Conference: Language and literature across the lifespan.
Location and dates: University of Namur, Belgium. 11-12 December 2025.
Deadline for proposal submission: 15 September 2025 (check website for extensions).
Event presentation
The English Unit of the University of Namur is pleased to be able to host the 2025 conference of the Belgian Association of Anglicists in Higher Education (BAAHE) on Friday 12 December 2025, preceded by a half-day symposium on Thursday 11 December 2025.
The theme for this year’s conference will be ‘Language and literature across the lifespan’. The plenary speakers will be Michael Erard, whose most recent book Bye Bye I Love You: The Story of Our First and Last Words helped inform our choice of theme, and Vanessa Joosen, who will share recent insights from her inspiring work on depictions of age and the life course in children’s literature. The conference will be preceded by a half-day interdisciplinary symposium, ‘Lifelines: Language, memory and the life course’, on Thursday 11 December. The provisional list of speakers includes Winny Ang, Patrick McGuinness, Peter Petré, Heike Pichler, Emma-Louise Silva and Markus Werkle-Bergner.
We are inviting submissions to the conference, by a 15 September 2025 deadline, from across the academic spectrum (predocs, postdocs, established scholars, emeriti) and the different disciplines of English Studies represented in BAAHE (cultural and literary studies, translation studies, linguistics and applied linguistics, ELT and EFL). The conference is open to both BAAHE members and non-members (or not-yet members). We encourage submissions that address our general theme, but for PhD students in particular, we will be happy to relax this expectation if this helps increase their active participation. For more information and to submit a proposal, please go to our website https://lifespan.unamur.be.
Website address
Contact details
(Posted 20 August 2025)
International Interdisciplinary Conference – (Un)welcome Imaginaries: (Non-)Fiction Literature on Fundamental Rights.
Location and dates: Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland. ONLINE CONFERENCE (Zoom). 12-13 December 2025.
Deadline for proposal submissions: 30 April 2025.
Event description
In the first half of the twentieth century, H. G. Wells wrote about the need to codify basic human rights. Although his optimism about the creation of a global order was based on an overly idealized perception of reality, his diagnosis of which areas within human existence should be protected does not differ fundamentally from the later regulations under the Declaration of Human Rights. What is most interesting, however, is his description of the socio-political context and the reasons that underpinned the formulation of individual provisions. In 1940, Orwell, referring to the “tendencies of our time”, Orwell (2015: 44) mentions the “shrinking distance” between people, “excessive mobility” and the need to “reorganize” the life of individual communities. He also writes about dangerous, post-war “rumor-spreading” operations, “propaganda”, and other similar “demoralizing practices”. Orwell also points to the problem of “uprootedness”, which concerns millions of people trying to find themselves in a new place, in new circumstances, evoking “xenophobic” reactions from the local population. It seems reasonable – in the third decade of the twenty-first century – to ask whether the Western world has not come full circle and found itself at the starting point diagnosed by the writer eighty years ago. Therefore, we propose that the participants of the conference analyze and present their conclusions on the extent to which contemporary literature as well as texts of the past both fictional and factual, outline – to paraphrase Timothy Snyder (2020: 4) – “our public malady” seen in our difficulty to respect fundamental human rights. We invite researchers from various fields to collaborate with us, from literary and cultural scholars to sociologists, political scientists, and experts in the field of law, to comment on human rights.
We are looking for papers on:
- Human rights as codified in the Declaration (https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights)
- Artistic and literary reflections on human rights and their historical foundations
- Activist and interventionist role of literature
- Literature and other texts of culture on egalitarianism, equality, inclusion, exclusion and discriminatory discourse
- Intersectionalities and human rights
- Reflections on freedom of thought and conscience
- Refugees and their testimonies
- The literary/cultural/socio-political discourse of (un)dignity
- Literary stance on detention centers (or ‘new camps’)
- (Un)hospitable societies and imagined communities
- Artificial intelligence and (non-)human rights
- Individual freedom and mass surveillance
- ‘Others’ as Agamben’s disposable subjects
- (Un)acceptable state violence
- Transnational (un-)belonging
- Dystopian/utopian expansion of rights
- New common (im)morality
- Old and new borders and boundaries vs fundamental rights
- Pre-memory (Beiner) – predictions of human rights violations
To attend the conference, please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words for your proposed 20-minute presentations, along with a short biographical note, by the end of April 2025. Proposals can be sent to hrconference2025@amu.edu.pl Notifications of acceptance will be sent by the end of June 2025.
The conference fee for presenters is 80 EURO.
The fee for attendees is 25 EURO.
Website address
tba
Contact details
(Posted 12 March 2025)