PASE 2025 / Crossroads 5 Conference – Voices of the Earth: literary and linguistic perspectives in environmental humanities.
Location and dates: University of Białystok, Poland. 4-6 June 2025.
Deadline for proposal submissions: 1 March 2025.
On site venue: University of Białystok, Faculty of Philology, Plac Narodowego Zrzeszenia Studentów 1, 15403 Białystok, Poland.
Event description
Traditional scientific approaches provide important information on climate change and environmental degradation; however, they typically fail to address the underlying cultural, ethical, and philosophical dimensions of such crises. These are deeply interwoven with economic and political agendas, and thus need multifaceted solutions. Environmental humanities connects diverse fields, enabling dynamic and interdisciplinary dialogue, which is essential in enhancing scientific efforts and promoting comprehensive solutions to intricate global challenges. Through the examination of cultural narratives, historical patterns, linguistic frameworks, and ethical discourses, environmental humanities enables us to reevaluate our connection with nature. By exploring the potential for composing a common world that unites both human and non-human entities, environmental humanities encourages a holistic understanding of our place within the ecosystem.
We welcome papers on literature, language, and culture that address questions broadly related to environmental humanities*. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:
- environmental harm/environmental justice/catastrophes and pandemics,
- ecological issues and enduring legacies of racism, enslavement, and colonialism, encounters between environmentalism and feminism,
- interrelationship between race, gender, poverty, and ecological concerns,
- climate migrations/climate trauma,
- natural landscape, landscape modification, ruins, spaces of abandonment,
- postnatural fiction, novels of the Anthropocene, Cli-Fi, extinction narratives, etc., representation of objects/matter/non-human others in discourse,
- Indigenous knowledges and practices,
- ecodiscourses, practices of making and communicating ecological knowledge, media systems and artifacts embedded in ecological relationship,
- ecological analysis of language, ecostylistics,
- eco-translatology,
- ecological approach to teaching and learning, ecopedagogy, ecoliteracy,
- language ecology: language diversity, minority languages.
*We also welcome proposals for presentations and panels on a variety of topics, including those not directly related to the main theme of the conference, as long as they align with the broader goals of the event.
A 300-word abstract and 5 keywords should be submitted as an email attachment to voicespase2025@gmail.com by March 1, 2025. In your email, please include your name, affiliation, email address, phone number, title of the paper, abstract, 5 keywords and a brief bio note. For more information, please visit www.pase2025.uwb.edu.pl.
Timeline
- Deadline for registration: April 1, 2025
- Deadline for submission: March 1, 2025
- Notification of acceptance: March 10, 2025
CFP
For further details, please check the original call inserted below.
PASE 2025 – call for papers(Posted 21 November 2024)
Conference: Generics and stereotypes in discourse: A cross-disciplinary perspective.
Venue and dates: Leiden University (the Netherlands); 5-6 June 2025.
Deadline for proposal submissions: 15 January 2025.
Organiser(s)
- Laure Gardelle, Université Grenoble Alpes, France
- Naomi Truan, Leiden University, the Netherlands
Presentation
The aim of this international conference is to bring together researchers from various disciplines – linguistics, sociolinguistics, pragmatics, communication and media studies, marketing, psychology, history, political science, among others – to further our understanding of how and why generics and stereotypes are explicitly referred to in discourse by speakers.
Despite the wealth of research on generics and stereotypes, the issue of why speakers would want to make a generic statement or make explicit reference to a stereotype in a given context has been understudied to date.
Keynote speaker
Camiel J. Beukeboom, Associate Professor, Department of Communication Science, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, PI on the NWO project “Uncovering biased language use: Implicit Communication of Stereotypes in Natural Language”
Website address
https://www.staff.universiteitleiden.nl/events/2025/06/generics-and-stereotypes
Contact details
- Laure Gardelle (laure.gardelle@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr)
- Naomi Truan n.a.l.truan@hum.leidenuniv.nl)
CFP
For further details please check the original call inserted below.
(Posted 16 July 2024)
Postgraduate symposium: Communities: Literature, Culture, Environment.
Location and dates: University of Malta, Valletta. 6-7 June 2025.
Deadline for proposal submissions: 7 April 2025.
Organised by the Department of English, University of Malta.
This is a postgraduate symposium and it is open to postgraduate students following courses at M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. levels.
Speakers are invited to present a 20minute paper around the following broad thematics:
- Representations of community in literature and textual works
- Discourses of and around the community; language and its communal uses
- Community as political society, community as global society, community as exclusivity
- Community and the arts: music, visual art, film, performance
- New media, transmedial, and AIdriven narratives of community
- Anthropological and sociological approaches to community
- Communal histories (with perspectives beyond the AngloAmerican encouraged)
- Philosophy and communities
- Community and disability
- Community from the lens of feminist, queer, Marxist, and postcolonial theories
- Community as nonhuman ecology
- Communities of/and creative writing
Contact details
CFP
For further details, please check the original call inserted below.
(Posted 23 February 2025)
The Eighth International Symposium on History of English Lexicography and Lexicology.
Location and dates: Tallinn University, Tallinn. Estonia. 11-14 June 2025.
Deadline for proposal submissions: 28 February 2025.
Event description
The Eighth International Symposium on History of English Lexicography and Lexicology will be held on 11-14 June 2025 at Tallinn University. The conference focuses on historical English lexicography, lexicology and semantics.
Confirmed keynote speakers are:
- Prof. Em. Charlotte Brewer (University of Oxford)
- Prof. Dr. Alexander Bergs (University of Osnabrück)
- Prof. Carole Hough (University of Glasgow)
We invite 400-word anonymised abstracts (excluding bibliography) in docx, rtf, or PDF formats for 20-minute papers to be sent to hellex8@tlu.ee by 28 February 2025. Please include in your email:
- Title of the paper
- Full name, title, and affiliation
- Contact details (address, phone, e-mail).
Website address
https://konverentsikeskus.tlu.ee/en/lexis25
Contact details
(Posted 22 February 2025)
Conference: Pseudo-Silence in Early Modern Theatre.
Location and dates: University of Naples L’Orientale. 16-17 June 2025.
Deadline for proposal submissions: 20 March 2025.
Event description
The conference Pseudo-Silence in Early Modern Theatre will be held in Naples on June 16th-17th, 2025. Through an interdisciplinary approach, combining literary, linguistic, historical-cultural and performance studies, the conference intends to investigate the forms and functions of silence in early modern English theatre, challenging its binary opposition with speech and revealing its linguistic power as a deliberate and performative choice to express reticence, resistance, or dissimulation. Potential topics include, but are not limited to: Female Speech and Gender Studies; Political/Religious Discourse; Linguistic Perspectives; Digital Humanities; Censorship and Editorial Silence; Adaptations and Translations; Performance History.
Please submit a 300-word abstract along with a brief bio by 28/02/2025. Selected papers will be published in an edited collection in 2026.
Plenary speakers: Jon R. Snyder (Research Professor Emeritus, Comparative Literature, UC Santa Barbara, USA); Maria Elisa Montironi (Associate Professor, English Literature, Università degli Studi di Urbino, IT).
Website address
https://archivio.unior.it/doc_db/doc_news_56131_6792368170897.pdf
Contact details
- Aoife Beville (University of Naples L’Orientale, IT): abeville@unior.it
- Beatrice Righetti (University of Verona, IT): beatrice.righetti@univr.it
CFP
For further details, please check the original call inserted below.
(Posted 22 February 2025)
Conference: ICAME46 (International Computer Archive of Medieval and Modern English).
Location and dates: Vilnius University (Lithuania), 17-21 June 2025.
Deadline for proposal submissions: 15 January 2025.
Venue details
Vilnius University is the oldest and largest Lithuanian higher education institution established in the 16th century. The university is located in the Old town of Vilnius, a vibrant and modern capital of Lithuania. https://www.vu.lt/en
Event description
The conference theme is “Per Corpora ad Astra: Exploring the Past, Mapping the Future”. We invite all submissions on corpus-based approaches to English, and especially abstracts addressing the theme of the conference.
The academic programme will consist of full papers, work‐in‐progress reports, software demonstrations, poster sessions and invited keynotes. There will also be a call for pre‐conference workshops. The social programme will include a welcome evening reception, a boat trip, and the gala dinner.
The following keynote speakers have confirmed their participation:
- Sebastian Hoffmann (Universität Trier)
- Rosa Lorés (Universidad de Zaragoza)
- Rūta Petrauskaitė (Vytautas Magnus University)
- Lukas Sönning (Universität Bamberg)
Notification of acceptance will be sent out in February 2025. More details are on the conference website!
Website address
Contact details: icame46@flf.vu.lt
CFP
For further details, please check the original call inserted below.
(Posted 21 Deecember 2024)
Conference: Poetry Off the Page, Around the Globe: Advances in Poetry Performance Research.
Location and dates: University of Vienna, Literaturhaus Wien, Austria. 13-14 June 2025.
Deadline for proposal submissions: 20 December 2024.
Organised by Shefali Banerji, MA BA; Dr. Rachel Bolle-Debessay; Assoz.-Prof. Mag. Dr. Julia Lajta-Novak.
Presentation
This conference will be a forum for new research on contemporary poetry performance and spoken word poetry from around the globe. Attending to local/national practices as well as transnational movements, it aims to shed new light on the aesthetics, politics, medialities, and histories of performed poetry, as well as to advance the theory and methodology of poetry performance studies.
We warmly invite proposals for presentations of 15-20 minutes in English. While this is an academic conference, we also welcome proposals from practitioners who speak about their own work in a self-reflexive, critically informed manner.
Areas of discussion might include (but are not limited to):
- Spoken-word poetry and its relationship with the visual arts/music/dance/performance art/theatre/comedy
- The multiple heritages of contemporary spoken word poetry
- Avant-garde poetic performances since the 1960s and their use of diverse media
- Thinking poetry performance with/against technology
- Spoken-word poetry’s relation with digital media
- Formats and genres of oral poetry performance (slam, open mic, poetry trails, spoken word theatre, one-person show, rap, poetry films, spoken word clips,…)
- Poetry performance communities, coteries, audiences
- Spoken word poetry and/as creative industry
- Poetry, identity, and social justice: performed poetry and its relationship with race, gender, ability, heritage, …
- Advances in spoken word pedagogy
- Methods of poetry performance research
- Poetry performance and critical/ cultural/ literary theory
Website address
Advances in Poetry Performance Research (conference website)
Poetry off the Page (Poetry Off the Page project website)
Abstracts and contact details
Please email abstracts of no more than 250 words and a short bio (maximum 80 words, in the same document) to: popconf2025@univie.ac.at.
Deadline: 20 December 2024.
We aim to notify respondents to the first call by 10th January 2025 (this is particularly to accommodate international delegates who must expect a lengthy visa application process). A second call – with a deadline in early February – will be issued in November.
Convenors:
- Shefali Banerji M.A.
- Dr. Rachel Bolle-Debessay
- Assoc. Prof. Julia Lajta-Novak (University of Vienna)
CFP
For further details, please check the original call inserted below.
(Posted 25 October 2024)
Conference: Unquiet Shores: Coastal Acoustics and the Terpsichorean Ocean.
Location and dates: Edinburgh Napier University, Scotland. 18-20 June 2025.
Deadline for proposal submissions: Monday, 10 February 2025.
Venue details: Edinburgh Napier University Craiglockhart Campus and online (Teams)
Event description
The coast is a region readily identified by its distinctive soundscapes. This conference – co-run by the Haunted Shores and Macabre Danse networks – invites contributions that attend to the wealth of gothic, weird, and uncanny media that explore and exploit the haunting potential of the coast’s unquiet atmospheres. How can we turn to gothic modes of thought in order to better comprehend the perception, production, or performance of coastal soundscapes? What can be gained by attending to the spectral or invisible dimensions of coastal ecologies, to the voices, songs, and quiet patterings and noisome crashings of the human and more-than-human world? What is gained, or lost, in capturing or responding to these elements through other mediums and modes, such as stage and screen? How can attending to the shoreline’s sound waves move us beyond anthropocentric ways of knowing the coast and bodies of water? How does the disorienting swirl of coastal fog affect our relationship with the environment and with the other bodies – human, nonhuman, or monstrous – that might also move through it? And what might be said when the unquiet shore finally falls silent?
We welcome papers, panels, or workshops on anything relating to sound or hearing on the shore, in coastal waters, or inland coastal regions, from any time period, form, media, genre, or theoretical approach – including, but not limited to, the sonic gothic, coastal studies, adaptation, the blue humanities, ballet gothic, and more. Possible topics can include but are not limited to:
- Gothic voices
- Spectral or mysterious sounds
- Music, scores, instruments
- Seabird or marine animal sound/ communication
- Waves, ripples, tsunami
- Rain, weather, storms
- Dance as response to coastal soundscapes
- Sonar and bathymetry
- Subsea sound (human, nonhuman, mechanical)
- Diving sound
- Bioacoustics
- Noise pollution
- Multimodal performance
- Foghorns, bells, sirens
- Navigational noise
- Atmospheric noise
- Affective responses to coastal sound
- Singing, chanting, shanties, ballads
- Recordings or mixes of coastal sound/ field recordings/ marine sounds as music
- Ice & glacial sounds
We invite proposals for individual papers (200 word abstracts), pre-formed panels/ roundtables (200 word summary plus individual abstracts), or workshops (300 word summary). If you would like to propose a session that falls outside of the above categories, let us know – we are interested in interdisciplinary and multimodal scholarship. The conference is hybrid and you can take part in person or via Teams. You may also opt into a Work in Progress session held at the end of the conference on 20 June (this means committing to submitting a 3000-word draft a month ahead, and reading 2-3 other drafts: see the submission form for details).
Website address
Contact details
(Posted 2 December 2024)
Convalescence in 19th- and 20th-Century Anglophone Literature.
Venue and dates: Faculté des Langues et Cultures Etrangères Nantes Université, FRANCE (26 June 2025) & Daulat Ram College, Delhi University, INDIA (27 June 2025), and online.
Extended deadline for proposal submissions: 20 January 2025.
Organisers: Leslie de Bont, Aude Petit-Marquis, Sanna Melin Schyllert, Deepshikha Mahanta Bortamuly, Violina Borah.
Presentation
Convalescence usually refers to the “gradual recovery of health and strength after illness”. Krienke (2021) and Ménager (2020) showed that even if the theme of convalescence plays a significant role in 19th- and 20th-century literature, reflecting the changing societal attitudes towards health, the human body, and the mind, it still remains a “neglected historical [and cultural] paradigm” (Krienke 149). This symposium aims to delve deeply into the intricate portrayals of convalescence in 19th- and 20th-century literature, exploring how these narratives convey the evolving representations and experiences of care and recovery, and complicate the social metaphors and categories sometimes associated with illnesses (Sontag 19783) and poor health. While it does “not necessarily portend complete recovery” (Krienke 2021, 2), convalescence in literature is—unlike the climactic diseases, accidents or crises—a paradoxically uneventful yet dramatic period of time that often brings a sense of liminality and uncertainty in character development and plot progression. By reevaluating both canonical and marginalised texts, and by examining how they engaged with their historical contexts, we hope to analyse how culture, class, race, and gender shaped various narratives of convalescence highlighting the diverse ways in which different authors and genres approach this “network of shared experiences of uncertain health, lingering trauma, and new opportunities” (Krienke 8). Schaffer has shown that in 19th-century novels, fictional care communities often offer “a temporal respite as well as a social haven, a space outside of political, productive, or practical needs” (5344). How do these literary depictions of convalescent care compare with 20th- century fiction, particularly given the modernist preoccupation with speed that Enda Duffy demonstrates in The Speed Handbook (2009)? What does it mean to convalesce in a society that moves ever faster and how is convalescence rendered in (post)modernist fiction? And while Fifield has demonstrated that “sickness is where [Virginia] Woolf’s modernism emerges” (875) and that her writing was an ambiguous “rehabilitative practice” (76), what roles do reading and writing play in the experience of convalescence?
We invite proposals on the topic of convalescence in its broadest sense in anglophone literature from any genre and artistic strand of the 19th and 20th centuries. We aim to foster cross-sectional dialogue, encouraging collaboration between scholars working on different time periods and genres and are particularly interested in papers that seek to bridge or question the divide between Victorian and Modernist literatures. Topics include (but are not limited to):
- genre and convalescence: convalescence and coming of age / Bildungsroman; convalescence and the supernatural; convalescence in war literature; the narrative strategies of convalescence; (auto)biographical accounts of convalescence; convalescence in speculative fiction etc.
- the subjective experience of convalescence: spiritual and religious dimensions of recovery; convalescent introspection; the affects of convalescence; solitude, isolation and contagion; dependence on help and medication; convalescence and care-giving; treatment compliance (or refusal); agency v passivity in convalescence; empowering convalescence and post-traumatic growth; mental health, trauma and convalescence; maternity and post-partum recovery etc.
- the social, political and economic implications of illness and recovery: convalescence from the margins; the impact of colonialism and systemic oppression on convalescence; convalescence and marginalised bodies; gendered illness and convalescence; the intersection of convalescence and disability
- the materiality and logistics of convalescence: spaces and places of convalescence; convalescence in nature; subjects and objects of the sickroom; convalescent aids, medication and therapeutic tools, post-acute care, pain management and coping techniques
- convalescence and time: convalescence as a transitional period; time out of time; chronic illness; never-ending convalescence
Paper proposals of max 300 words and a bio (max 100 words) should be sent before 20 December 2024 to: convalescencelit2025@gmail.com. Responses will be given by 28 February 2025. Please indicate in your proposal whether you wish to attend in person in Nantes (26th June 2025) or Delhi (27th June 2025) or via Zoom.
Keynote Speakers:
- Hosanna Krienke (26 June) and
- Prof. Talia Schaffer (27 June).
Website address
https://crini.univ-nantes.fr/appels/cfp-convalescence-in-19th-and-20th-century-anglophone-literature
Contact details
convalescencelit2025@gmail.com
CFP
For further details, please check the original call inserted below.
(Posted 6 September 2024. Updated 7 January 2025)