron (celine.sabiron@univ-lorraine.fr

CFP

For further details, please check the original call inserted below.

CFP Transatlantic Crossings (English version)Download

(Posted 30 October 2024)

International conference: Layers: Physical and Cultural Constructions of Space in the English-Speaking World.
Location and dates: The University of Strasbourg, France, 16-17 October 2025.
Deadline for proposal submissions: 31 March 2025.

Organised by SEARCH (Savoirs dans l’Espace Anglophone: Représentations, Culture, Histoire)

Keynote speakers: 

  • Jeremy Davies (University of Leeds)
  • Laurent Olivier (Musée d’archéologie nationale de Saint-Germain-en-Laye)

Presentation 

In connection with the SEARCH research group’s focus on “Spaces, territories and landscapes in the English-speaking world”, this conference aims to explore the notion of layers as an epistemological and representational prism through which to apprehend the temporalities of human and non-human spaces, understand the physical, cultural and social processes that shape them, as well as uncover the traces of the past embedded in them, in order to foster an interdisciplinary dialogue between earth sciences, geography, history, archaeology, literature and the arts. 

We welcome contributions focusing on social, cultural, historical and physical processes of layering and resurfacing in the English-speaking world. While layers may be especially conceived as a means to articulate spatial and historical processes, and to reflect about the processes of construction of territories and landscapes, literary, sociological and artistic approaches to the notion are also invited. Perspectives from the environmental humanities, postcolonial studies, geocriticism and geohistory are encouraged.

Submission guidelines: please send an abstract of 200 to 250 words, as well as a short bio (max 150 words), by March 31, 2025, to:

CFP

For further details, please check the original call inserted below.

LAYERS-CFP – Strasbourg 16.17 Oct. 2025Download

(Posted 23 February 2025)

Conference: Constructions of Identity 12 – “Conflict”.
Location and dates: Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca (Romania). 16-18 October 2025.
Extended deadlines: for individual papers: 15 June 2025; for fully formed panels: 15 June 2025.

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Venue: Faculty of Letters, 31 Horea St., Cluj-Napoca, Romania.

LITERATURE 

LITERARY FUTURES: CONFLICTS OF TECHNOLOGY, CULTURE, AND GLOBALIZATION 

In We’re Doomed. Now What?, American writer and academic Roy Scranton sees conflict as the  internal force shaping the “unimaginable multitude” of ideologically informed social structures, “down to  the individual human soul, in conflict with itself” (48). It is the force preventing “the entire human species  [from moving] together in one direction” and making “the human way reactive, improvised, ad hoc” (48- 9). The mechanism that we have developed for coping with the instability of the world is, Scranton claims,  our impressive ability of telling ourselves “the stories that we want to hear” (49). This, of course, raises a  series of ethical questions regarding the narrative approaches to and representation of conflict. Coming  from a different direction, narrative theorist Erin McGlothlin supports a similar thesis by examining the  modes in which narratives can appear to resolve conflicts, “particularly in ways that fulfill the reader’s  expectations and produce a satisfying sense of completeness” (111). While Scranton is critical of the  (self-)deluding potential of creating narratives to manage conflicts, McGlothlin dismantlesthe importance  of closure provided by narrative, which under scrutiny brings up its paradoxical nature. In McGlothlin’s  take, narrative’s construction of its own ending produces “ideological closure,” which, while seeming to reflect the “resolution to an extant problem of conflict,” is in fact engaged in the process of producing the  initial conflict (111). Following the suggestions of a phenomenological approach to the ethics of narrative,  McGlothlin points to the possibility of narratives avoiding “mastery” by illuminating their own perspectival  grounding and emplotment tactics. However, as perspective is first and foremost a matter of relation, this  opens an avenue into investigating conflict as an unavoidable dimension of our inherent relationality, and,  to put it in Judith Butler’s terms, as a form of “nonviolent” resolution. 

Since conflict – in the most generous understanding of the term – affects people’s sense of self  and of the world and thus contributes to shaping the way in which collective and individual identities  emerge, the twelfth edition of Constructions of Identity seeks to explore its role in the configuration of  the storied self and the storied world. We understand conflict as both a thematic and structural  phenomenon that cuts across various temporal, cultural, and geographical contexts, a phenomenon which  could yet reveal new critical understandings of the self, society, and the non-human world. Literature should and does act as a site where conflict is performed, rehearsed and (sometimes) solved, and where  its strategies become both instruments and objects for interpretation. We, therefore, welcome proposals  for papers and sessions addressing any aspect of our conference theme and we encourage a wide range  of critical and theoretical approaches, including insights from recent developments in critical theory,  world literature studies, the digital humanities, and ecocriticism.  

Possible topics include but are not limited to:  

  • ideological clashes; 
  • the conflicts between tradition and modernity; 
  • tensions and struggles within identity politics; 
  • conflict, trauma, memory; 
  • tensions in and around migration, colonialism, and globalization; 
  • the relationship between cores, peripheries, and semiperipheries; 
  • conflict, protest, war, violence; 
  • nonviolent conflictuality and narrative as the space for debate; 
  • nonviolent solutions to conflict and crisis; 
  • environmental crises & climate degradation; 
  • human vs artificial intelligence conflicts. 
  • human vs non-human conflicts. 

Confirmed keynote speakers: 

  • Prof. Jean-Michel Ganteau, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 
  • Prof. Anne Schwan, Edinburgh Napier University 
  • Assoc. Prof. Dragoș Ivana, University of Bucharest

LINGUISTICS 

CREATING AND RESOLVING CONFLICT IN LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTIC STUDIES 

Conflict approached through a linguistic lens offers numerous possible levels of analysis, from  language- and speaker-internal struggles to polarizing attitudes borne out of contextualized uses of  language, and beyond humans, in interactions with other media such as technology, and now even more  so, AI. Inquiry into both diachronic and synchronic linguistic displays, patterns, and behaviours within  communication represents a challenge in itself, as the digital age increased the availability of research and  scientific discourse, resulting in a divergence of perspectives on language phenomena. We thus welcome  papers which foster the ground for a synergy between various disciplines and research methodologies  coming from the fields of Internet linguistics, Sociolinguistics, Historical Linguistics, Psycho- and  Neurolinguistics, Discourse Analysis, Digital Humanities, Multilingualism and Multiculturalism, Theoretical  Linguistics and more. This multi- and inter-disciplinary dialogue between specialists from a variety of fields  will account for the complexity of the linguistic phenomena emerging from various conflictual situations  and discourses. 

We invite proposals for papers and specialty panels addressing any aspect of our conference theme.

Possible topics include: 

1. Online conflicts, digital culture and communication  

  • digital culture, subcultures and conflictual situations; 
  • online identity construction and communities of practice; 
  • representation of conflict through multimodal communication and visual culture; human versus AI generated speech; 
  • hate speech in online social media and linguistic mitigation; 
  • conflict and online digital activism; 
  • digital and pragmatic practices in online conflictual situations; 
  • digital performance of conflict; 
  • conflict expressed through the use of memes, emojis, emoticons. 

2. Cultural and linguistic diversity 

  • toxic language in various online and offline environments; 
  • multilingualism and language ideologies: how language unites and/or divides, linguistic  discrimination; 
  • attitudes towards linguistic change and innovation; 
  • forbidden language: slang, taboos and conflict; 
  • linguistic trends in lavender languages; 
  • multilingualism and multiculturalism: migration and identity; 
  • diverse communities: cases of conflictual situations and mitigation. 

3. Theoretical linguistics, neurolinguistics 

  • conflict as the driving force for diachronic language change; 
  • inner language conflict as evolutionary pressure for meaning reassignment;
  • phonological and syntactic differences of multilingual input for language acquisition in  multilingual babies; 
  • cross-linguistic variation in morphological and syntactical structures; 
  • interface issues: Conceptual-Intentional to Sensory-Motor; 
  • language pathologies and the disruption of the intent-output continuum; 
  • structural disconnections in linguistic impairments. 

Confirmed keynote speaker:  

Prof. Martin Hilpert, Université de Neuchâtel

GENERAL INFORMATION 

Conference website:

https://consid.conference.ubbcluj.ro

Proposals 

  • For individual 20-minute papers, 150-word abstracts and a short bio note should be submitted here:  Constructions of Identity XII “Conflict” – Registration Form, by 15 June 2025. 
  • For tentative panels, please submit a title and a 100-word description of the topic, here: Constructions of  Identity XII – “Conflict” Panel Proposal Submission, by 15 January 2025.
  • For fully formed panels, 150-word  abstracts for each paper, accompanied by details of the proposed topic, the chair and the speakers, should  be submitted by 25 June 2025. 

Contact information: for more details, please write to

CFP

For further details, please check the original call inserted below.

CfP Constructions of Identity – extended deadlineDownload

(Posted 21 December 2025. Updated 26 March 2025 and 5 May 2025)

Conference: 11th International Conference on Language, Literature & Culture: “Humanities in the Digital Age”.
Location and dates: Batman University, Türkiye. 17-18 October 2025.
Extended deadline for proposal submission: 5 September 2025.

Venue: Batman University, Batman, Türkiye. 

Organized jointly by Batman University, Çankaya University, University of Prešov, Slovakia, and Nicolaus Copernicus  University in Toruń, Poland, and hosted by Batman University (Türkiye). 

Presentation

This international conference is a peer reviewed academic event and a comprehensive venue for the free exchange and dissemination of ideas on language,  translation, literary and cultural studies, and aims to bring together scholars and graduates researching the  intersections of these fields. The 11th LLC will be held as a hybrid conference, run in cooperation with the  Department of Western Languages and Literatures and the School of Foreign Languages at Batman University, on October 17–18, 2025, in Batman, Turkey.

Recent years have seen an unprecedented scale of technological advancement, impacting nearly every facet of life.  As digital devices and technologies increasingly mediate the ways in which culture is produced, accessed, distributed,  and consumed (Berry & Fagerjord, 2017, p. 7), the humanities cannot remain unaffected. Not only have these  developments altered the methods by which researchers conduct their work, but they have also reshaped the very  scope and aims of research itself.  

In congruence with this change, at the turn of the century, a new field of scholarship emerged: digital humanities. Broadly speaking, this field refers to the application of computational tools and methodologies to the study of the  humanities. However, as Berry and Fagerjord (2017) note, digital humanities is still “a discipline very much under  construction”, with ongoing debates about its scope, methodology, and theoretical foundations. This makes it an  exciting and evolving area for exploration, where new ideas and approaches continue to shape the scholarly  landscape. 

This year, we invite scholars to submit papers that engage with the theme “Humanities in the Digital Age.” We are  particularly interested in contributions that explore how digital tools and technologies are transforming not only  traditional humanities disciplines but also social sciences and interdisciplinary fields. By embracing a broad, inclusive  approach, we seek to foster dialogue across various disciplines, genres, and theoretical perspectives. 

We also intend to provide a platform for graduate/undergraduate researchers by dedicating a half-day session to  the presentation and discussion of their work. We believe that incorporating the perspectives of emerging researchers will not only support their academic development but also enrich the conference discourse, offering  fresh insights into the theme through the lens of a new generation. 

We welcome submissions on a wide range of topics, including (but not limited to): 

  • Digital Storytelling and New Forms of Narrative 
  • Digital fiction 
  • Born-Digital Literature 
  • The postdigital as a theme in literature  
  • Digimodernism 
  • The Future of Digital Storytelling: New Forms of Expression 
  • Literary Identity in the Digital Age 
  • Digital Literature and the Changing Role of the Author 
  • Digital Humanities in Education: New Approaches to Teaching Language, Literature and History The Role of AI in Teaching Language 
  • Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Literary Criticism 
  • AI in Translation: Threats or Enhancements for Human Translators? 
  • Neural Machine Translation and Its Impact on the Humanities 
  • Big Data in Literary Studies: Unveiling Patterns and Insights 
  • Digital Activism and Social Change: The Role of Technology 
  • Digital Archives and Memory: The Ethics of Digitizing the Past 
  • The Role of Digital Technology in Historical Preservation 
  • Ethics of Digital Humanities: Navigating Privacy, Accessibility, and Representation 
  • Virtual Reality and Immersive Humanities: Bridging Time and Space 
  • Humanities Data Science: Bringing Quantitative Methods to Humanistic Inquiry 
  • Social Media as Cultural Archive: Rewriting the Humanities Narrative 
  • Gamification and the Humanities: Learning, Play and Culture 
  • The Future of Libraries: Digitizing Cultural Knowledge and Accessibility 

Submissions

A max 300-word abstract and 5 keywords should be submitted as an email attachment  to llc2025conference@gmail.com by September 5, 2025. In your email, please include your name, affiliation, email  address, phone number, title of the paper, abstract, 5 keywords and a brief bio data. 

All submissions to the conference will be reviewed by at least two independent peers for technical merit and  content. Selected papers presented at the conference will be published in either an edited volume or ULAKBIM indexed University Journals. 

Timeline

  • Deadline for proposal submission: August 1, 2025 
  • Notification of acceptance: August 15, 2025 
  • Registration: September 1-September 20, 2025 
  • Late Registration: until September 30, 2025 

Conference Website: llc2025.batman.edu.tr 
For previous conferences: www.elts.cankaya.edu.tr 

The official language of the conference is English. 

Contact: llc2025conference@gmail.com 

CFP

For further details, please check the original call inserted below.

LLC CFP (1).docxDownload

(Posted 21 May 2025. Updated 14 August 2025)

Eighth International Aldous Huxley Symposium: “Aldous Huxley in Italy: Rest Cure or/and Cultural Challenge”.
Location and dates: The International Aldous Huxley Society (AHS) and the Centre for Aldous Huxley Studies (CAHS) – Florence, 21 – 25 October 2025.
Deadline for proposal submissions: 1 March 2025.

Venue: Centro Studi Ricerca e Formazione CISL, Via della Piazzuola, 71, 50133, Firenze (https://www.centrostudi.cisl.it/)

Presentation

The general theme of the conference (Aldous Huxley in Italy: Rest Cure or/and Cultural Challenge) will naturally focus on Huxley’s activities in Italy. Besides, there will certainly be room for a variety of other topics.

Website address 

<https://www.uni-muenster.de/Anglistik/Huxley/>

Contact details

Prof Bernfried Nugel (<nugel@uni-muenster.de>)

CFP

For further details, please check the original call inserted below.

Eighth International Aldous Huxley Symposium at Florence October 2025 CFPDownload

(Posted 18 November 2024)

Conference: Explicitness.
Location and dates: Université Paris-Est Créteil. 23-24 October 2025.
Deadline for proposal submissions: 15 June 2025.

The notion of explicitness seems irremediably at the heart of a paradox. The aim of the conference is to rethink this notion, often neglected in favour of its opposite, i.e. implicitness. As Dominique Maingueneau observes, explicitness is often approached as the necessary preliminary step to implicitness: “on peut tirer d’un énoncé des contenus qui ne constituent pas en principe l’objet véritable de l’énonciation mais qui apparaissent à travers les contenus explicites. C’est le domaine de l’implicite” (“It is possible, from an utterance, to derive contents that do not in principle constitute the true object of enunciation but which appear through its explicit contents. This is the domain of implicitness.”) (Les Termes clés de l’analyse du discours, Paris: Points, 1996, 47). Texts, images and sounds appear to be valued according to how complex they are, while explicitness is always relegated to an inferior position. To say that a work is explicit implies that it is poor in meaning, that it gives itself effortlessly (but also without real gratification) to the reader/listener/viewer.

Latin etymology informs us that the primary meaning of the participle explicitus was “deployed”, “executed” or, regarding texts, “completed, finished”. It would seem, then, that explicitness is less a starting point leading to implicitness than the end result of a text’s discursive deployment, or that of a fabric whose folds have been patiently unfurled. Why does explicitness seem so poor today despite its rich etymological meaning?

As readers, spectators and listeners always engaged in interpretative reading of essentially polysemous media, we are from the outset parasitized by the question of implicitness. On the face of it, explicitness has less value than implicitness since it implies a work whose meanings can be exhausted—due to its alleged superficiality or its use of clichés—or a reader who cannot go beyond what is explicit and is unable to grasp the hidden meanings. And yet, paradoxically, the very notion of explicitness proves elusive and seems harder to grasp than its opposite. What is explicitness? If it is what unfolds, where does it stop? Can we think of what is explicit without what is implicit, or are we obliged to link both these notions?

Perceiving explicitness is subject to cultural encoding. For example, one can think of the historical roots of Shakespeare’s plays: their audiences—including their uneducated members—understood their sauciness, while we rely on footnotes. Shakespearean ribaldry is all the more obscene as it is no longer immediately accessible to us and disappears into an off scene. Yet, do we enjoy a Shakespeare play more when all its references have been explained?  Similarly, the scandalous scenes in Hogarth’s Marriage à la Mode are not as shocking to us as they were to his contemporaries. Is implicitness, then, just a case of forgotten explicitness?

But even when explicitness is not lost, how explicit is it after all? All forms of artistic expression, however immediate and objective they may appear, are ultimately constructions. The narrator of a novel, for example, reserves the right to mislead the reader and lead them down false paths. Even when the narrator declares they are speaking plainly, readers are invited to question such a claim to being explicit; for example, the address to the reader at the start of Moby-Dick—“Call me Ishmael”—is a formula which both issues an injunction and induces doubt. It could almost be compared to Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe. The same deceptive obviousness can be found in the visual arts: the perspective used in Renaissance paintings, for example, claimed to offer the most realistic and objective view of reality; in cinema, the camera eye creates the illusion of following an objective gaze also frequently attributed to photography, perceived as a faithful capture of reality. Yet these supposedly objective views are no less biased, and hide, in the very depths of their obviousness, the manipulative effects inherent in all representation. Their objectivity is deceptive and calls for unfolding or unfurling.

Should we then give up explicitness? Even before we read a book, or watch a film, a play, a painting or a photograph, or listen to a piece of music, their paratexts conditions  their reception. When Barthes calls for the death of the author, observing, “donner un Auteur à un texte, c’est imposer à ce texte un cran d’arrêt, c’est le pourvoir d’un signifié dernier, c’est fermer l’écriture,” (“to give an Author to a text is to impose a stop to that text, it is to provide it with an ultimate signified, it is to close writing.”) he seems to be saying that explicitness lies on the side of closure, and that to reopen the text, we need to evacuate its ultimate paratext, i. e. its author (Le Bruissement de la langue, Paris: Points, 1984, 68). How, then, are we to fathom and formulate the complexities of the notion of explicitness? Topics for this conference may include but are not limited to:

  • Univocity and polysemy: is explicitness necessarily univocal? 
  •  Clichés and commonplaces 
  •  Explicitness and intentionality
  •  The role of paratexts 
  •  Speech and explicitness 
  •  Explicitness, genre and gender 
  •  Intertextuality 
  • Translation practices
  •  Theatre and explicitness (opening scenes, asides, stage directions…) 
  • Strategies of meaning in film and music 
  •  Obscenity
  • Humour and explicitness
  • Materiality and explicitness
  • Teaching and analysing texts in the classroom

Abstracts in English or French (300 to 500 words) should be sent with a short bio by 15 June 2025 to explicitecolloque@gmail.com

Organising committee:

  • Camille Adnot, Éric Athenot, Farid Ghadami and Élisabeth Vialle (UPEC)
  • Laboratoire IMAGER (Institut des Mondes Anglophone, Germanique et Roman) – EA 3958
  • Équipe Ties (Textes, Images et Sons).

CFP

For further details, please check the original call inserted below.

CFP_EN_Explicitness_Conference_TiesDownload

(Posted 15 March 2025)

Conference: Feeling the Limits: Censorship and Creative Freedom in Theatre, Film, and Visual Arts in the Age of Populism.
Location and dates: University of Łódź, Poland. 23-25 October 2025.
Extended deadline for proposal submissions: 30 June 2025.

Venue details: University of Łódź, Faculty of Philology. The conference is run on-site.

Organisers

  • University of Łódź, Poland, Department of English Drama, Theatre, and Film
  • University College Cork, Ireland, School of English

Event presentation 

Artistic freedom has been recognised as an international right that needs to be  protected because it is threatened when artists question political ideologies, religious  beliefs, and social mores. However, today the meaning of such concepts as “artistic  freedom” or “freedom of expression” seems more complex and in need of greater  definition. As democracies have, to a large extent, abandoned systems of censorship,  new constraints have emerged to silence artists in contemporary cultural life.  Censorship, as a term encompassing a wide array of mechanisms identified by  Catherine O’Leary (Routledge 2016), constitutes complex processes of cancellation,  voiding, erasure, or outlawing, which control the level of visibility and audibility of  artistic institutions. Censoring practices influence the circulation of ideas, the  condition of public debate, and the possibilities of artistic creativity in areas as diverse  as museums, art galleries, universities, and the media in ways which dominate the  production and interpretation of knowledge. As Paquette, Kleinfelder, and Miles  claim, the current state of freedoms in the arts and culture has been shaped by  earlier “culture wars” of the 1980s and 1990s, in which orthodox values clashed with  the ideas of progressivism (‘Introduction’ to In and Out of View: Art and the Dynamics  of Circulation, Suppression, and Censorship, Bloomsbury 2022).  

The aim of the conference is to reflect on the concept of limitation (from various  theoretical perspectives) and to explore how productions in the fields of drama,  theatre, film, television, as well as visual arts and performance are influenced by limits  internally or externally applied. It is to ask about positive and negative roles played by a variety of controls imposed by states, public institutions, activism, conservative or  liberal mores, or populist politics on artists and artistic independence, or by the artists  themselves. Is complete lack of censorship or control a required and positive goal to  strive for? Is censorship an effective method of erasure, or – to the contrary – a  method of stimulating interest? The scope of the conference includes, but also  extends beyond, the field of state censorship and aims at various cultural practices  which experience a controlling influence over artistic life and creativity.  

Censorship and other forms of public and private control, as well as self-imposed  repressive mechanisms, form part of the cultural history of Western civilisation. The  conference intends to rethink the presence of political, social, moral, and ideological  pressures imposed on the arts in reference to the contemporary rise of populist  politics. However, it is also the intention of the organisers to trace the development of  censorship practices back into history in order to show the extent to which  contemporary legislative activity and licensing regulations may continue the tradition  of state censorship operating across cultures and the arts. The current state of artistic  freedoms has been the product of complex historical circumstances. Investigating  how the tension between censorship in cultural institutions and the demands for  freedom of artistic expression has evolved across decades provides insights into the  future of what might be a seriously compromised creative independence.  

The organisers of the conference invite papers to investigate issues of artistic  freedom and censorship in the contemporary world, as well as in connection to both  historical development and possible projections into the future.  

In an effort to map the territory of freedom and censorship in a concise way, the  organisers will give priority to paper proposals concerning English-speaking territories  and continental Europe. The conference will be held in English.  

We invite papers addressing, among other topics, the following issues: 

  • Cultural censorship  
  • Covert and overt censorship in the arts 
  • Arts sponsoring 
  • Funding and organisational limitations in artistic institutions 
  • Legislation and performance 
  • Corporate art censorship 
  • Artivism, protest, and censorship 
  • Representing censorship in drama, theatre, film, and art 
  • Artistic works as challenges to censorship limitations 
  • Visibility, audibility, and cultural silencing in the arts 
  • Exhibition cultures 
  • Adaptation and artistic freedom 
  • Adaptation and cultural censorship 
  • Self-censorship  
  • Current geography of censorship in the arts 
  • Taboos as artistic topics 
  • Disability and representation in the arts
  • Marginalised and silenced voices 
  • Hollywood/Netflix/HBO/ streaming platforms and censorship 
  • Censorship, democracy, and art 
  • Censored pasts in art 
  • Art vandalism and censoring practices  

The event is the eleventh edition of the biennial Drama Through the Ages Conference which has been organised by the Department of English Drama, Theatre,  and Film, University of Łódź.  

Keynote speakers 

  • Anne Etienne, Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Drama, University College  Cork, Ireland;
  • Jacek Fabiszak, Professor in the Department of Studies in Culture,.

Abstract submission

Please submit your topic proposals and abstracts (up to 300 words), together with a  short bio, to lodz.conference@gmail.com. Extended deadline for submissions: 30 June 2025.

Conference website

For further information, please visit the conference website: https://dramathroughtheages.wordpress.com

CFP

For further details, please check the original call inserted below.

Drama Through the Ages 2025 CFP Second CircularDownload

(Posted 4 February 2025. Updated 12 June 2025)

Conference: Echoes of Hate, Screens of Resistance: Discourse, Media, and Pedagogy in the Digital Age.
Location and dates: Università di Napoli “L’Orientale”, Naples. 23–25 October 2025.
Deadline for proposal submission: 30 July 2025.
  • Venue details:
    23–24 October 2025:
    San Severo al Pendino Heritage Site, The Historic Sacristy Via Duomo, 286 – 80138 Naples
  • 25 October 2025:
    Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici, Palazzo Serra di Cassano Via Monte di Dio, 14-15 – 80132 Naples

Event convened by Giuseppe Balirano, University of Naples L’Orientale.

Event presentation

The international conference Echoes of Hate, Screens of Resistance marks the culmination of the PRIN 2022 project ECHOES – English Studies to Contrast Hate Online and Enhance Solidarity, a multidisciplinary initiative funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research. The project focuses on the critical analysis of harmful online practices (HOPs) in English multimodal discourse, with an emphasis on promoting solidarity, inclusion, and responsible digital citizenship.

In today’s increasingly polarised digital world, hate is no longer confined to fringe communities; in fact, it circulates widely through social media, public discourse, and popular audiovisual culture. Cinema and television, together with social networking systems, participate in both the reproduction and the contestation of exclusionary narratives. Meanwhile, educational institutions face mounting pressure to equip learners and educators with tools to identify, counter, and neutralise these forms of hate.

This conference provides an open platform for scholars, educators, cultural practitioners, media analysts, and digital activists to reflect on the critical role of language, screen discourse, and pedagogical practices in addressing hate and fostering inclusive futures.

Over the past two years, the ECHOES project has investigated online hate from a multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) perspective, analysing verbal, visual, and aural digital texts in English. Using this methodology, the interuniversity research team has identified four prominent forms of HOPs, namely trolling, cyberbullying, bashing, and defamation, and analysed their impact on four particularly vulnerable social groups: women, migrants and diasporic communities, LGBTIQ+ individuals, and people with disabilities. In addition, the analysis was guided by six main hate categories: Age (including discrimination against the elderly), Body, Disability, Ethnicity (including various forms of racism not necessarily linked to migration), Gender, and Religion.

The conference will explore how digital and screen-based textualities construct and circulate hate, and how they offer discursive and pedagogical opportunities for resistance. By convening experts from fields such as applied linguistics, discourse analysis, media and film studies, education, and social semiotics, Echoes of Hate, Screens of Resistance seeks to cultivate and promote interdisciplinary dialogue and reinforce the role of education and research in countering digital toxicity. We especially encourage contributions that engage critically with the idea of digital solidarity, interrogate the ethical responsibilities of content creators and educators, and propose tangible models for promoting inclusion and mutual respect in online and audiovisual communication.

Conference Themes

We welcome proposals for individual papers, panels, and workshops on topics including, but not limited to:

1.  Digital Hate Discourse

  • Multimodal analysis of online hate speech (HOPs) across social media platforms
  • Discursive strategies of exclusion and vilification in English-language digital environments
  • Affect, irony, humour, and other indirect forms of digital aggression and disambiguation
  • Corpus-informed approaches to the study of online hostility

2.  Cinema and Television as Arenas of Resistance

  • Audiovisual representations of vulnerable communities (LGBTIQ+, migrants, women, disabled people)
  • Screen narratives that challenge hate and promote empathy
  • Subtitling, dubbing, and the translation of discriminatory ideologies
  • Censorship, genre, and ideology in TV and film discourse

3.  Activism, Policy, and Civil Society

  • Best practices in hate monitoring, moderation, and civic advocacy
  • Pedagogies of peace and solidarity across sectors
  • Partnerships between researchers and public institutions
  • Lifelong learning and critical media literacy in local communities

4.  Teacher Training Track

  • As part of the ECHOES project’s commitment to outreach and societal impact, the Conference will feature a dedicated Teacher Training Track on Saturday, 25th. This track will include 45- minute workshops and/or materials presentations specifically designed to support English language teachers. Aimed particularly at those working in primary and secondary education, it will offer practical insights into teaching digital literacy, global citizenship, and intercultural communication through inclusive and critical methodologies.

Submission Guidelines

  • Abstracts (max 300 words, including references) for individual 20-minute papers must be submitted via email in English, accompanied by a brief bio (maximum 150 words).
  • Panel proposals (3-4 speakers) should include a panel rationale (max 300 words, including references) and individual abstracts (max 200 words each, without references).Write to: prin2022echoes@unior.it
  • Timeline:
    • Deadline for submissions: 30th July 2025
    • Notification of acceptance: 1st Sept. 2025
    • Registration deadline: 30th Sept. 2025
    • Language: English

Keynote Speakers

  • Salvatore Attardo (Texas A&M University)
  • Michael Burke (Utrecht University)
  • Giuditta Caliendo (Université de Lille)
  • Majid KhosraviNik (Newcastle University)
  • Tiziana Terranova (University of Naples L’Orientale)
  • Mikael Toulza (Université de Lille)

CFP

For further details, please check the original call inserted below.

Conference – PRIN 2022 ECHOES_200625_1Download

(Posted 4 July 2025)

International Conference: Discourses in Interaction III.
Location and dates: University of Madeira, Funchal, Madeira. 30-31 October 2025.
Deadline for proposal submission: 16 May 2025.

Venue details: University of Madeira, Funchal, Madeira, Portugal.

Organisers: University of Madeira in association with the University of Lisbon and the University of Łódź, Poland.

Event presentation

The International Conference Discourses in Interaction explores the connections between memory studies, literary studies, interactional linguistics, pragmatics, media analysis and cultural studies to provide a comprehensive perspective on the complexities of human communication. Thematically it builds upon two previous academic venues held at the University of Madeira, Discourses in Interaction: Literary & Film-induced Tourism and Discourses in Interaction II: Experiences, Memories and Identities, while sharing their genre crossing and interdiscursive approaches.

Drawing on the critical perspective by Baynham and Lee, this conference proposes to “consider translanguaging and translation in tandem – across languages, language varieties, registers, and discourses, and in a diverse range of contexts” (2019:74). This range of contexts is meant to address a more nuanced understanding of the concepts of memory and identity which carry strategic, political and ethical implications on the way we represent the relationship between the past and the present in a contemporary globalised society.

Inspired by Andreas Huyssen’s Present Pasts (2003), we seek submissions which examine the extent to which memories travel and transform across borders, and media, impacting identity and belonging, along with the role of mediation in shaping diasporic narratives, knowledge and socio-political aspects of remembering and forgetting.

Contributions may also delve into the ethical implications of empowerment and silencing within socio-historical discourses, collective memory and archives. We encourage discussions on the impact of propaganda and (dis)information strategies, as well as on the promotion of historical accuracy and initiatives which prioritize education and awareness in the public sphere. Furthermore, we welcome reflections on fictional and non-fictional representations of (collective) remembrance and forgetting, and their relationship with historical discourse on memory and identity.

We invite panel, roundtable, paper or art-based proposals and workshops dealing with, but not restricted to, the following topics:

  1. Transcultural Mobility and (Dis)Location: Memory, Authenticity, and Mediation
  2. Encoding / Decoding Emotion and Multimodal Narratives of the Self
  3. (Re)addressing Knowledge, Ethics, and Aesthetics Paradigms
  4. From Cognitivism to Ecologism in Language Studies
  5. Rhetoric and Gender Studies
  6. Mis/Disinformation and Publishing in the Digital Age
  7. Deconstructing Propaganda: Strategies for Media Literacy
  8. Holocaust and Genocide Denial and Distortion
  9. Activism and Social Justice Movements
  10. Agency, Voice, and (Dis)Empowering Discourses
  11. Language and Artificial Intelligence
  12. Interpreting, Translation, and Terminology
  13. (Digital) Storytelling as Translanguaging
  14. Dealing with the Past: Historical Discourses and Literary Representations

Proposals should be sent as PDF to <discourses.interaction@mail.uma.pt> by May 16, 2025, including: proposed format of presentation, title, abstract (up to 250 words), 5 keywords, presenter name(s), email(s), institution(s), and bionote(s) (up to 100 words).

Contact details

discourses.interaction@mail.uma.pt

CFP

For further details, please check the original call inserted below.

Discourses – CFP University of MadeiraDownload

(Posted 12 April 2025)

Workshop: “The Companies We Keep – Figurations, Narratives, and Practices of Co-Living in Common Spaces in 21st-Century British and Anglophone Literatures”.
Location and dates: Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main. 31 October – 1 November 2025.
Deadline for proposal submission: 6 May 2025.

Confirmed Keynote speaker: Ben Highmore (University of Sussex) 

Workshop presentation

Many of the crises and cultural trends of the 21st century have proven to ambivalently reflect and  inform the ways we experience figurations and practices of co-living. The cost-of-living crisis,  economic instability and precariousness have forced people to move closer together and share their  personal space, opening new terrains of care and kindness, but, simultaneously, also of vulnerability  and violence. While during the Covid pandemic and lockdown the home was contoured as a safe  space and place of retreat and refuge, the co-presence of family members or other roommates  sometimes proved to be annoying, if not dangerous, what can be seen in novels like Sarah Hall’s  Burntcoat and Sarah Moss’ The Fell. 

The ubiquitous smart devices that we live and sometimes work with in our kitchens, living and bedrooms make everyday life easier and more enjoyable, but at the same time they are also  becoming uncanny agents eroding human and non-human hierarchies. Novels such as Kazuo  Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun and Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger illustrate how robots, androids and  ghosts can populate the domestic sphere, complicating boundaries between presence and absence. 

According to Marie Kondo, we are encouraged to ask each object in our home whether it  sparks joy, highlighting the need to regulate our co-living with objects. This practice implicitly  acknowledges their decisive role in our domestic lives, suggesting that objects possess a form of  constitutive agency (Appadurai 1986, Bennett 2010). At the same time, popular booktoks, for  example, illustrate that books are not merely passive, readable objects and veritable furnishings,  but objects of para-social relationships. The book thus appears just as capable of friendship as a  living creature. 

What is more, pets – particularly cats and dogs – have played a crucial role in mitigating  loneliness and social isolation, offering emotional support and companionship in times of crisis.  This is addressed for instance in Laura Jean McKay’s novel The Animals in that Country that manages  to circumvent the pitfalls of anthropomorphism. Moreover, the presence of non-human animals  not only reconfigures domestic affective economies but also highlights the interdependence of  human and non-human relations in contemporary home-making while at the same time pests and  parasites – fungal, bacterial or metazoan – infest their hosts and dwellings.

This shows that forms of co-living are also often constituted involuntarily. Processes of  urbanization and gentrification continue to transform the makeup of domestic co-living, often  privileging certain relationalities while displacing others. Environmental issues and ecocriticism  have risen to prominence as scholars interrogate the intricate relationships between human life,  nature, and technology – an interplay that is central to the current scholarly and creative discourse.  Saeidi, Anderson, and Davidová for instance, investigate how “new modes of architectural practice  can foster multispecies co-living to reduce biodiversity loss and increase the quality of life for both  human and nonhuman inhabitants of architecture.” (2023) 

While earlier research has often focused on the home as a critical geographical site where  questions of identity, ideology and power are negotiated (e.g. Blunt/Dowling 2006) this workshop  focuses on the co-living relations between humans, animals, things and technologies within all  kinds of dwellings in 21st-century British and Anglophone literature. It seeks to engage with the  following questions: How do narratives portray the affective, ethical, and material entanglements  of co-living? What new forms and figurations of intimacy, dependence, and agency emerge in  contemporary depictions of domestic life? How does literature cope with these shifts in the  dynamics of different living constellations in times of crisis?  

Possible topics include, but are by no means limited to, the following: 

  • Affect, Care, and Conflict in Shared Spaces: The ethical and emotional dimensions of  cohabitation – how literature represents kindness, dependency, irritation, and violence in  shared dwellings. 
  • (Re-)Figurations of Gender, Class, and Race: The cultural politics of common spaces. 
  • Narratives of Precarious Co-Living: How do contemporary novels depict shared living  arrangements shaped by economic instability, gentrification, and housing crises?
  • Domestic Space and Smart Technologies: The impact of AI, smart home devices, and  digital surveillance on the experience of cohabitation. 
  • Vulnerability and Exposure in Shared Living Spaces: How do contemporary narratives  explore the precariousness of intimacy, privacy, and personal boundaries in domestic  cohabitation? What forms of emotional, physical, or structural vulnerability emerge in  shared dwellings? 
  • More-Than-Human Domesticities: Literary explorations of interspecies cohabitation, from  pets to parasites, and their effects on human-nonhuman relationships. 
  • Co-Living Beyond the Nuclear Family: How do novels challenge traditional family  structures and explore alternative kinships, communal living, and found families?
  • Things as Companions and Objects of Para-Social Relationships: The role of objects in  contemporary domestic life – emotional attachments, aesthetic functions, and digital  fandoms. 
  • Architectural and Ecocritical Perspectives on Co-Living: How do contemporary narratives  engage with sustainable, multispecies, or post-human living spaces? 
  • Queer and Trans Narratives of Co-Living: How does literature depict co-living as a site of  chosen kinship, safety, or negotiation of identity? 
  • Postcolonial and Global Perspectives on Domesticity: How do contemporary Anglophone  literatures address cohabitation in postcolonial, migrant, or diasporic contexts? 
  • AI, Robots, Androids and Ghosts in the Domestic Sphere: How do contemporary texts  depict spectral presences and artificial intelligences as cohabitants? What does their  presence reveal about memory, embodiment, and the porous boundaries between life, data,  and afterlife? 

Submission Guidelines: 

  • Please submit abstracts of 250-300 words for a 20-minute paper along with a short bio (100 words)  to bayerlipp@em.uni-frankfurt.de by May, 6th 2025. 
  • Notifications will be sent out by May 20th. 

A volume of essays on the topic of the workshop is being planned for publication. For further inquiries, please contact
Susanne Bayerlipp (bayerlipp@em.uni-frankfurt.de).

CFP

For further details, please check the original call inserted below.

CFP_The Companies_publicDownload

(Posted )