Calls for Papers

As a genre acclaimed for its literary and environmentalist insights, nature writing continues to shape ecological thinking and relationships to place. This call for the 2027 ASLE meeting seeks critical projects on recent anglophone nature writing that consider the genre’s new directions. In addition to a focus on texts from the last decade, this call is interested in a conception of “nature writing” that includes not only published essays and books but also standout work from publications like Orion and Terrain.org as well ...

Panel Call for ASLE 2027, 22–24 June 2027 at the University of Maryland, College Park

Contact: Thomas Bryant, Penn State (Thomasabryant4@gmail.com)

Insects often figure the bounds of meaningful life. Technologies of control such as pesticides and xenophobic rhetoric are shaped around the extermination and exclusion of insects. Simultaneously, authors have rendered insects as highly sympathetic or as models for collective life (whether they are deployed as forms of matriarchy, mutual aid, pests, contagion, or war). Scholarship has effectively bridged literary studies and Critical Animal Studies ...

Panel Proposal for ASLE 2027 Conference

This roundtable seeks 5-7 participants interested in discussing the legacy of Wendell Berry, who died in August 2026. Papers that consider any aspect of Berry’s extensive body of work, including his fiction, poetry, essays, and criticism, are welcome. What does Berry’s work offer to environmental literary studies and the environmental humanities today? How might we understand, extend, or challenge his ideas in light of contemporary ecological, political, and cultural concerns?

In keeping with the ASLE conference theme—Territory, Terroir, Terror—papers ...

“Like the other great revolutions, the coming sustainability revolution will also change the face of the land and the foundations of human identities, institutions, and cultures. Like the previous revolutions, it will take centuries to unfold fully­–though it is already under way.” – Donnella Meadows

The Ecology & Culture Area of the Popular Culture Association is soliciting abstracts for papers/presentations at the 2027 National Conference, March 24-27 in Boston. Our Ecology & Culture Area theme this year is “Ecocultural Sensibility and the Sustainability Revolution” (other ...

My colleague Lisa Blackmore and I are organizing an in-person seminar for the 2027 American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting titled “Watering the Fields: Porous Hydrocritical Practice in Precarious Times.”

The seminar asks how humanistic and artistic water research can move beyond conventional academic formats and communities. We welcome work on collaborations among humanities scholars, artists, activists, scientists, legal practitioners, and communities; river co-learning arenas and water schools; countermapping, data, and digital humanities projects; and creative practices of hydrocommoning. We are particularly interested in ...

 Encountering the non-human other: Interspecies empathy in global narrative media

Seminar within the American Comparative Literature Association’s (ACLA) annual convention in Houston, Texas, May 20th to 23rd, 2027

In recent years, fields like posthumanism, ecocriticism and critical animal studies have repeatedly discussed “[…] how the richness and complexity of non-human experience can be conveyed in a narrative that was created by a human mind” (Weik von Mossner, Affective Ecologies, 111). To delineate the boundary between a “[…] potentially transformative mode […] of access to the ...

Reading the Naval Lexicon: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Maritime Power and Ecology

Submission deadline: 31 March 2027

This special issue of Social Sciences & Humanities Open proposes a convergent method by reading the sea across interdisciplinary domains, like language and narrative, literature, media, and representation, and socio-educational practices (including ecological and infrastructural dimensions).

Guest editors:

Dr. Nikoleta Zampaki – University of Information Technology and Management, Rzeszów, Poland

Dr. Paula Wieczorek – University of Information Technology and Management, Rzeszów, Poland

Special issue information:

This special issue advances the emerging field of “hydro-criticism” ...

Panel at the 2027 NeMLA Convention

This panel invites theoretical and pedagogical explorations of experiential approaches to teaching environmental studies in higher education through the frameworks of new materialism, transcorporeality, affect theory, and embodied pedagogy. Aligning with NeMLA 2027’s theme, “Empowering Communities,” the panel examines how environmental learning can move beyond hierarchical and text-centered models toward collaborative, community-oriented, and experiential forms of knowledge production. Drawing on theorists such as Stacy Alaimo, Donna Haraway, and Jane Bennett, the panel foregrounds pedagogies that cultivate ecological agency ...

Panel at the Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) Convention, sponsored by the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE)

Held March 6-9, 2027, Newport RI.

This roundtable envisions writing as a collaborative act and centers writings that empower Environmental Justice communities. How have/do writing communities negotiate and enact environmental justice? How do writing communities disseminate scientific and technical information towards environmental action and justice? Participants in this roundtable are encouraged to consider:

o How does/can writing raise collective environmental consciousness?

o Writing in the ...

This special issue of American Literature will highlight new work in queer ecology that engages and extends concepts of queer time developed by theorists such as Lee Edelman, Jack Halberstam, Elizabeth Freeman, José Muñoz, Kathryn Bond Stockton, Carolyn Dinshaw, and others. Moving beyond investigations of sexual and gender diversity in nature—a central focus of queer ecological scholarship since its crystallization fifteen years ago—we seek to chart new directions in the field as queer ecology metabolizes the temporal turn in queer studies alongside of ...