Posts ⁂ The Postmodern Terminal >_
Where calls for papers actually circulate in the humanities, and why an hour spent building a scholarly profile now saves a week of scrambling later.
You have a draft worth sending out. Now what? I will argue that getting your work into circulation is a problem of infrastructure rather than inspiration, and I will show it by naming the four places where calls for papers actually appear and the two profiles you should build before you have any use for them.
Start with the board built for our people. RelCFP collects calls in religious studies, theology, and philosophy, which means you are reading announcements written by scholars who share your vocabulary rather than sifting a general feed for the three items that apply to you.
WikiCFP runs the other direction: crowd-sourced, every field, no gatekeeper. That breadth is exactly its value when your project sits between disciplines and no single subject database recognizes it as one thing. If you work on, say, religion and data ethics, the call you want may be posted by a conference that has never heard of your subfield.
The Penn calls-for-papers site has been running out of the University of Pennsylvania's English department for a long time, and it remains strong for humanities conferences and for edited-volume calls, which are the quiet route into print that nobody tells first-year students about. An edited volume is often a friendlier first publication than a journal: a named editor, a stated theme, a real deadline.
H-Net, a network of subject-area discussion lists, is where an announcement frequently shows up before it reaches any of the boards above. Calls, jobs, and reviews circulate there first because that is where the organizers already are.
Finding calls is only half of it. Other scholars have to be able to find you, and a search for your name should return something you control.
Humanities Commons, a nonprofit scholarly network run by the Modern Language Association, does that work without charging you for the privilege. Post your CV, deposit your own writing in the open repository, and connect with people working in your subfield. Deposited work gets a stable link, which matters the first time someone wants to cite a conference paper of yours that has not yet found a journal home.
Then register for an H-Net account and subscribe to the networks that match your interests. Subscribing, not merely knowing the network exists, is the whole move. Awareness puts nothing in front of you; a subscription puts calls and journal announcements in your inbox whether or not you remembered to go looking this month.
Here is the deflationary reading of the scholarly career: a great deal of what looks like luck is a subscription somebody set up two years ago. The people who seem to hear about everything are not better connected by temperament. They are on the lists. They have a profile that answers for them while they sleep, and they have already decided where they read their calls.
So do it now, in the slack time before the deadline arrives, because the profile takes under an hour today and will take a week you do not have in the middle of a revision. Set up the accounts, subscribe to three networks, paste in your CV, and then go back to the draft. The infrastructure runs quietly in the background, which is the only kind of infrastructure that ever gets used.
RelCFP, calls for papers in religion, theology, and philosophy
H-Net, subject-area networks and announcements
Humanities Commons, MLA scholarly network and repository
Penn Calls for Papers
The Postmodern Terminal >_