Call for Papers - 2027 Issue (Remembering and Forgetting)
Call for Contributions
We invite contributions to the 2027 issue of FOCUS: Papers in English Literary and Cultural Studies.
The 2027 issue of the journal, edited by Zsuzsanna Csikai and Mónika Fodor, will be devoted to
Remembering and Forgetting: Memory, Narrative, Silences and Forms of Mediating the Past
Memory is not simply a repository of the past but an ongoing cultural, social, and narrative practice through which individuals and communities make the past meaningful in the present. Remembering involves selection, interpretation, transmission, and transformation; it is shaped as much by what is forgotten, silenced, or rendered absent as by what is preserved and retold. Literary and cultural texts are part of this process, creating spaces in which personal memories intersect with collective histories to be preserved, contested, revised, or refused.
Contemporary cultures of memory also raise new questions about who or what remembers. Digital archives, social media platforms, search engines, and algorithmic systems increasingly participate in determining what remains visible, retrievable, and culturally memorable. At the same time, renewed attention to trauma, intergenerational transmission, migration, contested histories, and marginalized voices has foregrounded the ethical and political dimensions of remembering and forgetting.
We invite contributions exploring memory as a dynamic process rather than a stable record of the past. How do narratives construct, transmit, or transform individual and collective memories? How does personal remembering become entangled with cultural and historical narratives? What happens when memory is communicated across generations, communities, languages, or geographical spaces? How might silence, absence, forgetting, and refusal themselves function as modes of remembering? And how are contemporary technologies and algorithms changing the ways in which societies archive, retrieve, circulate and potentially erase the past?
Suggested Areas of Inquiry include (but are not limited to):
- Memory, narrative, and identity
- Collective and cultural remembering
- Autobiographical and life writing practices
- Intergenerational and transgenerational memory
- Trauma, testimony, and witnessing
- Silence, absence, forgetting, and amnesia
- Archives and the politics of preservations
- Digital memory and digital afterlives
- Mediation of memory: algorithms and platforms
- Visual, material, and embodied memory
- Future memory: how the present imagines what will be remembered
- Ethical and political dimensions of remembering and forgetting
Contributions may focus on literary texts, film, visual and digital culture, life writing, oral histories, archives, commemorative practices, or other cultural forms.
We expect titles, bios, and short abstracts by November 30, 2026, and will inform authors of their acceptance or rejection within the week after that date. Conforming to the MLA style, latest edition, with inside references keyed to a Works Cited section, the papers using MS Word (of 5,000-8,000 words in length) should be submitted online (see the Submissions page for detailed instructions) or sent to the issue editors and the editor-in-chief by April 30, 2027. In accordance with the journal's policy, papers will be read by external referees to assess their quality and determine whether they are accepted for publication. Reviews of scholarly books (1,000-2,000 words) on Anglophone literary or cultural subjects, published no earlier than 2024, are also welcome.
Please send your proposed title and abstract to: focusjournal@pte.hu
Editor-in-chief:
Mária Kurdi kurdi.maria@pte.hu
Issue editors
Zsuzsanna Csikai csikai.zsuzsanna@pte.hu
Mónika Fodor fodor.monika@pte.hu
