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)
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)
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)