Calls for Papers

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 ...

The constellation of essays in this collection will focus on place-based literary works and address issues around resource extraction and ecological devastation. As the foremost cause of underdevelopment and ecological destruction in the Global South and many parts of North America, resource extraction, its resulting land loss and labor exploitation, is the occasion for this project. One of the aims of this collection is to expand “resource extraction” beyond the primary focus on extraction of fossil fuels, natural gas, and minerals and includes ...

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 ...