Current Calls for Papers

Midwest/Southwest

Taking Care

College of the Ozarks

Point Lookout, Missouri

September 25-26, 2026

What does “taking care,” or caretaking, mean for literature and literary study? Salman Rushdie’s novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) offers one suggestive model in the figure of Mali, the Floating Gardener, who tends the strands of stories in the Sea of Stories. When Haroun encounters him, Mali explains that stories require attention. They must be tended, repaired, and protected if they are to flourish. Rushdie’s allegory gestures toward a broader set of practices and dispositions that shape our engagement with literature: slow, attentive reading; responsibility toward texts and traditions; pedagogical concern for students; sympathy, compassion, and care for others. Yet this language of care also raises a challenge for literary criticism. Care is frequently invoked as an ethical or pedagogical good, but its relationship to critical judgment is far from self-evident. At what point does an emphasis on care risk softening interpretation or discouraging interpretive conflict? Might critique itself be understood as a form of care? And when does care instead demand critique, even at the risk of disagreement or discomfort?

This regional meeting of the Conference on Christianity and Literature approaches “Taking Care” as an opportunity to examine the tensions, costs, and responsibilities that emerge when practices of care meet the demands of literary criticism. We invite participants to examine care not as a posture of affirmation, but as a practice of attention, responsibility, and judgment that shapes how we read, teach, argue, and disagree. We welcome proposals that engage taking care in relation to literary texts, interpretive methods, pedagogical practices, and Christian commitments, especially where care comes into productive tension with critique.

Possible lines of inquiry include (but are not limited to):

• What does it mean to take care with words, texts, or traditions?

• When does care sharpen interpretation, and when might it soften critique?

•   How do literary works stage, demand, complicate, or resist practices of care?

• How do literary forms and genres shape what kinds of care are possible or impossible?

• How does care relate to judgment, disagreement, and interpretive risk?

• What distinguishes care from charity, sympathy, or assent in reading practices?

• What kinds of insights can be gained by interpretations that draw on Christian moral vocabularies?

• What does taking care look like in the classroom, especially when texts provoke discomfort or resistance?

• When does care become burdensome, conflicted, or ethically costly?

Submission Guidelines:

Send abstracts (250-400 words) for 15-20 minute papers to jeff.galbraith@wheaton.edu on or before June 30, 2026. See HERE for the full CFP and submission requirements.

Southeast

Transformative Language: Literacies of Mind, Body, and Soul

Southeast Conference on Christianity and Literature

Birmingham, Alabama

October 22-24, 2026

Keynote Speaker: Jason Baxter, Director for the Center for Beauty and Culture at Benedictine University

The year 2026 marks the 500th anniversary of William Tyndale’s first printed translation of the English New Testament. Tyndale’s New Testament introduced scores of words and phrases into English vernacular and impacted language, text, and literature and religious practice into the modern age.  Sitting at the crux of both the Reformation and the Renaissance, this translation of the New Testament into the common language and its subsequent publication had a monumental impact on both spiritual formation and intellectual knowledge. It helped establish an idiom suited to both public hearing and private reading, shaping the cadence, vocabulary, and narrative voice that would dominate English literature and religious expression for centuries.  Even when we are not using “Tyndale’s words,” we are often using Tyndale’s English.

The movement of printed text across space and time furthermore transformed the way knowledge itself was created, consumed, and deployed in both secular and religious contexts. This singular event in history raises questions about the relationship between language, literacy, and the formation and transformation of the human mind, body, and soul.  

We invite individual papers and panel proposals related to the topics below.  We also welcome individual and panel proposals for readings of original creative work related to the conference theme. Other proposals concerning the relationship of Christianity and literature, including panel proposals and creative works, are welcome.

·      Language and literacy as spiritual formation and transformation

·      Scriptural, homiletic, and theological language and literacy

·      Reading and writing in the Renaissance and Reformation

·      Languages and literacies of antiquity and modernity

·      Historical and cultural contexts of language and literacy

·      Embodied nature of language and literacy

·      Embodied and disembodied language and literacies

·      Knowledge-making and the use of language

·      Impact of print and digital technologies on literacy and language

·      Formation and transformation of language and literacy over time

·      Lost and recovered languages or literacies

·      Slow and fast literacies

·      Languages and literacies of translation

·      Formative and transformative practices of reading and writing

Submission Guidelines:

·      Abstracts should be 250-300 words

·      Presentations should fit into a 20-minute panel time slot; roundtables of 60 minutes

·      All submissions should be sent by July 1, 2026. Submission Portal Link: Click HERE

See HERE for full CFP and HERE for the conference website. Please contact Sarah Durst (sdurst@samford.edu) and Laura Schrock Crawford (lcrawfo1@samford.edu) with any questions.

MLA Panel 2027

Golden States: Faith, Place, and Emancipatory Narratives

Modern Language Association Session

Los Angeles, California

January 7-10, 2027

 The image of California as the Golden State—a land of promise, risk, reinvention, and imagined abundance—has long shaped literary and cultural narratives of aspiration and freedom. Yet “golden states” are not bound to geography: they materialize wherever communities imagine possibility, long for deliverance, or chart pathways beyond constraint. 

 This panel invites papers that explore the intersections of Christian thought, literary expression, and emancipatory narratives. Using “California, the Golden State” as a conceptual springboard rather than a geographical limit, essays on any region or national literature are welcome. How do authors construct narratives of freedom, belonging, and transcendence across diverse landscapes, traditions, and textual forms? How do literary (and other) texts use place to map or gesture towards spiritual longing, human flourishing, ecological justice, or theological understandings of liberation? 

Possible Areas of Inquiry:

• Ecocriticism, place, and faith 

• Mapping, mobility, and pilgrimage 

• Emancipation narratives and the sacred

• Reimagining “promised lands” 

• Prosperity narratives of extraction and abundance 

• Christian literary approaches to utopia, dystopia, and transformation 

• California as a tension-inflected site: poverty, paucity, promise, and prosperity 

• Embodied, communal, or indigenous experiences of liberation 

We welcome works that brings a variety of literary texts from a range of traditions, including non-U.S. texts or global Christianities, into conversation with the panel theme. We encourage scholars at all stages—including graduate students—to apply. 

Submission Guidelines

Please submit a 250-300 word abstract and brief bio to ppowers@messiah.edu. 

Deadline: March 15 

West

All Things Made New: Creation. Re-Creation. And Redemption.

Western Regional Meeting of the Conference on Christianity and Literature

California Baptist University | Riverside, CA 

May 15-16, 2026

Our conference theme, “All Things Made New: Creation, Re-creation, and Redemption,” aims to explore the multifaceted dimensions of the creative and re-creative acts embedded in our discipline practices and the works we study. As a number of Christian scholars have pointed out, reading and writing literature is one way we can carry out our responsibility to establish a world that pleases and praises God by cultivating its potential. Just as Adam and Eve cultivated the fruits of the Garden of Eden, so are we to cultivate the talents and abilities God has given us in all areas: technology, literature, art, music, science, social and political structures, etc. Gallagher and Lundin state, we alone of God’s creatures are capable of creating and thinking in symbols, so we have a “natural tendency to engage in interpretation, to create narratives, and to use metaphor” (41).

Our keynote speaker, Dr. Tiffany Brooks, is the author and co-author of Fear is a Choice: Tackling Life’s Challenges with Dignity, Faith, and Determination with NFL running back James Conner (Harper, 2020); Espionage and Enslavement in the Revolution: The True Story of Robert Townsend and Elizabeth (Lyons, 2021); and, To Rebehold the Stars: Reimagining Faith and Formation After Deconstruction (Eerdmans, forthcoming March 2026). She has also written numerous articles for publications such as Smithsonian,New York Archives Magazine, and various peer-reviewed journals.

Topics of Interest: We welcome submissions on a wide range of topics, including but not limited to

·  The role of creation myths and origin stories in literature

·  Modern retellings of creation myths and origin stories

·  Literary representations of birth, rebirth, and renewal

·  The interplay between destruction and creation in dystopian and utopian narratives

·  Redemption arcs in character development

·  The influence of religious and philosophical ideas on themes of creation and redemption

·  The impact of historical and cultural contexts on literary interpretations of these themes

·  Comparative studies of creation, recreation, and redemption across different literary traditions

·  Roundtable discussions on the conference theme (preferably composed of colleagues representing different schools)

·  Creative works that embrace these themes

See Full CFP here.

Submission Guidelines:

Abstracts should be no more than 300 words

Presentations should fit into a 20-minute panel time slot; roundtables of 60 minutes

Please include a brief biography (100 words) with your submission.

All submissions should be sent by Apr. 1, 2026. Submission portal link: Click HERE

Information for Regional Conference Organizers

Regional Conference Guidelines

Regional Conference Planning Checklist