Call for Papers for “American Shorts 2026”. Please distribute.

“American Shorts 2026” will take place on October 29-31, 2026, at the School of Arts & Humanities of the University of Lisbon, Portugal.

American Shorts 2026 webpage: https://sites.google.com/view/americanshorts2026

Submission deadline: 10 June, 2026

Conference: 29-31 October, 2026

Location: Lisbon, Portugal

The contemporary American short story lives in a context where ‘short’ has tended towards the increasingly economic. In our new attention economy, brief forms thrive. We will be inquiring into how US short fiction has integrated and contended with, reacted to and against, different narrative forms. We are eager to discuss, in a setting welcoming to researchers, independent scholars, students and professionals, not only the traditional American short story but also how it has been morphing, or can be revisited, through the useful and more encompassing umbrella-term of the ‘short form’.

Keynotes

Dr. Michael Collins (King’s College, London), Chair of the British Association for American Studies, co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to the American Short Story (2023).

Dr. Ross K. Tangedal (University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point), Director & Publisher of Cornerstone Press, author of The Preface: American Authorship in the Twentieth Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), trustee of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation & Society, Vice-President of the Sherwood Anderson Society, President of the Society for the Study of the American Short Story.

We welcome proposals for individual submissions or thematically aligned panels of speakers (20-minute presentations).

Abstracts (max. 250 words) and brief biographical note (max. 150 words) should be submitted by no later than 10 June 2026. We will respond to applications by the end of 10 July 2026.

All submissions must be made through the designated platform available on the conference website. Submissions will be open as of early November 2025.

Please find the full CfP and more info on our website, here.