Category: Calls for papers

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Call for Articles on W. Somerset Maugham

Special Issue of the Journal of the Short Story in English (JSSE 88, Spring 2027) and another publication
Deadline for abstract submissions: 15 November 2025

Guest Editors
Xavier Lachazette (Le Mans Université, France), Jaine Chemmachery (Sorbonne Université, France) et Nicole Cloarec (Université de Rennes, France)

Presentation
Following “How Good Maugham Was: A Critical Reassessment”, the W. Somerset Maugham conference that we organised last March in Le Mans, we are planning two publications.
One will be dedicated to Maugham’s short stories, and published in Issue 88 of the Journal of the Short Story in English (Spring 2027).
The other will focus on any other aspect of Maugham’s life or multifaceted works (novels, theatre, essays, travel diaries, etc.), to be published in a separate volume.
In addition to the presentations from the abovementioned conference, we are issuing a call for articles on any aspect of Maugham’s works or life.

Framework Text
The full framework text for our conference is still available on our SciencesConf website.
It will help prospective contributors understand the literary reassessment of Maugham’s works and life that these publications aim to achieve.

Practical Details
• Proposals (300-400 words) should be sent to maugham-le-mans@sciencesconf.org by 15 November 2025, together with a short bio-bibliography (100-150 words).
• Full articles will be due by 15 January 2026 and should be between 45,000 and 48,000 characters (spaces included).
• The style sheet and guidelines for authors are available on the JSSE website: https://journals.openedition.org/jsse/234.

Contact
We will be more than happy to answer any questions about article ideas or to provide additional information.
Please use the following alias to contact all three of us: maugham-le-mans@sciencesconf.org.

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Call for papers: Defiance in 21st Century South African Short Stories

Special Issue of The Journal of the Short Story in English 89 (Autumn 2027)

Deadline for abstract submissions:  1 June 2026. Full details here 

From its roots in the oral tradition, the short story genre has continually adapted to societal and cultural factors. Although undergoing mutations which have fuelled the vitality of critical debate and research, “the short story, with its usual focus on a single event or single effect, has remained close to the primacy of the myth according to which myth expresses the inner meaning of things by telling a story” (Chapman xi). Thus, as myths provide “not just meaning, but also significance, and . . . [do] so by placing events in a more or less coherent plot” (Bottici 115), the short story may offer a way of making sense of the discrepancies between discourses and realities, between national narratives and people’s lives.

The short story is “the genre of short fiction that South African literature has most consistently excelled,” according to Craig MacKenzie (176). In the wake of the country’s industrialisation and urbanisation, induced by the late nineteenth-century mineral discoveries, it lost its “close relationship to oral lore, legend, and small-town gossip” to become city-based and increasingly fragmented (178). In response to the institutionalisation of apartheid (racial separation) in 1948, it engaged in social “realism of the kind that valorised witness and protest: art was subjugated to life” (Driver 387). It experienced a literary “renaissance” (MacKenzie 181) in the transition from apartheid to a non-racial South Africa. However, Corinne Sandwith (16) contends that “while earlier short story collections and anthologies marked the hopeful vision of democratic multipli­city of the early 1990s, post-2000 short stories are characterised by increasing generic diversification as well as a range of aesthetic practices, including oral forms, social realism, ‘true fiction,’ temporal disjuncture, fragmentation and liminality, all of which become symptomatic of the thwarted promises of the country’s political transition.”

Indeed, mixed feelings are pervading post-apartheid South Africa. The country faces serious challenges – e.g. high cost of living, unemployment and poverty- and remains one of the most unequal societies in the world as measured by its Gini Index. The 2016 Afrobarometer study showed a decline in people’s support for democracy, from 72% of the respondents in 2011 to 64% of them in 2015, concomitantly to a breakthrough of the authoritarian preference (“sometimes non-democratic is preferable”) rising from 15% to 17% (Lekalake 3). Disturbingly, 6 of 10 South Africans (61%) say “they are willing to forego elections in favour of a non-elected government or leader that could impose law and order, and deliver houses and jobs” (4). More recently, the South African Reconciliation Barometer 2023 revealed that 33% expressed confidence in parliament, 32% in the national government and 33% in the legal system, and that “less than a third of people believe that there have been improvements in key areas including job creation, personal safety and inequality since the transition to democracy” (Lefko-Everett 14, 41).

As Graham K. Riach stresses, “there is a growing body of criticism on the short story as a form usually dealing with American or European texts, yet there are few book-length studies available on the African short story, and fewer still on the short story in South Africa” (11-12)—particularly in the post- 2000s (Sandwith 2).

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. According to Nancy Nyquist Potter:

Defiance belongs with a cluster of attitudes and actions that include (but are not identical to) dissent, political (as contrasted with psychoanalytic) resistance, rebellion, and civil disobedience. A defiant action can be an “in your face” one; a defiant attitude usually comes across as openly and deliberately disrespectful (whether or not it means to be). In a refusal to bow to authority, the defiant person has the passion of anger (or indignation or contempt) behind her. Defiance has less force and more limited scope than rebellion, but does not imply the “civilised” quality that dissent, resistance, and civil disobedience do. Those latter forms of protest typically are organised and pre-planned. (32)

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?

Works Cited

Cornwell, Gareth, Dirk Klopper, and Craig MacKenzie. The Columbia guide to South African literature in English since 1945. Columbia: Columbia UP, 2010. Print.

Driver, Dorothy. ‘The Fabulous Fifties: Short Fiction in English’, Attwell, David, and Derek Attridge, eds. The Cambridge History of South African Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012. Print.

Chapman, Michael JF, ed. The New Century of South African Short Stories. Johannesburg: Ad Donker, 2004. Print.

Bottici, Chiara. A Philosophy of Political Myth. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. Print.

Fasselt, Rebecca, and Corinne Sandwith, eds. The Short Story in South Africa: Contemporary Trends and Perspectives. New York: Routledge, 2022. Print.

Lefko-Everett, Kate. “South African Reconciliation Barometer Survey: 2023 Report.” Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, 2023. Web. https://www.ijr.org.za/portfolio-items/south-african-reconciliation-barometers-survey-2023-report/

Lekalake, Rorisang. “Support for Democracy in South Africa Declines amid Rising Discontent with Implementation.” Dispatch 71.9 (Feb. 2016). Web. https://afrobarometer.org/sites/default/files/publications/Dispatches/ab_r6_dispatchno71_south_africa_perceptions_of_democracy.pdf

Potter, Nancy Nyquist. The Virtue of Defiance and Psychiatric Engagement. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016. Print.

Riach, Graham K. The Short Story After Apartheid: Thinking with Form in South African Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2023.

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Call For Submissions – Creative Journal Antenna

Antenna: Journal of Arts, Humanities and Health welcomes words and images attentive to life, in its fullness and its fragility. For it is mainly in moments of heightened awareness of our vulnerability, and of the vulnerability of the world we inhabit, that life invites us to slow down, listen, look, feel, and try to find shareable words, images, and gestures. This happens both in the exhilaration of fellowship and in the experience of loss, illness, and grief. We know how difficult it is to articulate pain, grief or love. We know that there are experiences that challenge representation, be it verbal or non-verbal. Yet it is precisely because of how disruptive such experiences are that we are compelled to find ways to intimate the inchoate, to articulate the inarticulate, so as to make this knowable and shareable. For, as Clarice Lispector noted (2010), often it is by writing that we become aware of things that we didn’t even know we knew.

Within the context of the Project in Medical Humanities, based at the School of Arts and Humanities, University of Lisbon, we have applied the methodology proposed by Narrative Medicine (Charon 2008 & Charon et al. 2016) in teaching, as well as in reading and writing groups for patients, students, and healthcare providers. In this praxis, we explore the potential of close reading and reflective writing to learn more about ourselves and others. Antenna welcomes these and other reflective expressions, for, as Arthur W. Frank (2022) reminds us, “to know my own story, I need to encounter stories that are not mine.” Likewise, it is through our own experience that we engage with the stories of others. If academic writing frames ongoing analytical thinking and scientific knowledge, creative expression enables us to explore other forms of integrating experiential and reflective knowledge. By re-connecting biology, biography, and culture, by inscribing the subjective in the communal, literary and artistic expression invites us to consider the multifaceted experience of health and illness, in the fullness and vulnerability of being alive. Antenna aims to air such expressions so that they may be audible and find resonance both among those receiving and providing healthcare, as well as in academic reflection, political decision-making, and civic engagement.

Antenna: Journal of Arts, Humanities and Health accepts texts, images, and videos in the following categories: poetry; fiction; literary non-fiction; graphic narrative; visual arts; video; reviews. The working languages are English and Portuguese

Submission Guidelines
Poetry: up to 3 poems
Fiction and literary non-fiction: 2000-3000 words
Flash fiction: up to 1000 words
Graphic narrative: up to 3 pages (high resolution)
Visual arts: up to 3 images (high resolution, at least 2000 pix)
Video (cinema, documentary, dance, music, theatre): up to 5 minutes
Reviews (of publications, films, documentaries, performances, exhibitions): up to 1000 words

Contact: antenna@letras.ulisboa.pt
Publication: annual

CFP Antenna 1/2025:
– Submissions: 30 June 2025
– Publication: Autumn 2025

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Goth 6th Annual Conference CFP

Call for Papers

EVENT: 6th Annual GOTH Symposium
CFP DEADLINE: 12 January 2026
EVENT DATE: Friday 15 May 2026

ORGANIZERS: The Open University Centre for Research into Gender and Otherness in the Humanities
GUEST PANEL: The Open University Medieval and Early Modern Research Group
TYPE: F2F
HOST: Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, School of Arts & Humanities
LOCATION: The Open University, Milton Keynes, Library Seminar Rooms 3&5.
THEME: Gender and otherness in drama, literature and visual culture, IV.

The Annual GOTH Symposium welcomes scholars from within and outside The Open University for productive interdisciplinary discussion and debate. The Program Committee invites proposals for presentations focusing on any aspects of gender and/or otherness in creative writing or pre-modern drama, literature and visual culture, in two formats:

1. Postgraduate students only: 5-minute lightning papers on any aspects of human gender and otherness in creative writing or drama, literature and/or visual culture.

2. Open call: 15-minute papers focusing on any aspects of gender and otherness in creative writing or drama, literature and/or visual culture, with particular emphasis on:

Panel 1: Gender, race, disability and/or human physical otherness in religious and secular medieval and early modern theatre, with topics including but not limited to:
performed otherness
otherness in secular dramatic texts
otherness in religious drama (eg convent drama, liturgical drama within the church, performances of Biblical episodes or Saint’s lives in religious and/or secular spaces).
understanding performed otherness through the study of performativity, gesture, costume, crossdressing and/or textiles.

Panel 2: Gender, race, disability and/or otherness in creative writing (Fiction, non-fiction, poetry, script), with topics including but not limited to:
Dark tourism and memorialisation
Ekphrasis
The portrayal and representation of “other” in creative writing
The role of the outsider in contemporary writing
The role of the body political in contemporary writing
The Gothic genre in contemporary writing

Panel 3: Female patrons and the fashioning of gender in medieval and early modern literary, dramatic and visual arts, with topics including but not limited to:
the role of gender in cultural creation, performance and patronage
cultural patronage as a pathway to female legal power and status.
Ways of using gender, costume, cross-dressing and textiles to study and reframe dramatic narrative (eg women as ‘story-weavers’ /embroiderers of vestments/costumes).

Panel 4: The Open University Medieval and Early Modern Research Group guest panel:
Radical Otherness? Utopia and other ideal societies in the medieval and early modern world, with topics including but not limited to:
Self and other in visual, literary and musical utopias
Gender, race, age and disability
Self and other in monastic and other ideal communities

Please submit your proposal (200 words max) and academic bio (100 words max) on or before the CFP deadline of 12 December 2025, to m.a.katritzky@open.ac.uk & FASS-GOTH-Admin@open.ac.uk. All presenters who stay for the whole symposium will be provided with 1 night of paid accommodation (14-15 May) and all refreshments on the day.

Further information on the event and registration is being posted on the GOTH website as it becomes available: http://fass.open.ac.uk/research/centres/goth.

Inquiries on any aspect of the symposium may be emailed to FASS-GOTH-Admin@open.ac.uk.

Circulated on behalf of Team GOTH
Consultant: Dr Chloe Fairbanks

Committee:
M A Katritzky – Director, GOTH & Professor of Theatre Studies, OU, ECW
Dr Andrew Murray, GOTH EDI Co-ordinator, Lecturer in Art History, OU
Mrs Jennie Owen, GOTH Health & Safety Co-ordinator, Lecturer in Creative Writing, OU, ECW.
Isabelle Lepore, GOTH PG Forum Convenor (OU, ECW)

Please check GOTH website for latest details: http://fass.open.ac.uk/research/centres/goth

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Call for Papers for Ecological Futurity in Short Fiction Conference: 27th of June 2025.

A hybrid conference convened by the University of Warwick and Manchester in partnership with the European Network for Short Fiction Research.

We are excited to announce this call for papers on Ecological Futurity in ShortFiction. We welcome papers that consider the ways in which short fiction envisions radical alternative futures to a world threatened by socio-ecological crisis.

Key critical research that has recently been done in the field of Ecological Futurity revolves around dystopian and utopian depictions of humanity’s future. In Worlds Without US: Some Types of Disanthropy, for instance, Greg Garrad examines depictions of humanity’s extinction, considering the ways in which writers, artists and filmmakers have imagined a world, ‘completely and finally without people’, and the challenges these disanthropic representations pose to anthropocentric hierarchies and privilege.1 In contrast, Thom Van Dorren, Eben Kirsky and Ursula Münster consider in their introduction on Multispecies Studies, the ways in which cobecoming encourages, ‘the exchange and emergence of meanings’, between participants as they become immersed, ‘in webs of signification’, that might be, ‘linguistic, gestural, biochemical, and more’, and how these cobecoming relationships could foster greater harmony between the human and the more-than-human world in the future.2 These two diverging representations on the future of humanity are at the heart of what Deborah Lilley identifies as a New Pastoral movement in contemporary fiction:‘where the themes and conventions of the pastoral are being reimagined and reshaped in response to environmental crises’.3 This body of contemporary research highlights how studies into Ecological Futurity are shining a light on the political, economic and environmental systems in play in the current-day and-age, and how they will shape humanity’s future.

This conference foregrounds the role of short fictional forms in providing imaginative access into ecological futures. We are inviting abstracts of 450 words, including a 150-word bio on a broad range of topics, including but not limited to:

· Utopian Futures in short fiction
· Post-Apocalyptic/ Dystopian Imaginaries
· Short Fiction, Ecocriticism and the Environmental Humanities
· Speculative Fiction, Sci-Fi, and Climate Change
· Feminism and ecological futurity
· Indigenous Knowledge and Ecology
· Technological Innovations
· Queer futurity/ alternative reproductive futures
.The Weird tale in the twenty-first century
· The folktale and environmental folklore

The Ecological Futurity Conference will take place in-person and online at the University of Manchester on the 27th of June 2025. Deadline for abstracts: 2nd May 2025. To be sent to ensfrcg@gmail.com

Organisers: Paul Knowles (University of Manchester), Madeleine Sinclair (University of Warwick) and the ENSFR Network.

References 

1 ‘Worlds Without Us: Some Types of Disanthropy’, Greg Garrard, SubStance (2012), 41.1, 127, 40-60, p.41.
2  Multispecies Studies: Cultivating Arts of Attentiveness’, Thom Van Dooren, Eben Kirksey, Ursula Münster, Environmental Humanities (2016), 8.1, 1-23, p.2.
3 Deborah Lilley, The New Pastoral in Contemporary British Writing (Oxon, Routledge, 2020), p.156.