Below is a call for papers for a panel Dominique Hétu is organizing at the 2027 APFUCC Annual Conference (May 26–29, 2027, PEI, Canada): "Une communauté de brûlé·es : feu, vulnérabilité et responsabilité dans les littératures francophones contemporaines". 

From intimate wounds to collective uprisings, fire occupies a powerful and ambivalent place in contemporary French and Francophone literature, particularly in women's writing and feminist, queer, and Indigenous literary imaginaries. This panel invites us to consider fire not simply as a force of destruction, but as a literary, affective, and political figure through which writers explore anger, vulnerability, trauma, resistance, care, and transformation.

The organizer is especially interested in the provocative notion of a “community of the burned” (communauté de brûlé·es): Can shared experiences of violence and vulnerability generate new forms of solidarity, or might the desire for community obscure inequalities, conflicting experiences, and the uneven distribution of harm?

The organizer would particularly welcome contributions exploring women's writing, feminist and queer literary imaginaries, representations of rage and resistance, the politics of care, and the intersections of gender, colonialism, and ecological crisis. Proposals engaging with feminist, queer, Indigenous, decolonial, and ecocritical approaches across diverse Francophone contexts are encouraged.

You can find the full call for papers here:

https://www.fabula.org/actualites/137201/colloque-annuel-de-l-apfucc-26-au-29-mai-2027-universite-de.html

Please feel free to circulate the call among colleagues and graduate students who might be interested.

De bonnes et de mauvaises traductions des littératures francophones

Colloque international de Traduction et de Traductologie

19 – 21 mai 2027

Università degli Studi di Trento, Dipartimento di Lettere e Filosofia

Calendrier :

Date limite pour l’envoi des propositions : 7 janvier 2027.

Notification d’acceptation : avant le 15 février 2027.

Inscription et frais d’inscription : 28 février 2027.

Publication après évaluations par les pairs : mars-mai 2028.

Envoie des propositions : mauvaisesetbonnes@gmail.com

Langue du colloque : français.

Durée des communications : 30 minutes (20 min. communication + 10 min.

questions/discussion).

Frais d’inscription : avant le 28 février 2027 – 80 Euros. Après le 28 février 2027 – 110

Euros. Les frais d’inscription comprennent les pauses café et le matériel du colloque.

Paiement électronique. Informations après acceptation des propositions de communication.

For more information click here: De bonnes et de mauvaises traductions des littératures francophones.pdf

International Symposium on Repro-Fiction: Representing Reproductive Bodies in Contemporary Literature and Culture

Vilnius University, 18 June 2027

1.  Making Modernity: French and Francophone Women Creators, 1900–1959

Women in French (WIF) invites submissions for a special session at the South Atlantic Modern Language Association (SAMLA) Annual Conference in Atlanta, Georgia, November 5-7. We welcome papers examining both canonical and lesser-known figures working in literature, film, journalism, theater, visual arts, music, fashion, intellectual history, and related cultural fields. Contributions may address individual creators, networks of women artists and intellectuals, historical movements, transnational exchanges, publishing and production contexts, feminist interventions, or questions of reception and legacy. In keeping with this year’s SAMLA theme of “Hospitality,” we also welcome proposals that explore the ways women creators negotiated inclusion, exclusion, hospitality, and cultural belonging within artistic, social, and political spheres.

Topics that might be considered include:

• French and Francophone women writers, filmmakers, artists, journalists, intellectuals, performers, and cultural producers active between 1900 and 1959.

• Women’s contributions to literary, artistic, cinematic, and cultural modernisms.

• Women and the avant-garde, surrealism, dadaism, symbolism, futurism, or related movements.

• Colonial, transcolonial, and diasporic perspectives in Francophone women's cultural production.

• Women’s publishing networks, salons, journals, and artistic communities.

• Questions of visibility, canon formation, recovery, and archival research.

• Intersections of literature, film, visual culture, theater, music, fashion, and performance.

• Representations of hospitality, welcome, exclusion, belonging, foreignness, or displacement in women's creative works.

• New theoretical or methodological approaches to understudied women creators and texts.

By September 1, 2026, please send abstracts of 250–500 words, along with a brief bio and any AV requests, to Mary McCullough(memccull@samford.edu) and Marylaura Papalas (papalasM@ecu.edu).

2. The Work of Art as Host: How does one work of art “host” another? What is at stake when a text makes room for another voice, in the same or differing media, either in collaboration or through ekphrasis, allusion, or even pastiche? Does the act of welcoming in another work of art create an economy of giving and receiving, such as in Hélène Cixous’s writing about painting? Or does the other work of art disturb and trouble the original, resisting interpretation, like the photography in Marie Ndiaye’s Autoportrait en vert? This panel invites papers that reflect on the possibility and/or impossibility of hospitality offered by women’s writing and artistic practice in the 20th and 21st centuries. Papers that examine textual/artistic hospitality as it relates to gender and sexuality, life writing and autofiction, intermediality, intertextuality, or adaptation are encouraged. This panel is organized by Women in French and presenters must be members of the organization. Women in French offers a complimentary one-year membership for first time members and competitive travel grants for graduate students (rolling applications). Please submit proposals of 250-500 words by September 1. For more information, contact Noelle Giguere at ngiguer@emory.edu.

3. Refreshments Provided: Language Departments and Hospitality

Food, music, culture: language departments in higher education often have the reputation of being places where students learn as much in class as they do outside of class, participating in activities such as conversation tables, cultural events, study abroad, and field trips. These activities can draw in students and generate interest; however, they can also sometimes detract from the academic and critical work of a department. Students might choose to study a foreign language, especially at the beginning level, because the classes are considered as extra-curricular and less rigorous. In a time when language enrollments are dropping and students are increasingly relying on AI for translation and knowledge, how can departments leverage their talent for hosting events to continue to attract students while also maintaining high expectations for academic rigor and serious work? What does/should/can hospitality look like in departments where in-person events are being replaced by digital communication? This roundtable is organized by Women in French, and presenters must be members of the organization. Women in French offers a complimentary one-year membership for first time members and competitive travel grants for graduate students (rolling applications). Please submit proposals of 250-500 words by September 1. For more information, contact Noelle Giguere at ngiguer@emory.edu.

Sessions sponsored by Women in French (WIF). Presenters must be members of Women in French by the time of the conference. Information about membership is available through the WIF organization.

Please consider proposing a panel or roundtable for sessions to be sponsored by Women in French at the 2026 Southeast Modern Language Association (SAMLA) Convention, to be held Nov. 5-7, 2026 in Atlanta. We would love to have a roundtable in particular on a topic related to Women in French at this year’s convention. There are 8 days left to send in a proposal. See below for details.

Women in French welcomes session proposals that engage with the study of women, gender, feminism, sexuality, and intersectionality in French and Francophone literatures, cultures, cinema, media, history, philosophy, linguistics, and related fields. We especially encourage interdisciplinary and transnational approaches that foreground diverse voices, critical methodologies, and emerging scholarly conversations within French and Francophone studies.

SAMLA’s theme this year is Hospitality. You are welcome to propose a panel that aligns with this theme. Please see SAMLA’s CFP description below. Proposals should include:

• Session title 
• Session format 
• A 250–500-word session description
• Organizer name, affiliation, and contact information

I ask that you send me the proposal for a WIF panel or roundtable before July 15.

We warmly encourage submissions from scholars at all career stages, including graduate students, contingent faculty, independent scholars, and interdisciplinary researchers. Women in French remains committed to fostering inclusive, collaborative, and intellectually vibrant spaces for scholarship in French and Francophone studies.

Below is the CFP advertised on SAMLA’s webpage.

We may imagine the act of hospitality benign: to open a door, to welcome another across a threshold, or to make an offer to a guest. Rooted in such acts, however, is an ethics of how we engage with another, whether friend or stranger. Acts of hospitality contain their own contradictions, as to serve as host is to hold power, to set terms, to guard thresholds and entry points. For this year’s SAMLA conference, we invite papers, panels, and creative works that consider the many meanings and complications of hospitality—as practice, metaphor, ethics, affect, and structure. As SAMLA begins to look forward to its centennial, and thereby backward at its near-century of fostering academic collegiality and exchange, a focus on Hospitality affords a consideration of the encounters that go, so often, undertheorized. We hope that the capaciousness of this theme will invite a wide range of approaches and voices, from literary and cultural analysis to creative works, studies in medical humanities, digital technologies, and beyond.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

·       Hospitality and the ethics of encounter;

·       Home, exile, unhoming, and transience;

·       Borders, boundaries, and liminal or in-between spaces;

·       Hosts, hostesses, guests, and power;

·       Subjectivity and ipseity;

·       Places of public hospitality, including hospitals, hostels, and hotels;

·       Crimes of hospitality;

·       Translation, language, and linguistic hospitality;

·       The digital, the virtual, and non-places;

·       Religious traditions of hospitality;

·       Cognitive and neurobiological perspectives on openness and receptivity;

·       The uncanny, ghosts, mourning, and spectrality;

·       Hospitality and/as pedagogy;

·       Refuge, asylum, and migration; 

·       Citizenship, non-citizenship, intruders, and belonging; 

·       Geographic or regional conceptualizations of hospitality (e.g. Southern Hospitality);

·       Animal, non-human, cross-species, and posthuman hospitality;

·       Tourism and the hospitality industry;

·       Reading and interpretation as hospitable acts; and

·       Gendered, racialized, and classed dynamics of hospitality.

Call for Papers/Appel à communications - Women in French UK–Ireland Conference 2027

Dates: 28–30 May 2027

Place: Hinsley Hall, Leeds, UK

 

Political Linda Lê 

With Linda Lê’s Cronos (2010) as the selection for One Book, One WiF initiative, this panel aims to investigate Linda Lê as a “engagé” writer – politically and otherwise. Unlike figures like Simone de Beauvoir and Annie Ernaux, Lê did not publish op-eds, did not take part in demonstrations, etc. However, she criticized some systems; in this regard, Cronos can be read as the representation of past dictatorial societies and as a manual to identify the signs of a dictatorship in the making.

We invite papers on this rarely addressed aspect of Linda Lê’s work (preferably but not only Cronos) within this conference’s framework of Legacies and Genealogies. 

Please send a title, a 300-word abstract, and a short bio in French or in English to Michèle Bacholle (bachollem@easternct.edu) by September 29, 2026. Please indicate the title of the panel in the subject box.

Français:

Dans le cadre de l’initiative « One Book, One WiF » consacrée à Cronos (2010) de Linda Lê, ce panel se propose d’examiner la figure de Linda Lê en tant qu’écrivain « engagé » – sur le plan politique ou autre. Contrairement à des personnalités telles que Simone de Beauvoir et Annie Ernaux, Linda Lê n’a pas publié de tribunes ni participé à des manifestations. Elle a toutefois critiqué certains systèmes ; à cet égard, Cronos peut être lu comme une représentation de sociétés dictatoriales passées et comme un manuel permettant d’identifier les signes d’une dictature qui s’installe.

Nous invitons les chercheur.e.s à proposer des communications portant sur cet aspect rarement abordé de l’œuvre de Linda Lê (en privilégiant Cronos, sans toutefois s’y limiter), en résonance avec la thématique de la conférence : « Legacies and Genealogies ».

Veuillez envoyer un titre, un résumé de 300 mots et une courte biographie (en français ou en anglais) à Michèle Bacholle (bachollem@easternct.edu) avant le 29 septembre 2026. Merci d'indiquer le titre du panel dans l'objet du courriel.

Title: Languages, Humanities, and Human Futures in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.

As artificial intelligence increasingly transforms education, communication, research, translation, and cultural production, questions about the future of languages and the humanities have become more urgent than ever. While AI can generate texts, summarize research, facilitate translation, and provide access to vast amounts of information, it cannot fully replicate the human dimensions of meaning-making, cultural memory, ethical judgment, creativity, empathy, and lived experience that are central to language and the humanities.

This roundtable invites scholars, educators, students, translators, and cultural practitioners to reflect on the enduring importance of language study and the humanities in an AI-driven world. How do languages shape human relationships, identities, communities, and worldviews? What roles do literature, history, philosophy, the arts, and cultural traditions play in preserving and transmitting collective memory and fostering intercultural understanding? How can AI serve as a tool for learning, accessibility, and innovation while reinforcing rather than replacing human expertise, critical thinking, and cultural engagement?

Participants are encouraged to discuss both the opportunities and challenges posed by AI, including its impact on teaching, research, translation, cultural preservation, and global communication. The roundtable seeks to foster a constructive conversation about how languages and the humanities remain essential to sustaining human connection, cultural diversity, democratic dialogue, and creative innovation in the twenty-first century.

Please submit your abstract directly to Dr. Latifa Zoulagh at latifazoulagh@gmail.com . 

Title: Women, Gender, and Culture in the Francophone World

This open panel invites papers exploring the diverse cultural productions, experiences, and representations of women and gender in French and Francophone contexts. We welcome contributions that examine literature, film, visual arts, performance, media, popular culture, life writing, philosophy, and other forms of cultural expression from any historical period or geographical region of the Francophone world.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to, questions of identity, memory, embodiment, creativity, migration, language, community, activism, cultural transmission, social change, and the intersections of gender with race, class, sexuality, disability, religion, and colonial histories.

The panel seeks to foster interdisciplinary conversations that highlight the richness and diversity of women's and gendered experiences, voices, and cultural practices across the Francophone world.

Papers employing a wide range of theoretical and methodological approaches are encouraged.

Please submit your abstract directly to the panel chair, Dr. Latifa Zoulagh, at latifazoulagh@gmail.com .

From Migritude to Fémigritude: African Women Writers Theorizing Migration and Displacement

Inspired by Jacques Chevrier's concept of migritude, which designates literary writing centered on migration and its displacements, this panel proposes the concept of Fémigritude as a theorectical framework for reading African women's literary and cultural representations of migration, and displacement. Building on Filomina Chioma Steady's theory of African feminism as rooted in material conditions of survival and extending the legacy of Négritude through a gendered lens, fémigritude names the epistemological interventions emerging from African women’s narratives of migration. This panel invites African women writers and filmmakers, whose works examine how migration restructures kinship networks, transforms motherhood into a site of political vulnerability, exposes women and children to state and structural violence, and compels women to navigate intersecting systems of oppression. These cultural productions theorize migration not as an individual tragedy, but as a structural condition shaped by necropolitics, border regimes, neoliberal precarity, climate insecurity, terrorism, and global inequality. These cultural works see migration as a structural situation influenced by necropolitics, border regimes, insecurity, terrorism, and global inequity. We welcome papers engaging literature, film, autobiography, testimony, performance, and other forms of cultural production written by African women that portray African women’s experiences of migration, displacement, survival, resistance and agency.

Keywords: Migritude, fémigritude, migration, displacement, necropolitics 

Please send abstracts of 250–300 words and a short bio to Diweng M. Dafong at
mdafong@crimson.ua.edu

Salve Regina University, Newport, Rhode Island March 6–9, 2027

Panel Chair: Adrienne Angelo

Session format: Traditional panel

Session title: Care and Embodied Vulnerability in Contemporary Francophone Studies

Session proposal: 

Contemporary Francophone cultural production increasingly turns to bodies under pressure: exhausted bodies, ill bodies, racialized and gendered bodies, aging bodies, maternal bodies, traumatized bodies, and bodies entangled with damaged environments. Drawing on feminist care ethics, from Joan Tronto’s insistence that care must be understood as a matter of politics, democracy, and justice to Pascale Molinier’s work on the gendered, affective, and often invisible labor of care, this session invites papers that examine how women, queer, and gender-expansive writers, filmmakers, artists, and thinkers represent embodied vulnerability as a relational and political condition that exposes the uneven distribution of care. Rather than approaching care as a purely private or ethical practice, this session asks how care is demanded, refused, withheld, institutionalized, or made impossible in Francophone cultural texts. How do cultural works represent bodies that require care, bodies that provide care, and bodies abandoned by families, institutions, states, or communities? How do gender, race, class, sexuality, disability, illness, age, migration, colonial history, and ecological precarity shape who is expected to care, who is deemed worthy of care, and whose vulnerability remains unseen? By placing feminist care ethics in dialogue with embodied vulnerability, this panel asks how contemporary Francophone cultural production gives form to dependence, exposure, and survival as political questions. What kinds of feminist critique become possible when vulnerability is understood as a condition shared unequally across human and more-than-human life?  Papers may address literature, cinema, visual culture, philosophy, life writing, or other cultural forms that explore these questions in relation to the forms of embodied vulnerability and care relations outlined above. The session especially welcomes approaches grounded in feminist theory, care ethics, affect theory, medical humanities, disability studies, ecocriticism, and postcolonial/decolonial feminisms.

Please submit directly your abstract to the panel chair:
Adrienne Angelo
Professor of French
Auburn University
ama0002@auburn.edu