Calls for Papers

Boston March 24-27, 2027 Subject Area: Disasters and Apocalyptic Culture Submission Deadline: Oct 31, 2026 Scope of the paper topics accepted under this area: Disasters and Apocalyptic Culture offers a forum for these questions and critical approaches surrounding the culture of disasters, catastrophes, accidents, and apocalypses in global art, literature, media, film, and popular culture. Disasters and Apocalyptic Culture addresses broader disciplinary topics and innovative intersections of humanities, musicology, social science, literature, film, visual art, psychology, game studies, material culture, media studies, ecology, and information technology. Interested individuals are ...

The multidisciplinary field of Extinction Studies attends to historical losses as well as those that are in progress and projected. With more than a million animal and plant species currently at risk and many other ways of being under existential threat, there is no end to the work of scholars, artists, and activists who address extinction in their work.

Guided by the conference theme “Territory: Terra, Terroir, and Terror,” this session seeks perspectives from the arts, humanities, and social sciences on the relationship between ...

Sixty years after the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which shed light on species decline as a result of pesticides like DDT, noticing silences in nature and employing the rhetoric of silence in environmental literature continue. However, there is a simultaneous effort by writers to rethink and reimagine the audibility of “silent” beings like plants, worms, and glaciers. While sound is not often thought of as a feature of literary media, close-reading for sound shows literature’s capacity to imagine sound, silence, and ...

Environmental humanists and literary scholars have many genres for theorizing environmental fear, injustice, despair, or pessimism. Environmental gothic, noir, picaresque, horror, and crime fiction are all genres theoretically defined by and committed to engaging with exploitation and terror in historically and formally specific ways. And the hermeneutic of suspicion, devoted to diagnosing and revealing obscured forces and causes, is especially attuned to those that produce systemic violence. We know how to read for necropolitics, colonialism and neocolonialism, anti-Blackness, objectification, and misogyny. What, conversely, are ...

Animal Studies Across Disciplines Symposium April 7th-April 9th 2027 Arizona State University

Many scholars argue that we are now living in a new geological epoch—the Anthropocene—a name chosen to encapsulate an irreversibly transformed planet due to the rapid expansion of human populations, increasing exploitation of animals and natural resources, and pervasive pollution. The effects of the Anthropocene have been caused by only a small percentage of the world’s population, yet those living in the Global South disproportionately suffer the consequences. The Anthropocene, then, is just as ...

In “The Dawn of Green,” Harriet Ritvo details how nineteenth century British environmentalist movements gave birth to the idea that “the citizenry as a whole—the nation, that is to say—had a vested interest in preserving the traditional appearance of certain rural landscapes” (4). The entanglement of environment and nation has since persisted in British culture: through images of England as a garden, former British colonies as tourist and extractivist Edens, the establishment of national parks and preservation societies such as the National Trust ...

Speculative literature, whether it be in the form of novels, poems, short stories, films, plays, games or television programs, often depicts the plight of the extraterrestrial. Following the spirit of the ASLE 2027 conference theme, this proposed seminar seeks to expand the scope of the term “extra-terrestrial” to include not only alien life from outside the Earth’s atmosphere, but to also encompass life that is “without” or “separate” from land. In this way, “extraterrestrial” becomes a helpful lens through which to acknowledge both ...

This is a guaranteed session supported by the ASLE “Ecogothic and Ecohorror” Interest Group.

Representations of pests, predators, and parasites are often sources of terror in the ecogothic, ecohorror, and other related speculative literature/visual media, but they can also move beyond the functional terror to negotiate multispecies relationality, transformation, symbiosis, and uneasy coexistence in today’s changing world.

This roundtable (5-7 panelists for 8-10 minutes each) invites submissions addressing the imaginaries of pests, predators, and parasites in contemporary speculative literature/visual media (broadly defined), especially those in ...

Call for OLHJ Special Collection Articles:

“Eros Across Antiquity, Ecology and Posthumanism” in the “Open Library of Humanities Journal” (Q1 in Scopus).

Editors: Nikoleta Zampaki, Andreas Markantonatos, Lorena Rojas-Parma, María Di Muro-Pellegrino

This special collection explores a simple but powerful concept: that love, or eros, as the ancient Greeks called it—is not just a personal emotion but a fundamental force that binds the universe together. From the cosmic particles of ancient philosophy to the algorithms of AI, eros appears again and again as a principle of ...