The postings below are all still active, and organized by deadline. Once the deadline has passed, they will be moved to the IABA Posting Archive, on the CBR Website
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Call for papers
Disposable Bodies and the Aesthetics of War: Representations of Vulnerability, Violence, and Resistance in Literature and Culture
A Special issue of Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai Philologia
Deadline for Abstracts: September 15, 2026
https://studia.reviste.ubbcluj.ro/index.php/subbphilologia/article/view/3084/9430
Guest Editors:
Dr. Andrea Roxana Bellot
Associate Professor, Department of English and German Studies
Rovira i Virgili University (URV), Tarragona, Spain
andrearoxana.bellot@urv.cat
and
Dr. Nóra Máthé
Assistant Lecturer, Department of Applied Linguistics
Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania, Târgu-Mureș, Romania
mathenora@ms.sapientia.ro
Description of the CFP:
Wars have been a recurring feature of human history. They have shaped territories, identities, and political orders, and they continue to do so today. From large-scale invasions and civil wars to drone strikes and digital surveillance, armed conflict remains a constant global reality. In a world marked by ongoing warfare, from Europe to the Middle East, from Africa to the Pacific, its human consequences can no longer be treated as distant or exceptional. Contemporary wars demand renewed attention to the ways violence renders certain lives expendable, invisible, or ungrievable. This special issue of Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai Philologia explores how modern and contemporary wars produce disposable bodies and how cultural and literary forms expose, question, or resist that disposability. We invite contributions that examine how conflict constructs hierarchies of human worth and how artistic practices challenge the political, military, and media narratives that normalise the loss of particular lives.
The notion of the “disposable body” has become central to analyses of power, violence, and vulnerability. Thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Achille Mbembe, Judith Butler, and Lauren Berlant have shown how modern systems determine whose lives are protected and whose can be neglected, sacrificed, or forgotten. Drawing on these frameworks, from Foucault’s biopolitics (1976) to Agamben’s bare life (1998) and Mbembe’s necropolitics (2003), as well as Butler’s notion of precarious life (2004) and Berlant’s concept of slow death (2011), this special issue examines how contemporary systems govern bodies, distribute vulnerability unevenly, and expose certain populations to intensified forms of harm and disposability.
While these debates emerge in diverse contexts, they converge on a fundamental insight: political orders are sustained through the unequal distribution of exposure to death. War intensifies these logics. Soldiers may be treated as resources rather than persons; civilian casualties often disappear into statistics; racialised, colonised, or displaced populations are framed as collateral; and wounded veterans may become invisible once they fall outside military utility. Contemporary warfare, including remote and automated forms of killing, further distances the public from the bodies affected by violence.
Literature and cultural production play a crucial role in making these processes visible. As Jean Colleran suggests (2003), today’s “disposable wars” are often mediated through images that turn violence into spectacle. Yet literature, theatre, film, visual art, and digital media can interrupt this spectacle by returning specificity, presence, and dignity to those positioned as expendable. Through narrative detail, embodied performance, aesthetic disruption, testimonial force, or digital counter-archiving, cultural texts help audiences confront the human costs of war. They reveal the mechanisms that erase certain lives, and they also imagine alternative modes of witnessing, remembering, and valuing.
Thus, this special issue asks:
- How do cultural and literary representations make visible the production of disposable bodies in wartime?
- How do aesthetic forms resist, reproduce, or complicate narratives of expendability?
- What happens when we understand war not only as geopolitical conflict but as a system for managing human disposability?
- How do different media intervene in the processes that decide whose suffering matters?
- What alternative memories, narratives, or futures emerge from artistic engagements with wartime violence?
We welcome contributions from literary studies, cultural studies, performance studies, war studies, memory and trauma studies, gender studies, media studies, and digital humanities, among others.
Suggested Subtopics:
- The biopolitics and necropolitics of war: theoretical and cultural representations.
- The expendable soldier: race, class, and coloniality in military hierarchies.
- Civilian casualties and the politics of ungrievability in war narratives.
- Bodies as testimony: trauma, injury, disability, and the aesthetics of the wounded body.
- Spectacle, media, and the visual erasure of wartime suffering.
- Veterans, memory, and postwar disposability.
- The transformation of spectatorship into witnessing in theatre, film, and performance.
- Gendered and sexualised disposability in wartime representation.
- Digital warfare, drones, and the distancing of bodily harm.
- Commemoration, memorial practices, and racialised hierarchies of remembrance.
Selected Bibliography:
Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995.
Banita, Georgiana. Plotting Justice: Narrative Ethics and Literary Culture after 9/11. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012.
Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.
Buelens, Gert, Samuel Durrant and Robert Eaglestone, eds. The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism. Abingdon/Oxon: Routledge, 2014
Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2009.
———. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2004.
Colleran, Jeanne. “Disposable Wars, Disappearing Acts: Theatrical Responses to the 1991 Gulf War.” Theatre Journal 55, no. 4 (2003): 613–632. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25069333
Douglass, Ana, and Thomas A. Vogler, eds. Witness and Memory: The Discourse of Trauma. London: Routledge, 2003.
Erll, Astrid. “Media and the Dynamics of Memory: From Cultural Paradigms to Transcultural Premediation.” In Handbook of Culture and Memory, edited by Brady Wagoner, 305–324. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.
Engberg-Pedersen, Anders, and Neil Ramsey, eds. War and Literary Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023.
Favret, Mary A. War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. (Originally published 1976.)
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. “Soldier’s Heart: Literary Men, Literary Women, and the Great War.” Signs 8, no. 3 (1983): 422–450.
Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.
———. “The Generation of Postmemory.” Poetics Today 29, no. 1 (2008): 103–128.
———. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.
Huyssen, Andreas. “Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia.” Public Culture 12, no. 1 (2000): 21–38.
Ignatieff, Michael. “The New World Disorder.” The New York Review of Books, September 26, 2014.
Landsberg, Alison. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.
Lury, Celia. Prosthetic Culture: Photography, Memory, Identity. London: Routledge, 1998.
Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40.
McLoughlin, Kate. Authoring War: The Literary Representation of War from the Iliad to Iraq. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Nordin, Astrid H. M. and Dan Őberg. “Targeting the Ontology of War: From Clausewitz to Baudrillard.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 43, no. 2 (2014): 392-410.
Rigney, Anne. “The Dynamics of Remembrance: Texts between Monumentality and Morphing.” In Cultural Memory Studies, edited by Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, 345–353. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008.
Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.
Van Alphen, Ernst. “Second-Generation Testimony, Transmission of Trauma, and Postmemory.” Poetics Today 27, no. 2 (2006): 473–488.
van Dijck, José. Mediated Memories in the Digital Age. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007.
Wagoner, Brady, ed. Handbook of Culture and Memory. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.
Wertsch, James V. “National Memory and Where to Find It.” In Handbook of Culture and Memory, edited by Brady Wagoner, 259–281. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.
Winter, Jay. War Beyond Words: Languages of Remembrance from the Great War to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
———. “Thinking about Silence.” In Shadows of War, edited by Efrat Ben-Ze’ev, Ruth Ginio, and Jay Winter, 3–31. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Languages Accepted:English
Deadlines and Selection Procedure
• September 15, 2026 – deadline for paper proposals (abstract of 200 words, 7 keywords, minimum 5 theoretical references, author’s bio note of 150 words);
• October 30, 2026 – notification of acceptance;
• February 28, 2027 – submission of full articles (the required format for referencing can be found at: http://studia.ubbcluj.ro/serii/philologia/pdf/Instructions_En.pdf);
• September 30, 2027 – publication of the special issue.
Proposals and completed articles should be sent to the following addresses:
Double-blind peer review: All articles that pass the first screening will undergo anonymous evaluation by two external reviewers following the journal’s standard peer-review procedures.
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Hi All,
I’ve co-organized this American Comparative Literature Association seminar,“The Fragment as Form: Embodiment, Memory, and the Politics of Representation,” for the online-only stream of the conference (May 15-16, 2027). I hope you consider applying (by September 22). Please see the information below.
Cheers,
Leila Pazargadi
leila.pazargadi@nevadastate.edu
Seminar Title: The Fragment as Form: Embodiment, Memory, and the Politics of Representation
Abstract: Contemporary writers across diasporic, racialized, disabled, and transnational communities frequently turn away from traditionally coherent narratives of identity. Instead, they embrace fragmentation, rupture, embodied difference, contradiction, silence, and incompletion as aesthetic and political practices. This seminar asks: What possibilities emerge when the self refuses wholeness as a condition of recognition?
Building from conversations in Arab American studies, Black studies, disability studies, autobiography studies, feminist theory, and comparative literature, this seminar examines the relationship between form and identity. How do writers represent selves that have been displaced, racialized, medicalized, gendered, translated, or otherwise made illegible? How might fragmented forms, nonlinear narratives, multilingual texts, embodied archives, and experimental aesthetics challenge the expectation that marginalized subjects must make themselves transparent?
We invite papers considering questions such as:
- fragmented, hybrid, or experimental autobiography
- disability, embodiment, illness, and narrative form
- Arab American, SWANA, Black, Indigenous, and comparative ethnic literatures
- multilingualism and translation as identity practice
- archives, memory, inheritance, and absence
- women’s life writing and feminist self-representation
- diaspora, migration, exile, and belonging
- genre disruption and aesthetic resistance
Rather than approaching fragmentation as loss, this seminar asks how broken, unfinished, embodied, or nonlinear forms become alternative modes of knowing. How do texts teach us to read identities that are always in process?
Leila Pazargadi, Ph.D.
Professor of English
Nevada State University
702.992.2657
leila.pazargadi@nevadastate.edu
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Graduate Fellowship Opportunity–Cold War Archive Research Program (9/15/2026) Oxford, UK
The CWAR Institute, in association with the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at Wolfson College, Oxford uses innovative and collaborative approaches to train next generation Cold War historians in archival research methodologies. The institute has two goals: to stimulate original scholarship on the interplay between soft and hard power in the cold and hot wars between 1945 and 1991, and to demonstrate the power of cooperative scholarship through innovative archival and life-writing practices.
The year-long CWAR Institute Graduate Fellowship program trains M.A. and Ph.D. level students through a combination of online seminars, discussions, and in-person research experience at Cold War archives, culminating in conferences and publications. Competitively selected applicants will join the institute as CWAR Graduate Fellows to hone critical research skills in collaborative historical and archival methodologies, further their own research agendas in Cold War history, improve their communication and presentation skills, and develop a network of supportive professional contacts.
M.A. and Ph.D. students and candidates in history, international relations, government, journalism, sociology, and public policy, as well as area and regional studies are eligible to apply. Interested applicants should display an original and compelling historical dimension to their work, grounded in Cold War studies and demonstrate a strong commitment to collaborative scholarship. Applicants should also demonstrate the utility of their presence on one of the two archival trips planned this year to the following locations:
(1) the Open Society Archive in Budapest, Hungary
(2) The British National Archives at Kew, UK.
Applicants should also show how their work intersects with life-writing, broadly construed to encompass the lives of people, objects, places, ideas.
Bi-monthly meetings begin in October 2026 and run until the conference in June 2027. There is no pay for this position.
Click here to learn more about the CWAR Institute and to apply for the 2026-27 fellowship cycle: https://cwar-institute.org/
Contact Email
URL
https://cwar-institute.org/call-for-applications
Max Ferrer, Ph.D.
Historical Methods Research Fellow, CWAR Institute, Wolfson College, Oxford
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Empowering Voices: Autobiography as Agency and Resistance
Deadline for Submissions; September 30, 2026
Northeast Modern Language Association Convention
March 6–9, 2027
Newport, Rhode Island, USA
contact email:
Recent scholarship in autobiography and life writing has expanded beyond traditional literary forms to encompass a wide range of practices through which individuals narrate, perform, and negotiate their identities. As scholars such as Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson have argued, life writing constitutes not merely the representation of a life but a dynamic process through which identities are constructed, mediated, and made visible within specific social and cultural contexts. Consequently, autobiography has evolved into an interdisciplinary field of inquiry encompassing visual art, graphic narratives, performance, body art, digital media, and other forms of self-representation. For many women and members of historically marginalized communities, autobiographical practices function not only as acts of self-expression but also as means of asserting agency, challenging dominant narratives, and resisting social exclusion. Through the articulation of personal experience, individuals reclaim the authority to represent themselves and, in many cases, their communities while contesting systems of power that have historically silenced or marginalized their voices. Across literature, visual culture, performance, graphic narrative, and other creative practices, autobiographical expression serves as a site where personal testimony intersects with broader questions of gender, race, sexuality, disability, migration, colonialism, memory, and social justice. This interdisciplinary session welcomes papers that examine autobiography, life writing, and self-representation as practices of agency and resistance. Possible topics include, but are not limited to: women’s autobiographical writing; feminist life writing; graphic memoirs; performance art; memory and trauma; decolonial and Indigenous life writing; LGBTQ+ autobiographical narratives; digital self-representation; and autobiography as social or political intervention.
Please submit a 250-word abstract on a topic of your choice via the NeMLA website. The session will be held in-person, but a few remote presentations may be included.
https://www.nemla.org/convention.html
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CfP / Mehrsprachigkeit und Intertextualität im autobiographischen Schreiben – Multilingual Self-Writing and Intertextuality
[ENGLISH VERSION BELOW, for French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese versions follow https://calenda.org/1421792 ]
Deadline for submissions: September 30, 2026
Thematisches Dossier, herausgegeben von Louise Sampagnay (CEREG, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle / ERLIS, Unicaen) und Dirk Weissmann (CREG, Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès / ITEM)
Mehrsprachigkeit und Intertextualität im autobiographischen Schreiben / Multilingual Self-Writing and Intertextuality [Announcement]
Vorstellung der Zeitschrift
Plurilinguisme littéraire ist eine internationale und interdisziplinäre Open-Access-Zeitschrift, die jährlich in digitaler Form erscheint. Sie untersucht literarische Schreib- und Produktionsformen sowie literarische Verbreitungs- und Rezeptionspraktiken, die durch den Gebrauch mehrerer Sprachen geprägt sind. Zugleich bietet sie Raum für theoretische, methodische und kritische Zugänge, die eine differenzierte Analyse solcher Texte ermöglichen.
Die Zeitschrift veröffentlicht Beiträge aus den Literaturwissenschaften, der Linguistik, der Übersetzungswissenschaft, der Textgenetik, der Soziolinguistik, der Psycholinguistik, den Kognitionswissenschaften sowie der Sprach- und Literaturdidaktik, sofern sie die literarische Kreativität unter Bedingungen sprachlicher Vielfalt untersuchen.
Sie publiziert Aufsätze in sechs Sprachen: Französisch, Englisch, Deutsch, Spanisch, Italienisch und Portugiesisch. Eingereichte Beiträge werden in einem doppelblinden Begutachtungsverfahren (Double-Blind Peer Review) geprüft. Die Online-Veröffentlichung ist kostenfrei und auf der Plattform des Verlags frei zugänglich.
Thema des Schwerpunkts
Der Themenschwerpunkt der zweiten Ausgabe der Zeitschrift, „Mehrsprachigkeit und Intertextualität im autobiographischen Schreiben“, herausgegeben von Louise Sampagnay und Dirk Weissmann, untersucht die Funktionen, Formen und Grenzen der Intertextualität in Texten, die das eigene Leben zwischen den Sprachen erzählen: Autobiographien, Memoirs, Autofiktionen, selbstreflexive und autotheoretische Essays, Erzählungen über das Sprachlernen, über die eigene Herkunft, über Exil und Migration.
Leitthese
Im autobiographischen Schreiben unter Bedingungen der Mehrsprachigkeit ist Intertextualität weder ein bloßes Geflecht gelehrter Referenzen noch ein ornamentales Verfahren zur Literarisierung des Textes. Sie wirkt vielmehr als Verfahren der Subjektivierung, der Legitimation, der Zugehörigkeit und bisweilen auch der Distanzierung oder Verfremdung. Das Verhältnis zum eigenen Selbst entsteht nicht allein in der Erzählung einer individuellen Bewegung zwischen den Sprachen, sondern ebenso in der Auseinandersetzung mit anderen Lektüretraditionen und Schreibmodellen.
Im Anschluss an Arbeiten zur literarischen Darstellung des mehrsprachigen Subjekts (Kramsch 2004; Ausoni 2018; Grell-Borgomano und Devésa 2019) schlägt der Themenschwerpunkt vor, den theoretischen Rahmen der language memoirs (Kaplan 1994; Kramsch 2009; Kellman 2019) hin zu einem offeneren Verständnis autobiographischen Schreibens zwischen den Sprachen zu erweitern. Dabei sollen literarische Formen, intertextuelle Beziehungen und Praktiken des Übersetzens gleichermaßen in den Blick genommen werden.
Korpus
Die untersuchten Texte können:
– in einer spät erworbenen, bewusst gewählten, ererbten, auferlegten, verlorenen und wiedergefundenen Sprache oder in einer zum alleinigen Schreibmedium erhobenen Sprache verfasst sein;
– mehrere Sprachen inszenieren, ohne diese notwendigerweise alle in Form eines schriftlich literarisierten Code-Switching in den Text einzuschreiben;
– den Erwerb, den Verlust, die Weitergabe oder die Übersetzung von Sprachen sowie von Texten anderer Autorinnen und Autoren reflektieren;
– durch Lektüren, Zitate, Übersetzungen oder Szenen der Vermittlung zwischen mehreren Sprachtraditionen eine literarische Genealogie entwerfen;
– Machtverhältnisse zwischen dominanten und minorisierten, kolonialen und postkolonialen, schulischen, familiären, migrantischen oder diasporischen Sprachen verhandeln.
Die Korpora können von language memoirs, die ausdrücklich um Spracherwerb und Sprachlernen kreisen — etwa Alice Kaplans French Lessons, Jhumpa Lahiris In altre parole, Eva Hoffmans Lost in Translation oder Akira Mizubayashis Une langue venue d’ailleurs — bis zu hybrideren Formen reichen, etwa Emine Sevgi Özdamars Mutterzunge, Andreï Makines Le Testament français oder Nancy Hustons Nord perdu. Berücksichtigt werden können auch Texte, in denen die mehrsprachige Erfahrung die narrative Stimme, das kulturelle Gedächtnis oder selbst mehrsprachig strukturierte Modelle literarischer Legitimation prägt.
Ein produktives Paradox
Die Frage der Intertextualität mag für die Untersuchung autobiographischer Texte zunächst zweitrangig, ja widersprüchlich erscheinen, da solche Texte häufig vor dem Hintergrund jener Authentizität gelesen werden, die vom autobiographischen Pakt vorausgesetzt wird (Lejeune 1975). Genau dieses Paradox möchte der Themenschwerpunkt hinterfragen: Wenn jede Erzählung eine narrative und zumindest teilweise fiktionalisierende Formung von Erfahrung voraussetzt (Ricœur 1985) und jeder Text von anderen Texten durchzogen ist (Barthes 1985), dann gewinnt die Frage der Intertextualität gerade im autobiographischen Kontext an Bedeutung, umso mehr, wenn die gelebte und erzählte Erfahrung mehrere Sprachen umfasst.
Im autobiographischen Schreiben zwischen den Sprachen wird das Verhältnis zu Sprachen auch über andere Texte formuliert, die häufig in anderen Sprachen gelesen, zitiert, übersetzt oder kommentiert werden. Es geht daher nicht darum, die Authentizität der Erzählung oder das ‘tatsächliche’ Niveau sprachlicher Kompetenz in den einzelnen geschriebenen oder als fremd inszenierten Sprachen zu beurteilen. Vielmehr soll untersucht werden, wie Texte mehrsprachige Erfahrung durch Verweise auf andere Autorinnen und Autoren, Traditionen und Sprachen evozieren, inszenieren, fiktionalisieren oder problematisieren.
Theoretische Perspektiven
Intertextualität wird damit zu einem privilegierten Beobachtungsfeld für Spannungen zwischen gelebter Erfahrung, Sprachgedächtnis, persönlicher Bibliothek, kulturellen Erbschaften, Machtverhältnissen und literarischer Positionierung. Sie erlaubt die Frage, wie sich ein mehrsprachiges Subjekt eine Genealogie gibt, sich in eine Tradition einschreibt oder einen Gegenkanon entwirft.
Intertextuelle Praktiken sind niemals neutral: Das Zitat eines kanonischen Autors in einer dominanten Sprache erzeugt andere Effekte als die Aufnahme einer Referenz aus einer minorisierten Sprache, einer mündlichen Tradition, einem familiären Gedächtnis oder einem diasporischen Raum. Solche Praktiken betreffen Entscheidungen über Autorität, Lesbarkeit, Legitimität und Weitergabe.
Der Themenschwerpunkt lädt auch dazu ein, den Status der Übersetzung innerhalb intertextueller Praktiken genauer zu bestimmen: Zitat in der Originalsprache, Zitat einer veröffentlichten Übersetzung, vom Autor oder von der Autorin integrierte Übersetzung, Selbstübersetzung, Neuübersetzung, intratextuelle Übersetzung, metatranslatorischer Kommentar. Selbstübersetzung kann dabei als eine Form der Intertextualität des Selbst mit sich selbst verstanden werden, die das Sprachgedächtnis, die narrative Identität und mehrsprachige auktoriale Autorität ins Spiel bringt.
Die Arbeiten von Christine Meyer (2004) zur Intertextualität zwischen Canettis Die gerettete Zunge und Stendhals Vie de Henry Brulard haben etwa gezeigt, dass Intertextualität an der Inszenierung des autobiographischen Ichs beteiligt ist, das sich eine Position innerhalb einer selbst mehrsprachig strukturierten literarischen Tradition erarbeitet.
Mögliche Zugänge
Der Themenschwerpunkt lädt zu folgenden methodischen Ansätzen ein: Untersuchungen von Epigraphen, Zitaten, Anmerkungen, Glossaren und Paratexten; textgenetische Analysen und Vergleiche von Fassungen, Entwürfen, Notizbüchern oder Übersetzungsdossiers; Studien zu Autorenbibliotheken; Kartierungen von Zitationsnetzwerken; Buchgeschichte, Übersetzungswissenschaft, Digital Humanities und Archivanalysen.
Der Schwerpunkt möchte zudem eine diachrone Perspektive eröffnen: Berichte von Sprachkonversionen, Korrespondenzen, Memoiren, Tagebücher, Reiseberichte, Exiltexte und Autobiographien von Gelehrten können dazu beitragen, besser zu verstehen, was zu gegenwärtigen Konfigurationen der Mehrsprachigkeit gehört und was sich in eine lange Geschichte autobiographischen Schreibens zwischen den Sprachen einschreibt.
Besondere Aufmerksamkeit kann der Frage von Gender und sozialer Klasse in mehrsprachigen Lebens- und Bildungswegen gelten: Wie prägen sie den Zugang zu Sprachunterricht, Bibliotheken, Bildungsinstitutionen und literarischen Kanones?
Schließlich bietet der Themenschwerpunkt die Gelegenheit, die terminologische Vielfalt selbst zum Gegenstand der Reflexion zu machen: language memoirs, translinguales oder mehrsprachiges autobiographisches Schreiben, Sprachbiographien, usw. Diese begriffliche Vielfalt entspricht dem gegenwärtigen Stand eines sich dynamisch entwickelnden Forschungsfelds und lädt zu einer kritischen Prüfung ein.
Mögliche Fragestellungen
1. Intertextualität, Dialog und Gemeinschaft
– Wie schaffen intertextuelle Praktiken „imaginierte Gemeinschaften“ mehrsprachiger Leserinnen, Leser, Autorinnen und Autoren?
– Wie begünstigen intertextuelle Netzwerke kollektive Formen von Autorschaft oder ein mehrsprachiges Gedächtnis, die über die monologische Stimme hinausgehen?
– Wie entstehen alternative literarische Genealogien, Gegenkanones oder transnationale Filiationen?
– Inwiefern lassen sich sprachliche und soziale Verschiebungen, translinguale Erzählungen und Erzählungen des Klassenwechsels zusammendenken (De Balsi 2025)?
2. Sprachliche Hierarchien, Herrschaft und Subversion
– Wie macht Intertextualität Machtverhältnisse zwischen dominanten und minorisierten, kolonialen und postkolonialen, kulturell legitimierten und familiären Sprachen sichtbar?
– Schreiben Zitationspraktiken die Autorität eines bestimmten Kanons fort, oder ermöglichen sie die Konstruktion eines mehrsprachigen Gegenkanons?
– Wie erzeugen Entscheidungen für Zitat, Übersetzung oder Nicht-Übersetzung Effekte von Lesbarkeit, Ausschluss, Anerkennung oder Widerstand?
3. Gender, Filiation und literarische Autorisierung
– Inwiefern unterscheiden sich mehrsprachige Lebenswege und Strategien literarischer Zugehörigkeit in geschlechtsspezifischer Perspektive, und wie können sie das von Yasemin Yildiz (2012) herausgearbeitete Paradigma der sogenannten Muttersprache unterlaufen?
– Wie verschränken sich Sprachen, Elternschaft, Filiation, Erbe, Weitergabe und literarische Legitimität? Beispielsweise in Lily Robert-Foleys The Duty to Presence (2022).
– Lassen sich spezifisch mehrsprachige weibliche, queere oder minoritäre literarische Genealogien bestimmen? Beispielsweise in Kim de l’Horizons Blutbuch (2022).
4. Übersetzung, Zitat und textuelle Autorität
– Was bedeutet es, in einer mehrsprachigen Selbsterzählung einen Text in der Originalsprache statt in einer Übersetzung zu zitieren?
– Wie machen Autorinnen und Autoren übersetzerische Vermittlungen sichtbar oder unsichtbar, und mit welchen Folgen?
– Lässt sich Selbstübersetzung als eine Form der Intertextualität des Selbst mit sich selbst verstehen?
5. Materielle Praktiken und Analyseinstrumente
– Wie prägen Praktiken des Lesens und Schreibens zwischen den Sprachen intertextuelle Beziehungen?
– Welche Instrumente erlauben eine konkrete Analyse mehrsprachiger intertextueller Netzwerke: Textgenetik, Paratextanalyse, Kartierung von Zitaten, Untersuchung von Bibliotheken und Archiven?
6. Metalinguistisches und metatextuelles Bewusstsein
– Gibt es spezifische Verfahren autobiographischen Schreibens zwischen den Sprachen — Code-Switching in Zitaten, Glossare, Anmerkungen, intratextuelle Übersetzungen —, die klassische Modelle der Intertextualität erweitern?
– Muss Intertextualität manifest mehrsprachig sein, oder kann sie auch über die Beschreibung von Schreibtechniken, Lektüreerinnerungen oder Sprachlernszenen wirksam werden?
7. Theorie, kulturelles Gedächtnis und Archive
– Wo liegen die Grenzen klassischer Theorien — Bachtins Dialogismus, Kristevas Intertextualität, Genettes Transtextualität —, wenn sie auf autobiographisches Schreiben zwischen den Sprachen angewandt werden?
– Wie entwickeln oder bestreiten intertextuelle Netzwerke das kulturelle Gedächtnis in minoritären, diasporischen oder postkolonialen Kontexten?
– Wie ermöglichen Archive, Entwürfe, Notizbücher oder Übersetzungsdossiers die Rekonstruktion intertextueller Praktiken, die im veröffentlichten Text unsichtbar bleiben?
8. Autobiographisches Schreiben zwischen Sprachen historisieren
– Wie schreiben sich gegenwärtige Praktiken in eine lange Geschichte autobiographischen Schreibens zwischen den Sprachen ein?
– Welche älteren Modelle — Memoiren, Korrespondenzen, Tagebücher, Reiseberichte, Konversionsberichte — erlauben es, diese Praktiken historisch zu kontextualisieren?
– Funktioniert mehrsprachige Intertextualität je nach Epoche und je nach den historischen Sprachhierarchien unterschiedlich?
Modalitäten der Einreichung
Beitragsvorschläge von etwa 500 Wörtern sowie eine vorläufige Bibliographie sind an die beiden folgenden E-Mail-Adressen zu senden:
louise.sampagnay@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr
Die Beiträge können in einer der sechs Sprachen der Zeitschrift verfasst werden: Französisch, Englisch, Deutsch, Spanisch, Italienisch oder Portugiesisch.
Die angenommenen Aufsätze müssen enthalten:
– den Aufsatztext mit einer maximalen Länge von 40.000 Zeichen (inklusive Leerzeichen, Fußnoten und Bibliographie);
– Zusammenfassungen in drei Sprachen (ca. 150–200 Wörter);
– fünf Schlüsselwörter in drei Sprachen;
– eine bio-bibliographische Notiz in drei Sprachen im Umfang von etwa 150 Wörtern je Fassung.
Die Zusammenfassungen und Schlüsselwörter werden in der Sprache des Aufsatzes sowie in zwei weiteren Sprachen der Zeitschrift verfasst. Die genaue Sprachwahl erfolgt je nach Fall und in Absprache mit den Herausgeberinnen und Herausgebern des Themenschwerpunkts.
Vorläufiger Zeitplan
– Frist für die Einreichung der Beitragsvorschläge: 30. September 2026
– Rückmeldung der Redaktion: 30. Oktober 2026
– Einreichung der vollständigen Aufsätze: 15. Januar 2027
– Doppelblindes Begutachtungsverfahren und Rückmeldung an die Autorinnen und Autoren: Anfang Mai 2027
– Einreichung der endgültigen Fassungen: 15. Juni 2027
– Veröffentlichung des Themenschwerpunkts: Herbst 2027
Redaktion
Olga Anokhina — Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin, ITEM (CNRS / ENS)
Valentina Chepiga — Assoziierte Forscherin, ITEM (CNRS / ENS)
Anne Godard — Hochschuldozentin, Abteilung für Französisch als Fremdsprache, Universität Sorbonne Nouvelle
Anne-Laure Rigeade — Hochschuldozentin, Abteilung für Französisch als Fremdsprache, Universität Paris-Est Créteil
Dirk Weissmann — Universitätsprofessor für Germanistik, Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès
Internationaler wissenschaftlicher Beirat
Alain Ausoni — Universität Lausanne
Franca Bruera — Universität Turin
Xosé Manuel Dasilva — Universität Vigo
Marianna Deganutti — Slowakische Akademie der Wissenschaften
Vladimir Feshchenko — Russische Akademie der Wissenschaften
David Gramling — University of British Columbia
Delphine Grass — Lancaster University
Rainier Grutman — University of Ottawa
Anne Marie Kleveland — Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Elizabete Manterola — Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea / University of the Basque Country
Barbara Siller — University College Cork
Ilan Stavans — Amherst College
Literatur
Anokhina, Olga, Hg. Multilinguisme et créativité littéraire. Louvain-la-Neuve: Academia-Bruylant / L’Harmattan, „Au cœur des textes“, 2012.
Ausoni, Alain. Mémoires d’outre-langue. L’écriture translingue de soi. Genf: Slatkine Érudition, 2018.
Bakhtin, Michail. Esthétique et théorie du roman. Aus dem Russischen übersetzt von Daria Olivier. Paris: Gallimard, 1978.
Barthes, Roland. „Texte (théorie du)“. Encyclopædia Universalis, 1973. Wiederabgedruckt in L’Aventure sémiologique. Paris: Seuil, 1985.
De Balsi, Sara. „Postures d’auteurs et représentation de la langue : les récits translingues, des récits de transfuge de classe parmi d’autres ?“ COnTEXTES, Nr. 36, 2025.
Deganutti, Marianna, und Sandra Vlasta, Hg. „Trauma and Multilingualism in Literature“. Sonderheft, Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies, Bd. 11, Nr. 1–2, 2022.
Genette, Gérard. Palimpsestes. La littérature au second degré. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1982.
Grell-Borgomano, Isabelle, und Jean-Michel Devésa, Hg. L’écriture du Je dans la langue de l’exil. Louvain-la-Neuve: EME Éditions, „Proximités“, 2019.
Kaplan, Alice Yaeger. „On Language Memoir“. In: Angelika Bammer, Hg., Displacements: Cultural Identities in Question. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994, S. 59–70.
Kellman, Steven G. „Hugo Hamilton’s Language War“. Critical Multilingualism Studies, Bd. 7, Nr. 1, 2019, S. 51–63.
Kramsch, Claire. „Language and Identity“. Journal of Sociolinguistics, Bd. 8, Nr. 3, 2004, S. 390–416.
———. The Multilingual Subject: What Foreign Language Learners Say About Their Experience and Why It Matters. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Kristeva, Julia. „Bakhtine, le mot, le dialogue et le roman“. Critique, Nr. 239, 1967, S. 438–465.
Lejeune, Philippe. Le Pacte autobiographique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975.
Meyer, Christine. Canetti lecteur de Stendhal. Construction d’une écriture autobiographique. Rouen: Presses universitaires de Rouen, „Études autrichiennes“, 2004.
Ricœur, Paul. Temps et récit, III. Le temps raconté. Paris: Seuil, „L’ordre philosophique“, 1985.
Yildiz, Yasemin. Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012.
[ENGLISH VERSION]
CfP : Multilingual Self-Writing and Intertextuality
Thematic dossier edited by Louise Sampagnay (CEREG, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle / ERLIS, Unicaen) and Dirk Weissmann (CREG, University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès / ITEM)
About the Journal
Plurilinguisme littéraire is an international, interdisciplinary, open-access annual journal published digitally. It is devoted to the study of literary writing, creative practices, and the circulation of works shaped by the use of multiple languages. It also provides a space for the theoretical, critical, and methodological frameworks needed to analyse such texts.
The journal welcomes contributions from literary studies, linguistics, translation studies, genetic criticism, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive sciences, and language and literature pedagogy, provided that they address literary creativity under conditions of linguistic diversity.
It publishes articles in six languages: French, English, German, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. Submissions undergo double-blind peer review. Online publication is free of charge and fully open access on the publisher’s platform.
Rationale
The thematic dossier for the journal’s second issue, “Multilingual Self-Writing and Intertextuality”, edited by Louise Sampagnay and Dirk Weissmann, examines the functions, forms, and limits of intertextuality in texts that narrate a life between languages: autobiographies, memoirs, autofiction, self-reflexive and autotheoretical essays, and narratives of language learning, family inheritance, exile, and migration.
Central Hypothesis
In multilingual self-writing, intertextuality is neither merely a network of learned references nor an ornamental device designed to “literarise” the text. Rather, it becomes a means through which subjectivity, legitimacy, affiliation and, at times, disaffiliation are constructed. The relation to the self is shaped not only through the narration of an individual trajectory between languages, but also through engagement with other traditions of reading and models of writing.
Building on work devoted to the literary representation of the multilingual subject (Kramsch 2004; Ausoni 2018; Grell-Borgomano and Devésa 2019), this special issue proposes to broaden the theoretical framework of language memoirs (Kaplan 1994; Kramsch 2009; Kellman 2019) toward a more open understanding of autobiographical writing between languages. In doing so, it aims to encompass literary forms, intertextual relationships, and translational practices alike.
Corpus
Prospective corpora may include texts that:
– are written in a late-acquired, deliberately chosen, inherited, imposed, lost-and-regained language, or one elevated to the status of a sole literary tongue;
– stage several languages without necessarily inscribing them all in the textual fabric through written, literary code-switching;
– reflect on the conditions of language acquisition, loss, transmission, or translation, as well as the texts of other authors;
– construct a literary genealogy through practices of reading, quotation, translation, or scenes of mediation between several linguistic traditions;
– negotiate power dynamics between dominant and minoritized, colonial and postcolonial, institutional, familial, migrant, or diasporic languages.
The corpora may range from language memoirs explicitly centring on language acquisition and learning — such as Alice Kaplan’s French Lessons, Jhumpa Lahiri’s In altre parole, Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation, or Akira Mizubayashi’s Une langue venue d’ailleurs — to more hybrid forms, such as Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Mutterzunge, Andreï Makine’s Le Testament français, or Nancy Huston’s Nord perdu. Contributions may also consider texts in which multilingual experience shapes the narrative voice, cultural memory, or inherently multilingual models of literary validation.
A Productive Paradox
The question of intertextuality may seem secondary, or even paradoxical, in the study of autobiographical texts, since such texts are often read through the prism of the authenticity implied by the autobiographical pact (Lejeune 1975). This is precisely the paradox that the dossier seeks to explore: if every narrative involves a narrative and at least partly fictionalized shaping of experience (Ricœur 1985), and if every text is traversed by other texts (Barthes 1985), then intertextuality becomes particularly significant in an autobiographical context, all the more so when the lived and narrated experience involves several languages.
In autobiographical writing between languages, the relationship to languages is also formulated through other texts, which are often read, quoted, translated, or commented upon in other languages. The objective is therefore not to evaluate the authenticity of the narrative, or the “actual” level of linguistic competence in each language that is written, represented, or staged as foreign within the main language of the text. Instead, the aim is to examine how texts evoke, stage, fictionalize, or problematize multilingual experience through references to other authors, traditions, and languages.
Theoretical Stakes
Intertextuality thus becomes a privileged vantage point for observing tensions between lived experience, the memory of languages, personal libraries, cultural inheritances, power relations, and literary positioning. It prompts the question of how a multilingual subject crafts a genealogy, inscribes themselves within a tradition, or maps out a counter-canon.
Intertextual practices are never neutral: quoting a canonical author in a dominant language yields entirely different effects than integrating a reference drawn from a minoritised language, an oral tradition, family memory, or a diasporic space. Such practices entail choices concerning authority, readability, legitimacy, and transmission.
The thematic focus invites contributors to map out the status of translation within intertextual practices: quotation in the original language, quotation from a published translation, translation integrated by the author, self-translation, retranslation, intratextual translation, and metatranslational commentary. Self-translation may be considered as a form of self-directed intertextuality, involving linguistic memory, narrative identity, and multilingual authorial authority.
For instance, Christine Meyer’s work (2004) on the intertextual relations between Canetti’s Die gerettete Zunge (or Histoire d’une jeunesse) and Stendhal’s Vie de Henry Brulard has shown that intertextuality participates in the staging of the autobiographical “I”, which carves out a position within a literary tradition that is itself structurally multilingual.
Preferred Approaches
This special issue encourages methodologically precise approaches: the study of epigraphs, quotations, notes, glossaries, and paratexts; genetic criticism and the comparison of versions, drafts, notebooks, or translation dossiers; the study of writers’ libraries; the mapping of citation networks; book history; translation studies; digital humanities; and archival analysis.
The dossier also seeks to open up a diachronic perspective: conversion narratives, correspondence, memoirs, diaries, travel writing, exile writing, and scholarly autobiographies may help us better understand what characterizes contemporary configurations of multilingualism and what forms part of a longer history of self-writing between languages.
Particular attention may be paid to the intersecting factors of gender and social class in multilingual trajectories: how do they shape access to language instruction, libraries, educational institutions, and literary canons?
Finally, the thematic focus offers an opportunity to turn terminological diversity itself into an explicit object of reflection: language memoirs, translingual or multilingual autobiographical writing, linguistic autobiographies. This conceptual richness reflects the current state of a rapidly developing field and calls for critical examination.
Suggested Lines of Inquiry
1. Intertextuality, Dialogue, and Community
– How do intertextual practices create “imagined communities” of multilingual readers and writers?
– How do intertextual networks foster collective forms of authorship or a multilingual memory that surpass the monological voice?
– How are alternative literary genealogies, counter-canons, or transnational filiations constructed?
– To what extent can linguistic displacement and social mobility be thought together? How do translingual narratives intersect with narratives of class transition (De Balsi 2025)?
2. Linguistic Hierarchies, Domination, and Subversion
– How does intertextuality make visible power relations between dominant and minoritized, colonial and postcolonial, institutional, and familial languages?
– Do citational practices reinforce the authority of certain canons, or do they make it possible to construct multilingual counter-canons?
– How do choices of quotation, translation, or non-translation produce effects of readability, exclusion, recognition, or resistance?
3. Gender, Filiation, and Literary Authorization
– To what extent are multilingual trajectories and strategies of literary affiliation shaped by gender, and how might they disrupt the paradigm of the so-called mother tongue identified by Yasemin Yildiz (2012)?
– How do languages, parenthood, filiation, inheritance, transmission, and literary legitimacy intersect? For example, in Lily Robert-Foley’s The Duty to Presence (2022).
– Can specifically multilingual female, queer, or minoritarian literary genealogies be identified? For example, in Kim de l’Horizon’s Blutbuch (2022).
4. Translation, Quotation, and Textual Authority
– What does it mean to quote a text in the original language rather than in a translation within a multilingual self-narrative?
– How do writers make translational mediations visible or invisible, and with what consequences?
– Can self-translation be understood as a form of intertextuality from self to self?
5. Material Practices and Analytical Tools
– How do practices of reading and writing between languages shape these intertextual dynamics?
– What tools allow us to analyse multilingual intertextual networks in concrete terms: genetic criticism, paratextual analysis, citation mapping, the study of libraries and archives?
6. Metalinguistic and Metatextual Awareness
– Are there techniques specific to multilingual self-writing — code-switching in quotations, glossaries, notes, intratextual translations — that expand classical models of intertextuality?
– Must intertextuality be visibly multilingual, or can it operate through descriptions of writing techniques, memories of reading, or scenes of language learning?
7. Theory, Cultural Memory, and Archives
– What are the limits of classical theories — Bakhtin’s dialogism, Kristeva’s intertextuality, Genette’s transtextuality — when applied to multilingual self-writing?
– How do intertextual networks develop or contest cultural memory in minoritarian, diasporic, or postcolonial contexts?
– How do archives, drafts, notebooks, or translation files allow us to reconstruct intertextual practices that remain invisible in the published text?
8. Historicizing Multilingual Self-Writing
– How do contemporary practices inscribe themselves within a longer history of self-writing between languages?
– What earlier models — memoirs, correspondence, diaries, travel writing, conversion narratives — allow these practices to be historicized?
– Does multilingual intertextuality function differently according to historical period and to the linguistic hierarchies specific to each era?
Submission Guidelines
Abstract proposals of approximately 500 words, accompanied by a preliminary bibliography, should be sent to both of the following email addresses:
louise.sampagnay@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr
Articles may be written in any of the journal’s six languages: French, English, German, Spanish, Italian, or Portuguese.
The articles should include:
– the article itself, with a maximum length of 40,000 characters (including spaces, footnotes, and bibliography);
– abstracts in three languages (approx. 150–200 words);
– five keywords in three languages;
– a bio-bibliographical note in three languages, approximately 150 words per version.
The abstracts and keywords will be written in the language of the article and in two other languages of the journal. The specific choice of languages will be decided on a case-by-case basis in consultation with the guest editors.
Provisional Timeline
– September 30, 2026: Deadline for submitting abstract proposals (approx. 500 words) and a preliminary bibliography.
– October 30, 2026: Notification of acceptance or rejection sent to authors.
– January 15, 2027: Deadline for submitting full articles (maximum 40,000 characters, including spaces, footnotes, and bibliography).
– Early May 2027: Double-blind peer review process completed and editorial feedback returned to authors.
– June 15, 2027: Deadline for authors to submit the final, revised versions of their articles.
– Autumn 2027: Official publication of the thematic dossier online.
Editorial Board
Olga Anokhina — Researcher, ITEM (CNRS / ENS)
Valentina Chepiga — Associate researcher, ITEM (CNRS / ENS)
Anne Godard — University lecturer, Department of French as a Foreign Language, Sorbonne Nouvelle University
Anne-Laure Rigeade — University lecturer, Department of French as a Foreign Language, Paris-Est Créteil University
Dirk Weissmann — University professor, German Studies Section, University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès
International Scientific Board
Alain Ausoni — University of Lausanne
Franca Bruera — University of Turin
Xosé Manuel Dasilva — University of Vigo
Marianna Deganutti — Slovak Academy of Sciences
Vladimir Feshchenko — Russian Academy of Sciences
David Gramling — University of British Columbia
Delphine Grass — Lancaster University
Rainier Grutman — University of Ottawa
Anne Marie Kleveland — Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Elizabete Manterola — Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea / University of the Basque Country
Barbara Siller — University College Cork
Ilan Stavans — Amherst College
Works Cited
Anokhina, Olga, ed. Multilinguisme et créativité littéraire. Louvain-la-Neuve: Academia-Bruylant / L’Harmattan, “Au cœur des textes”, 2012.
Ausoni, Alain. Mémoires d’outre-langue. L’écriture translingue de soi. Geneva: Slatkine Érudition, 2018.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Esthétique et théorie du roman. Translated from the Russian by Daria Olivier. Paris: Gallimard, 1978.
Barthes, Roland. “Texte (théorie du).” Encyclopædia Universalis, 1973. Reprinted in L’Aventure sémiologique. Paris: Seuil, 1985.
De Balsi, Sara. “Postures d’auteurs et représentation de la langue : les récits translingues, des récits de transfuge de classe parmi d’autres ?” COnTEXTES, no. 36, 2025.
Deganutti, Marianna, and Sandra Vlasta, eds. “Trauma and Multilingualism in Literature.” Special issue, Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies, vol. 11, nos. 1–2, 2022.
Genette, Gérard. Palimpsestes. La littérature au second degré. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1982.
Grell-Borgomano, Isabelle, and Jean-Michel Devésa, eds. L’écriture du Je dans la langue de l’exil. Louvain-la-Neuve: EME Éditions, “Proximités”, 2019.
Kaplan, Alice Yaeger. “On Language Memoir.” In Angelika Bammer, ed., Displacements: Cultural Identities in Question. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994, pp. 59–70.
Kellman, Steven G. “Hugo Hamilton’s Language War.” Critical Multilingualism Studies, vol. 7, no. 1, 2019, pp. 51–63.
Kramsch, Claire. “Language and Identity.” Journal of Sociolinguistics, vol. 8, no. 3, 2004, pp. 390–416.
———. The Multilingual Subject: What Foreign Language Learners Say About Their Experience and Why It Matters. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Kristeva, Julia. “Bakhtine, le mot, le dialogue et le roman.” Critique, no. 239, 1967, pp. 438–465.
Lejeune, Philippe. Le Pacte autobiographique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975.
Meyer, Christine. Canetti lecteur de Stendhal. Construction d’une écriture autobiographique. Rouen: Presses universitaires de Rouen, “Études autrichiennes”, 2004.
Ricœur, Paul. Temps et récit, III. Le temps raconté. Paris: Seuil, “L’ordre philosophique”, 1985.
Yildiz, Yasemin. Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012.
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When Lives Do Things: Lives as Archives
Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)
March 6-9, 2027. Newport, RI
deadline for submissions: September 30, 2026
contact email:
As Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson argue, “autobiographical storytelling is a performative act through which narrators construct rather than simply describe selves.” In recent times, “life writing” has become a familiar term in literary and cultural studies, encompassing a range of written texts, including autobiographies, biographies, letters, memoirs, slave narratives, prison narratives, captivity narratives, travel narratives, confessionals, conversion narratives and even in recent times, personal diaries. However, rather than remain transparent records of lived experience, life writings actively shape identities, produce historical knowledge, preserve cultural memory, and intervene in social and political worlds. This panel invites scholars to reconsider what life writing does beyond just what it says. We invite contributions that challenge conventional approaches to reading life writings. We are particularly interested in scholarships that examine how life writings preserve marginalized histories, challenge dominant archives, and create alternative ways of knowing. We also welcome papers that investigate life writing across historical periods, geographical locations, and disciplinary approaches. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
Life writing as archive.
Counter-archive or alternative historical record.
Testimony, witnessing, and the ethics of narration.
Life writing and the production of race, gender, sexuality, or class.
Spiritual, religious, and ritual dimensions of autobiographical expression.
Collective, communal, and relational forms of selfhood.
Life writing and memory studies.
Digital, visual, and multimodal life narratives.
Abstracts of 250–300 words and a short bio (100 words) should be submitted via: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22538
Session modality:Hybrid (in-person but accepting remote presentations).
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The Rewritten Self: Counter-Narratives and Resistant Aesthetics
Northeast Modern Language Association Convention
March 6–9, 2027
Newport, Rhode Island
Deadline for Submissions; September 30, 2026
contact email:
On January 19, 2022, Sheila Heti published the first of ten weekly installments of “A Diary in Alphabetical Order” in The New York Times. Each installment included an author’s note explaining that Heti had “loaded all 500,000 words of [her] journals into Excel to order the sentences alphabetically,” hoping to “see the self in a new way.” Over time, the project “grew into something more novelistic,” and the note concludes that “the self’s report on itself is surely a great fiction.” Heti is hardly the first author to challenge or destabilize autobiographical conventions. Subsequently published as Alphabetical Diaries (2024), Heti’s work evokes Roland Barthes’s conception of autobiography as the generation of “a further text,” one that is ultimately “totally fictive,” as well as his celebration of the “euphoric” nature of the alphabet. Heti, like Barthes, posits autobiography as an aesthetic endeavor to write, rewrite, and disarrange the self against ideological coherence.
This panel invites papers on autofiction, autobiographical writing, and autofictional film/media that resist dominant ideological narratives surrounding identity, memory, race, gender, sexuality, or authorship. Proposals that put these texts or artifacts in conversation with the 2027 NeMLA Convention’s focus on “cultural knowledge,” “empowerment,” and “constructing agency” are particularly encouraged. Subjects might include (but are not limited to):
–Autobiography or memoir as archive of cultural knowledge
–Autofiction as counter-ideological practice
–Autofictional film, hybrid documentary, and the mediation of identity
–Digital selves and alternative modes of self-representation
–Memory, fragmentation, and the recursive self
–Readerly expectations: disclosure, concealment, and authenticity
–Reimagining self, community, and cultural agency
Convention dates: March 6–9, 2027, Newport, RI.
Please submit proposals of 200-300 words by September 30, 2026: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22447.
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CALL FOR PAPERS:
Global and Intersectional Framings of Disability in Comics & Graphic Narratives
A Special Issue of Disability Studies Quarterly (peer-reviewed)
Edited by Crystal Yin Lie (California State University, Long Beach) and Kai Qing Tan (Ghent University; Aachen University)
Abstract Due: September 30, 2026
Comics and graphic narratives have become a powerful medium for representing embodied disability experience in both fiction and non-fiction. Foundational scholarship in disability and comics studies has largely focused on Anglophone and Euro-American contexts. This special issue of Disability Studies Quarterly seeks to expand the field by foregrounding transnational, multilingual, Global South perspectives, and beyond. We invite essays that examine how contemporary comics and graphic narratives engage core concepts from disability studies—such as crip time, interdependence and collective access, disability justice, debility and slow death, crip ecologies, and speculative crip futurities—across diverse cultural and geopolitical contexts.
Possible topics include (but are not limited to):
- Life writing and/or fictional representations of physical, sensory, and/or cognitive disability; neurodiversity; chronic illness; aging; and embodied trauma
- Disability as method/embodied knowledge
- Resistance to diagnostic and pathological frames
- Formal strategies that materialize disability in comics form
- Disability networks, care infrastructures, and collective survival
- Critiques of social, political, and urban contexts
- Structural violence, colonialism, environmental crisis, and debility
- (In)accessibility in both content and form
- Speculative or futurist imaginaries of disability justice
- The place of comedy and humor was in disability narratives
- The commodification of disabilities/narrative via social media and how to circumvent it
- Ethical obligations in the discourse of disability narratives
- Theorizations, critiques, and reimaginings of form and genres
- Emergent directions and movements in comics and comics activism
We welcome analyses of transnational and multilingual works, including Japanese manga, South Korean manhwa, Brazilian and Latin American graphic memoir, Indigenous comics, Francophone bandes dessinées from West Africa and the Caribbean, Middle Eastern, Southeast Asian, and Eastern European graphic narratives, graphic journalism, autobiographical comics by disabled artists, and webcomics or other digital formats circulating across borders. In line with our commitment to providing space for disability narratives, we also encourage contributions that combine ethnographic research with creative interventions, integrating praxis alongside more theoretical approaches to the topics listed above. This issue aims to develop comparative methodologies for studying disability and graphic narrative across geographies, languages, and traditions. We encourage submissions from scholars at all career stages and from diverse disciplinary backgrounds.
Submission Guidelines:
Please submit a paragraph-length (300-500 words) abstract, a list of 3-5 key words, and a brief bio (100 words) by 30 September 2026 (Wed). Invitations to submit full essays (8,000-12,000 words) as well as shorter works of creative writing will follow. Full manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer review in accordance with DSQ guidelines.
Send abstracts and inquiries to:
Crystal Yin Lie, California State University, Long Beach
crystal.lie@csulb.edu
Kai Qing Tan, Research Foundation Flanders; Ghent University
kaiqing.tan@ugent.be
Crystal Yin Lie, Ph.D. (she/her)
Assistant Professor
Department of Comparative World Literature & Classics
California State University, Long Beach
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Call for Papers Alizés 47 (2027)
Discursive Resistance in Contemporary Anglophone Literature and Public Discourse
Special issue edited by Talal Hochard (University of Reunion Island) and Zuzana Fonioková (Masaryk University)
Abstract submission deadline (400 words) and short biographical notes (150 words): September 1, 2026
Notification of acceptance: October 1, 2026
Full draft papers submission: February 15, 2027
Final papers submission: June 30, 2027
Languages: submissions are accepted in English and French
Format: MLA
Alizés is a peer-reviewed academic journal which specialises in Anglophone studies (literature, cultural and historical studies, linguistics and language pedagogy). Founded in 1991, it has been published online by Presses Universitaires Indianocéaniques (PUI) since 2023. This call for papers is for Issue 47, which is scheduled for publication at the end of 2027.
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The last decade has witnessed an accelerated transformation of the conditions under which a shared sense of reality is manufactured. The political moment of 2016 was, in fact, only a turning point in a longer process that could be attributed to late modernity, late capitalism, and the information age. The signs of this acceleration are felt globally, not only in the political sphere, with the rise of extremism, authoritarianism, and “techno-feudalism” (Varoufakis, 2023), but also in social behavior, artistic production, and, most crucially, the generation and circulation of information.
A remarkable succession of events has made this transformation increasingly visible: the election of Donald Trump and the Brexit vote in 2016, the COVID-19 pandemic, the killing of George Floyd in 2020, the public emergence of generative AI in 2022, the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the attacks of 7 October 2023 and their aftermath. Shared reality has, once again, become unstable. Political speech has become increasingly fabricated; the authority of legacy media has been eroded; Western publics appear more distracted than ever, their collective attention manipulated by algorithms; and liberal democracy itself has been placed in jeopardy.
We use the term discursive resistance broadly to name the many ways in which literature and other narrative practices push back against hegemonic discourses and dominant cultural narratives that exploit these instabilities, establishing systems of constraint and justifying social inequalities. Works that manifest this quality may offer retellings of official histories that have systematically silenced dissenting and marginal voices. In the context of what has been called the “postsecular” condition, they may reactivate spiritual dimensions of society through ritual and neo-religious practices. They may challenge prevailing norms or cultural misrepresentation by foregrounding non-normativity and alterity, however these concepts are understood, especially in opposition to mainstream culture, homogeneity, and conformism. They may contest climate-sceptic discourses that cast doubt around environmental crisis. Finally, they may expose the constructedness of discourses that present themselves as transparent reports of fact, thereby destabilizing relations between speaker, text, and reader.
Several theoretical traditions have laid the groundwork for this kind of exploration: Cultural Studies and the legacy of Stuart Hall and the Birmingham School; Critical Theory, from the Frankfurt School to Habermas’s work on the “public sphere”; feminist, postcolonial, and other poststructuralism-informed approaches; and more recent studies of the fiction/fact divide in narrative theory.
We are especially interested in works that engage the contemporary moment. While many of the questions raised here have a long history, the twenty-first century has reshaped them in ways that deserve specific attention. This is particularly important given our aim to investigate possible links between discursive resistance and the aforementioned recent developments. We invite submissions that critically engage with contemporary Anglophone writing across a wide range of genres and media: the novel, life writing, autofiction, poetry, drama, the essay, comics, narrative nonfiction, and hybrid forms. We also welcome work that proposes new theoretical frameworks for thinking about discursive resistance in the present.
This issue is organized around three thematic axes. Contributors are invited to address one or more of them, or to submit work that cuts across them.
Axis 1. Counter-hegemonic narrative and literary form
This axis examines how contemporary Anglophone literary writing articulates positions of discursive resistance through formal, structural, and rhetorical means. We are particularly interested in contributions that examine how literary form itself—polyphony, narrative fragmentation, the deliberate mixing of authentic and fabricated archival material, the ritual reactivation of cultural and spiritual resources, the imagining of alternative subjectivities—operates as a critical response to contemporary discursive conditions. Topics may include but are not limited to:
- Postsecular literary fiction and the reactivation of religious, ritual, or spiritual resources (in the lineage of John A. McClure’s Partial Faiths and Emily McAvan’s The Material Sacred)
- The relationship between literary fictionality and post-truth political discourse
- Counter-historical fiction and the contested use of the historical archive
- Polyphony and multi-perspectivism as narrative techniques
- Slowness and sustained attention as resistance
- The return to analog and material form in contemporary writing
- The novel’s renewed engagement with collective and communal experience in the context of modern atomization
- Diasporic and racialized literary form as discursive resistance
- Contemporary forms of gendered and embodied writing
Axis 2. Life writing and autotheory as sites of discursive resistance
This axis examines how contemporary autobiographical, autofictional, and autotheoretical practices articulate resistance to dominant frameworks of subjectivity, identity, and self-representation. We are interested in how contemporary life narrative, including autofiction, contests dominant notions of truth, the self, and normalcy. We are also interested in exploring the recent surge in autotheory, a form that merges lived experience—often with a focus on the body—with theories of subjectivity and social critique, situating the self within historically specific conditions and culturally imposed meanings. Topics may include but are not limited to:
- Illness, disability, and bodily difference in narrative
- Queer and trans life writing as discursive intervention
- Racialized and migrant life narratives
- Narrating motherhood and non-motherhood in resistance to normative frameworks
- Hybrid forms at the intersection of memoir, theory, poetry, and essay
- Interrogating the subject–object divide through autotheoretical practices
- Autofiction and the question of “truth” in the twenty-first century
- Performing the self in twenty-first-century life writing
- Self-narration and self-invention in the post-digital age
Axis 3. Literary engagements with media and contemporary public discourse
This axis examines how contemporary Anglophone literature engages with the media environments, journalistic practices, and digital public discourses of the twenty-first century, and the modes of discursive resistance generated by this encounter. We are especially concerned with works that operate at the boundary between the literary and the journalistic—between fiction, reportage, the essay, and digital writing—and that reimagine the principles of contemporary public communication. Topics may include but are not limited to:
- Literary nonfiction and the contested boundary between fact and fiction
- Documentary fiction, reportage-novels, and the contemporary novel’s engagement with the news
- Essayistic writing and the renewal of literature as public argument
- Literary writers working in digital and online environments
- Literary podcasts, audio essays, and emergent hybrid forms
- Literary responses to post-truth political discourse and the crisis of journalistic authority
- Literary responses to climate-sceptic discourse
- The literary mediation of contemporary political events and crises
- Literature, attention, and the algorithmically saturated public sphere
We invite authors to submit a 400-word abstract along with a short biographical note (150 words) by September 1, 2026. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by October 1, 2026.
Book reviews of recent or understudied works that engage with topics relevant to this call for papers are also welcome.
Abstract submissions should follow the submission guidelines available at https://alizes.univ-reunion.fr/ and be emailed to the editors:
The full draft papers for all accepted proposals must be submitted by February 15, 2027, and will undergo a double-blind peer review process.
Selected Bibliography
Critical theory and cultural studies
Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. 1944. Translated by John Cumming, Verso, 1979.
Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. 2nd ed., Edinburgh University Press, 2014.
Alcoff, Linda Martín. Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self. Oxford University Press, 2006.
Berlant, Lauren. On the Inconvenience of Other People. Duke University Press, 2022.
Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October, vol. 59, 1992, pp. 3–7.
Fraser, Nancy. The Old Is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born: From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump and Beyond. Verso, 2019.
Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, International Publishers, 1971.
Habermas, Jürgen. “Notes on Post-Secular Society.” New Perspectives Quarterly, vol. 25, no. 4, 2008, pp. 17–29.
Hall, Stuart. Essential Essays. Edited by David Morley, 2 vols., Duke University Press, 2019.
Mbembe, Achille. Out of the Dark Night: Essays on Decolonization. Translated by Daniela Ginsburg, Columbia University Press, 2021.
Rosa, Hartmut. Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World. Translated by James C. Wagner, Polity Press, 2019.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, University of Illinois Press, 1988, pp. 271–313.
Varoufakis, Yanis. Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. Bodley Head, 2023.
The postsecular and the sociology of religion
Casanova, José. Public Religions in the Modern World. University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Hungerford, Amy. Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion since 1960. Princeton University Press, 2010.
McAvan, Emily. Divinity, Hospitality and the Posthuman in 21st-Century Literature: The Material Sacred. Bloomsbury, 2024.
McClure, John A. Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison. University of Georgia Press, 2007.
Ratti, Manav. The Postsecular Imagination: Postcolonialism, Religion, and Literature. Routledge, 2013.
Storm, Jason Ā. Josephson. The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences. University of Chicago Press, 2017.
Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Harvard University Press, 2007.
Post-truth, fictionality, and contemporary discursive conditions
Bell, Alice, et al. “Multimodality, Transmediality, and Ethics in Post-Postmodernist Fictions of the Digital.” Narrative, vol. 33, no. 3, 2025.
Fludernik, Monika, and Marie-Laure Ryan, editors. Narrative Factuality: A Handbook. De Gruyter, 2019.
Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. University of Chicago Press, 2016.
Goodman, Robin Truth, editor. Literature and Journalism: Inspirations, Intersections, and Inventions from Ben Franklin to Stephen Colbert. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
Korthals Altes, Liesbeth. Ethos and Narrative Interpretation: The Negotiation of Values in Fiction. University of Nebraska Press, 2014.
Kakutani, Michiko. The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump. Tim Duggan Books, 2018.
Kirby, Alan. Digimodernism: How New Technologies Dismantle the Postmodern and Reconfigure Our Culture. Continuum, 2009.
McIntyre, Lee. Post-Truth. MIT Press, 2018.
Nielsen, Henrik Skov, James Phelan, and Richard Walsh. “Ten Theses about Fictionality.” Narrative, vol. 23, no. 1, 2015, pp. 61–73.
Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press, 2011.
Oreskes, Naomi, and Erik M. Conway. Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. Bloomsbury Press, 2010.
Rushdie, Salman. Languages of Truth: Essays 2003–2020. Random House, 2021.
Stuckey-French, Ned. The American Essay in the American Century. University of Missouri Press, 2011.
Walsh, Richard. The Rhetoric of Fictionality: Narrative Theory and the Idea of Fiction. Ohio State University Press, 2007.
Autotheory, autofiction, and embodied life writing
Brostoff, Alex, and Vilashini Cooppan, editors. Autotheories. The MIT Press, 2025.
Couser, G. Thomas. Signifying Bodies: Disability in Contemporary Life Writing. University of Michigan Press, 2009.
Dix, Hywel, editor. Autofiction in English. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
Effe, Alexandra, and Hannah Lawlor, editors. The Autofictional: Approaches, Affordances, Forms. Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.
Fournier, Lauren. Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism. MIT Press, 2021.
Gilmore, Leigh. The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony. Cornell University Press, 2001.
Guignery, Vanessa, and Wojciech Drag, editors. Experimental Life Writing Today. Bloomsbury Academic, 2025.
Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals. W. W. Norton, 2019.
McNeill, Laurie, and John David Zuern, editors. Online Lives 2.0, Biography, vol. 38, no. 2, 2015.
Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. 3rd ed., University of Minnesota Press, 2024.
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Call for Papers
A Golden Age? Global Historical Fictions and Political Nostalgia
One-Day Online Workshop of the Historical Fictions Research Network
28 November 2026 (online in Zoom) ca 8 am to 5 pm (GMT)
15 min talks
Deadline for Submissions: Oct. 1, 2026
The Historical Fictions Research Network, an interdisciplinary and international network of scholars examining historical fictions, i.e. narratives of the past in a variety of popular media, is happy to organise its 2026 one-day workshop on the topic of
“A Golden Age? Global Historical Fictions and Political Nostalgia”.
Globally, the last years have been dominated by a wide-spread feeling of nostalgia, “a bittersweet longing for former times” (Niemeyer 2014: 1), in which the world still seemed to be ‘better’, safer and more colourful than our tumultuous and fast-changing present (see e.g. Bauman 2017; Gaston & Hilhorst 2018; Jacobsen 2020). This feeling has been traced back to ever-faster technological changes and the accompanying feeling of insecurity, as well as to international developments which have severely affected and undermined the existing world order and international co-operation. The emerging feeling of nostalgia is often connected to a very specific period in the respective national past, a “‘prelapsarian’” Golden Age, a mythic, glorious time when the nation was still great (see Henneböhl 2023: 50). Thus, the US-American MAGA movement repeatedly conjures up images of the post-WWII era, when the US had just won a major war and experienced a period of economic well-being (see Krieg 2016). On the other side of the former East-West divide, in the countries of the former Soviet block, there is also a wide-spread longing for the years of Communism, when the world was presumed safer and more just (see Jeffery & Váradi 2026). In the former GDR, this often takes the form of ‘Ostalgie’; while in Russian politics, cherished memories of the Soviet Union are utilised to justify the war against Ukraine. A third international example can be found in India where President Modi’s policy of Hindu nationalism channels ideas of a glorious period of Hindu rule that preceded conquests by first Muslim and then European invaders (see Jaffrelot & Schoch 2021: ch 1).
These examples highlight problems intrinsic to notions of a national ‘Golden Age’: they can be easily manipulated to political ends as demonstrated by the strategies of contemporary populists, who conflate mythic pasts with conservative or nationalist agendas. This evocation of such imagined pasts often consciously excludes those absent from their perceived flourishings – for example, immigrants, people of colour, women, or men not fitting the martial stereotype often associated with the idea of a Golden Age. Additionally, as many of the so-called ‘Golden Ages’ were also times of strong imperialist expansion – the concept also sidelines the experience of those subjugated by the dominant power.
Historical fictions world-wide have long engaged with the idea of Golden Ages, not least because they offer narratives of action, glamour and power that bolster national identities. In Europe for example, stories of the Spanish, Dutch and English Golden Ages of the 16th and 17th centuries are characterised by strong leadership figures, colourful costumes and exciting events whilst also providing comforting familiarity given that these periods remain prominent in school curricula (see e.g. String & Bull 2013; Rodríguez Pérez forthcoming). Conversely, many historical fictions emerging in recent decades have been key to challenging the concept of a Golden Age by foregrounding the experiences of the marginalised and helping to move postcolonial, feminist or queer perspectives into the mainstream. Historical fictions have thus not only played a key role in drawing attention to the violence, exclusions and injustices inherent to the Golden Ages of popular imagination but have also countered them with alternative visions of fairer, more equal pasts.
These trends, and the role of historical fictions in creating, criticising and undermining the concepts of Golden Ages world wide will be explored in our 2026 HFRN online workshop. Given the global range of the Network, we particularly welcome proposals from beyond countries of the Global North.
Sources cited:
Bauman, Zygmunt, Retrotopia,Polity, 2017.
Gaston, Sophie & Sacha Hilhorst, At Home in One’s Past: Nostalgia as a Cultural and Political Force in Britain, France and Germany, Demos, 2018.
Henneböhl, Dennis, ‘Taking Back Control’ of the Nation and Its History? Contemporary Fiction’s Engagement with Nostalgia in Brexit Britain, Intermedia 21, Brill Fink, 2023.
Jacobsen, Michael Hviid ed., Nostalgia Now: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on the Past in the Present, London: Routledge, 2020.
Jaffrelot, Christophe, and Cynthia Schoch, “Hindu Nationalism: A Different Idea of India.” Modi’s India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy, Princeton University Press, 2021, pp. 11-30. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1dc9jzx.8. Accessed 20 July 2026.
Jeffery, L., & Váradi, A., eds. Replaying Communism: Trauma and Nostalgia in European Cultural Production. Central European University Press, 2025.
Krieg, Gregory. “Donald Trump Reveals when he Thinks America was Great.” CNN 28 March 2026, https://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/26/politics/donald-trump-when-america-was-great. Accessed 22 July 2026.
Niemeyer, Katharina, “Introduction: Media and Nostalgia”, in Katharina Niemeyer, ed., Media and Nostalgia: Yearning for the Past, Present and Future. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, pp. 1-23.
Pérez, Yolanda Rodríguez, “A House of Mirrors: Historical Reparations in the Educational Setting and the Case of Pérez Reverte’s The Sun over Breda (1998)”, in Ingibjörg Ágústsdóttir et al., eds., Historical Fictions as Reparative Histories. Global Historical Fictions (Amsterdam: Brill, forthcoming).
String, Tatiana C., and Marcus Bull (eds), Tudorism: Historical Imagination and the Appropriation of the Sixteenth Century, Proceedings of the British Academy (London, 2011; online edn, British Academy Scholarship Online, 31 Jan. 2013), https://doi.org/10.5871/bacad/9780197264942.001.0001. Accessed 18 July 2026.
Paper proposals are due by October 1st 2026. They should consist of a title, an abstract of 250 words max., and a short bio (150 words max). Please submit proposals through our online form: https://historicalfictionsresearch.org/online-workshop-2026/.
Organisers: Series Editors Global Historical Fictions (Brill), Ingibjörg Ágústsdóttir, Jerome de Groot, Dorothea Flothow, Siobhan O’Connor, and Stephanie Russo.
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In Her Words: Women Artists and Life Writing Before 1920
Women and the Arts Forum Conference 2026
Friday, 2 October 2026
10.30 am – 6.30 pm, doors open at 10 am
Location: The National Gallery, London
In person, and online
For centuries, women artists have written about their lives and careers using diaries, letters and other documents. This was a means of resisting expectations, reflecting on their experiences and shaping their own sense of identity.
Taking a broad geographical approach, this conference will address how women artists navigate their artistic identities through writing. Rather than viewing these writings as only biography or confession, we will explore them as creative and strategic spaces of self-expression and agency. Women used writing to voice their experiences and imagine different ways of living an artistic life.
The conference is a collaboration between the National Gallery, London; the Women’s Art Collection, Murray Edwards College, Cambridge; and the University of St. Andrews. It will build on an earlier symposium at Murray Edwards College, supported by the Association for Art History, which took place on 19 June 2026 and focused on women artists’ life writing from the 20th and 21st centuries. This second conference, hosted at the National Gallery, will focus on the period before 1920.
The conference will conclude with a drinks reception for in-person attendees.
Schedule
10am – Registration opens
10.30am – Welcome by Christine Riding
10.35am – Introduction by Susanna Avery-Quash
PANEL 1 – Life writing and self-fashioning
Chair: Dr Rebecca Birrell
10.40am – Helena Anderson (Amgueddfa Cymru-Museum Wales & University of Bristol), “‘A very important event!’: the role of the letter in Gwen John’s artistic practice”
10.55am – Kellie Sabin (Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum), “Beyond the Seeming Authority: Identity, performance and multiplicity of selves in Paula Modersohn-Becker’s letters and journals”
11.10am – Dr Apolline Malevez (Ghent University), “Queer Landscapes: Louise Héger and the Writing of the Non-Binary Self”
11.25am – Questions and Discussion (20 minutes)
BREAK (30 minutes): 11.45am –12.15pm
PANEL 2 – Collective and comparative approaches
Chair: Dr Susanna Avery-Quash
12.15pm – Dr Caroline Watkinson (City St Georges, University of London), “Fragmentary Selves: Life-writing and the Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood”
12.30pm – Mattea Gernentz (University of Glasgow), “Daughters of Impressionism: Illuminating Nature and Friendship in the Belle Époque”
12.45pm – Professor Linda Goddard (University of St Andrews), “Writing and Ambition: The Diaries of Women Artists in Paris Around 1900”
1pm – Questions and Discussion (20 minutes)
1.20pm – Lunch (1.5 hours; tour of the National Gallery)
PANEL 3 – Constructing a Legacy
Chair: Prof Linda Goddard
2.50pm – Paloma Ley (University of Edinburgh & Fitzwilliam Museum), “‘Jewels of Sculpture Made by Her Hand’: Reassessing Luisa Roldán’s Madrid Period Through Her Letter Writing (1692-1706)”
3.05pm – Caroline Gould (University of Sheffield & National Portrait Gallery), “‘A Useful Purpose’: The life writing and art of Ellen Sharples (1769-1849)”
3.20pm – Professor Susannah Thompson (Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University), “‘How Edmonia Lewis Became an Artist’: An Autobiographical Construction”
3.35pm – Questions and Discussion (20 minutes)
BREAK (30 minutes) 3.55pm–4.25pm
PANEL 4 – Modulated Voices
Chair: Dr Jack Hartnell
4.25pm – Dr Tori Champion (Rhode Island School of Design), “Obituary as Autobiography: Madeleine Françoise Basseporte’s Posthumous Life Writing”
4.40pm – Dr Rachel Sloan (The Courtauld Gallery), “A Memoir by Stealth? Harriet Lister’s Memoir of Amos Green”
4.55pm – Dr Jennifer Thatcher (Manchester Metropolitan University), “Interviewing Rosa Bonheur”
5.10pm – Questions and Discussion (20 minutes)
5.30pm – Concluding remarks by Dr Rebecca Birrell
5.45pm – Drinks reception
6.30pm – Drinks reception concludes
Contact Information
To book in person tickets, see here: https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/events/conference-in-her-words-women-artists-and-life-writing-before-1920-women-and-the-arts-forum-conference-2026-02-10-2026
To book online tickets, see here: https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/events/conference-in-her-words-women-artists-and-life-writing-before-1920-online-access-02-10-2026
If you have any specific questions please reach out to the Research Events Coordinator in the email below.
Contact Email
emily.bell@nationalgallery.org.uk
URL
https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/events/conference-in-her-words-women-artists…
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News and a CFP from the Autobiography Study Group (10/4/2026; 12/11/2026) London, UK
WINTER CONFERENCE – CALL FOR PAPERS
We are pleased to announce the call for papers for this year’s Auto/Biography Winter conference entitled ‘Peace’ on Friday 11th December 2026 at Friends House, Euston, London, UK. We are delighted that the keynote will be given by Dr Christine Lewis.
We invite your abstract submissions (250 words) for a 30-minute oral presentation followed by 15-minutes of discussion. We welcome papers from across the broadest range of auto/biographical work, including ‘work-in-progress’ and creative approaches. The conferences are a rich, supportive environment for the development of academic work in Auto/Biography for colleagues at all career stages, so please share this call with your colleagues. Please submit your abstract by Sunday 4th October at 23:59 here: https://www.britsoc.co.uk/events/key-bsa-events/autobiography-winter-conference-2026-peace/. Please note we are unable to accept abstracts via e-mail).
The key dates leading up to the conference are as follows:
• Abstract submission deadline: Sunday 4th October
• Abstract notification and conference registration opens week beginning: Monday 26th October
• Presenter booking deadline: Monday 2nd November
• Delegate booking deadline: Monday 9th November
• Conference: Friday 11th December
All enquiries about the conference to Anne Chappell (anne.chappell@brunel.ac.uk).
ONLINE SEMINAR SERIES REGISTRATION:
We have a programme of online seminars running again in 2026-2027 and registration is now open for the first one on Wednesday 7th October 1700-1800 entitled ‘It’s ok!’ Autobiography and Ethics’ with Mich Page (Independent Academic): https://www.britsoc.co.uk/events/key-bsa-events/it-s-ok-autobiography-and-ethics/. The joining link will be sent to those who register approximately 24 hours before the seminar.
DATES FOR YOUR DIARY:
The dates for your diary for the other seminars this year are available on the website and further details will follow: https://www.britsoc.co.uk/groups/study-groups/autobiography-study-group/events/. The summer conference 2027 is planned for 14th-16th July at Venue Reading and this will be added to the website soon.
AUTO/BIOGRAPHY REVIEW:
After several years as Editor, Carly Stewart has decided that the time is right to step back from the editorship of the Auto/Biography Study Group journal. She has greatly valued the opportunity to work with colleagues from across the Study Group and to support the journal and its contributors. The group has significantly benefitted from the work that Carly has done to set the journal up in its current online format, providing an open access forum for the important scholarship of colleagues in the group. I am particularly grateful to Carly for working with me as a convenor over several years. We would like to thank everyone who has recently submitted papers to the journal. As we manage the editorial transition, there may be a delay in processing submissions, and we appreciate authors’ patience during this period. Thank you, as always, for your continued engagement with and support for the journal.
CALL FOR AN EDITOR AND EDITORIAL TEAM MEMBERS:
In light of the forthcoming change, we are now inviting expressions of interest for the role of Editor, as well as from colleagues interested in joining the wider editorial team. This is an opportunity to help shape the journal’s future direction and contribute to its ongoing development. Those expressing an interest should be willing to engage with the journal’s online platform and the technological aspects of the editorial and publishing processes. There will be a detailed hand over process. Previous editorial experience is welcome but is not essential. Please complete the Expression of Interest: Journal Editor and Editorial Team form here by 16th September 2026: https://eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fforms.cloud.microsoft%2Fe%2F0HeAMPEvpJ&data=05%7C02%7Canne.chappell%40brunel.ac.uk%7C8897d514ee14423b749508deff86e3c1%7C4cad97b159354103a86657ad98a1517e%7C0%7C0%7C639229151973952689%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=OC%2B9P3aIiQSHFCZbjnsKmAwHup48Xw9I%2BgCRTv%2Bdrjs%3D&reserved=0
INFORMATION FROM STUDY GROUP MEMBERS:
1. Maria Tamboukou has shared the news about the publication of her recent co-edited book on Liz Stanley entitled ‘Doing Feminist Research with Texts: Thinking with Liz Stanley’. This is particularly relevant to the Auto/Biography study group given Liz’s key role in establishing it in 1992:
https://www.routledge.com/Doing-Feminist-Research-with-Texts-Thinking-with-Liz-Stanley/MeadhbhMurray-Tamboukou/p/book/9781032749624
2. Jenny Byrne and Michael Erben have published an article entitled, “Autobiographical Experience and Relative Deprivation: anxiety and pain in the lives of the post-war British middle-class, 1945-1951’ which is available here: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/PP7YKEGPQHXPU5FSTDSY/full?target=10.1080/14484528.2026.2683585
3. Lisa Moran has shared the following Call for Papers for the RUN-EU ICARUS conference, the Annual International Conference on Applied Research with Business and Society, which is now open. This 5th edition will take place online on 2 October 2026, under the theme “Reimagining Innovation and Collaboration in Uncertainty: Invention, Impact and RUN-EU”. https://run-eu.eu/2026/07/16/run-eu-icarus-5-conference-2026/
Best wishes
Anne Chappell
Auto/Biography Study Group Convenor
Email: anne.chappell@brunel.ac.uk
Find the Auto/Biography Study Group: https://www.britsoc.co.uk/groups/study-groups/autobiography-study-group/
Join the Auto/Biography Study Group: https://www.britsoc.co.uk/groups/study-groups/autobiography-study-group/join-us/
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A call for book chapters:
Walking and Heritage: Embodiment, Place and Memory, Richard White & Thomas Kampe (eds)
From walking arts and guided tours to sacred pilgrimage, how and in what ways do walking practices speak to heritage?
Deadline for abstracts 31/10/2027
This is an invitation to contribute to an edited collection of critical writings and reflective documentation from practices at the intersection of embodiment, site and heritage. The collection attends to walking as a situated practice, in which contributors write from within the grounds they move through, not from a distance. Heritage has often been produced from a detached and authorizing gaze, one that extracts meaning from place while remaining outside it. Embodied practices, such as walking, keep knowledge located in the body that moves and in the relational experience that movement makes, inherits and evokes.
We invite contributions from practitioners: activists, guides, custodians, educators, artists, scholars and researchers. The book will offer an inter-disciplinary engagement in the field through case studies, blueprints, contextualisation and analysis from contemporary practitioners.
We welcome contributions attending to the following thematic clusters, which may form sections of the book:
● Embodiment, re-embodiment and being in place:
Writing that begins with the body, in motion, in time, in place.
We invite writing attending to questions of the body, the significance of the physical activity of walking/movement and being in place with regard to learning and heritage. This can include reflective commentary on movement practices, or on strategies that engage with the past through affect and embodiment.
Possible reference points:
Walking tours/tourism/education/
Place and site
Engaging the past in the present
Eco-somatics & artistic practice
dis-embodiment/ constructed amnesia
Re-enchantment and re-embodiment
Body archaeology
More-than human
● Walking, memory and agency:
Writing that critically reflects on the intent of the practice with regard to memory and heritage.
This theme seeks to develop an exploration of the construction and mobilisation of ‘heritage’ through embodied practices. Where, why and how is memory activated through walking? We invite practitioners and researchers to articulate and discuss their intention with regard to participation and the agency of heritage and memory.
Possible reference points:
Memory, memoryscapes and memorialisation
Inheritance, ancestors, tradition
Participation, inclusion, exclusion
Wounded landscapes/acts of care
Obscured/uncomfortable/
Ghosts, spectres and hauntings
Archive and repertoire
Legacies of empire, colonial extraction
Decolonial practices
● Walking as productive of heritage
Reflections on contemporary embodied practice that resonates with its own ‘heritage’ and activates complex ways of knowing.
How can walking practices function as interventions that interfere with, or renew, ‘heritage’ interpretation and designation? We invite critical reflection on walking/movement as productive of ‘heritage’, however defined. Productive with regard to embodied and complex modes of knowledge beyond the production of artefacts, performance, and spectators.
Possible reference points:
Mnemonic landscapes/cityscapes
Pilgrimage and ritual
Indigenous peoples’ walking practices eg ‘Songlines’
Intangible cultural heritage and its designation
Walking as heritage practice
Performance/performativity
Walking-with
Affective and cognitive connections
How to Contribute:
Reflecting on our own perspectives and privileges, the colonial extraction of knowledge and ways heritage has been used, the editorial/advisory team welcome contributions grounded in practice. We invite each contributor to speak from and name their own relationship to the ground they walk. We take this not as a preliminary disclosure but as a method, one that shapes both the walking and the writing.
We encourage contributions from Global South perspectives and marginalised communities. We welcome interdisciplinary writing collaborations and from practices that merge creative arts and academic study.
Contributions are invited in three formats:
● Grounded theoretical/philosophical reflections on practice and context
● Critical evaluation of specific interventions/engagement/projects
● Artistic contributions eg. blueprints, scripts, short poems, scores, possibly pics/graphics
Abstract:
● 300 word abstract for the formal proposal and publishers editorial team
● Key words
We welcome a more extended chapter summary of 1000 -1500 words. An indication of proposed engagement with one of the three core clusters would be helpful. Abstracts will be curated for inclusion by the editors, guided by the advisory team and publisher’s readers. Each chapter can include up to two relevant black and white images/graphics but are not essential at this stage.
● CV: 300 word max CV/biog, plus link to relevant website/s and/or list of relevant publications
Deadline: abstract and cv to r.white@bathspa.ac.uk by 31 October 2026
Anticipated deadline for completed chapters end of July 2027 (tbc)
Context of this call:
Following an editor’s invitation to submit a proposal on Walking and Heritage to the Museum and Heritage Studies list at Routledge (an imprint of Taylor & Francis) Richard White https://www.walknowtracks.co.
Walking and Heritage: Embodiment, Place and Memory [Announcement]
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CFP–Character Assassination in the Era of Permanent Crisis
May 13–15, 2027
CARP 6 Conference, The Lab for Character Assassination and Reputation Protection, George Mason University, VA, USA
Host: Department of International and European Studies, University of Piraeus, 80 Karaoli & Dimitriou Str., 185 34, Piraeus, Greece
Deadline for Submissions: October 15, 2026
Character assassination (CA) refers to the intentional destruction of a reputation. This enduring phenomenon has appeared in diverse forms across all cultural, political, and technological periods. Tactics including lies, insinuations, and ridicule have long been used as influential tools in power struggles. In recent years, the academic study of character assassination has experienced significant interest and growth.
Western democracies are experiencing persistent societal and political conflicts that challenge social cohesion, contribute to polarization, and raise concerns about the overall stability of democratic systems. Contemporary global society is marked by ongoing liminality, where situations of temporary crisis have become persistent and long-lasting. Democracy and political culture are increasingly marked by incivility, where personal ridicule and unwarranted attacks are commonplace. Populist politicians frequently deploy character attacks to provoke reactions and dominate media attention. Moreover, under globalization, local communities have grown increasingly vulnerable to international scandals and reputational threats originating from abroad.
Character assassination campaigns are commonly employed against both domestic and international opponents in political warfare, with strategic actors increasingly using AI and deepfakes to bolster their causes or undermine their opponents. These factors further intensify and reinforce the ongoing state of crisis normalized in today’s society.
While these developments appear distinctly contemporary, they resonate with longer historical patterns. Periods of political upheaval, from classical antiquity and early modern religious conflicts to the rise of mass politics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, have likewise been marked by intensified reputational attacks and propaganda. A historical perspective thus highlights both the continuity of character assassination as a tool of power and how its forms and effects are reshaped by changing political and technological contexts.
We invite scholars and practitioners to submit research and works in progress that discuss character assassination, crisis, politics, and power from a variety of disciplinary and cultural angles. We welcome both theoretical work and case studies that explore this phenomenon across the globe and throughout history.
Possible Topics:
· Historical cases of CA during political conflicts, revolutions, and wars
· Psychological theory and CA
· Populist rhetoric and ad hominem attacks
· International conflict and enemyfication strategies of CA
· The weaponization of emotions in CA campaigns
· Deepfakes, AI, and visual disinformation in CA campaigns
· Strategic incivility and smear tactics in political campaigns
· Memes, caricatures, and ridicule as the means of CA
· Call-out and shaming in social media hashtag campaigns
· Reputational brand attacks, brandjacking, and corporate scandals
· Reputational security and CA
· Reputation management, image repair, and inoculation strategies
Contact Information
Please submit a 250-word abstract of your paper with a 100-word bio by October 15 at the latest. Email the abstract as a single attachment to Sergei A. Samoilenko at ssamoyle@gmu.edu
Contact Email
URL
https://communication.gmu.edu/research-and-centers/carp/carp-conferences
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Call for Papers
Biography, Autobiography, Memoir, and Personal Narrative
Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)
48th Annual Conference, February 17-20, 2027
Marriott Albuquerque, Albuquerque, New Mexico
Submissions open: September 1, 2026
Proposal submission deadline: October 31, 2026
Proposals for papers and panels are now being accepted for the 48th annual SWPACA conference. One of the nation’s largest interdisciplinary academic conferences, SWPACA offers nearly 70 subject areas, each typically featuring multiple panels. For a full list of subject areas, area descriptions, and Area Chairs, please visit https://swpaca.org/
Paper proposals on any aspect of biography, autobiography, memoir, and personal narrative are welcome. Literary papers as well as creative works will be accepted.
All proposals must be submitted through the conference’s database at https://swpaca.org/app.
For details on using the submission database and on the application process in general (including submitting proposals for roundtables and preformed panels), please see the FAQS & Resources tab on https://swpaca.org/.Individual proposals for 15-minute papers must include an abstract of approximately 200-500 words and a brief summary of 100 words or less.
For information on how to submit a proposal for a multi-paper panel, please view the above FAQs & Resources link.
The deadline for submissions is October 31, 2026.
SWPACA offers monetary awards for the best graduate student papers in a variety of categories. Submissions of accepted, full papers are due January 1, 2026. More details are here: https://swpaca.org/
Registration and travel information for the conference is available at https://swpaca.org/
In addition, please check out the organization’s peer-reviewed, scholarly journal, Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, at https://digitalcommons.unl.
If you have any questions about the Biography, Autobiography, Memoir, and Personal Narrative area, please contact its Area Chair, John Rose from Dallas College, jwrose@dallascollege.edu. If you have general questions about the conference, please contact us at support@swpaca.org, and a member of the executive team will get back to you.
This will be a fully in-person conference. If you’re looking for an online option to present your work, keep an eye out for details about the 2027 SWPACA Summer Salon, a completely virtual conference to take place in June 2027.
We look forward to receiving your submissions!
Contact Information
If you have any questions about the Biography, Autobiography, Memoir, and Personal Narrative area, please contact its Area Chair, John Rose from Dallas College, jwrose@dallascollege.edu. If you have general questions about the conference, please contact us at support@swpaca.org, and a member of the executive team will get back to you.
Contact Email
URL
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Call for Chapters
Literary journalism and the author’s memoir: A collision of form
Deadline for Submissions: October 31, 2026
Our essential aim in this proposed Palgrave text is to examine the memoir by either a journalist or writer who uses the craft of literary journalism to render their narrative. Historically, conflating literary journalism and memoir opens up a polemical debate; interesting and polarising. As the editors, we are smiling – we believe disruption is a fundamentally healthy aspect of any academic endeavour. There is nothing sanitised nor discrete about literary journalism, which has given us decades of enjoyment and wonder, and its genre borders were never set in stone. Indeed, scholars all over the world breach the Anglo borders constantly: the Spanish and Portuguese crónica; France’s reportage li,éraire; Poland’s reportaz; literarischer journalismus in Germany; bibun kisha in Japan; baogao wenxue in China, and ocherk (очерк) in Russia. Each one of these forms disrupts and enriches the Anglophone canon of literary journalism, dominant for so long. Keeping this in mind, our aim with this text is to make a strong argument that some memoir perform as literary journalism. In order to narrow this down, we are looking for analyses of memoir by either a journalist or writer using the many elemental facets of literary journalism, from any national canon.
As an example, below are elements that US author Constance Hale
(https://niemanstoryboard.org/2020/10/06/the-struggle-to-define-cinematic-writing/)
puts forward as fundamental to the craft:
• precisely painted scenes, to put the reader into the story;
• fleshed-out characters to make the reader care about the story;
• not quotes, per se, but dialogue between characters;
• plot, or actions that unfold over time and lead us toward an endpoint;
• paradox, to give the story twists and turns;
• suspense to keep the story taut and thrilling;
• dramatic conflict (between characters, cultural forces, or communities);
• shapely sentences to pull the reader through paragraphs;
• inventive metaphors that surprise us;
• the presence of a narrator, what many call ‘voice’;
• some sense of relationship to the reader, viewer, or listener, so that there is a connection between storyteller and audience.
We know there are other literary journalism elements utilised around the world and are eager to read about them. Please send a 200-word abstract to sue.joseph@adelaide.edu.au and rkeeble@lincoln.ac.uk by October 31, 2026. We aim to submit our proposal to the Palgrave Studies in Literary Journalism, edited by Sue Joseph, Willa McDonald and Matthew Ricketson (https://link.springer.com/series/17131), by the end of 2026. Deadline for 6-7,000 word chapters is October 31, 2027, with a 2028 publication date.
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CfP: Life Writing and Holocaust Literature Conference
May 5, 2027
Toronto, Canada
Deadline for Submissions: October 31, 2026
The Azrieli Foundation’s Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Program invites proposals for a one-day conference to be held in Toronto on May 5, 2027. The conference is open to scholars at all career stages, and early career researchers and PhD candidates are especially encouraged to apply.
The conference will explore themes of life writing and Holocaust literature in the broader context of Holocaust studies. Personal narratives such as memoirs, letters, diaries and journals have formed the basis of traditional life-writing sources. Life writing, however, is much more than simply the recorded narrative of one’s experiences — it encompasses the ways in which lived experiences are remembered, interpreted and given meaning by the authors. Consequently, life writing plays a crucial role in shaping
nuanced understandings of the Holocaust and how it was experienced, remembered and narrated.
Themes such as love and loss, trauma and resilience, and the dynamics of memory — what is recalled, emphasized or omitted — frequently emerge in life writing about the Holocaust. Proposals may focus on individual case studies or use a collective or comparative approach and may include a gendered analysis, analysis of theoretical frameworks of discourse or another methodology that examines how life writing intersects with Holocaust literature.
Proposals that examine the relationship between the life-writing form, memory and literary representation are encouraged.
Proposals must engage with at least one publication from the Azrieli Foundation’s Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Program. For a curated collection of literary works, visit here.
Timeline:
Send 250-word proposal and 50-100-word bio to carson@azrielifoundation.org by October 31, 2026
Applicants will be notified by December 30, 2026
Proposal Review Committee:
Carson Phillips — Azrieli Foundation, Gratz College
Ariela Freedman — Concordia University
Ariane Santerre — Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf/Université de Montréal
Travel Bursary:
Two-night hotel accommodation will be provided by the Azrieli Foundation; travel bursaries available for successful applicants residing outside of the Greater Toronto Area.
Carson Phillips, Ph.D. (he/him)
Manager of Academic Initiatives
Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Program
Programme des mémoires de survivants de l’Holocauste
Azrieli Foundation | Fondation Azrieli
carson@azrielifoundation.org
T: 416-322-5928 ext. 331
memoirs.azrielifoundation.org
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Reimagining Biography: Contribute to a Special Issue of Tiempo Devorado
Deadline for Submissions: November 6, 2026
How is biography being reimagined across the humanities? Tiempo Devorado invites submissions for a special issue on new forms of biographical writing, exploring innovative historiographical approaches and interdisciplinary perspectives that connect contemporary history with broader methodological and cultural debates.
We welcome original articles on topics including, but not limited to:
- Global and transnational biography
- Collective and relational biography
- Digital archives and born-digital sources in biographical writing
- Biography and the history of emotions
- The history of knowledge through individual trajectories
Submissions addressing other emerging approaches to biography and life-writing are equally encouraged.
Submission deadline: 6 November 2026
Article length: 7,000–10,000 words (including bibliography)
Join a timely conversation on the future of biographical writing and help shape new directions across the humanities.
Contact Email
URL
https://revistes.uab.cat/tdevorado/about/submissions
Reimagining Biography: Contribute to a Special Issue of Tiempo Devorado [Announcement]
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Call for Chapter Proposals
The Heirs of Annie Ernaux
Volume #3 Annie Ernaux International Studies (De Gruyter Brill)
Series editors: Michèle Bacholle and Jacqueline Dougherty
Volume editors: Beth Kearney and Alexandra Pugh
“Sometimes I wonder if the purpose of my writing is to find out whether other people have done or felt the same things or, if not, for them to consider experiencing such things as normal. Maybe I would also like them to live out these very emotions in turn, forgetting that they had once read about them somewhere” (Ernaux, Simple Passion 41).
“To create a symbolic generation is to elude the oppressive, decisive nature of a biological generation – or rather what patriarchal structures have created of biological generation – by playing with time and space, by rendering infinitely more complex systems of kinship, by creating spiritual families [familles d’esprit], by promoting incongruous connections: a ‘family’ that reinvents and reshapes itself according to desire, a kinship of language rather than of blood or law, that materialises ‘by travelling through words and images’” (Collin 88).
We are preparing an edited volume that will explore the multiple legacies of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate, Annie Ernaux. In what ways do writers, visual artists, and filmmakers inherit from and reimagine Ernausian themes, approaches, poetics, and aesthetics?
We are seeking proposals for scholarly chapters as well as non-traditional, creative submissions. All proposals should make clear reference to the elements of Ernaux’s work that are being “inherited” and they should study either a single Ernausian “heir” or multiple “heirs” through a comparative lens. We are interested in chapters focusing on practitioners from across the world, and not only those from anglophone and francophone spheres, although the volume will be published in English.
Contributors are encouraged to adopt a broad view of the notion of “inheritance,” which may apply to individuals of a succeeding generation (“vertical” genealogy) as well as those of the same generation (“horizontal” genealogy). Inheritance may, furthermore, be understood as a dialogue between generations for, as Françoise Collin writes (82), inheritance often occurs bilaterally – through relationality and exchange. All contributors should consider how the act of inheritance necessitates a degree of transformation or evolution, shaped by the spatial, temporal, cultural, social, and political differences that distinguish Ernaux from her heirs. In this sense, we envisage inheritance in the terms thatEvelyne Ledoux-Beaugrand develops (25), namely as an opening to alterity, difference, and newness. Inheritance need not be understood as a deliberate act, since an heir may unintentionally borrow or rework Ernausian themes, tropes, and approaches. Ernaux’s work has enjoyed a global reception and impacted the ways readers across the globe think about art, society, politics, gender, the body and more; it is therefore inevitable that her contributions have both directly and indirectly influenced other practitioners. Furthermore, inheritance need not imply agreement with or praise of Ernaux’s work. What, for instance, does it mean to be the bearer of a troublesome, difficult, or unwanted inheritance? Is it possible to work against the process of inheritance? To again cite Collin, “filiation is the art of holding onto a thread and breaking a thread” (83). Similarly, Ledoux-Beaugrand (25) writes that “an inheriting posture” involves a “process of sorting” characterised by both continuity and rupture. Finally, we invite contributors to engage not only with “successful” or reparative forms of inheritance, but to explore “unsuccessful,” oppositional, and even superficial engagements with Ernaux’s legacy.
The following thematic axes are four among many possible approaches to this topic, and they provide only a few potential starting points for responses to this call for proposals. Please let us know if your contribution fits within one of these themes, or whether you would like to propose another.
Betraying and Defending Origins
“Ernaux has become a critical observer of socio-economic structures and an embodiment of the complexity of cultural capital,” write Élise Hugueny-Léger and Fabien Arribert-Narce. In her role as observer of class structures and sociocultural dynamics, Ernaux also examines her own positionality. Raised by working-class parents who made sacrifices to send their daughter to university, Ernaux at times frames her own social mobility as a “betrayal” of her origins. Yet through the political force of her writing, as well as her concrete interventions into France’s political sphere, Ernaux regularly acts in solidarity with a variety of working-class groups. This fidelity, rather than betrayal, was powerfully evoked in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, when she spoke words that she had written in her diary over sixty years earlier: “I write to avenge my people.”
This notion resonates in the work of multiple authors writing today. Perhaps the most well-known example is Édouard Louis, whose texts offer intimate portrayals of his parents and the multiple forms of violence that he observed and experienced throughout his working-class childhood. Yet the Ernausian trope of defecting from, betraying, or defending one’s origins extends well beyond the work of Louis. It is discernible, for instance, in narratives that portray a trajectory from the banlieues of France towards its urban “centres,” including Nesrine Slaoui’s Illégitimes (2021)[Illegitimates] and Fatima Daas’s La Petite dernière (2020)[The Last One (2021)]. The trope is also present in texts about immigration to France, such as Kaoutar Harchi’s Comme nous existons (2021)[As We Exist (2023)]. This aspect of Ernaux’s legacy is further observable in the ways that authors critically experiment with the French language while attempting to do “justice” to their origins, as Harchi argues in Je n’ai qu’une langue et ce n’est pas la mienne in relation to the work of Kateb Yacine, Assia Djebar, Rachid Boudjedra, Kamel Daoud, and Boualem Sansal.The language of popular and working-class cultures is also brought to life in the fiction of Virginie Despentes: as Martina Stemberger writes, Despentes incorporates a popular vernacular through slang, verlan, anglicisms, and hybridity.
Disclosing Bodily Experience
Embodied experience has been a core focus of Ernaux’s writing since her first publication, the novel Les Armoires vides(1974) [Cleaned Out (1990)], which portrays the illegal abortion of its young protagonist. This focus on the body reappears in recent texts, such as Le Jeune homme (2022) [The Young Man (2023)], in which Ernaux describes a romance that she had with a student thirty years her junior. Across her career, then, a major focus for Ernaux has been the body, which she represents as a site of pleasure, violence, shame, illness, and class struggle and which bears the imprint of gendered, classist, and ageist hierarchies.
The disclosure of bodily experience is an increasingly dominant trend in global literature, and Ernaux’s work in this space has been particularly influential. In part, this is because she interrogates embodied experience – that of women, in particular – in ways that resist convention. When Passion Simple (1992) [Simple Passion (2021)] was first published, even feminists disapproved of the work, perceiving a lack of female agency as the protagonist succumbed to her desire for a man. And yet, this text has served as inspiration for contemporary women authors such as Liliane Fishman who, in Acts of Service (2022), also explores submission and female desire.
Ernaux’s transgressive approach [footnote 1] to disclosing bodily experience often serves to highlight gender inequalities, most famously in L’Événement (2000) [Happening (2019)], which emphasises the dangers of criminalising abortion. This is also true of texts such as La Femme gelée (1981) [A Frozen Woman (1996)] and Les Années (2008) [The Years (2018)], in which Ernaux critically addresses the socio-culturally entrenched association between femininity, domesticity, motherhood, and wifedom. How do contemporary writers, visual artists, and filmmakers adopt and adapt these themes? How are embodied experiences narrated today, and does this extend, depart from, or reimagine Ernaux’s legacy?
Writing Life
Critics and scholars have described Ernaux’s work as autobiographical, autoethnographic, and autofictional, yet Ernaux prefers the term “autosociobiography;” for her, this term reflects a sustained interest in the relationship between the self and wider socio-historical realities (Ernaux, L’Écriture comme un couteau 41 and Ernaux in Rérolle). How have Ernaux’s heirs negotiated the distinctions between, and hybridity of, these forms of writing? How might “autosociobiography”relate to Deborah Levy’s notion of “living autobiography,” for example – a form of life writing that is open, evolving, and unresolved? [footnote 2] Ernaux resists the popular term autofiction, sensing that it is applied misogynistically to denote a supposedly lesser “feminine genre, with a narcissistic, trashy, sentimental side to it” (Ernaux in Rérolle). To what extent do Ernaux’s heirs embrace, reject, or problematise other categories and genres in their approach to writing life?
Ernaux consistently emphasises the truth value of her work. Both within her narratives and in media interviews, she stresses her work’s proximity to life. Her texts frequently make use of personal diary entries, and she writes in Happening of her desire to use the autobiographical text to “physically bond” with images from her past (19). Ernaux also experiments with the diary form, notably in her “journaux extimes” (“extimate” diaries or diaries of/from the outside) [footnote 3], an approach that Lauren Elkin appears to inherit in her “diary of a year on the bus” titled No. 91/92. Moreover, in writing life, Ernaux uses language that is functional, spare, and unadorned – a style she refers to as “flat writing” (Ernaux, La Place 24). The heirs of Ernaux’s “flat” prose might include Constance Debré and Colombe Schneck, whose life writing tends towards frankness and concision. Yet the simplicity of Ernaux’s prose is deceptive, since she simultaneously broaches powerful societal taboos – from abortion to ageing, illness, and female desire. Could writers like Rachel Cusk, Chris Kraus, or Goliarda Sapienza be understood to inherit Ernaux’s interest in the transgressive expression of intimate experience? And to what extent do these authors go beyond the self in their writing, to express a more “transpersonal”truth?
Crossing Media
Ernaux’s corpus encompasses multiple media: while she is known principally for her writing, she has co-produced a film, Les Années Super 8 (2022) [The Super 8 Years] and multiple works of “photobiography,” including the co-authored L’Usage de la photo (2005) [The Use of Photography (2024)] and a newly illustrated, collaborative edition of L’Autre fille (2023) [The Other Girl (2025)]. In works such as The Years, Ernaux also describes photographs in prose, rather than reproducing them as images. This interest in text-image hybridity can be traced in the work of many other contemporary practitioners, such as W.G. Sebald, Sophie Calle, Roland Barthes, and Hervé Guibert [footnote 4]. Although Louis is often understood as an “heir” of Ernaux for his intimate narratives of class mobility and social violence, his practice of using photographic images and collaborating on stage adaptations of his own works may likewise be understood as an Ernausian inheritance.
In the exhibition “Exteriors: Annie Ernaux and Photography” (2024), curator Lou Stoppard juxtaposed “snapshots” of Ernaux’s writing with photographs of everyday life by Martine Franck, Daido Moriyama, William Klein, and many others. This exhibition invites us to appreciate the photographic quality of Ernaux’s writing, and to consider visual artists as her “heirs.” In 2024-25 in London, a stage adaptation of The Years made headlines when an abortion scene caused many theatregoers to faint. This raises questions about the impact of re-presenting subject matter across different media, though we invite contributors to attend to the distinction between adaptation and inheritance.
Submissions
Please send proposals via this online form by Monday 30 November 2026: https://forms.office.com/r/ep4MvEXmEb. You may direct questions to the volume editors, Beth Kearney (b.kearney@uq.edu.au) and Alexandra Pugh (alexandra.pugh@queens.ox.ac.uk).
All contributions will be in English, and English translations of all foreign language material should be provided. The exception here is creative contributions, which may be multilingual depending on the aims, scope, and ambition of the piece. Chapters are expected to be 5,000-6,500 words in length.
Project Timeline
- Submissions due: Monday 30 November 2026
- Notification of the editors’ decisions on chapters: January 2027
- Full chapters due: May 2027
- Peer review: May-November 2027
- Publication: 2028
Works Cited
Collin, Françoise. “Un héritage sans testament.” Les Cahiers du GRIF, no. 34 (1986): 81-92, https://doi.org/10.3406/grif.1986.1707.
Daas, Fatima. The Last One. Translated by Lara Vergnaud. Other Press, 2021.
––––. La Petite dernière. Les Éditions Noir sur Blanc, 2020.
Elkin, Lauren. No. 91/92: A Diary of a Year on the Bus. Semiotext(e), 2021.
Ernaux, Annie. The Young Man. Translated by Alison L. Strayer. Fitzcarraldo, 2023.
––––. Le Jeune homme. Gallimard, 2022.
––––. Exteriors. Translated by Tanya Leslie. Fitzcarraldo, 2021.
––––. Simple Passion. Translated by Tanya Leslie. Fitzcarraldo, 2021.
––––. Happening. Translated by Tanya Leslie. Fitzcarraldo, 2019.
––––. The Years. Translated by Alison L. Strayer. Fitzcarraldo, 2018.
––––. Things Seen. Translated by Jonathan Kaplansky. University of Nebraska Press, 2010.
––––. Les Années. Gallimard, 2008.
––––. L’Écriture comme un couteau: Entretien avec Frédéric-Yves Jeannet. Stock, 2003.
––––. La Vie extérieure. Gallimard, 2000.
––––. L’Événement. Gallimard, 2000.
––––. A Frozen Woman, trans. Linda Coverdale. Penguin, 1996.
––––. Passion Simple. Gallimard, 1992.
––––. Cleaned Out. Translated by Carol Sanders. Dalkey Archive Press, 1990.
––––. Journal du dehors. Gallimard, 1983.
––––. La Place. Gallimard, 1983.
––––. La Femme gelée. Gallimard, 1981.
––––. Les Armoires vides. Gallimard, 1974.
Ernaux, Annie, and Marc Marie. The Use of Photography. Translated by Alison L. Strayer. Fitzcarraldo, 2024.
––––. L’Usage de la photo. Gallimard, 2005.
Ernaux, Annie, and Nadège Fagoo. L’Autre fille. Éditions Light Motiv, 2023.
Ernaux-Briot, David and Annie Ernaux, directors. Les Années Super 8. Les Films Pelléas, 2022.
Arribert-Narce, Fabien. Photobiographies: pour une écriture de notation de la vie (Roland Barthes, Denis Roche, Annie Ernaux. Honoré Champion, 2014.
Fishman, Lilian. Acts of Service. Europa, 2022.
Harchi, Kaoutar. As We Exist: A Postcolonial Autobiography. Translated by Emma Ramadan.Other Press, 2023.
––––. Comme nous existons. Actes Sud, 2021.
––––. Je n’ai qu’une langue et ce n’est pas la mienne. Fayard, 2016.
Hugueny-Léger, Élise, and Fabien Arribert-Narce. “Introduction.” In Annie Ernaux Across Borders edited by Élise Hugueny-Léger and Fabien Arribert-Narce. De Gruyter Brill, forthcoming.
Kawakami, Akane. Photobiography: Photographic Self-Writing in Proust, Guibert, Ernaux, Macé. Taylor and Francis, 2013.
Ledoux-Beaugrand, Evelyne. Imaginaires de la filiation: Héritage et mélancolie dans la littérature contemporaine des femmes. Les éditions XYZ, 2013.
Levy, Deborah. Real Estate. Penguin, 2021.
––––. The Cost of Living. Penguin 2019.
––––. Things I Don’t Want to Know. Penguin, 2018.
Rérolle, Raphaëlle. “Toute écriture de vérité déclenche les passions.” Le Monde,February 3, 2011. https://www.lemonde.fr/livres/article/2011/02/03/camille-laurens-et-annie-ernaux-toute-ecriture-de-verite-declenche-les-passions_1474360_3260.html.
Schaal, Michèle. Une troisième vague féministe et littéraire: les femmes de lettres de la nouvelle génération. Brill, 2017.
Slaoui, Nesrine. Illégitimes. Fayard, 2021.
Stemberger, Martina. “La parole au ‘bas people’ ? Langage populaire et polyphonie chez Despentes.” In La langue du peuple dans la littérature: Le français populaire mis en texte, de l’âge classique à nos jours, edited by Andreas Dufter and Susanne Zepp-Zwirner. De Gruyter, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111547619-008.
Wroblewski Ania. La vie des autres: Sophie Calle et Annie Ernaux, artistes hors-la-loi. Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2016.
1. See Wroblewski’s comparative analysis of the transgressive poetics and aesthetics of Ernaux and Sophie Calle.
2. See Things I Don’t Want to Know, The Cost of Living, and Real Estate.
3. See Ernaux’s Journal du dehors and La Vie extérieure, translated respectively as Exteriors and Things Seen.
4. For more on Ernaux’s place within a broader tradition of photobiography, see Kawakami and Arribert-Narce.
Dr Beth Kearney
she/elle
FHEA, PhD, M.A., BA (Hons.)
Lecturer in French and Francophone Studies
The School of Languages and Cultures
The University of Queensland
Treasurer of the Australian Society for French Studies
Secretary of Women in French: AustraliaCo-founder and co-producer of the Positionalities podcast
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Craig Howes, List Manager
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Call for Papers — Truth or Dare: Canadian Graphic Auto/Biography
Deadline: January 31, 2027 (Pacific Time)
Submission Length: Articles and graphic essays (6,000–8,000 words) and interviews (7,000–9,000 words)
Guest Editor: Melissa Jacques (University of British Columbia, Okanagan)
In 2022, Canadian Literature published a special issue on Canadian comics based on “80 Years and Beyond,” a two-day virtual symposium hosted by Western University. Both the conference and the special issue showcased the rich history of comics in Canada, from the Golden Age of Canadian comics (1940–1946) through to the explosion in independent comics in the late twentieth century and beyond. In their introduction, guest editors Candida Rifkind and Zachary J. A. Rondinelli acknowledged the practical limitations of representing Canadian comics in a single issue and called on others to continue working toward a “reorientation of the Canadian comics conversation, which has long languished in the rhetoric of nationalism and patriotism” (9).
This special issue on comics aims to answer their call while, at the same time, focusing on comics that fall under the rubric of life writing, broadly conceived. Tentatively titled “Truth or Dare,” after a game that pushes at the limits of truth and invites risk, the issue hopes to capture the incredible risk-taking of contemporary Canadian nonfictional graphic narratives. Consider politically informed biographies like Guy Delisle’s Hostage (2017) and Sarah Leavitt’s Agnes, Murderess (2019); graphic memoirs like Miriam Katin’s We Are on Our Own (2006), Geneviève Castrée’s Susceptible (2013), and Kate Beaton’s Ducks (2023); and speculative memoirs like Arizona O’Neill’s Opioids and Organs (2026); to texts that address history and experience through a method akin to Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation” (11), like the four volumes of katherena vermette’s A Girl Called Echo, Lee Lai’s Cannon (2025), and Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas’ The Lost Haida Manga (2026).
One guiding premise of this special issue is that comics are intrinsically suited to telling stories about lived experience that challenge narrative conventions governing time and space. This expansiveness—achieved through tensions between text and image, between panel and gutter, between the diegetic and the extradiegetic, and even between fact and fiction—makes possible complex forms of representation and engagement. As comics scholar Juliet J. Fall has argued, “reading comics is an embodied, codified, learnt and culturally-situated activity. Viewer involvement takes place through the distinctive devices, vocabulary and grammar of comics: parts are observed while the whole is sensed and constructed” (17).
Canada is a real international comics powerhouse, even beyond what “Canadians” produce. To read comics as a culturally situated activity within Canada, then, means engaging with work that both recognizes and extends beyond our borders. To that end, we invite contributions on contemporary Canadian writers and illustrators who are producing graphic auto/biography, memoir, and cultural history. In addition to essays on specific creators and texts, we welcome contributions including, but not limited to:
- essays on Canadian publishers like Drawn & Quarterly, whose roster includes award-winning work by Canadian as well as international writers and illustrators;
- essays that explore the relationship between comics and pedagogy, such as the inclusion of graphic nonfiction in elementary-, middle-, and high-school curricula;
- essays that explore the unique contribution of comics within post-secondary programs like narrative medicine or health humanities;
- autobiographical contributions about the teaching of graphic nonfiction in programs like creative writing and visual art; and
- essays on recent film adaptations of Canadian graphic memoirs, like Chester Brown’s Paying for It (dir. Sook-Yin Lee, 2024) or Sarah Leavitt’s Tangles (dir. Leah Nelson, 2026), which premiered this year at Cannes.
In addition to traditional essays, we invite interviews and graphic essays on any aspect of Canadian comics relevant to our contemporary experience.
Works Cited
Fall, Juliet J. “Worlds of Vision: Thinking Geographically through Comics.” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, vol. 20, no. 1, 2021, pp. 17–33, https://doi.org/10.14288/acme.v20i1.2037.
Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe, vol. 12, no. 2, 2008, pp. 1–14. Project MUSE, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/241115.
Rifkind, Candida, and Rondinelli, Zachary J. A. Introduction. Past, Presents, and Futures of Canadian Comics, special issue of Canadian Literature, no. 249, 2022, pp. 5–10, https://doi.org/10.14288/cl.vi249.197406.
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Submission Guidelines
Submissions should be sent online through our Open Journal Systems (OJS) portal.
All submissions to Canadian Literature must be original, unpublished work. Essays should follow current MLA bibliographic format (MLA Handbook, 9th ed.).
Please limit images accompanying submissions to those receiving substantial attention in the article. Contributors will be required to obtain permission to reproduce images in their article and pay for any permission costs. The journal will provide a template for permission requests; such requests must be completed before publication. Please send high-quality images as separate attachments along with your article file.
Please review our full submission guidelines prior to submitting.
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Contact Us
Feel free to contact the guest editor (melissa.jacques@ubc.ca) or Canadian Literature (can.lit@ubc.ca) with any questions.
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Call for Papers: Journal of Travel Literature Studies (JTLS)
deadline for submissions:
December 1, 2027
contact email:
Submissions Invited for Upcoming Issues
Dear Colleagues and Researchers,
The Editorial Board of the Journal of Travel Literature Studies (JTLS) warmly invites scholars, experts, and young researchers from the global academic community to submit their original, unpublished manuscripts for our upcoming issues.
JTLS is a peer-reviewed academic journal dedicated to bridging the fields of literary criticism, cultural geography, anthropology, and translation studies through the lens of travel. We aim to provide a vibrant, international platform for cutting-edge research on how travel shapes human text, culture, and history.
1. Scope and Core Columns
We welcome theoretical innovations, empirical analyses, text-based criticisms, and interdisciplinary approaches. Manuscripts can be submitted to any of our regular columns:
- Theoretical Studies of Travel Literature: Innovations, histories, and methodologies in travel writing theory, spatial criticism, and mobile aesthetics.
- Studies on Chinese Travel Literature: Critical analysis of classical and contemporary Chinese travelogues, geographical poetry, and diaspora narratives.
- Studies on Foreign Travel Literature: Interpretations of global travel writing, colonial/post-colonial expeditions, and Western/Eastern travel canons.
- Travel Culture and Sino-Foreign Cultural Exchanges: Investigations into how travel facilitates historical, political, and cultural dialogues between China and the world.
- Translation Studies of Travel Literature: Linguistic, cultural, and historical analyses of the translation and reception of travel texts across different languages.
- Book Reviews and Interviews: Critical evaluations of recent milestone publications in travel literature, or dialogues with prominent scholars in the field.
2. Submission Guidelines
To ensure a smooth editorial process, please adhere to the following technical and academic requirements:
- Language: Manuscripts should be written in clear, grammatical English.
- Word Count: For English submissions, articles should typically range between 6,000 and 10,000 words (including abstract, keywords, footnotes, and references).
- Components: Each submission must include a title, an abstract, 3–5 keywords, the main text, and a complete bibliography.
- Citation Style: Please follow latest standard academic formatting (APA).
- Originality: Submissions must represent original research that has not been published previously or is not currently under consideration elsewhere.
3. Why Publish with JTLS?
- Rigorous Peer Review: We employ a strict double-blind peer-review process handled by international experts to maintain the highest scholarly integrity.
- No Publication Fees: JTLS operates with No Article Processing Charges (APCs) and no submission fees. Publishing with us is completely free of charge.
- Academic Leadership: Spearheaded by a distinguished editorial board of leading experts in travel literature studies.
4. How to Submit
Please submit your manuscript directly to the editorial office via our official email address:
Editorial Email: jtls2026@163.com
Subject Line Format: JTLS Submission – [Author’s Name] – [Paper Title]
For further inquiries regarding formatting or the status of your submission, please feel free to contact the Editorial Secretariat at the email listed above or visit our official website: https://www.tlsjournal.com.
Sincerely,
The Editorial Board Journal of Travel Literature Studies (JTLS)