Call for Proposals for AmLit – American Literatures

We invite proposals from prospective guest editors interested in curating a special issue for AmLit – American Literatures, a Diamond Open Access journal dedicated to cutting-edge scholarship on contemporary developments in American literatures. AmLit provides a platform for both established
and emerging scholars, fostering discussions on how literary texts from North, Central, and South America engage with and narrativize key cultural transformations such as digitization, migration, globalization, trans- and interculturality, as well as visuality and intermediality.

We welcome proposals for special issues typically comprising five high-quality essays. Contributions should engage with fictional, non-fictional, and graphic texts within the fields of U.S. American, Canadian, and Latin American literary studies. The journal’s methodological orientation spans a broad
spectrum of literary theories, including (but not limited to) the following approaches:

• Affect Theory & Emotion Studies
• African American, Ethnic & Critical Race Studies
• Critical Digital Humanities & Media Theory
• Critical Disability & Neurodiversity Studies
• Decolonial, Postcolonial & Global South Studies
• Gender, Feminist, Queer & Trans Studies
• Intermediality, Visual Culture & Multimodality
• Marxist, Materialist & Political Economy Approaches
• Narrative Theory, Poetics & Formalisms (incl. postclassical approaches)
• New Historicism & Cultural Materialism

Proposal Guidelines

Please submit a 400–500-word proposal outlining the thematic scope and scholarly significance of
your special issue. Please also include:

1. Project Status
   • Have any contributions already been secured (for example, from a conference,
   workshop, or research network)?
   • Or will you issue a new Call for Papers to recruit contributors?
2. Submission Format
   Please choose one of the following formats:
   • Fully Developed Issue
   ▪ 400–500-word issue abstract
   ▪ 250-word abstracts for each planned essay
   (all combined in a single document)
   • New Project
   ▪ 400–500-word issue abstract
   ▪ Draft Call for Papers

Potential Topics

We encourage submissions on a wide range of topics. Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

• AI, Algorithmic Culture & Machine Creativity (literary authorship, co-creation, and narrative form in the age of large language models)
• Affect, Emotion & Mood Economies (the representation and circulation of feeling in contemporary literary texts)
• American Cultural Production & Political Identity (literary negotiations of nationalism, ideology, public discourse, and the shaping of collective identities)
• Climate Fiction & the Environmental Humanities (Anthropocene narratives, eco-poetics, and environmental justice in literature)
• Critical Digital Humanities & Post-Digital Textuality (e-literature, multimodal storytelling, and the transformation of reading practices)
• Data, Archives & Algorithmic Memory (archival gaps, erasure, and the literary negotiation of digital memory)
• Decolonial & Global South Approaches to American Literatures (hemispheric reconfigurations, epistemic justice, and literary world-making)
• Migration, Borders & Mobility Regimes (literary representations of displacement, diaspora, and transnational belonging)
• Platform Studies & Digital Infrastructures (the impact of digital circulation on literary production, distribution, and reception)
• Queer, Trans & Non-Binary Futures (queer poetics, temporalities, and alternative modes of literary world-building)
• Security, Surveillance & Biopolitics (literary engagements with control, data, and the governance of bodies and populations)

Submission Details

Please send your proposal along with:

• A CV and short bio of the guest editor(s)
• A list of potential contributors (if applicable)

Please submit your proposal as a single PDF (or Word) file containing all elements listed above.

Submissions should be sent to amlit-journal@uni-graz.at by Monday, June 1, 2026.

For more information, visit www.amlit.eu.

We look forward to your submissions!

The Editorial Team of AmLit – American Literatures