Text and Texture: Rethinking Materiality in Adaptation Studies.
Deadline for contributions: 30 April 2026.
Edited by Assoc. Prof. Gülden Hatipoğlu
Publication presentation
Across its diverse multidisciplinary landscape, Adaptation Studies has evolved beyond questions of fidelity in intersemiotic practices and expanded its critical purview to explore the material dimensions of adaptation—ranging from the physicality of media formats to the sensory, affective, and technological textures that re/shape how stories circulate across forms. The term “texture” invites us to approach adaptation not merely as a process of transfer or translation, but as an interplay of surfaces, densities, and material registers. What does it mean to read, view, or experience an adaptation as a textured object? How do material practices—as diverse as printmaking, mural painting, sculpture, textiles, costume, installations, 3D printing, projection mapping, biofabrication—inform the production and reception of adaptations? How do material conditions intersect with questions of authorship, embodiment, gender, reception, and technology?
Such questions open onto broader inquiries about how materiality itself shapes adaptive processes and meanings—a dialogue that this collection seeks to extend and deepen. By foregrounding the dynamic intersections of texture, materiality, and mediation, we invite scholars to reconsider adaptation through its tactile, sensorial, spatial dimensions. Hoping to offer renewed critical perspectives on the material turn that continues to redefine the field – and extending the conversation beyond the conventional boundaries of film studies (e.g., S. Murray’s “Materializing Adaptation Theory” [2008] and K. Meikle’s “Rematerializing Adaptation Theory” [2013]) – this collection encourages new ways of seeing how media forms, physical substrates, human and nonhuman agents co-produce meaning. As this framework positions adaptation as a material practice rather than a purely representational one, submissions from artists, curators, and practitioners are also welcome, especially those reflecting on how the act of making transforms, translates, and reimagines textual narratives.
Possible topics include (but are not limited to):
- Theoretical approaches to materiality, embodiment, and texture in adaptation
- Adaptation and the senses: touch, sound, smell, and the phenomenology of adaptation
- Textile as interface: embroidery, knitting, weaving, and print as adaptation practices
- Tapestry as medium of adaptation
- Practices of stitching, binding, and mending as modes of textual interpretation
- The poetics of thread, fabric, and fiber as media of storytelling in adaptation
- Costume, set design, and scenography as adaptive material practices
- Recycled media assemblage
- Mural art, public spaces and adaptation
- Architecture and adaptation
- Sculpture, carved figures, engravings, and other forms of arts and crafts as adaptation
- Objects and adaptation
- Performance, bodies, and adaptation
- Body art and adaptation
- Ecological or environmental approaches to adaptation and material culture
- Adaptation and the politics of production: labour, craft, and creative economies
The volume will be submitted for consideration to a critically acclaimed international academic Publisher.
Timeline (of the publication process)
- Please submit a 300–400-word abstract and a 150-word biographical note by 30 April 2026.
- Full essays will be requested following acceptance of abstracts.
- Submit proposals to: Assoc. Prof. Gülden Hatipoğlu, e-mail:
guldenhatipoglu@yahoo.co.uk - Notification of acceptance: 11 May 2026
- Full chapters due: 1 September 2026
Contact details: Assoc. Prof. Gülden Hatipoğlu, e-mail: guldenhatipoglu@yahoo.co.uk
CFP
For further details, please check the publication original call inserted below.
CFP-Text and Texture–Rethinking Materiality in Adaptation Studies(Posted 9 January 2026)
Zealos: Studies in the Humanities, Social Sciences, Arts & Design, Volume 4, 2026.
Deadline for contributions: 30 April 2026.
Publication presentation
Zealos: Studies in the Humanities, Social Sciences, Arts & Design is an annual peer-reviewed and open-access journal published by the School of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Nicosia (UNIC).
We are now accepting contributions for the fourth volume of Zealos, which is due to be published in 2026. Zealos welcomes original and previously unpublished articles that fall within the scope of the journal and follow internationally sanctioned scientific standards. Submissions are free of charge. We welcome contributions in Greek or English.
Zealos is a fully open-access journal issued annually. Each volume is published electronically as a PDF file. All papers are available on the Internet to all users immediately upon publication and free of charge, according to the Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Under this licence, authors agree that others can copy and distribute the article free of charge, provided that they give appropriate credit, do not modify the article and do not use it for commercial purposes.
Aims and Scope
The journal aims to showcase the empirical, theoretical and practice-based research of scholars and practitioners in the fields of the humanities, social sciences, arts and design. Zealos intends to make its mark on these fields by publishing research papers, essays and creative work, conference and book reviews. Adopting a multidisciplinary approach, we aim to contribute to both local and international literature, showcasing the work of academics and practitioners in the process. The journal particularly welcomes submissions on issues related to Cyprus. Special issues focusing on a specific theme and acting as a connecting point between the various disciplines are also planned. We accept papers in English and Greek. All manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer review by two experts in the relevant field.
Website address
Contact details
shss.zealosubmissions@unic.ac.cy
CFP
For further details, please check the publication original call inserted below.
(Posted 22 February 2026)
A Tribute to William Labov’s Impact on English Phonetics and Phonology.
Deadline for contributions: 30 April 2026.
Issue edited by:
Spoken Englishes – Journal in English Variation Studies will publish its very 1st issue in 2027. It will be edited by Christophe Coupé-Jamet (CY Cergy Paris Université, France), Quentin Dabouis (Université Clermont-Auvergne, France), Pierre Fournier (Université Sorbonne Paris Nord, France), Olivier Glain (Université Jean Monnet de Saint-Étienne, France), Véronique Lacoste (Université Lumière Lyon 2, France) & Anne Przewozny (Université Toulouse – Jean Jaurès, France), on the topic of William Labov’s Impact on English Phonetics and Phonology.
Publication / Volume presentation
William Labov’s groundbreaking work (from 1966 onwards) revolutionized the study of language variation and change. Labov is often regarded as the founder of variationist sociolinguistics. He challenged traditional linguistic theories by focusing on the social context of language use, and by approaching language variation and change, not as accidental elements, but as fundamental features of language. From its seminal works on the importance of social forces in language change and variation, initiated in New York City and Martha’s Vineyard, to the understanding of African American Vernacular English, or to the development of the Atlas of North American English, Labov’s founding studies in sociolinguistics, phonology, and phonetics, based on rigorous empirical research, revealed how language varies systematically across social groups and situations. He introduced the sociolinguistic interview and quantitative analysis, which then became standard in the field. The principles of language change and variation that he defined, including their life cycle and the role of social factors, have shaped our understanding of how languages change and have spurred many subsequent studies. His work on sound changes (Labov, Ash & Boberg 2006) in North American English varieties has equally been impactful from the point of view of our understanding of sound change and has led to different methods of data normalization. Labov’s influence extends beyond the world of academia, impacting education, policy, and public discourse on language diversity and language discrimination. Labov’s pioneering work, methods and theories have inspired generations of linguists.
This very first issue of SPEN, meant to be a tribute to William Labov, invites submissions on, but not limited to, the following topics:
- Interaction between spoken language behaviour and social attributes (age, gender, social class…);
- Labov’s Principles and the “three waves” of variation studies;
- The relationship between sociolinguistics and phonology/phonetics;
- Methods in sociolinguistic data collection (sociolinguistic interview, corpus design, field recording techniques, speaker sampling and selection…);
- Ethical issues (informed consent, personal data collection, anonymization, data management…);
- Issues with discriminating between noise and variation in spoken corpora (e.g. vowel normalization and statistical modelling);
- Phonetic and/or phonological variation in synchrony and sound change in diachrony from a Labovian perspective;
- The concurrent rise in popularity of sociolinguistics and other theoretical and methodological frameworks amongst linguists;
- The evolution of sociolinguistics as a field;
- The influence of sociolinguistics on linguistic theory;
- The role of sociolinguistics in synchronic and diachronic studies;
- The legacy of Labov’s work in contemporary phonological studies.
The list above consists of only a few suggestions and is by no means exhaustive. Submissions dealing with other topics related to English phonetics and phonology will also be considered. Submissions that do not align with the present issue’s scope will be duly considered, but assigned to the Varia section.
Timeline (of the publication process)
- February 2026: Call for papers
- April 30 2026: Deadline for submitting abstracts (to christophe.coupe@u-cergy.fr)
- May 31 2026: Evaluation decisions notified to authors
- October 31 2026: Deadline for submitting papers
- November-December 2026: Proofreading of papers by the evaluation committee
- December 2026: Authors’ corrections
- January 2027: Deadline for sending in final versions of papers
- February 2027: Publication
Contact details
Submissions (abstract and papers) will be submitted to christophe.coupe@u-cergy.fr. Submissions will be anonymously peer-reviewed by a scientific committee composed of specialists in their fields.
Abstracts
Your abstract must be between 3,000 and 6,000 characters (including spaces and references). Please include a title, and five to six relevant keywords.
Papers
While English is recommended, papers in French are also accepted. There is no page limit; however, all papers should include an abstract (between 3,000 and 6,000 characters) provided in both English and French.
(Posted 1 March 2026)
Irish Studies: Legacies and Futures. Special Issue 3/2026 of Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai Philologia.
Extended submission deadline of completed essays: 1 May 2026.
Guest editors:
- Brian Ó Conchubhair (University of Notre Dame) boconch1@nd.edu
- Erika Mihálycsa (Babeș-Bolyai University) erika.mihalycsa@ubbcluj.ro
Publication presentation
In December 2024, a group of international Irish Studies scholars gathered in Cluj, Romania to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Babeș-Bolyai University’s MA programme in Irish Studies – to this day the only postgraduate degree offering a cross-disciplinary perspective on Irish culture, literature and history at any Central/Eastern European university. When the MA programme, initially designed as Irish Writing and Its Contexts, was created in 1999, Ireland and Central/Eastern Europe were entering a decade of hopes for deeper European integration and democratisation in their regions and worldwide. It was a time that witnessed the rapid globalising of Irish Studies, backed by Celtic Tiger optimism. However, that decade would also bring in far-reaching changes that prompted, in our domains of knowledge and across the humanities, a thorough overhaul of ways of seeing and framing difference. At the start of the Cluj ISMA, global Irish Studies was dominated by postcolonial rehistoricising and recontextualising approaches pivoting on rigorous archival studies. Importantly, the early 2000s saw a definite decline in the understanding of literary culture as part of the anthropological program of “inventing Ireland”, to quote the title of one of Declan Kiberd’s seminal books that to this day underpins our discipline; a transition from culture understood as projecting a shared sense of identity and future, to “after Ireland” (to quote another title by Kiberd), that is, to an understanding of literature as operating in a planetary field, fully enmeshed with other forms and modes of imagining personhood, creaturely life and vulnerability.
Lego, legare: as the Latin etymon of the first word in our title implies, “legacies” translates as chords binding future developments or meshing their potential unfoldings with that which the past bequeaths, in the sense of both an alignment with existing lines of research and an opening up of fields of inquiry towards future possibilities. In fact, in the quarter century since the Cluj ISMA started, literary and cultural studies – Irish Studies included – have shown a pervasive preoccupation with questions of ethics and biopolitics that cut across lines of gender, class, ethnicity, human and nonhuman geographies and habitats. Consequently, the curriculum taught today is informed by corporeal studies, trauma studies, new materialism(s), different posthumanisms, animal studies, and ecocriticism, whose investigations as a rule reveal the ontological and ethical tangle of literary phenomena with earthly life.
Irish culture has often been forced by history to experiment with modes of being, ways of transmission and aesthetic forms that widely deviated from established norms and genres, received notions of the status and social role of culture, and canonical aesthetics. Given the rapid, dramatic changes Ireland underwent since the millennium turn, to the exceptionally progressive post-Celtic Tiger state, Irish culture is again among the “first respondents” to the multiple, intersectional crises affecting all earthlings. Irish culture’s public framing has similarly continued to change. An almost symbolic illustration could be the transition from the “greening” of the towering modernist self-exiles, whose names came to adorn Dublin’s contemporary architectural landmarks (the “James Joyce” and “Samuel Beckett” bridges across the Liffey designed by international star architect Santiago Calatrava) to the naming of an offshore patrol vessel participating in UN humanitarian missions after the latter: the LÉ Samuel Beckett, which rescued around 1,000 refugees in the Mediterranean before the pandemic.
Twenty-five years since the founding of ISMA in Cluj, we invite proposals for essays on any aspect that perspectivises these legacies anew, for a retrospective and prospective re-threading of our thoughts on Irish culture. We seek papers that explore Irish literature and its modes of questioning and provoking putative certainties, of subverting established norms and forms that corresponded to social, political and cultural power structures. Proposals related to these and any other aspects of the multifarious “tense future” ahead of us are also welcome.
Submissions
Extended submission deadline of completed essays: May 1, 2026. Articles should adhere to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the journal’s stylesheet:
https://studia.reviste.ubbcluj.ro/index.php/subbphilologia/article/view/6341/6042 
and should be sent to the following addresses:
CFP
For further details, please check the publication original call inserted below.
(Posted 11 February 2026)
Journal of The Short Story in English (JSSE): “Defiance in 21st–century South African short stories”.
Deadline for contributions: 1 June 2026.
Publication presentation
The short story is the short fiction genre in which South African literature has most consistently excelled. It experienced a literary “renaissance” in transitioning from apartheid to a non-racial South Africa (MacKenzie 2010). However, while short stories of the early 1990s marked the hopeful vision of a ‘rainbow nation, ‘post-2000 short stories reflect increasing generic diversification and a range of aesthetic practices symptomatic of the thwarted promises of the country’s political transition (Sandwith 2022). This special issue of the Journal of the Short Story in English (JSSE) will examine the 21st-century South African short story genre through the prism of defiance. How is defiance re-imagined in post-2000 South African writing? Is there a new poetics of defiance emerging in contemporary short stories? How do the shades of defiance, in form and substance, reflect and address the complexities of the country’s cultural, social and political realities?
Full CFP: https://journals.openedition.org/jsse/4636
Timeline
- Abstract submissions: 1 June 2026
- Notification of provisional acceptance : 1 July 2026
- Completed papers: 1 January 2027
- Publication in Autumn 2027
Website address
https://journals.openedition.org/jsse/4636
Contact details
DefianceJSSE2027@protonmail.com
CFP
For further details, please check the original call inserted below.
(Posted 28 May 2025)
Lea – Quaderni di Lea. Transimperial Encounters: Networks of Cultural and Literary Exchange Between India and Europe, 1870-1947.
Deadline for contributions: 8 June 2026.
Edited by Ujjwal Jana (University of Delhi) and Greta Perletti (University of Trento)
Publication presentation
This special issue of the journal LEA seeks to explore the transimperial intellectual, cultural, and political exchanges between India and Europe in the colonial period (1870-1947) by examining the complex, multidirectional flows of ideas, people, and cultural forms across imperial boundaries. While the notion of ‘transimperial encounters’ immediately evokes postcolonial theory and frameworks, the issue also intends to respond to the recent ‘global turn’ of Victorian studies, with scholars advocating for the need to “widen” (Banerjee, Fong and Michie 2021) or “undiscipline” the field (Chatterjee, Christoff and Wong 2020). The special issue Transimperial Encounters builds on such approaches by investigating how exchanges between the East and West – whether through travel, political activism, literary production, philosophical or religious discourse – reshaped anti-colonial thought, cultural movements, and intellectual traditions on both sides of the colonial divide.
The issue is especially interested to explore transimperial cultural movements like feminism, radicalism, vegetarianism etc. (Gandhi 2006; Selbin 2024), as well as transimperial literary genres like science fiction, spiritual autobiographies, realism etc. (Joshi 2002; Boehmer 2015; Gibson 2019). We welcome contributions from a range of disciplines, including literary studies, history, intellectual history, cultural studies, and transnational studies. In addition, we aim to bring together scholars working on different national and linguistic contexts to explore how anti-colonial and cultural networks functioned beyond the Anglo-Indian binary. We thus encourage also contributions that examine less-explored East/West connections (e.g., between India and Italy, France, Germany, etc.), as well as the role of multilingual and cross-cultural literary production.
We invite proposals that engage with, but are not limited to, the following themes: transimperial intellectual networks and literary genres; religious and philosophical exchanges; transimperial perspectives on feminism and the ‘New Woman’; Anti-colonialism and radical thought in India and the West; models of education and pedagogy across empires; theoretical perspectives on transimperialism.
Timeline
- Article ready for publication (no longer than 6,000-7,000 words in length) should be submitted by 8 June 2026
- Accepted articles (following double blind peer reviewing) will be published in February 2027.
Website addresses
Call for Papers – FUP Journals Transimperial Encounters – Call for Papers
Contact details
- Dr. Greta Perletti, greta.perletti@unitn.it
- Prof. Ujjwal Jana, ujana@english.du.ac.in
CFP
For further details, please check the publication original call inserted below.
(Posted 4 October 2025)
Representations of Reality in The Post-Millennial Novel in English, 2001–2025.
Deadline for contributions: 30 June 2026.
Monograph edited by: Bożena Kucała and Robert Kusek (Institute of English Studies, Jagiellonian University in Kraków)
Publication presentation
Although most readers have an intuitive understanding of what realism is, in literary theory it has been an increasingly problematic concept to define – partly because of its contingency upon shifting ideas about reality and changing literary methods of rendering it. Chris Baldick signals some of its most contentious aspects when he defines realism as “a mode of writing that gives the impression of recording or ‘reflecting’ faithfully an actual way of life” (2004: 212). The apparent verisimilitude is, of course, a matter of literary conventions rather than a transparent mirror held up to reality. Following the twentieth-century linguistic turn, the question of representation appears much more complex. However, in her 2003 book Realism Pam Morris still asserts the viability of realist literature in the context of the perceived disjunction between language and reality; in Morris’s formulation, literary realism is “any writing that is based upon an implicit or explicit assumption that it is possible to communicate about a reality beyond the writing” (2003: 6).
Despite its many antagonists, including modernist or postmodernist experimentation and ontological uncertainty, realism has survived and even proved receptive to certain new techniques. A number of different types of realism have emerged (Holland 2020: 31–32); however, as Mary K. Holland argues, there is “an important continuity running through all of these forms of realism: their belief in and commitment to representing a material world that is primary and defines human experience” (2020: 255). In her view, realism prioritises “the real, material, and physical over language and representation” (Holland 2020: 40), choosing descriptions of the empirical world over fantasy, idealisation, escapism, utopia, dystopia, and the supernatural. It also focuses on an intersubjective, communal, socially-made reality, “rather than splintering [human experience] into a compendium of subject positions” (Holland 2020: 256).
Krystyna Stamirowska argues that, despite being accused of naïveté and lack of sophistication, realist narratives “are – paradoxically – perhaps most significant through their acceptance of the major challenge – that of justifying their own role in the pattern of human life, and a refusal to be consigned to the status of a game or irrelevance” (1992: 9). Even though science and philosophy provide effective ways of describing reality, the uniqueness of literature, in Stamirowska’s words, resides in its capacity to offer “a product of an individual experience of the world, transformed by imagination” (1992: 8). More recently, Timothy Bewes has echoed this approach by asserting “the singularity of literature” as “a form whose truths and insights seem ever less transferable to, or comprehensible within, standard historical, scientific, or political vocabularies” (2012: 160).
The planned volume, Representations of Reality in the Post-millennial Novel in English, 2001−2025, will be a tribute to the late Professor Stamirowska’s scholarship, and a continuation of her work on contemporary realism. Her 1992 monograph, Representations of Reality in the Post-war English Novel 1957–1975, analysed selected fiction in relation to the social and cultural context of postwar Britain. The editors of Representations of Reality in the Post-millennial Novel in English, 2001−2025 invite articles on 21st-century fiction in English that seeks to represent the experience of living in the contemporary world, in a mode that may be broadly described as realistic. Suggested topics include:
- legacies of 19th-century realism in contemporary fiction
- precursors of contemporary realist fiction – realism after realism(s)
- genres and modes of contemporary realism
- historical events and their 21st-century representation
- class struggles, gender troubles, and racial tensions
- global crises, local responses, and their social implications
- migration, exile, and intercultural encounters
- self and community in contemporary fiction
- ecological catastrophes and health hazards – Anthropocene realism and pandemic fiction
- technological developments and new modes of communication
Timeline (of the publication process)
Please send a 300-word proposal and a short bio to
by 30th June.
Completed articles will be expected by 15th December 2026.
The monograph will be published by the Jagiellonian University Press (Kraków) or another internationally recognised publisher.
Contact details
CFP
For further details, please check the publication original call inserted below.
(Posted 28 February 2026)
Journal of American Studies of Turkey (JAST): 2026 Fall Issue: Science Fiction and the American Imagination.
Deadline for full-text submissions: 15 July 2026.
Edited by: Dr. Firuze Güzel
Publication presentation
The guest editor of this themed issue of the Journal of American Studies of Turkey seeks original, previously unpublished manuscripts that examine science fiction novels, short stories, collections, films, TV series, as well as games, comics, and graphic novels, within the American context. Aside from the keywords given below, interdisciplinary and comparative studies of SF literature and media alongside analyses by sub-genre, era, or author are also welcome to be included in this issue.
Topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Theoretical and Critical Discussions of the SF Genre
- Posthumanist, Transhumanist, Metahumanist, and Antihumanist Discourses
- Artificial Intelligence and Human-Machine Interactions
- Techno-Scientific Dystopias/Utopias
- Gender and Body Politics
- Representations of Race and Ethnicity
- Afrofuturism, Indigenous Futurisms, and Latinx Futurism
- Constructions of Religion and Belief Systems
- Philosophical Dimensions / Thought Experiments
- Moral and Ethical Quandaries
- Envisioning the Other: Robots, Aliens, Monsters, etc.
- Ideology, Politics, and Governmental Control
- Postapocalyptic Narrations and Precarity
- Cyberpunk and Its Offshoots
- Space Opera, Space as Frontier, and Space Colonization
- Climate Fiction and Environmental Concerns
- Space, Architecture, and Urbanism
- History as Future / Future as Present
Contact details
Correspondence should be directed to: Dr. Firuze Güzel, Guest Editor
firuzeguzel@yahoo.com iruze.guzel@ege.edu.tr
For general questions or problems about JAST, please contact Dr. Nisa Harika Güzel Köşker, Editor-in-Chief nkosker@ankara.edu.tr
(Posted 22 January 2026)