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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We are working on Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly’s annual annotated bibliography of critical and theoretical works on life writing, the most extensive reference of its kind, and before finalizing it, we want to make sure it is as timely, inclusive, and extensive as possible.

If in the last two years (from January 2024 to December 2025) you published, edited, or coedited a book; wrote an article for a journal or an essay for an edited collection; or completed your doctoral dissertation, we would appreciate having that information, so that we can incorporate it into the list. (We may have already harvested it, but this will make sure your work is noted.) 

We would request the following information:

·   Full bibliographic information for each text, formatted according to MLA 9 style

·   A one-sentence annotation per text

We are especially committed to noting publications in languages other than English. If you also could provide a title and annotation in English, however, that would be helpful. 

Please note that we will not be listing podcasts, book reviews, blogs, or works of exclusively creative writing. 

We would appreciate getting the information by Friday, February 27. Please send your information to our Critical Lifewriting Resources Bibliographer, Caroline Zuckerman (gabiog@hawaii.edu).

Thanks in advance. This installment of the bibliography, the most extensive annual critical survey of the field, will have 1,000 entries, more or less, and represents the most up-to-date survey of our field. We want to make sure your work appears within it.

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Dear colleagues,
 
We regret to inform you that the XIV Global Conference of the International Auto/Biography Association (IABA), scheduled to take place from July 21 to 24, 2026, in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, will not be held as planned.
 
Despite the strong relevance of the conference theme, “RESIST TO EXIST: Life Writing, Democracy, and Conceivable Futures,” the number of paper and panel submissions received by the close of the call for proposals was unfortunately insufficient to ensure the academic vitality and financial viability of the event.
 
After careful consideration, the Organizing Committee, in consultation with the local host institution, concluded that proceeding with the conference under these circumstances would not be feasible. We therefore decided to cancel the 2026 edition and to explore the possibility of organizing a future IABA conference in Brazil at a later date.
 
We sincerely thank all colleagues who submitted proposals or expressed interest in the conference, and we deeply regret any inconvenience or disappointment this decision may cause. We appreciate your understanding and continued engagement with the International Auto/Biography Association.
 
Further information regarding future events will be shared through IABA’s official communication channels.
 
With our best regards,
 
Organizing Committee
XIV Global IABA Conference
International Auto/Biography Association
iababrasil2026@gmail.com
 
Sergio Barcellos 
barcellossergio@aol.com
barcellos.sergio@gmail.com

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MLA 2027: Child Narratives of Violence

Modern Language Association Convention
January 7–10, 2027
Los Angeles, USA

deadline for submissions: 

March 13, 2026

Mary Gryctko

contact email: 

marygryctko@gmail.com

Children’s accounts of violence occupy a paradoxical space in public discourse: they are framed as both essential, unquestionable evidence, and, sometimes at the same time, as unreliable and prone to outside influence. Both framings rely on cultural constructions of the child’s “innocence.” This panel invites papers examining narratives of violence told by children, with a particular interest in experiences of institutional or state violence. How do these narratives complicate familiar tropes of children as voiceless victims in need of saving, or of certain topics as exclusively “adult” or “childish”?  How do child narrators themselves exploit, resist, and play with or into these tropes? How are these children’s narratives received, reframed, and utilized by adult interpolators?

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

Child social media content creators in Gaza/occupied Palestine

Narratives by or about child soldiers

Stories about and/or by children experiencing incarceration or police violence in the US

Narratives of immigrant or displaced children in the US

Children as perpetrators of violence

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MLA 2027 Panel : Contemporary Queer Asian/Asian American Travelers

Modern Language Association Convention

January 8 to 11, 2027

Los Angeles, USA

Deadline for Submissions: March 16, 2026

Existing scholarship in Asian (North) American Literature has long examined travel narratives about Asian travelers within immigrant or diasporic paradigms: Sau-ling Wong famously establishes the Necessity/Extravagance framework in understanding transpacific mobility by early Asian American immigrants (1993), whereas Chih-ming Wang reads the autobiographical travelogues by diasporic Vietnamese American writers as “homecoming stories” (2013), and Patricia Chu interprets them as “return narratives” deploying acts of countermemory and postmemory to address racial melancholia (2019). Yet Asian/Asian American travelers today embark their transnational and transpacific journeys for reasons beyond “reconnecting with their homelands,” thanks to unprecedented convenience of movement, global capitalism, (over)tourism, and new technologies of connection and socialization. Instead, their journeys are now defined by eclectic forms of leisure and privilege, pleasure and pain, adventure and self-exile, obligation and exploitation, post-war and contemporary geopolitics—introducing new erotics and ethics of mobility.

This panel attempts to examine the undertheorized figure of queer Asian/Asian American travelers (queer in every sense of the word) represented in contemporary Asian/American literatures, where they are differently racialized and sexualized in the strangely familiar Asia. We invite papers addressing (but not limited to): tourism and travel writing, travel by refugees, empire and its legacies, queerness, brownness, Asianness, ethnoracial passing, minor feelings, politics of leisure, etc.

Please send 250-word abstracts and brief bios to Kam Tou Pang, University of Macau (kamtou.pang@connect.um.edu.mo) and feel free to contact for any inquiries and ideas.

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Call for Papers
Current Writing 39 (2) 2027
 
Special Issue: Life Writing in/on southern Africa

Deadline for Submissions: March 15, 2026
 
While auto/biographical representation has long existed in the southern African region – indigenous oral life histories preceded and continued beyond European settlement – life writing remained a marginal focus in southern African literary scholarship for much of the twentieth century.
      In recent decades, however, a range of theoretical innovations – including poststructuralism, New Historicism, testimony studies, postcolonial critique, gender studies, and relational and performative models of selfhood – have reshaped understandings of how life narratives are constructed and interpreted. During the same period, life writing has gained significant scholarly visibility, with steady growth in monographs, journal articles, and postgraduate research. The genre itself has also undergone substantial transformation: from the traditionally conceived, factually verifiable account of a life to a wide proliferation of autobiographical forms across languages, media, genres, and communities.
      This special issue seeks contributions that shed new light on auto/biographical practices in or on the southern African region as well as on comparative connections between southern Africa and wider postcolonial concerns.
 
Topics may include, but are not limited to:
 Historical and Cultural Contexts

• Indigenous, mother-tongue, and community-based auto/biographical practices
• Histories of auto/biographical representation in particular Southern African countries
• Life writing, archives, and the politics of voice, visibility, and authority
• Studies of key figures in southern African life writing

Politics, Testimony, and Activism

• Autobiography as testimony, witnessing, or activism
• Life writing that challenges dominant cultural norms, including work from marginalised positions – LGBTQ+ identities, minority ethnic communities, rural or migratory contexts, disability, illness, addiction, or destitution
• Autobiographical engagement with the natural world – its flora, fauna, landscapes, and related sciences

Forms, Media, and Modes of Self-Representation

• Creative nonfiction, autofiction, personal essays, and other hybrid life-writing forms
• Dramatic, photographic, filmic, graphic, and other multimodal forms of self-representation
• Blogs, online journals, podcasts, and social-media micro-narratives

Scholarship, Reflexivity, and Teaching

• Auto-ethnography and reflexive scholarly self-narration in southern African contexts
• Life writing in southern African university curricula
• Publishing, readership, and the political economy of life writing

 
Editor:
This special issue will be edited by Judith Lütge Coullie.
 
Submission instructions:
Email submissions to Judith Coullie at coulliej@ukzn.ac.za
 
Key dates: 
15 March 2026: Submit brief biographical note of about 100 words and abstracts of about 200 words.
15 September 2026: Submit papers of about 6000 words.
June 2027: Expected publication date.

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Court Records and African Lives: Adjudication, Proof, and the Making of Social Knowledge

African Studies Association Conference, December 3-6, 2026

New Orleans, USA

Deadline for Submissions: March 15, 2026

Africanist scholars have long emphasized the richness of court archives. While adjudicators sought to isolate disputes, assign responsibility, and deliver judgment, litigants routinely expanded the frame. In persuading judges and audiences, litigants narrated ethnic pasts, kinship histories, labor trajectories, sexual experiences, medical conditions, religious and political claims. What began as a narrow legal question became a documentary moment in which expansive social histories were rendered legible. This panel shifts attention from what courts decided to what litigation required. The procedural demand for proof compelled participants to assemble biographies, moral claims, and collective histories as evidence. Treating case files as sites where social existence was strategically narrated, the panel seeks to study how legal encounters did not merely record African life but reorganized belonging and identity by transforming private memory into institutional knowledge and lived experience into archival authority. By centering litigants’ testimony rather than legal doctrine alone, the panel moves beyond mining court materials for information; it instead asks how the very process of adjudication generated dense formations of historical knowledge and how ordinary people, in meeting the demands of proof, shaped the institutional record that claimed authority over them.

Some helpful questions: How did disputes illuminate forms of social knowledge that administrative archives suppress? In what ways did adjudication transform private biography into public, institutional record? How can retrospective testimony in early court records become an evidentiary record of precolonial pasts?

Subthemes include, but are not limited to, the following:

Proof, Procedure, and Social Legibility

Embodied Evidence, Intimacy, and Legal Claims

War, Memory, and Retrospective Testimony

Slavery, Freedom, and Legal Claims

Marriage, Custody, and the Adjudication of Kinship

If you would like to join this panel, please send a 250-word abstract and a short bio to Oluwasola Daniels: oidaniels@ucdavis.edu by March 15th, 2026.

Contact Email

oidaniels@ucdavis.edu

URL

CFP: Court Records and African Lives: Adjudication, Proof, and the Making of Social Knowledge. African Studies Association 2026 Conference. [Announcement]

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The Self at Scale

Workshop

Bard College Berlin in cooperation with ICI Berlin

May 4–5, 2026, in Berlin, Germany

deadline for submissions: March 15, 2026

contact email: 

theselfatscale@ici-berlin.org

Why does it seem so productive today to be simultaneously the subject and object of one’s writing? This workshop starts from the premise that certain writing and artistic practices position the theorizing self as a mediator between the subject and larger scales of social organization.

The contemporary fascination with autotheory, autofiction, and related genres, such as auto-sociobiography or mythobiography, is a case in point. These forms show the interplay between theorizations of personal life, subjectivity and historical or collective experience. However, these practices also have their own histories. The workshop is therefore interested in the politics and aesthetics of this interplay, in the genealogies of these forms, and in the moments when these practices have intensified.

The aim of the workshop is to facilitate dialogue between multiple discourses. One such discourse is feminist theory, which has long offered insights into the concept of the theorizing self as mediator. Another discursive resource is the theory and practice of life writing, from the early 20th century onwards. It is precisely within the space between theory and practice, between history and biography, that the ‘unexpected subject’ can emerge (to borrow the term of Italian critic and theorist Carla Lonzi). Such tension has been framed in works of life writing that deliberately play with the implications of this problem, such as Luisa Passerini’s Autoritratto di gruppo (Autobiography of a Generation, 2008), Annie Ernaux’s Les années (The Years, 2008), the collective autobiography Baby Boomers. Vite parallele dagli anni Cinquanta ai cinquant’anni (written by Rosi Braidotti, Roberta Mazzanti, Serena Sapegno, and Annamaria Tagliavini, 2003), as well as Carla Lonzi’s seminal Autoritratto (Self-portrait, 2022), published in 1969. In other contexts, and in relation to the problems posed by racialization and more recent developments in the conceptualization of sexuality, authors such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Saidiya Hartman, Sara Ahmed, and Paul B. Preciado, have turned to forms of autotheory to reconsider the relationship between embodied subjectivity, selfhood, and the world. Alongside gender, race, and postcolonial critique, what additional insights could autotheoretical writing offer to a renewed reflection on class, its representations, and its lived contradictions?

In what ways do contemporary practices of autotheory preserve, or intentionally erase, a potential space of freedom? Rather than preemptively reading this genre as a symptom of narcissism and self-referentiality, this question aims to explore the reasons behind its attraction for readers and its global success. Traditionally, the ‘freedom’ of the liberal individual is located in the private spheres of the domestic or inner life. However, in a post-Marxist and post-Foucauldian landscape, such spaces of freedom appear to be possible only through the disavowal of one’s social embeddedness. Feminist and critical instances of the practice of autotheory generally aim to open up or create spaces in which a focus on the self functions as an antidote and an alternative to a multiplicity of discourses connected to power. These discourses include the logocentrism of canonical theoretical discourse, in which the abstraction of theory is seen to cloud or obscure specific subject positions, their histories, and their epistemologies. This workshop, which is designed to be accessible to students, will bring together scholars, writers, and artists. Some of the questions at the heart of this CfP emerged from conversations with students at Bard College Berlin. The workshop will open with a discussion of selected key texts that will inform the presentations in subsequent sessions.

The organizers welcome proposals for 20-minute talks; presentations may address but are not limited to the following topics:

• Autofiction and autotheory in relation to feminism
• Autofiction and autotheory as critical methods for understanding class relations
• Trans and Queer adoptions of autofiction and autotheory
• Self-referential practices in the arts
• Theories of identity in relation to theories of self
• Theories of selfhood in literature and life writing
• Possibilities of collective selfhood in autofiction and autotheory

Abstracts of 300 words and short bios should be sent by 15 March 2026 to theselfatscale@ici-berlin.org

The workshop takes place in person May 4-5, 2026 in Berlin, Germany.  

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The Expatriate Archive Centre (EAC) invites master’s students worldwide to submit theses that contribute to the scholarship of expatriation studies. 
 
The winner of the thesis award will receive €500, the executive summary of the thesis will be published online by the EAC and organisations involved in this initiative.
 
The submission deadline is 31 March 2026.
 
Candidates must ensure their thesis meets the following criteria:
 

• it relates to the EAC’s mission and objectives;
• it amplifies the importance of expatriation studies and improves the understanding of expatriate life;
• it is written in English;
• it has been awarded a mark of 8/10 or more (or equivalent, e.g., 16/20 or more, or an ‘A’);
• it is from the last four academic years (2021–22, 2022–23, 2023–24, or 2024–25).

The following criteria are used to assess submitted theses, the weight of each in percentages:

• originality and innovation (20%);
• technical quality (30%);
• composition (10%);
• potential to contribute to the stimulation of scholarly (e.g. theoretical, methodological, etc.) perspectives regarding the topic of expatriation (20%);
• potential to contribute to the stimulation of practical engagement by policy, industry and/or civil society actors with the topic of expatriation (20%).

 
All candidates must submit the digital application form
If you would like to know more about the evaluation process, the jurors, how to apply, or our partner organisations, please visit the EAC Thesis Award page. Questions can be sent to welcome@xpatarchive.com.”
 
Lale A. Uribeechevarria
Director
Expatriate Archive Centre
Paramaribostraat 20
2585 GN  The Hague (the Netherlands)
T. +31 (0)70 427 2014
F. +31 (0)70 427 2016
director@xpatarchive.com
www.xpatarchive.com

Follow us on:
Facebook, Instagram & LinkedIn
Sign up for our semi-annual newsletter to learn more about our latest activities!

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Children’s Testmonies.
Unveiling historical and art-historical archives.
Conference at the University of Bonn/Center for Slavery and Dependency Studies (BCDSS)
Oct 22nd -24th 2026
Deadline for Submissions March 28, 2026
 
The conference addresses the question of how children, as historical actors, recount and bear witness to their experiences. These often include physical and psychological violence, as well as experiences resulting from separation, war, and displacement.
 
The field of testimonial research has been gaining importance in historical research for several years, although children and young adults are often overlooked in these contexts.1 This is particularly true for the pre-modern period, as the available sources are considered insufficient. We, on the other hand, argue that they should be considered untapped. For this reason, the declared aim of this conference is to develop cultural-historical archives that could close the postulated source deficit. This also applies in particular to archives on visual culture, which have grown steadily in recent years and are still awaiting systematic development. Historically, children underwent a radical reevaluation in the early modern period. This applies to both Europe and non-European, colonial contexts. To name just two examples: children’s statements in early modern court practice have been unjustly marginalized, while recent dependency research has reevaluated the importance of children and young people as laborers. This opens up perspectives for a new history of interdependence that is methodologically and epistemologically relevant to the concept of the conference. The aim is to broaden the view beyond Europe in order to bring together research areas that have previously worked in isolation from one another and to respond to the call for a decolonization of the history of childhood and children.2 At the same time, non-textual sources in particular are the focus of interest. Examples include music, drawings, and evidence of material culture, to name but a few.
 
The aim of the conference is to synthesize perspectives from historical and art-historical research and to (finally) take children seriously in their role as witnesses. We welcome methodologically reflective contributions that deal specifically with children as contemporary witnesses or with children’s testimonies in the early modern period. Entanglement-historical perspectives, including interdisciplinary ones, can be considered, as can disciplinary discussions on the important question of material, visual, oral, and textual archives, with contributions from the perspective of memory history and memory theory being particularly welcome:

Please send your proposals (max. one page) with a short academic CV by March 28, 2026, to the conference organizers:

 
claudia.jarzebowski@uni-bonn.de (Claudia Jarzebowski) and bmuench@uni-bonn.de (Birgit Münch).
 
1 Goodman, Gail S. “Children’s Testimony in Historical Perspective,” Journal of Social Issues 40, no. 2 (1984): 9-31; Yuille, John C. “The Systematic Assessment of Children’s Testimony,” Canadian Psychology/Psychologie Canadienne 29, no. 3 (1988): 247-262.

2 Niewenhuys, Olga: Theorizing childhood(s): Why we need postcolonial perspectives. In: Childhood 1/20 (2013), S. 3-8.
 
Notifications will be sent out by April 22nd 2026. A (limited) budget is available for reimbursement of travel expenses.

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Here are panels for the Modern Language Association Conference for 2027, to be held from January 7 to January 10 in Los Angeles, California, USA

Autobiography After the Algorithm
This panel invites papers on how life writing evolves through digital technologies, including social media and generative AI. We welcome analyses of new forms, authenticity, and agency. Please send a 250-word abstract and brief bio. Deadline for submissions: Monday, March 16, 2026
Kimberly Hall, Wofford C (hallka@wofford.edu)

Cooking Up a Life: Foodways in Black Los Angeles
How does food—in the home, in the restaurant, and beyond—tell stories about Black Los Angeles? How are Black auto/biographical food narratives essential sites of hope, joy, and liberation? Submit 300-word abstracts & short bios.
Deadline for submissions: Monday, March 16, 2026
Kimberly Mack, University of Illinois (krmack@illinois.edu)

The Life Writing Workshop
This session will discuss work-in-progress in life writing scholarship; participants will circulate brief drafts (15-30 pages) ahead of time. Please submit an abstract and CV by 3/20. Deadline for submissions: Friday, March 20, 2026
Anthony S. Foy, Swarthmore College (afoy1@swarthmore.edu)

New Directions in Life Writing
This session will showcase recent critical and theoretical developments in the field of life writing. Please submit an abstract and CV by 3/20. Deadline for submissions: Friday, March 20, 2026
Anthony S. Foy, Swarthmore College (afoy1@swarthmore.edu)

Anthony S. Foy

Associate Professor & Chair 

Department of English Literature  

Swarthmore College 

Swarthmore, PA 19081 

610-690-6867 

LPAC 207

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CFP – Self-Writing and Migration. Ego-Documents by Researcher in the Humanities and Social Sciences. 19th and 20th Century

Diasporas. Circulations, migrations, histoire

Coordinator : Michela Passini (CNRS-IHMC)

Deadline for proposals: March 16, 2026

Proposals for articles, in French or English, falling within one or more of the themes outlined below and/or proposing extensions to these themes, should be submitted to the following address : michela.passini@ens.psl.eu, before 16 March 2026.

They must include a provisional title, an abstract of the paper mentioning the methodology and the type of sources used (maximum 3,000 characters) and a brief bio-bibliographical presentation (maximum 2,000 characters).

In 1952, the theme chosen for the Benjamin Franklin Lectures at the University of Pennsylvania was “cultural migration”, the migration of German-speaking academics of Jewish origin who had fled to the United States to escape Nazi persecution. On this occasion, Franz L. Neumann, Henri Peyre, Erwin Panofsky and Paul Tillich, among others, are invited to reflect on their experiences as “European scholars in America”. Each scholar – among the most recognized in their respective fields and holding prestigious positions in North American academic institutions – then acts as the representative of his or her discipline, evoking the situation of his or her field of research in the United States before the 1930s, and exploring both the contributions of immigrant researchers and the way in which his own practice evolved through contact with North American colleagues. The result is a pacified image of scholarly migration, in which silences and discreet allusions reveal a great deal about the stages of the difficult adaptation process faced by even these relatively linear researchers in their host countries.

The testimonies of these scholars are part of a series of texts that revisit, question or challenge the experience of migration. Whether published or unpublished, whether in the form of a public statement or, as in the case of correspondence, intended for a more confidential circulation, these texts invite us to consider migration over a long period of time : that of the scholar’s arrival in his host country (whether permanent or temporary), but also that of his gradual and more or less successful adaptation to a new scientific environment. They also encourage us to take into account and take seriously the rough edges of exchanges, the phenomena of resistance – on the part of both immigrant and local researchers – and the inertia and relative watertightness of scholarly traditions that have already taken root, in contrast to a discourse, often maintained by the migrants themselves, of rapid and successful integration into their host institutions, and a rhetoric of “pioneers” going out to found new disciplines in an almost totally virgin scholarly space. Compared to other types of sources, these texts finally allow us to rethink contemporary scientific migration from the perspective of the intimate, emotional and affective dimensions of knowledge production.

Focusing on a material and practical approach to these ego-documents, this issue of Diasporas aims to rethink the reflexive return to the experience of migration carried out by researchers in the humanities and social sciences, wherever they come from, throughout the 19th and 20th century.

Priority will be given to the following themes, which are non-exclusive and often mutually permeable :

• Forms and strategies of integration into the host scholarly environment : we are going to analyze and measure adaptation (but also possible resistance) to the use of another language, to different forms and registers of scientific writing ; to the methods, but also to the working, teaching, information-gathering and processing practices that prevail in the host institutions ; to new places of scientific practice and the conventions that are specific to them.
• The relationship with objects and workplaces : books, archives, museum objects and collections, fields, excavation sites… How is the relationship with the materiality of objects of study and workplaces no longer available or accessible ? How are methods being transformed in the face of these shortages ?
• The way in which local researchers and immigrant scholars perceive and describe changes in their discipline as a result of the latter’s arrival ; the rise of disciplinary mythologies linked to migration (in art history, for example, the 1970s and 1980s saw the development of a narrative of the origins of the discipline in the United States, in which the arrival of German-speaking researchers in the 1930s played a central role).
• The effects of censorship and self-censorship, particularly as regards the difficulties encountered in the new scholarly environment, the welcome given to migrants by locals, forms of professional protectionism, stereotypes about migrants that develop in the host area, and anti-Semitism in the case of Jewish scholars. The material and financial situation of migrant researchers is also one of the subjects most rarely raised in the texts they produce.
• The relationship with politics in the host country, whether in terms of immigrant scholars’ view of local political life, and their possible participation in it, or more specifically their role in university politics and in creating more or less informal assistance structures for migrants.
• The gendered dimension of scholarly migration : how does migration impact the trajectory of female researchers, and how does it influence their collective visibility in the world of scientific work ?
• Finally, we will examine the role that migration plays in the construction of a public image of the scholar, and the possible specificity of the trajectories of researchers in the humanities and social sciences compared to those in other disciplines.

Bibliographie

Écriture de soi, egodocuments, correspondances de savants

Bennett M. Berger, Authors of their own Lives. Intellectual Autobiographies of Twenty American Socilogists, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1990.

Matthieu Béra, « De l’intérêt des correspondances pour la sociologie et pour son histoire en particulier », Les Études sociales, 2, 2014, p. 5-24.

Rudolf Dekker (dir.), Egodocuments and History. Autobiographical Writing in its Social Context since the Middle Ages, Hilversum, Verloren, 2002.

Maurice Halbwachs, Écrits d’Amérique. Édition établie et présentée par Christian Topalov, Paris, Éditions de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 2012.

Patricia Vannier (dir.), La sociologie en toutes lettres. L’histoire de la discipline à travers les correspondances, Toulouse, Presses universitaires du Midi, 2019.

Françoise Waquet, Une histoire émotionnelle du savoir, xviie -xxie siècle, Paris, CNRS Éditions, 2019.

Communautés savantes

Christian Jacob (dir.), Lieux de savoir. Espaces et communautés, Paris, Albin Michel, 2007.

Olivier Orain et Jean-Christophe Marcel, « Penser par écoles », numéro thématique de la Revue d’histoire des sciences humaines, 32, 2018.

Herman Paul (dir.), How to be a Historian. Scholarly Personæ in Historical Studies, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2019.

Migrations d’élite et migrations scientifiques

Peter Alter (dir.), Out of the Third Reich. Refugee Historians in Post-War Britain, London, New York, I.B. Tauris, 1998.

Marianne Amar, Nancy L. Green (dir.), Migrations d’élites. Une histoire-monde (xvie-xxie siècle), Tours, Presses universitaires François-Rabelais, 2022.

Stefan Berger, Philipp Müller, Dynamics of Emigration. Émigré Scholars and the Production of Historical Knowledge in the 20th Century, New York, Oxford, Berghahn, 2022.

Hélène Bertheleu, Laure Teulières, Marianne Amar (dir.), Mémoires des migrations, temps de l’histoire, Tours, Presses universitaires François-Rabelais, 2015.

Peter Burke, Exiles and Expatriates in the History of Knowledge, 1500-2000, Brandeis University Press, Historical Society of Israel, University Press of New England, Lebanon (New Hampshire), 2017.

Elsie Cohen, « Intellectuel·les en exil en France et en Allemagne : entre précarisation et engagement », Emulations. Revue de sciences sociales, 51, 2025, p. 73-92.

Antoon De Baets, « Exile and Acculturation. Refugee Historians since the Second World War », The International History Review, 28, 2, 2006, p. 316-349.

Delphine Diaz, Antonin Durand, Romy Sanchez, « Dans l’intimité de l’exil », numéro thématique de la Revue d’histoire du xixe siècle, 61, 2020-2.

Judith Friedlander, A Light in Dark Times. The New School for Social Research and its University in Exile, New York, Columbia University Press, 2019.

Giuliana Gemelli (dir.), The “Unacceptables”. American Foundations and Refugee Scholars between the Two Wars and after, Bruxelles, Presses Interuniversitaires Européennes, Peter Lang, 2000.

Eckart Goebel, Sigrid Weigel (dir.), “Esacpe to Life”. German Intellectuals in New York. A Compendium on Exile after 1933, Berlin, Boston, De Gruyter, 2012.

Nancy L. Green, François Weil (dir.), Citoyenneté et émigration. Les politiques du départ, Paris, Éditions de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 2006.

Jérémy Guedj, « Les espaces de l’intellectuel en exil. Trajectoires et réseaux immigrés dans le Paris d’après-guerre (1945-1960) », Revue européenne des migrations internationales, 33, 2017.

Ethan Katz, « Displaced Historians. Dialectical Histories », Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 7, 2, 2008, p. 135-155.

Claus Dieter Krohn, Wissenschaft im Exil. Deutsche Sozial- und Wirtschaftswissenschaftler in den USA und die New School for Social Research, Francfort, New York, Campus, 1987.

Jacqueline Lindenfeld, Gabrielle Varro, « Language maintenance among “Fortunates Immi-grants”. The French in the United States and Americans in France », International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 189, 2008, p. 115-131.

Karen Michels, Transplantierte Kunstwissenschaft. Die deutschsprachige Kunstgeschichte im amerikanischen Exil, Studien aus dem Warburg-Haus, Berlin, Boston, De Gruyter, 1999.

Contact Information

Michela Passini (CNRS/IHMC)

Call in French and English: https://ihmc.ens.psl.eu/appel-contributions-ecriture-de-soi-et-migration-revue-diasporas.html

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Call for Articles–Global Reader on Documenting Women’s Lives in the Historical Record

Deadline for Proposals:  March 16, 2026

Dear Colleagues,

We have contracted with Bloomsburg Publishing to co-edit a global reader on documenting women’s lives. Our specific focus will be women, gender, sexualities, and human rights in the broadest sense, as reflected in the documentation provided by personal, institutional, and organizational records. We seek contributions that critically examine how women’s lives and experiences are recorded, erased, contested, or reclaimed across diverse cultural, political, and geographic contexts.

We welcome chapter proposals addressing any country or diaspora and engaging with one or more of the following themes:

• Women and intersectional feminism, including the politics of medicine, contested histories, and the attempted regulation of women’s bodies
• The impact of violence, including domestic, sexual, political, on women, ethnic minorities, queer communities, and transwomen populations
• War and conflict reflected by the destruction of records, terrorism and the disappeared, erasure of documents, and the repatriation of records
• Contemporary global events and their contexts from the women’s perspective, including global conferences, Truth Commissions, United Nations, swisspeace, and related transnational initiatives

We welcome original research, comparative studies, case studies, suggested reprints with updates, and examination of best practices. Other types of work will be considered. 

Please submit proposals or any questions to womensglobalreader@gmail.com

The PROJECT TIMELINE is as follows:

Proposals due:  March 16, 2026

The proposal abstract should include one to three paragraphs providing an overview of the topic, proposed thesis, five to ten sources that reflect the basic foundation of research related to the subject. Proposals will be accepted on a rolling basis and authors will be given approval to begin developing their manuscripts as soon as possible.

First deadline for manuscripts: September 7, 2026. Reviews will be conducted in an ongoing manner and feedback provided to authors as soon as possible.

Additional peer review (as needed):  January 18, 2027

Final manuscripts (avg 5,000 – 7,000 words) draft due:  February 18, 2027

Book manuscript submitted to the publisher: March 16, 2027

We hope you will consider sharing your research and expertise with us. Please do not hesitate to let us know if you have any questions.

Thank you,

Elizabeth Myers
womensglobalreader@gmail.com

Tanya Zanish-Belcher
womensglobalreader@gmail.com

Contact Information

Tanya Zanish-Belcher, Director
Special Collections & Archives, ZSR Library
Wake Forest University

Contact Email

womensglobalreader@gmail.com

https://networks.h-net.org/group/announcements/20140736/call-articles-global-reader-documenting-womens-lives-historical-record

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Call for Papers: 

“The Road Less Travelled? Irish-European Lives and Multi-Modal Approaches to Life-Writing”

Online Conference 25-26 June 2026

Deadline for Submissions: March 30, 2026

Organisers:

Associate Prof. Sabine Egger (Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick)

Apl. Prof. Dr. Fergal Lenehan (Friedrich Schiller University of Jena)

Life-writing, the purposeful recording of one’s own or of someone else’s life experience, is now seen as inherently multi-genre and multi-modal, well beyond the narrower parameters of memoir and autobiography. Literary Irish Studies has engaged greatly with both memoir and autobiography, not least that of Irish migrants. However, the study of Irish migrant memoir and autobiography has, understandably, been dominated by Irish-American, Irish-British and, more recently, Irish-Australian migrants.  The publishing of Belfast-born artist Elizabeth Shaw’s Irish-British-East German memoir, How I Came to Berlin, for the first time in English in 2025, and current research suggest that there may indeed be a hidden reservoir of Irish-European life-writing that has still to be investigated by scholars. This online conference, therefore, aims to explore life-writing by those Irish who have found themselves in various parts of Europe as migrants, exiles or travellers; in person, in imagination and in the digital world. Furthermore, we are interested in a broad range of modes of life-writing, for example by women and members of marginalised groups that may have found it difficult to position themselves to narrate their own life histories in the sustained, authoritative style associated with the classic forms of autobiography, but also by others transcending generic and medial boundaries. 

Thus, for our online conference on 25 and 26 June 2026 we are looking for scholars to examine Irish-European life-writing from a multi-generic and multi-modal perspective. Topics to be examined may include: 

• Irish-European memoir and autobiography in comparison with Irish-American and Irish-British memoir and autobiography (and those linked to other global. diasporas), in English, Irish and indeed further languages when applicable.
• Irish-Central European life-writing, particularly with a focus on German-speaking areas, understood in terms of diaspora, travel destinations, points of reference; the latter may also be linguistic, historical, social or cultural connection points in Irish writing and Irish lives (e.g. Hamilton’s Speckled People as a contribution to ‘New Irish’ autobiographical writing); Irish-Eastern European life-writing.
• Studies of the personal essayistic engagement with Irish-European life and lives, from Hubert Butler to Emilie Pine, and incorporating the essays published in  publications specialising in the essay form, including The Dublin Review, The Stinging Fly, Winter Pages, Irish Pages and Tolka, as well as other publications. 
• Irish-European autofiction and its position between life-writing and fictional writing.
• Visual-oriented approaches to life-writing, such as auto-fictional, biographical and autobiographical graphic novels, from an Irish-European perspective.    
• Online versions of Irish-European personal essay-writing, such as blogs and vlogs and social media accounts dedicated principally to the topic.
• Varieties of Irish-European podcasting or visual media which may be seen as taking a personal essayistic form. 
• Multi-modality in Irish-European women’s life-writing. 
• Overviews of autobiography and related forms of life-writing in other European literatures (ideally in comparison with Ireland, but also contextualising overviews without explicit reference to Ireland)

Abstracts, setting out clearly the goal and potential arguments of your paper, should be sent to: fergal.lenehan@uni-jena.de and sabine.egger@mic.ul.ie by 30 March 2026. The conference is free and open to all. Prof. Liam Harte (University of Manchester) has been confirmed as one of our keynote speakers. Funding for the publication of outcomes of the conference has already been secured for a peer-reviewed open-access e-book with a renowned academic publisher. Presenters with suitable papers will be asked to turn their oral presentation into a written chapter, to be handed in by September 2026. Contact Information

Dr. Sabine Egger, Associate Professor
Department of German Studies | Mary Immaculate College | University of Limerick | www.mic.ul.ie
S.C.R. | Limerick | V94 VN26 | IRELAND | sabine.egger@mic.ul.ie | research profile
Irish Centre for Transnational Studies (ICTS), Joint Director | ICTS  

PI: DAAD Project Elizabeth Shaw’s Irish Berlin  
 
Apl. Prof. Dr. Fergal Lenehan
https://redico.eu
Intercultural Studies/IWK, Jena
fergal.lenehan@uni-jena.de
Tel.: +49 (0)3641 – 944379
Fax: +49 (0)3641 – 944372
Home Office: +49 (0)1737645442 Contact Emailsabine.egger@mic.ul.ie URLhttps://www.mic.ul.ie/Elizabeth-Shaws-Irish-Berlin/events?index=0

https://networks.h-net.org/group/announcements/20143067/online-tagung-road-less-travelled-irish-european-lives-and-multi-modal

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Call for Papers – Memory Activism Across the Lusophone World: (Im)Possibilities of Decolonial Practice

Dossiê temático da revista Portuguese Studies Review

Encontra-se aberta a chamada para contribuições ao número especial da Portuguese Studies Review dedicado ao tema Memory Activism Across the Lusophone World: (Im)Possibilities of Decolonial Practice, que pretende reunir novos estudos sobre activismo da memória, práticas de contestação e intervenções de teor decolonial no espaço lusófono.

O dossiê parte da intensificação, na última década, de debates públicos e académicos em torno de monumentos, estátuas, topónimos e outros elementos associados ao colonialismo, à escravatura e à supremacia branca. Embora estes processos de reinscrição simbólica não sejam novos, a sua visibilidade recente — em particular após o Verão de 2020 — reacendeu discussões sobre o impacto das comemorações materiais e imateriais na memória colectiva e na construção de identidades nacionais.

A proposta editorial procura inserir os casos lusófonos num quadro comparativo mais amplo, retomando contributos da crítica pós-colonial e dos estudos de memória que expandiram o conceito de lieux de mémoire para incluir o legado imperial (Nora; Geppert & Müller; Achille et al.). O número especial pretende assim contribuir para o debate internacional, ainda limitado em língua inglesa, sobre activismo da memória e dinâmicas de contestação associadas à história colonial portuguesa.

Consulta abaixo a chamada completa.

Via CFPList

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Call for Papers – Memory Activism Across the Lusophone World: (Im)Possibilities of Decolonial Practice

Special Issue – Portuguese Studies Review
 

Deadline for Submissions: March 31, 2026

Focusing on the past decade – particularly the summer of 2020 and its aftermath, which witnessed an unprecedented wave of iconoclastic acts against monuments and statues linked to colonialism, white supremacy, and slavery, alongside renewed calls for the decolonisation of museums and urban toponyms – much of the subsequent scholarly attention in English has centred on developments in the Anglophone world. Although these incidents, including but not limited to removals, renaming, and other symbolic transformations are not new and have long been part of political and cultural strategies of regimes and societies throughout history, their contemporary resurgence invites renewed reflection on how tangible and intangible forms of commemorations continue to affect national memory and collective identities. Against this backdrop, this special issue seeks to bring together new studies on parallel and emerging developments within the Lusophone (Portuguese-speaking) world.

By situating Lusophone case studies within a broader and longer historical pattern of memory contestations, and drawing on postcolonial memory scholarship – among them, Sites of Imperial Memory (Geppert and Müller, 2015) and Postcolonial Realms of Memory (Achille et al., 2020), which extend Pierre Nora’s (1984–1992) concept of lieux de mémoire (‘sites of memory’) to include imperialism and colonialism in national memory – the special issue aims to contribute to the expanding, though still comparatively limited, English-language scholarship on memory activism involving present-day commemorations and spaces connected with Portuguese colonial history. It will examine decolonial practices and explore the (im)possibilities of these efforts, whether through overt acts of iconoclasm or through subtler interventions – such as artistic or media-based engagements with ‘sites’. At the same time, it will recognise that such acts, in seeking either to erase entirely commemorations associated with Portuguese colonialism or to open space alongside commemorations for marginalised voices and silenced histories, simultaneously provoke retaliatory responses from those who criticise these (decolonial) actions.                                                                                                

We seek contributions that engage with this outline, and while we welcome all studies addressing memory activism in relation to colonial memory sites of Portuguese provenance within Lusophone spaces, submissions should focus on events from the past decade (2015–2025), or revisit incidents before 2015 if they are examined in light of recent developments concerning ‘sites’, and relate to one or more of the themes listed below.
 

Commemoration, memory, and resistance in Lusophone contexts:

• Analyses of commemorative and memory politics, including critiques of preservation, erasure, and (re)interpretation by government bodies, cultural institutions, or museums, particularly in relation to enduring colonial heritage and objects associated with colonialism.
• Resistance to decolonisation initiatives, including political, institutional, or social defences of colonial sites, as well as responses from far-right movements, nationalist groups, or other actors opposing changes to public commemorative memory.
• Public debates, controversies, or media coverage surrounding the maintenance, removal, or reinterpretation of colonial monuments and spaces.

Decolonisation, activist interventions, and cultural engagements in Lusophone contexts:

• Acts of iconoclasm, vandalism, and other physical interventions which directly target colonial sites.
• Popular and grassroots activist-led initiatives confronting or transforming Portuguese colonial sites, including protests, guided tours, and pedagogical interventions to decolonise sites.
• Artistic and cultural interventions in any medium – literature, theatre, film, television, photography, or modern artworks – that challenge or reframe colonial sites and their associated narratives.
• Collaborative or participatory projects that amplify marginalised voices, interrogate historical silences, or foster new forms of collective remembrance.

The chosen selection of the articles will be submitted to the journal Portuguese Studies Review for a special issue, with publication anticipated sometime in 2027. Please note that the journal is not open access and is freely available only to members of the Lusophone Studies Association (LSA). Contributors should be aware that the readership is therefore primarily academic and association-affiliated.

Initially, we seek abstracts of 350–500 words from potential contributors, along with a short bio (including institutional affiliation if any) of no more than 250 words. Please note that abstracts that are accepted will likely be included in the special issue following the contents page(s), under the title of contributors. As such, please ensure high-quality abstract submissions.

Abstracts, titles, and short bios must be sent by 31 March 2026 to both editors of the special issue: Andrew Nunes (studies.andrewnunes@gmail.com) and Leonor Rosas (leosrosas@gmail.com)

The goal is to incorporate nine articles with an introduction by the editors, resulting in the special issue consisting of ten articles. Once authors are informed if their abstract has been accepted (first in the special issue proposal to be sent to Portuguese Studies Review, and then in the final issue if it is accepted by the journal) authors will be required to submit their article of no more than 7,000–8,000 words, including footnotes, by 30 October 2026. Please note to NOT include images in your submissions, so please best describe anything that would otherwise have been done so using visual figures. Moreover, submissions must be in English and follow British spelling and the Chicago Manual of Style (footnote referencing with no bibliography at the end of the article). After receiving feedback from both the editors and anonymous reviewers, authors will revise their articles and send their finalised version in accordance with the provisional timeline below:

UNDERTAKINGS AND DUE DATES:

‘Call for Papers’ published online to solicit potential contributors. Dec. 2025

Potential contributors submit title, abstract (350–500 words, excluding references), and short bio (250 words). 31 Mar 2026

Editors review abstracts and notify contributors of acceptance or rejection. Apr. 2026

Submission of full special issue proposal to Portuguese Studies Review. May 2026

Contributors notified of acceptance of the full proposal and invited to submit full articles. May 2026

Submission of full articles (7,000–8,000 words, including footnotes; no images; English – British spelling; Chicago Manual of Style). 30 Oct. 2026

Full paper review by editors and anonymous peer reviewers. Nov. 2026 – Jan. 2027

Contributors submit revised papers based on reviewer/editor feedback. Feb. – Mar. 2027

Finalisation of special issue for journal editorial board review. Apr. – Jun. 2027

Target publication of special issue in Portuguese Studies Review. Q3–4 2027

We thank you for your interest in this special issue and look forward to receiving your submissions.

WORKS CITED:

Achille, Etienne, Charles Forsdick and Lydie Moudileno (eds.), Postcolonial Realms of Memory: Sites and Symbols in Modern France (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020).

Geppert, Dominik and Frank Lorenz Müller (eds.), Sites of Imperial Memory: Commemorating Colonial Rule in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015).

Nora, Pierre (ed.), Les Lieux de Mémoire, 7 volumes (Paris: Gallimard, 1984–1992). 

SELECT FURTHER READINGS:

Bethencourt, Francisco, ‘A Memória da Expansão’, in Francisco Bethencourt and Kirti Chaudhuri (eds.), História da Expansão Portuguesa: Ultimo Imperio e Recentramento (1930–1998), vol. 5 (Lisbon: Circulo de Leitores, 1999), pp. 442–80.

Cardina, Miguel, O Atrito da Memória: Colonialismo, Guerra e Descolonização no Portugal Contemporâneo (Lisbon: Tinta da China, 2023).

Gensburger, Sarah and Jenny Wüstenberg (eds.), De-Commemoration: Removing Statues and Renaming Places (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2023).

Gutman, Yifat and Jenny Wüstenberg et al. (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Memory Activism (Abingdon: Routledge, 2023).

Jerónimo, Miguel Bandeira and Walter Rossa (eds.), Patrimónios Contestados (Lisbon: Público, 2021).

Nunes, Andrew, ‘Decolonising Difficult Heritage Through Political Graffiti: (Re)Interpreting the Commemoration of Pedro Álvares Cabral in Santarém, Portugal’, Patrimônio e Memória, vol. 21, no. 1 (2025), 1–29.

Peralta, Elsa, Lisboa e a Memória do Império: Património, Museus e Espaço Público (Lisbon: Outro Modo and Le Monde Diplomatique – Edição Portuguesa, 2017). 

Ribeiro, Carla, ‘Wars of Memory and Identity Narratives in a Post-colonial World: The Case of the Monument to the Discoveries in Lisbon’, in Rodrigo Christofoletti (ed.), Heritage in Eight Acts: International Themes (Cham: Springer, 2024), pp. 1–22.

Rosas, Leonor, De quem se esqueceu Lisboa? – A luta pela inscrição da memória anticolonial e antirracista no espaço público (Vila Nova de Famalicão: Húmus, 2023).

Sousa, Vítor de, ‘Memory as an Interculturality Booster in Maputo, Through the Preservation of the Colonial Statuary’, Comunicação e Sociedade, special issue (2019), 269–86.

studies.andrewnunes@gmail.com

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Crafting Auto/Bio/graphy: the Mixed Materialities of Southern and Eastern African Lives
9 – 11 September 2026
Deadline for Submissions: April 7, 2026

A colloquium hosted by the English Department (Stellenbosch University), in collaboration with the Department of Fashion Design (University of Johannesburg) and the Department of Media Language and Communication (Durban University of Technology).

This colloquium focuses on acts of written, sonic, visual or other forms of the auto/biographical (a/b) that engage with the subject of a southern and/or eastern African life, or lives. The keynote will be given by Prof. Grace Musila (Department of African Literature, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg). 
There are two categories for possible presentation at the colloquium:

1. 15-minute conference papers in the familiar format which address questions of a/b, whether written, visual, or otherwise, by and on southern and eastern Africa subjects.
2. 15-minute a/b exhibition or performance; a/b screening; a/b practice demonstration.

We invite abstracts on topics including, but not limited to:

• creative lives in a/b; the art of/art as life narration (written, performed, visual, cinematic, digital);
• queering a/b practice; genders, sexuality and a/b genres;
• lives in crisis; marginal/liminal lives; fragmented lives; lives revealed/concealed; lives in transition, transit or cultural translation; living interregnums;
• migrant and refugee life stories: risk, resilience, resistance and rights;
• disability and illness a/b;
• (re)viewing cinematic selves/subjects: auto-pics, biopics, a/b documentary; a/b drama/playscripts/screenplays;
• citizenship and identity – private lives, public lives, collectives, communities;
• life narration in question; decolonizing life writing and a/b theory; innovative a/b methodologies;
• a/b as ethics and aesthetics; a/b as memory, remembering and archives;
• hybrid generic forms e.g. autofiction, biofiction, embedded epistolary, diary, journal, auto- or bio-graphics;
• memoir: written, photo/visual; mixed media memoir;
• eco-a/b, toxic dwelling, damaged environments;
• Indian and/or Atlantic l

Submission Guidelines & Deadlines:

• Abstract submission deadline: 7 April 2026
• Notification of acceptance: 8 May 2026

Please use the link below to submit your 250 words abstract, your university affiliation and a short biographical note (80 words):
Link: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdhJ9WEQhIFHpzYhn5XkPn2WralkeM1zHRQ9aVFXtxZ31vJ9Q/viewform?usp=publish-editor
OR
Submit your 250 words abstract, your university affiliation and a short biographical note (80 words) to (all) colloquium organisers:  Mathilda Slabbert, mslabbert@sun.ac.za; Prof Khaya Mchunu, khayam@uj.ac.za; Dr Rachel Matteau, RachelM1@dut.ac.za; Prof Louise Green, lagreen@sun.a.za
Once accepted, we will provide information on the particularities of the colloquium. Attendees are responsible for arranging and funding their own travel, accommodation, and local transport.
Conference Fee:

• Academics: R500
• Students: R300

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Migration, Adaptation and Memory

9th International Interdisciplinary Conference

18–19 June, 2026

Gdansk, Poland in person, and online (via Zoom)

Deadline for Submissions; April 10, 2026–in-person presenters, April 30, 2026 for online presenters.

https://www.inmindsupport.com/migration-adaptation-and-memory

Scientific Committee: 

Professor Wojciech Owczarski – University of Gdańsk, Poland

Professor Polina Golovátina-Mora – NTNU, Norwegian University of Science and Technology

 
How do we remember and represent our migration experiences? Who is involved in these processes? How does history remember these events? What helps migrants and societies to adapt? The significance of these and related questions have made their way into our daily lives, from the refugee crisis to policy decisions, individual psychotherapy to (re)building identities, communities, and memories.

During the conference, we are going to turn our attention to processes that are integral to human experience: migration, adaptation, and memory. We are interested in all aspects of migration and adaptation, in their individual and collective dimensions, in the past and in the present-day world. We would like to examine the role of memory, the processes of migrating and adapting to various dynamic life circumstances, across time, space, culture, language, and discipline.

Therefore, we strive to represent and discuss the crossroads of migration, adaptation, and memory in their multiple representations: psychological, social, historical, cultural, philosophical, religious, neurological, organizational, methodological, economic, political, and many others. We will also devote considerable attention to how these phenomena appear and transform in artistic practices: literature, film, theatre, and visual arts. This is why we invite researchers representing various academic disciplines: anthropology, history, psychiatry, psychology, psychoanalysis, sociology, politics, philosophy, economics, law, literary studies, theatre studies, film studies, design, project management, memory studies, migration studies, consciousness studies, dream studies, gender studies, postcolonial studies, medical sciences, cognitive sciences, and urban studies, to name a few.

Different forms of presentations are encouraged, including case studies, theoretical inquiries, personal reflections, problem-oriented arguments, comparative analyses, and creative expressions.

​We will be happy to hear from experienced scholars and young academics, doctoral and graduate students, as well as professionals from various disciplines. We also invite all persons interested in participating in the conference as listeners, without giving a presentation.

​Our repertoire of suggested topics includes but is not limited to:

I. Arts

• Literature, poetry, film, theatre, etc. as adaptive mediums
• Adaptation through artistic creation and destruction
• Artistic imagination and adaptation
• Migration as represented in arts
• Art created during migration
• Creative expression through memories

​II. History

• Adaptation across history
• Memory processes in writing history
• Documenting history and memories in migration

​III. Political Sciences and Law

• Policies related to migration and adaptation
• Human rights and migration
• Bureaucracy in relation to migration policies
• Judiciary systems
• Political agendas, memory and migration
• Objective vs. subjective memory in politics
• International politics and adaptation

​IV. Psychology and Psychiatry

• Mental health and adaptation
• Abnormal behaviors and adaptation
• (Mal)adaptive memory processes
• Social and transcultural psychiatry
• Perception/cognition/attention
• Personality
• Psychoanalysis

​V. Medical sciences

• Genetics/epigenetics in adaptation processes
• Neurobiology and biochemistry of adaptation and memory
• Evolutionary approaches to memory, adaptation and migration
• Chronic diseases, memory, and adaptation

​VI. Humanitarian work, Governments and NGOs

• Roles and responsibilities
• Management of temporary and transitory spaces
• Project management and evaluation
• Best practices
• Welcome contexts

VII. Philosophy and Worldviews (Eastern, Western, Indigenous…)

• Epistemology and metaphysics
• Existential and postmodern adaptation
• Ethics in migratory context
• Philosophy of memory

VIII. Sociology and Anthropology

• Cultural determinants and adaptation
• Race/ethnic identity and adaptation
• Religion, adaptation and migratory experiences
• Gender, adaptation and migratory experiences
• Social networks and adaptation
• Language of adaptation, memory and migration
• Family relations and adaptation
• Urban planning and adaptation
• Diaspora and community development

​IX. Economics

• Adaptation and job security
• Private sponsorship and adaptation

Please submit abstracts (no longer than 300 words) of your proposed 20-minute presentations, together with a short biographical note to: migrationconferenceoffice@gmail.com or
onsite presenters – by 10 April 2026
online presenters – by 30 April 2026

The conference language is English.

Our conference email: migrationconferenceoffice@gmail.com

For all details please visit our website.

Contact Information

Conference Office

Contact Email

migrationconferenceoffice@gmail.com

URL

https://www.inmindsupport.com/migration-adaptation-and-memory

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International Seminar Autotheory as a Literary Practice

Ghent University, Belgium |

17 September 2026

Keynote speaker: Lauren Fournier

Deadline for Submissions: April 15, 2026

In recent years, autotheory has increasingly established itself as a burgeoning field of practice and study, as the forthcoming Autotheory and Its Others – edited by Becky McLaughlin,Eric Daffron, Maria Gil Ulldemolins, and Kris Pint – attests to. A capacious term, so far autotheory has been used to designate “literary genres, critical discourse, creative practice, and academic methodology” (Baxter & Auburn).Indeed, roughly coinciding with the 2021 publication of Lauren Fournier’s seminal study on autotheory from a feminist angle, special issues by the journals Arizona Quarterly (ed. Wiegman) and ASAP/Journal (eds. Brostoff and Fournier) have alternatively conceptualised autotheory in relation to poststructuralism and as a decolonial praxis respectively. Between 2022-2023, three other special issues followed, which are devoted to autotheory’s relation to feminism (eds. Sweeney & Gardiner), the concomitant tension between visibility (of the self, the genre, etc.) and discipline (ed. Cernat), and its manifestations as a visual art practice (eds. Baxter & Auburn). 2025, then,saw the publication of the intellectually generous collection Autotheories,edited by Alex Brostoff and Vilashini Cooppan, with contributions ranging from psychoanalysis and pedagogy to critical whiteness studies and digital capitalism. While autotheory’s discursive and textual dimensions are not ignored in these accounts, with experimental citation often being considered a hallmark, what seems to be missing is a comprehensive assessment of autotheory as a distinctively literary practice, alongside its critical-political potential and broader artistic merit. Building on Baxter and Auburn’s typology, we thus seek to home in on that first, literary dimension. In this wider understanding not restricted to explicitly para-academic, non-fictional works (Clare 89), autotheory is related to autofiction and is a kind of experimental writing that starts from embodied experience to stage and question knowledges of all kinds. Moreover, the research field currently seems to be dominated by an Anglophone focus, likely following the term’s uptake in Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015),although efforts have been made to position this mode of writing in other linguistic and cultural contexts as well (e.g. Savard-Corbeil, Pint). During this one-day seminar, we therefore seek to open up the category of autotheory by approaching it as a literary practice in its own right with offshoots and alternative entry points in different languages and cultures.

We specifically welcome contributions focusing on one or more of the following aspects:-

Autotheory as a literary genre or mode;-

Autotheory’s borders separating it from related literary practices like autofiction, theory fiction, the theory novel, essay-novel,lyric essay, critical memoir, etc.;-

Historical precursors to autotheory from a literaryperspective;

Questions of voice (performative, collective, etc.) and authorship;-

Discussions regarding autotheory’s relation to fact andfiction;-Narratological matters, including questions of narration andfocalisation;-

Paratextual elements;-

Recurring themes (e.g. sexuality, motherhood, violence)& motifs (e.g. water);-

Intertextual networks of “kinship” (Brostoff) among authors writing works of autotheory.

Although the seminar language is English with a view to an international exchange of ideas, we encourage research concerning non-Anglophone contexts.

Proposals (max. 300 words) for 20-minute papers and a biographical note should be sent to helena.vanpraet@ugent.be by 15 April 2026. Notifications of acceptance will be communicated by mid-May. Selected contributions will beconsidered for inclusion in a special issue of a journal.

Organising committee:

Lars Bernaerts (Ghent University), Hannah Van Hove (VUB – FWO) & Helena Van Praet (Ghent University – FWO)

Scientific committee:-

Lars Bernaerts (Ghent University)-

Laura Cernat (KU Leuven – FWO)-

Maria Gil Ulldemolins (Hasselt University)-

Kris Pint (Hasselt University)-

Hannah Van Hove (VUB – FWO)-

Helena Van Praet (Ghent University – FWO)-

Sven Vitse (Utrecht University)

References

Baxter, Katherine, and Cat Auburn. Introduction. Autotheory in Contemporary VisualArts Practice, special issue of Arts, vol. 12, no. 11, 2023, https://doi.org/10.3390/arts12010011.

Brostoff, Alex. “An Autotheory of Intertextual Kinship: Ambivalent Bodies in the Work of Maggie Nelson and Paul B. Preciado.” Synthesis,no. 14, 2021, pp. 91-115.

Brostoff, Alex, and Vilashini Cooppan, editors. Autotheories. MIT Press, 2025.

Brostoff, Alex, and Lauren Fournier. “Introduction: Autotheory ASAP! Academia,Decoloniality, and ‘I.’” ASAP/Journal, vol. 6, no. 3, 2021, pp. 489-502.

Cernat, Laura. “Introduction: Autofiction, Autotheory, and Regimes of Visibility.” American Book Review, vol. 43, no. 2, 2022, pp. 9-17.

Clare, Ralph. “Becoming Autotheory.” ArizonaQuarterly, vol. 76, no. 1, 2020, pp. 85-107.

Fournier, Lauren. Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism. MIT Press, 2021.

McLaughlin, Becky, et al., editors. Autotheory and Its Others. Punctum Books, 2026 [forthcoming].

Pint, Kris. “‘I shudder that I exist’. Hadewijch’s Mystical Writings as a WaywardPrecursor of Autotheoretical Life-Writing.” The European Journal of LifeWriting, vol. 13, 2024, pp. 54-73.

Savard-Corbeil, Mathilde. “L’autothéorie comme forme d’engagement de lalittérature contemporaine : Esthétique et féminisme dans Saint Phalle.Monter en enfance de Gwenaëlle Aubry.” Revue critique de fixxionfrançaise contemporaine, no. 27, 2023, https://doi.org/10.4000/fixxion.13271.

Sweeney, Megan, and Judith Kegan Gardiner. Preface. Autotheory / Autoethnography, special issue of Feminist Studies, vol. 49, nos. 2-3, 2023, https://doi.org/10.1353/fem.2023.a915905.

Wiegman, Robyn. “Introduction: Autotheory Theory.” Arizona Quarterly, vol. 76,no. 1, 2020, pp. 1-14.

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Witnessing the War on Ukraine: Beyond Testimony – Silences, Gaps, and Unspoken Memories

Summer Institute

11-14 August 2026 – Uzhhorod, Ukraine

 Deadline for Submissions: April 15, 2026

Call for Applications

In response to Russia’s full-scale aggression against Ukraine, the Summer Institute Witnessing the War on Ukraine (WWSI) was launched in July 2022 as a joint initiative of several academic and cultural institutions. From the outset, the Institute has been conceived as a professional and ethical response to the urgent need to document wartime experiences and to support junior researchers engaged in the study of Ukrainian war testimonies. It provides a space for sharing expertise in oral history, ethnography, memory studies, interview-based research, and witness literature and art.

Over the past four years, WWSI has developed into a stable international educational platform bringing together scholars and practitioners from Ukraine and abroad. While maintaining a consistent focus on witnessing and testimony, each annual iteration has addressed new thematic and methodological challenges shaped by the evolving context of war:

• WWSI 2022 focused on a “rapid response” to the ethical challenges of conducting research amid ongoing trauma and on how to carry out interviews without causing harm.
• WWSI 2023 examined contemporary scholarly and creative approaches to witnessing the war.
• WWSI 2024 explored testimony research in the pursuit of justice, emphasizing innovative disciplinary approaches and the creation of spaces of trust and dignity for victims.
• WWSI 2025 addressed oral history as a socially and historically responsible research practice, focusing on the conceptualization and preservation of war testimony as cultural heritage and as a foundation for future historical memory in Ukraine.

The Fifth Summer Institute, Witnessing the War on Ukraine: Beyond Testimony – Silences, Gaps, and Unspoken Memories (WWSI 2026), will focus on the limits of testimony and on the methodological, ethical, and interpretive challenges of engaging with silence, self-censorship, and the unspoken in war narratives. In the context of the ongoing war, as well as in relation to earlier wars of the twentieth century, attention to “silent testimonies” makes it possible to identify gaps in collective memory and to analyze mechanisms of repression, self-censorship, and the transformation of experience. At the same time, this perspective opens new avenues for rethinking oral history methodology, interpretive frameworks, and the ways war narratives are constructed in academic and public spaces. In this sense, WWSI 2026 situates testimonial research within broader debates in memory studies and oral history.

WWSI 2026 will have a predominantly theoretical and methodological orientation. The Institute will focus on conceptual debates within oral history and memory studies, including the theorization of silence and absence, the epistemological limits of testimony, the relationship between narrative, experience, and non-narration, as well as the ethical and interpretive consequences of working with gaps, interruptions, and the unspoken. Particular attention will be paid to how silences are produced, maintained, and interpreted in conditions of war, repression, and violence, and to how oral historians and memory scholars can develop analytical frameworks that account for both what is said and what remains unsaid.

WWSI 2026 will bring together researchers and practitioners working on oral history, memory, and testimony in Ukraine and in comparative perspective. The Institute will serve as a space for in-depth methodological discussion, critical reflection on ethics and research practice in wartime, and exchange between scholars at different stages of their academic careers.

Why does oral history matter when testimony is fragmented, silenced, or withheld? How can researchers work responsibly with absence, gaps, and the unspoken? What interpretive tools allow us to address silence without instrumentalizing it? These questions will guide the discussions throughout the Institute.

What to expect

Over the course of four days, the Institute will offer a series of lectures, thematic panels, and workshops. Invited speakers and faculty will lead discussions, book presentations, and film screenings addressing various dimensions of silence, memory, and war. Participants will have the opportunity to present their ongoing research projects and receive feedback from leading scholars in the field. 

WWSI 2026 will feature a keynote lecture by Alistair Thomson, a leading oral historian and the author of seminal works including Anzac Memories: Living With the Legend and The Oral History Reader, which have profoundly shaped oral history scholarship globally. The Summer Institute will take place exclusively in person in Uzhhorod on 11-14 August 2026. Some invited speakers may participate online. The working language of the WWSI 2026 is English.

This Summer Institute is organized in partnership with UOHA International Conference 2026 “Testimony Across History” (10-11 August 2026) and will include joint events.

There is no registration fee for participation. Accommodation, travel, and meals will be fully covered for selected participants.

Applications

The call is open to researchers and practitioners engaged in oral history, memory studies, and related fields focusing on war and violence in Ukraine and beyond.

To apply, candidates are required to complete the application form and submit all materials specified there. In addition to a personal statement explaining how participation in the Institute will benefit the applicant’s scholarly work, a short biographical note, and contact information, applicants are required to submit a prospectus of a methodological article (up to 500 words) related to the themes of the Institute. Selected participants will be expected to develop this prospectus into a draft of the methodological article (up to 6000 words) and submit it one month prior to the start of the Institute. These articles will serve as a basis for collective discussion during the Institute. A limited number of the participants will be invited to collaborate on the production of a collection of essays in one of the international publishing venues.

Important Dates

Application deadline – 15 April 2026

Notifications of acceptance – 1 May 2026

Articles submission deadline – 15 July 2026

Summer Institute – 11-14 August 2026

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us at wwsi@ualberta.ca

Organizers and Partners

Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, Canada
Ukrainian Oral History Association, Ukraine 
Uzhhorod National University, Ukraine
University of Alberta, Canada
National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Ukraine
Lund University, Sweden
Dobra Wola Foundation, Poland

Organizing Committee

• Natalia Khanenko-Friesen 
• Eleonora Narvselius 
• Gelinada Grinchenko 
• Alina Doboszewska 
• Pavlo Leno
• Oksana Khomiak
• Anna Olenenko

Contact Email

wwsi@ualberta.ca

URL

https://www.ualberta.ca/en/canadian-institute-of-ukrainian-studies/projects/wit…

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Call for Papers:
Forthcoming conference 
GIRL, INTERRUPTED
Testimonies, Silences and Self-Censorship
in Women’s Life Writing
3^rd edition
Global Perspectives on Gender Violence and Trauma in Women’s Life Writing
Cluj-Napoca, Romania, October 15-16, 2026
The Faculty of Letters, “Babeș-Bolyai” University 
“Sextil Pușcariu” Institute, The Romanian Academy, Cluj-Napoca Branch
 
 “Why is autobiography the most popular form of fiction?” (Conway, 1998). The demise of the Communist regime in Eastern Europe triggered a surge of memoirs, diaries, and correspondence, together with biographies, autobiographies of different personalities, either new or retraced from previously censored or self-censored writings. This inflation of ego-documents, which started in the early 1990s and has continued since, has served in many cases as a compensation to decades of state-mandated censorship and institutional surveillance. Thus, the major regime shift in 1989 initiated more than a political transition; it was followed by a life-writing boom on the literary market.
This life-writing “boom” is not merely a quantitative increase in publications, but also a phenomenological shift, in an international context favouring such an approach. This fascination with narratives based on true characters and events, with all its varieties and spectrum of subgenres, from biographies to biofiction and from memoirs to heterobiographies or autotopographies has led to a “cult of memory” (Bell, 2006), especially in the post-totalitarian societies where transitional justice and the need to come to terms with a repressive past were involved in the process of retracing details of collective memory. The Post-communist “life-writing boom” is not a transparent window but a palimpsest. As Duncan Bell’s framework suggests, these narratives are “parallel stories” that compete with official history. Ultimately, “defrosting silence” through Life Writing is an act of courage and resilience.
While Life Writing has flourished as an umbrella genre across Europe, women’s personal narratives – memoirs, diaries, and correspondence – have faced a longer, more arduous journey toward academic and public recognition. Following the success of our first and second editions, this third international conference seeks to fill the remaining gaps by centring on a global phenomenon: the “literary boom” of female Life Writing. In the last decade, these accounts have moved from the margins to dominate the book market, serving as a natural, long-awaited compensation for historically silenced voices.
The 2026 edition expands our focus to the raw intersections of gender violence and trauma on a worldwide scale. For women – often treated as silenced political subjects – the act of writing is more than a creative endeavour; it is a vital testimony of survival. We aim to explore the tension between what can be verbalized and what remains censored, self-censored, or silenced in narratives of childhood, youth, and adulthood shaped by systemic violence and historical trauma.
Theoretically, this conference situates itself at the intersection of Cathy Caruth’s foundational concepts of “unclaimed experience” and more recent decolonial and intersectional critiques of trauma. We seek to interrogate how women’s life writing navigates the “crisis of truth” inherent in traumatic memory, where the body remembers what the mind often cannot articulate. We will examine whose lives are deemed “writable” and how the act of narrating gender violence serves as a performative reclamation of agency. Furthermore, we invite discussions on Leigh Gilmore’s limits of autobiography, exploring how female authors innovate Life Writing forms to bypass the constraints of traditional testimony, thereby transforming the “secondary status” of women’s voices into a primary site of global cultural resistance.
 
We welcome interdisciplinary proposals on topics including, but not limited to:
·       Testimony, Memory and Post-Memory. Comparative and Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Challenges on European Women’s Life Writing.
·       Mapping the Trauma: Comparative perspectives on gender violence in women’s life writing worldwide.
·       Politics, Violence and Trauma in 20^th and 21^st century Life Writing. Narratives of Psychological and Physical Violence
·       The Mirror Crack’d: Representing physical and psychological trauma and the process of re(dis)covery.
·       Working/writing through Trauma: Narratives of resilience, resistance, and recovery in the face of gender violence
·       A Room of One’s Own vs. The Panopticon: Privacy, state surveillance, and domestic intrusion in personal narratives.
·       Girls Unchained: Memoirs of political interrogation, imprisonment, and resistance under oppressive regimes.
·       Girls Uninterrupted. How Post-Communist Women’s Life Writing Became Post-Communist Book Market Stars

• Long-Lasting Legacies vs. Silence Legacies. Unsilencing Endurance, Healing the Trauma vs. Silencing Trauma. Intergenerational Echoes

 
We encourage innovative methodologies and diverse geographical perspectives to foster a rigorous debate on the complexity of women’s testimonies today.
Submission Guidelines & Deadlines:

·       Abstract submission deadline: April 30, 2026
·       Notification of acceptance: May 20, 2026
·       Conference dates: October 15-16, 2026
·       Location: Onsite, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
 
Please submit your 300-400 words abstract, your university affiliation and a short bionote to Dr. Hab. Andrada Fătu-Tutoveanu (“Babeș-Bolyai” University, The Faculty of Letters, The Department of Foreign Languages for Specific Purposes, andrada.pintilescu@ubbcluj.ro). 
 
We look forward to receiving your interesting contributions and welcoming you to Cluj. Once accepted, we will be happy to assist you with the practicalities and travel information. The conference will include a welcome cocktail, a city tour and a one-day optional trip to discover beautiful Transylvania.

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International Conference 

“Life Writing, Figurations of the Self and Critical Digital Humanities” 

Assembly Hall – University of Aveiro, Portugal

19 – 20 November 2026

Deadline for Submissions: 30 April 2026

Over the past decades, life writing and the diverse figurations of the self (ranging from canonical autobiography to hybrid narratives between fiction and non-fiction, including diaries, testimonies, autoethnographies, graphic narratives and digital forms) have consolidated as one of the most dynamic fields within literary studies. In parallel with this movement, critical attention has increasingly turned to the dimensions of hybridity, creativity and transgression that cut across practices of self-articulation, processes of identity negotiation, and modes of subject inscription within contexts shaped by inequalities of gender, class, race, sexuality and geopolitical location.

Foundational works such as those by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (2010, 2017, 2024) have systematised this field by proposing analytical categories for understanding life narratives as situated and performative autobiographical acts. Alain Milon further argues that “while writing may operate as a form of self-welcoming, of the self to itself, about itself, for itself and by itself, it can also become a space of openness towards an other beyond the self” (2005, p. 17). Essays such as Witnessing Girlhood: Toward an Intersectional Tradition of Life Writing (Gilmore & Marshall, 2019) further demonstrate how the figure of the girl-as-witness emerges as a privileged site for exposing structural injustices and for calling forth ethical response, thereby inscribing life writing within a broader horizon of political responsibility and social justice.

Within the field of life writing on childhood and youth (and, in some cases, in dialogue with children’s and young adult formats and audiences), scholarship has underscored how power relations between adults and young subjects (as addressees, objects of representation or agents of enunciation) produce specific modalities of voice, authority and subjectivity (Shavit, 1986; Nikolajeva, 2009). Even when such writing does not present itself as strict autobiography, the recurrence of diaristic forms and first-person enunciation (including dispositifs of remembrance, archive and autobiographical play) highlights how childhood and youth are frequently constructed as privileged scenes for the formation of the self and for negotiations with social regimes of normativity (Barnett, 2013; Poletti, 2013; Cardell, 2014; Douglas, 2022).

Life writing and writing of the self are simultaneously embedded in national and transnational literary fields structured by unequal power relations. Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the literary field offers a framework for understanding the production, circulation and reception of texts as effects of differentiated positions within structures of consecration and legitimation (Bourdieu, 1993). In La République mondiale des lettres, Pascale Casanova demonstrates how the global circulation of literature is organised around linguistic and geopolitical hierarchies, delineating literary centres and peripheries and shaping the visibility of authors and works (Casanova, 1999). From a critical perspective, Rita Felski interrogates the dominance of a hermeneutics of suspicion, emphasising the need to diversify modes of relating to texts, including forms of reading that bring together affect, recognition and social use (Felski, 2015).

The digital turn has introduced new methodologies as well as new challenges. Franco Moretti’s proposal of distant reading (2013) redefines the scales of literary analysis by deploying large-scale corpora and visualisations to map the evolution of genres and literary systems. Concurrently, the institutional consolidation of the digital humanities has generated extensive debates foregrounding the plurality of practices and the pivotal role of infrastructures, as documented in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019 (Gold & Klein, 2019), as well as critical interventions warning against the reproduction of social inequalities through data and algorithmic systems, most notably articulated by Risam (2018). The intersectional data feminism proposed by Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein explicitly situates data practices within relations of power, gender and social justice (D’Ignazio & Klein, 2020).

These transformations converge with the emergence of an “algorithmic culture”, in which recommendation systems, search engines and digital platforms increasingly shape access to information and culture (Striphas, 2015). The recent expansion of generative Artificial Intelligence further intensifies this landscape, opening up debates on authorship, creativity and literary value in texts produced with, by or for algorithms (Colella, 2025; Danesi, 2025; Shukla & Singh, 2025). Questions such as Who (or What) writes? How is the reading pact reconfigured? and How is writing labour redistributed between humans and machines? have thus become central to contemporary debates on literature and technology.

Against this backdrop, the international conference “Life Writing, Figurations of the Self and Critical Digital Humanities” seeks to: 

• discuss contemporary forms of life writing and writing of the self across different literary traditions and genres; 
• analyse figurations of the subject in transit (across languages, genders, ages, postcolonial spaces and digital dispositifs); 
• examine how these forms of writing are situated within the literary field and cultural industries; 
• critically reflect on digital methodologies and on the impact of AI on the production, mediation, and reading of literary texts.

Thematic Strands 

Proposals should be submitted under at least one of the following strands (a secondary strand may be indicated where appropriate). 

Strand 1 – Life Writing, Figurations of the Self and Poetics of Hybridity

This strand foregrounds theoretical and analytical-textual approaches to life writing and figurations of the self in contemporary literature, with particular emphasis on poetics of hybridity, formal creativity and the transgression of generic boundaries. Possible topics include:

• redefinitions of “life writing” and “life narratives” in contemporary theory;
• autofiction and zones of indiscernibility between autobiography, the novel and the essay;
• multimodal forms of life writing, including graphic autobiographies, photobiographies, diary novels, and projects combining text, image and sound;
• strategies of montage, collage and fragmentation, as well as the use of personal and family archives;
• the relationship between formal hybridity, aesthetic experimentation and the critical interrogation of categories such as author, subject, testimony and archive.

Strand 2 – Life Writing, the Literary Field, Cultural Industries and Mass Culture

This strand invites contributions that examine life writing and writing of the self as practices situated within national and transnational literary fields, intersecting with cultural industries and the logics of mass culture. Possible topics include:

• life writing and symbolic capital: processes of consecration and marginalisation, and hierarchies of value within the literary field;
• the “world republic of letters” and the circulation of life writing between linguistic centres and peripheries;
• markets of autobiography and autofiction: memoirs of public figures, narratives of trauma, scandal and celebrity; regimes of truth, marketing practices and the spectacularisation of the private;
• relations between literature, cinema, television, streaming platforms, podcasts, comics (including graphic novels) and narrative videogames, including adaptations of life writing and writing of the self within transmedia ecosystems;
• tensions between independent or experimental authorial projects and industrial logics of visibility, serialisation and author branding.

Strand 3 – Critical Digital Humanities, Data and AI in Life Writing 

This strand welcomes proposals that mobilise tools, methods or frameworks from the Digital Humanities and that critically interrogate algorithmic mediation and Artificial Intelligence in contemporary literature. Proposed topics include:

• other computational approaches applied to corpora of life writing;
• digital archives of letters, diaries, testimonies, blogs and social media, approached from postcolonial and intersectional perspectives;
• debates within the Digital Humanities on mixed methodologies, infrastructures, data politics and epistemic inequalities;
• algorithmic culture and regimes of literary visibility across search engines, sales platforms, rankings and recommendation systems;
• generative AI and literary authorship, including AI-co-written texts, style simulation, non-human narrators and reconfigurations of the figure of the author, as well as theoretical proposals and case studies on “algorithmic authorship”.

Strand 4 – Ethics of Memory, Archive and Authorship in the Digital Age

This strand invites contributions that engage in a broad ethical and political reflection on life writing, bringing questions of memory, testimony, archive and authorship into dialogue with the challenges posed by digital technologies. Proposed topics include:

• autobiographical pacts, regimes of truth and practices of falsification in life narratives, including false memories and controversies surrounding authorial authenticity;
• life writing in contexts of political violence, war, forced migration, dictatorship and transitional justice, with particular attention to the intersections of trauma, narrative and history;
• archive politics (personal, family, community, institutional and digital): criteria of selection, regimes of visibility and practices of forgetting, as well as life archives approached from postcolonial and intersectional perspectives;
• intimacy, exposure and consent in the editing and circulation of diaries, letters and real or fictionalised biographies, including cases involving children and young people;
• questions of authorship, labour and recognition in the context of generative AI and algorithmic culture, including debates on authorial responsibility and the credibility of partially automated texts.

References

Barnett, T. (2013). “Reading saved me”: Writing autobiographically about transformative reading experiences in childhood. Prose Studies, 35(1), 84-96. https://doi.org/10.1080/01440357.2013.781413

Bourdieu, P. (1993). The field of cultural production: Essays on art and literature. Columbia University Press. 

Cardell, K. (2014). Dear World: Contemporary Uses of the Diary. University of Wisconsin Press.

Cardell, K., & Douglas, K. (Eds.). (2015). Telling tales: Autobiographies of childhood and youth. Routledge.

Cardell, K., & Douglas, K. (2013). Telling tales: Autobiographies of childhood and youth. Prose Studies, 35(1), 1-6. https://doi.org/10.1080/01440357.2013.781340

Caruth, C. (2016). Unclaimed experience: Trauma, narrative, and history (20th anniversary ed.). Johns Hopkins University Press. 

Casanova, P. (1999). La République Mondiale des lettres. Seuil 

Colella, S. (2025). “The language of the digital air”: AI-generated literature and the performance of authorship. Humanities, 14(8), 164. https://doi.org/10.3390/h14080164

Danesi, M. (2025). AI-generated literature: Whither literary creativity? In P. Hacker (Ed.), Oxford intersections: AI in society. Oxford University Press. 

Douglas, K. (2022). Children and biography: Reading and writing life stories. Bloomsbury Academic. 

D’Ignazio, C., & Klein, L. F. (2020). Data feminism. MIT Press. 

Felski, R. (2015). The limits of critique. University of Chicago Press. 

Gilmore, L., & Marshall, E. (2019). Witnessing girlhood: Toward an intersectional tradition of life writing. Fordham University Press. 

Gold, M. K., & Klein, L. F. (Eds.). (2019). Debates in the digital humanities 2019. University of Minnesota Press. 

Lynch, C. (2013). Ante-autobiography and the archive of childhood. Prose Studies, 35(1), 97-112. https://doi.org/10.1080/01440357.2013.781414

Milon, A. (2005). L’Écriture de soi. Ce lointain intérieur. Encre marine.

Moretti, F. (2013). Distant reading. Verso. 

Nikolajeva, M. (2009). Power, voice and subjectivity in literature for young readers. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203866924

Poletti, A. (2013). Autobiography and play: “A conversation with my 12 year old self”. Prose Studies, 35(1), 113-123. https://doi.org/10.1080/01440357.2013.781415

Risam, R. (2018). New digital worlds: Postcolonial digital humanities in theory, praxis, and pedagogy. Northwestern University Press. 

Shavit, Z. (1986). Poetics of children’s literature. The University of Georgia Press. 

Shukla, A. K., & Singh, N. K. (2025). Algorithmic authorship: AI and the changing nature of literary creation. International Journal of Research in English, 7(2), 425-430. 

Smith, S., & Watson, J. (2024). Reading autobiography now: An updated guide for interpreting life narratives (3rd ed.). University of Minnesota Press. 

Smith, S., & Watson, J. (2017). Life writing in the long run: A Smith & Watson autobiography studies reader. Maize Books. 

Smith, S., & Watson, J. (2010). Reading autobiography: A guide for interpreting life narratives. University of Minnesota Press. 

Striphas, T. (2015). Algorithmic culture. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 18 (4-5), 395-412

Key Dates:

• Deadline for submission of paper or panel proposals: 30 April 2026
• Notification of acceptance: by 31 May 2026
• First registration period: 1–15 June 2026
• Second registration period: 16–30 June 2026
• Publication of provisional programme: 19 October 2026

Conference Date:

19–20 November 2026

Submissions

Proposals for participation should be submitted electronically to the following email address: dlc-escritasdevida@ua.pt

Each proposal should include: 

• Title of the paper
• Name(s) of the proposer(s)
• Affiliation and contact email
• Proposed strand
• Abstract(between 200 and 300 words)
• Five keywords
• Short biographical note (max. 100 words)

Languages

• Proposals may be submitted in Portuguese, Spanish, French or English.
• Papers may be presented in any of these languages, regardless of the language chosen for the abstract. 

Format

• The conference will be held in person.

Registration Fees

• Members of the University of Aveiro: free of charge
• PhD students: 50€
• Presenting participants: 80€ (until 15 June) / 100€ (until 30 June) 
• Non-presenting participants (with certificate of attendance): 20 €

Certificates of paper presentation and certificates of participation will be issued.

Payment details:

University of Aveiro

Tax Identification Number: 501461108

IBAN: PT50 0035 0836 00001785230 70

BIC/SWIFT: CGDIPTPL 

Proof of payment should be sent to the following email address: dlc-escritasdevida@ua.pt

 

Publication

The publication of the conference outcomes is envisaged in the following formats:

• A book of abstracts, in digital format, with ISBN/ISSN;
• An open-access e-book, subject to scientific peer review, featuring a selection of texts derived from the presented papers.

Instructions for the submission of full papers will be announced after the conference.

 

Contacts

For queries and requests for further information:

Maria Eugénia Pereira

Márcia Neves

Maria João Lopes

Sofia Ribeiro

Email: dlc-escritasdevida@ua.pt

Organising Committee

Andreia Boia

Andreia Salgueiro Varela

Carina Rodrigues

Filipe Senos

Márcia Neves

Maria Eugénia Pereira

Maria João Lopes

Sofia Ribeiro

Contact Information

Maria Eugénia Pereira

Márcia Neves

Maria João Lopes

Sofia Ribeiro

Contact Email

dlc-escritasdevida@ua.pt

https://networks.h-net.org/group/announcements/20142840/international-conference-life-writing-figurations-self-and-critical

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CFP for a special issue of Feminist Modernist Exiles   

Feminist Modernist Studies

Deadline for Abstracts 4/30/2026

Deadline for Accepted Essays 9/1/2026
 
“[T]he position of the writer – at least the modernist writer – maps easily onto the position of the outsider, and some writers have famously chosen exile, precisely for the bonus of that sharp angle of vision, the bracing coolness of distance and defamiliarization” (Eva Hoffman, “Out of Exile”).
 
We invite proposals for a special issue of Feminist Modernist Studies titled Feminist Modernist Exiles. We aim to show how women’s ongoing experiences of transnational, transcultural, and translingual experiences in voluntary and involuntary exile continue to generate new forms of feminist cultural production that express their ongoing experiences and responses to political, social, psychological, and cultural upheaval and migration.
Through a wide range of approaches, essays will show how women writers and artists continue to confront and dissolve the gendered definitional and canonical boundaries that constrain women’s creative expressions and responses to their myriad experiences of exile. In addition to such literary genres as fiction and non-fiction, biography, memoir, and poetry, we wish to include interpretations and analyses of women’s multi vocal, fluid, and hybrid forms of modernist expression, including autofiction and poetic nonfiction as well as graphic narratives, the plastic arts, photography, film, and dance.
Situated within historical and geopolitical contexts, essays will represent a range of women’s places and perspectives of origin and immigration to examine how they situate their experiences as historically contingent within the global phenomenon of exile. We are particularly interested to show that, as women have chosen or been forced to move from place to place, their exilic experiences extend across a range of everyday domestic and communal experiences, from working to support themselves and/or their families or contending with government policies. Essays might argue how such existential conditions as national belonging and cultural and gender identity change the meanings of home and exile. Although hardship and tortuous exile experiences persist, this special issue will argue that for modernist women writers and artists, exile, in its multiple, often inconsistent, fluid, and elastic meanings, can also represent opportunity, self-redefinition, and achievement.
Possible topics include:
Persecution and Expulsion Leading Up To, During, and After War
Between Mother Tongue, Translation, and the Language of Adaptation
Refiguring Home and Belonging
LGBTQ+ and Trans Exile Experiences and Responses
Everyday Life and Domesticity in Exile
Philosophical, Cultural, Political, and Psychological Expressions of Exile
Bodily Expressions of Exile
Challenges, Hardships, and the Creative Expression of Resilience and Resistance
Departure and Relocation
Place and Identity
Writing in Exile
Othering
Diasporic, Cross-Cultural Self-Invention
Exile and Memory
Exile and Trauma

Please send 300 word Proposals and Short Bios by April 30, 2026 to:
Phyllis Lassner: phyllisl@northwestern.edu
Victoria Aarons: vaarons@trinity.edu
Essay submission deadline: September 1, 2027

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CFP International Society for Educational Biography Conference 2026 

Deadline for Submissions: May 1, 2026

International Society for Educational Biography (I.S.E.B.) invites proposals for its annual  conference, to be held in partnership with The Society of Philosophy and History of Education  (S.O.P.H.E.) and the Organization of Educational History (O.E.H.) on October 1-3, 2026, at the Courtyard Marriott Downtown hotel in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. 

CONFERENCE THEME 

This 2026 theme is Revolutionary Educators: Change Makers and Schoolhouse  Troublemakers. As the United States marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of  Independence and the formal beginning of the American Experiment, we turn our attention to the roles that educators have played in significant changes and revolutions at the local, regional, and  national levels. Education itself becomes a revolutionary question: schools have long been sites  of empowerment and challenge in addition to opposition and oppression, for both teachers and  students. Stories of how individuals have navigated, resisted, enriched, and even reformed educational environments are more timely now than ever. 

While work around the American Revolution is certainly welcome, this theme extends far past  the national boundaries of the U.S.A. What makes an educator or an educational approach  “revolutionary” in a particular time and place? How does education inform the stories of  individual revolutionaries in your work—and how has education itself become a tool for change  or resistance in specific historical moments? We are particularly interested in highlighting  historical examples of educational resistance, courage, risk, and change. We encourage you to  consider how your Life Writing work could challenge, expand, and deepen our scholarly  understandings of these important themes. 

I.S.E.B. welcomes scholars from across the spectrum of Educational Life Writing (from  biography to scholarly autobiography) to share their work. Papers and presentations may include,  but are not limited to, one or more of the following topics: 

1. Biographies of educators that shed light on one person’s motivation, practice,  beliefs/philosophy, or influence/legacy.  

2. Narratives of/in schools and schooling, especially those that examine education as a tool  for change. 

3. Life stories as illustrations of the conference theme, especially those that illuminate  erased and silenced voices in the history of education. 

SHOULD I SUBMIT? 

Submissions are welcome from I.S.E.B. members, non-members, and independent scholars both  inside and outside the U.S.A. (Please note that non-members whose proposals are accepted must become members when registering for the conference to remain on the program. Presenters who  have not become members by September 1st will not be eligible to present and will not appear in  

the final program.) 

Graduate Students are particularly welcome to submit proposals! I.S.E.B. and its conference  partners are dedicated to providing a welcoming, engaging atmosphere for grad students and  first-time conference presenters; the small and intimate nature of this conference is hard to  match. Grad students have their own dedicated happy hour, and will also find lots of  opportunities to meaningfully engage with notable scholars in the field of Educational Life  Writing throughout the conference. 

As always, I.S.E.B. is proud to support and welcome proposals from International Members,  whose work and perspective offer so much value to our scholarly community. As always, we  strongly encourage international members to attend in person if possible, since the full  experience of the conference can never be fully replicated online. However, we are aware that  travel to the U.S.A. can be challenging for international members. We are still keen to support  your scholarship, and will also offer an improved online presentation experience for international  members who are unable to join us in Oklahoma City. Virtual participants will be unable to view  some parts of the conference, depending on technology limitations at the hotel. Participants in  virtual presentations should send 15-minute video clips of their presentations before the  conference and must be available to engage in the live Q&A for their panel via zoom. 

HOW DO I SUBMIT A PROPOSAL? 

Format: Submissions should fall into one of three formats—individual papers, panels, or  workshops/seminars. Here are details on each format: 

1. Individual Papers: These presentations should be 15-20 minutes long, as part of a 90- minute panel session. Participants who propose an individual paper will be placed with  other scholars whose work deals with similar themes or time periods. Q&A will be  available for all the presented papers at the end of the session. 

2. Panels: Participants can also submit as a group, offering a fully formed panel that makes  thematic sense. This category offers a 90-minute session comprised of three or four  presentations on a common topic. Once a panel is accepted, no other speakers/papers can

be added to the lineup.  

3. Workshops/Seminars: This category facilitates interactive discussions of issues and  methods pertinent to life writing of all types. Each workshop/seminar lasts for 60 minutes regardless of the number of presenters. Workshops/seminars should emphasize interactive participation with attendees. If a presentation is involved, it should take no  more than 30 minutes, leaving the remaining time for discussion with the audience. The  proposal must include 1) a title for the workshop/seminar, and 2) an abstract (up to 500  words) describing the goals of the workshop/seminar, and 3) a full list of the presenters.  

All participants should submit a title and an abstract for their proposal no later than May 1st,  2026. The content of the submission will depend on your chosen format: 

Individual Paper: Title and abstract of max 300 words. You should also inform us  whether your presentation will be in-person or virtual (to the best of your current  knowledge.) If a single paper is co-authored and will involve more than one presenter,  please submit it as an individual paper, but make that clear in the proposal. 

Complete Panel: Title and an abstract of 500 words that explains the theme of your  panel, which all of the presentations will support. In addition to the abstract, make sure to  include names of all presenters included in the proposal and the title of each individual  presentation. One presenter should submit the proposal on behalf of their group. 

Seminars/Workshops: Title and abstract of max 500 words detailing the subject/topicand its relevance to the conference. In addition to the abstract, make sure to include the  names of all presenters included in the proposal and identify one presenter who will  function as the chair/moderator (if appropriate.) One presenter should submit the proposal  on behalf of their group. Workshops/Seminars should have a clear link to the conference  theme.  

Submission Process: Please submit your proposals using this form no later than May 1st.  

Further Information: For more information about the conference or assistance with your  submission, please email I.S.E.B. program chair Ivy Tyson (tyson.142@osu.edu) or visit  https://isebio.com  

HOTEL INFORMATION 

The conference rate at the Courtyard Marriott Downtown is $159/night. Booking details and  more information will be available this summer. 

SPECIAL DRAWING FOR EARLY SUBMISSIONS!! 

If you submit your proposal by April 10, you will be entered into a special drawing. Two lucky  early submitters will receive a free annual ISEB membership! (Prize only valid for accepted proposals. This discount will be made available to you at conference registration.)

Contact Information

Dr. Ivy Tyson

Contact Email

tyson.142@osu.edu

https://networks.h-net.org/group/announcements/20143416/cfp-international-society-educational-biography-2026-conference

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Kitty Kelley Dissertation Fellowship in Biography 
Biographers International Organization
Deadline for Submissions: May 1, 2026

Biographers International Organization (BIO) invites applications for the Kitty Kelley Dissertation Fellowship in Biography. The fellowship provides $25,000 to a doctoral student in any department who is writing a dissertation in English focused upon the life of another person or upon the lives of two or more individuals. Ideally the project should combine the rigor of doctoral research with the art of storytelling. The work cannot be fictionalized nor should the focus be primarily autobiographical. The fellowship is endowed by Kitty Kelley, a founding member of BIO, the author of seven best-selling biographies, and a long-time advocate for biography and biographers.
 
For the fellowship starting September 1, 2026, the deadline to apply will be January 15, 2026, and the winner of the $25,000 scholarship will be announced no later than May 1, 2026. The request for applications is now open. For more information, please visit: https://biographersinternational.org/award/kitty-kelley-dissertation-fellowship-in-biography/
 
BIO is a nonprofit, tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to promoting the art and craft of biography, cultivating a diverse community of biographers, encouraging public interest in biography, and providing educational and fellowship opportunities that support the work of biographers worldwide.

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Literacy in Letters and Letter Writing. The Epistolary Research Network Conference 2026

October 2–3, 2026

Deadline for Submissions: May 16, 2026

Literacy is more than reading and writing. Though historically associated with the educated and the privileged, it carries varied social meanings and remains essential for many as a means of communication. Even societies we consider literate, past and present, contain those who are not – or not fully so – varying widely in their levels of proficiency and ability to engage with some forms of writing over others. Much knowledge from the recent and distant past resides in written texts, be they documents or manuscripts, a significant number of which are letters. 

What does it mean to be “letter literate”? Traditionally, the composition of letters relies on familiarity with writing equipment and epistolary conventions in addition to being able to read and write for the purposes of mediating and maintaining personal and professional relationships. The Epistolary Research Network (TERN) welcomes proposals that seek to contribute to a rich discussion around the conference theme in relation to diverse time periods, geographical locations and disciplines. 

Abstracts of 250 words (maximum) for 20-minute papers should be sent as a DOCX or PDF document to ternetwork@hotmail.com by 16 May 2026. Both individual and panel submissions are accepted. This conference is online only and will be held October 2-3, 2026.

Please see the attachment or the website for further information and a list of potential topics.

Contact Information

Linda McGuire

Robert Butler

Contact Email

ternetwork@hotmail.com

URL

https://www.epistolaryresearch.org/

CFP – “Literacy in Letters and Letter Writing.” The Epistolary Research Network 2026 Conference 

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Transformations: Irish Literature and Social Change
Deadline for Submissions: June 15, 2026

The early decades of Irish independence are now remembered as a time of repression and socioeconomic stagnation, and in recent decades Irish studies has examined the period with an unwavering dedication to analyzing the injustices and often harsh realities of the era. 

In this collection of essays, tentatively titled Transformations: Irish Literature and Social Change, we seek instead to explore the artistic works which have reflected and even helped to activate what could be described as a revolution in the Irish experience of class, disability, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. We invite proposals that identify and analyze such works, drawn from 1922 to today. Recognizing the many ways Irish society has changed over the course of a century, our hope is that these essays may illuminate the part literature can play in the transformation of a society—a question bearing urgency in the present moment.

We also welcome engagements with recent literature that exposes the problems that remain in the struggle for equality and human rights in Ireland. In addition to academic papers, we welcome personal essays by those who have been directly involved in Irish social activism and/or arts projects that have engaged underrepresented communities. 

Papers might explore literature, art, or media that engages topics such as:

• Disability experiences
• Institutionalization
• Scandal 
• Sexuality
• Celibacy
• Women’s rights
• Unmarried motherhood
• Racial, ethnic, and religious diversity
• Migration
• Class and economic disparity
• Queer history and literature
• LGBTQ rights
• Social activism

Submission guidelines: 

Please email proposals to Marion Quirici and Elizabeth Grubgeld at TransformationsIreland@gmail.com by June 15, 2026. Abstracts should be approximately 300 words. Please include a title and a one-sentence author bio.  

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Mediapolìs Europa
 
XXV Symposium of the Osservatorio scientifico della memoria autobiografica scritta, orale, iconografica
 
Autobiography and Artificial Intelligence
Towards a Redefinition of the Subject?
 
Rome, 3-4-5 November 2026
BSMC Biblioteca di Storia Moderna e Contemporanea
Palazzo Mattei di Giove
Via Caetani 32-00186
 
Deadline for Submissions: June 15, 2026
 
Colloquium organized by the Cultural Association Mediapolis Europa and by the international journal Mnemosyne, Université de Louvain
 
 
Scientific Committee:
Editor:
Beatrice Barbalato
Members:
Antonio Castillo Gómez, Universidad de Alcalá
Nathalie Frogneux, Université catholique de Louvain
Françoise Hiraux, Université catholique de Louvain
Irene Meliciani, Mediapolis.Europa
Anca Mitroi Sprenger, Brigham Young University, Utah
Francesca Rachele Oppedisano, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Roma
Giulia Pelillo, Diplomatische Akademie Wien / Vienna School of International Studies
Laurence Pieropan, Université de Mons
Edgar Radtke, Universität Heidelberg
 
 
Ante omnia: between scepticism and adherence
In Apocalittici e integrati (1964), Umberto Eco identified two attitudes towards the technologies of mass culture: the “apocalyptic”, critical and pessimistic (Eco referred in particular to Adorno’s work), and the “integrated”, animated by an optimistic and sometimes naïve vision. These two poles can be transposed to current debates on artificial intelligence (AI from this point onwards in this text).
One of the key points to be clarified concerns the way in which it is possible to define an autobiography conceived with or through AI. This issue – at once philosophical, technical and existential – touches on a crucial point in our relationship with the digital worlds: is the metaverse an extension of the subject or a space of delegation to an algorithmic otherness? (Poussart D. 2024: 10).
This set of problems falls into a juridical context in continuous flux: the European Union has recently adopted the AI Act (Regulation 2024/1689 of 13 June 2024), aimed at regulating the development of an AI ethic that is reliable and respectful of fundamental rights.
 
 
This call for papers invites entries to explore the following thematic points:
a) The notion of subject in the era of artificial intelligence.
b) The connections between autobiographical narration and virtual environment (metaverse).
c) The concept of plagiarism in a context of AI-assisted production.
d) The ‘me’ and the other in the dynamics of AI.
e) Artificial intelligence as collective unconscious.
f) The consequences of ceding personal data within the context of self-narrations.
 
In this view, we also propose to present autobiographies developed with the involvement of AI, accompanied by an in-depth critical analysis. The aim is to put the digital tools to the test while questioning the foundations of the subject, memory and narration in the algorithmic era.
 

• The subject to the test of artificial intelligence

“What Does It Matter Who Is Speaking,”
Someone Said, “What Does It Matter Who Is Speaking”.
Samuel Beckett (1998: 231)

The first question concerns the statute of the subject in an autobiography in the era of artificial intelligence: does knowledge produced by AI still allow for the conception of a subject? Or do its answers remain confined to what is enunciated, without ever corresponding to the act of enunciation? This criticism is central to the debates on the use of AI in self-narrations.
Where human intelligence confronts itself with lacunas, grey areas, AI tends to erase them, generating models founded on predefined rules. Its speed and capacity to simulate omniscience can give the illusion of dealing with an entity that is a repository of total knowledge.
Lacan maintained that even if the patient attributes absolute knowledge to the analyst, the latter knows that he/she does not have it. The role of sujet supposé savoir (subject as repository of knowledge) consists not in filling a void with exhaustive answers, but rather in preserving the openness of meaning (Lacan, 1974 [1964]: 256-271).
Can AI be conceived as a sujet supposé savoir?
An alternative point of view: against a pessimistic vision, could the writing subject/autobiographical writer positively avail of AI to filter, modulate, reformulate the variables it proposes, with the aim of constructing his/her discourse?

• The death of the author and decentralised subjectivity

This reflection refers to the debates on the “death of the author” that marked critical thinking from the 1960s. From L’Innommable by Beckett (1953) to Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur? by Foucault (1969), through Derrida (2003 [1964]) as well as Frédéric Weinmann “Je suis mort”. Essai sur la narration autothanatographique, (2018), many thinkers have sought to overcome a hegemonic subjectivity (see also Mathieu Jung, 2020).
The aspiration to erase the figure of the author in some artistic practices of the 20th and 21st centuries is manifested emblematically in the Mnemosyne Atlas by Aby Warburg (1921-1929), a veritable harbinger of artificial intelligence, and it finds very open expression in the film Werk ohne Autor (Never Look Away, 2018) by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck.
Though very distant in form and context, these two works share the same willingness to shift the centre of gravity from the individual to collective memory.
In his unfinished atlas, Warburg gathered paintings, sculptures, bas reliefs and visual documents according to thematic and symbolic affinities, regardless of their geographical or chronological origins. This cartographical gesture rejects historical linearity and the author’s centrality, proposing a transverse reading of cultural forms in which images dialogue with one another according to a logic of survival (Nachleben) and transformation.
The film Werk ohne Autor draws inspiration freely from the biography of Gerhard Richter, a contemporary artist whose work questions collective memory (the focal point of his reflection), through photography and family narrations.
In its capacity of crossing bodies of work, establishing correspondences and setting forms into dialogue beyond the contexts of origin, doesn’t artificial intelligence perhaps resemble Warburg’s method and the aesthetic of Werk ohne Autor? However, one wonders how far AI – which can organize data, choose a style, draw on immense archives – can be guided by an individual.
As Derrida reminded us in Échographies de la télévision (1996), it is essential to understand the processes that construct information as well as to allow for an understanding of how archives are conceived as fundamental rights of the citizen (Derrida & Stiegler, 2002).
AI, which can be regarded as an arch-enhanced archive, poses the question of exploitation of knowledge. A critical reflection on what has been said on the relationship between research-archives and AI would be fruitful (see Baldacci, 2016; Calvino, 2023 [1994]: 5-10).
We are aware that AI is no longer only a prosthesis or a reserve of data: it reproduces human cognitive processes, appropriates research methods. It is therefore important to understand whether the human being is capable of governing these mechanisms.

• La société du spectacle and algorithmic autobiography

From a critical point of view, AI-generated autobiographies can be considered as a materialization of the society of the spectacle described by Guy Debord (1967), whereby the individual becomes a consumer good.
The slogan of an AI program – How to transform your life into an autobiography – illustrates an overturning: it is no longer one’s life experience that seeks a form, but it is the wish to self-narrate that drives one to live. Autobiography becomes performance, and life, material to be dramatized.
Guy Debord had anticipated this drift: politicians, artists, public figures live to show themselves. Heidegger, Marcuse, Derrida questioned the links between technology, power and the exploitation of archives (see Carrasco 2025: 53).
In a world saturated with information, is there still room for serendipity – the capacity to discover something by chance? (Barbalato B. 2024: 130).
Alerts multiply: Stuart Russell, in Human Compatible Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control (2019), invites one to suspend the development of some AIs, which he regards as a race to a precipice. The film Eternal You (2024) explores the digital avatars who make the dead return to life. AI even continues the work of Tezuka, who died in 1989, simulating his style.
In short, AI no longer restricts itself to assisting: it creates, develops procedures, replaces. At what price, though? And with what consequences for the relationship with the subject, narration, memory?

• The metaverse and The Death of the Pitia

The metaverse – or meta-universe – constitutes a virtual space devoid of anchoring in life experience. It overturns the classic process of knowledge: instead of starting from empirical facts to draw conclusions, it proposes virtual scenarios that are capable of influencing reality. This overturning is not unknown: statistical sciences, for example, anticipate the future starting from an analysis of past data. And to predict also means to orient opinions, behaviours, trajectories.
In the text The Death of the Pitia (1988 [1976]), Friedrich Dürrenmatt imagines an aged, dying Pitia obnubilated by fumes, who, unable to read Oedipus’s future, makes it up. From that moment on, it is this fiction that becomes reality: step after step, Oedipus fulfils the fabricated prophecy. Dürrenmatt thus illustrates how a vision – even a fictitious one – can generate facts, provided it is invested with symbolic authority.

• The collective self and the end of the solipsistic subject

What is meant by ‘collective self’ in the context of artificial intelligence? In the chapter “Autobiocopie” in Les Brouillons de soi (1998), Philippe Lejeune explores plagiarism as a condition intrinsic to every autobiography. He cites Cioran: “To exist is plagiarism” (La tentation d’exister 1956). Think also of the heteronyms of Fernando Pessoa, who, though splitting in two, nonetheless remains the puppeteer of his doubles.
Western cultural history has long counterposed the original to the copy. Yet, from Montaigne to Perec, all the way to Andy Warhol’s Pop Art, the act of copying has invariably been claimed as a creative gesture. Blogs – a contraction of web log – which appeared in 1997, fall in line with this. They propose an often anti-chronological self-narration in which the last event precedes the first one, and the personal narration is constructed on the basis of dialogue with the readers.
Michel Tournier defined this kind of writing as journal extime (2004 [2002]): an intimate diary exposed to other people’s gaze. The term extime, coined by Lacan and reclaimed by Jacques-Alain Miller, designates the point in which the intimate reveals itself in the space of the Other – a radical externality that becomes constitutive of the subject.
As diaries extimes, blogs are shaped by the interactions with the readers. Pierre Lévy (1994) talks about collective intelligence, about an autobiography that is auto- and hetero-produced at the same time. Like intelligence, these spaces evolve with use, becoming places of shared reflection.
It is now established that the Internet has profoundly transformed our relationship with alterity. According to an investigation by Lejeune (2000: 193-194), the Internet favours a singular self-narration in which the absence of private writing is compensated for by a public mise-en-scene. This exposition can generate doubles, alter egos, figures of the self that are shaped by other people’s gaze.
The artist Sophie Calle based most of her work on this logic: autobiography as construction through other people’s eyes. In M’as-tu vue? (2003), she overturns the paradigm of the seeing subject to consider it as a “seen being”. With irony, she explores a radical inter-subjectivity, proposing devices of self-knowledge in which each one can appropriate him/herself – in the manner of scientific method.

• The acephalous machine and AI as collective unconscious

It is hard, say, to cross out six different numbers on a Lotto ticket in such a way that the arrangement looks convincing. And yet the sequence that emerges after the numbers are drawn seems entirely right and credible in every way. Gerhard Richter, 2003: 16

Through his Readymades, Marcel Duchamp proposed a conception of art as a system deliberately devoid of intention. The work thus becomes a machine for generating meaning – or for dissolving it – with neither centre nor authority. By removing the artist from the scene, Duchamp establishes an acephaly of meaning, in which the work unfolds independently. In the same way, Alexander Calder, with his Mobiles, gave life to a kinetic art form in which movement escapes any deliberate intention and every narrative logic.
Numerous works by Yves Tanguy, a Surrealist, open up to another conception of artistic creation: the one of an automatism where form emerges without premeditation, guided by an internal logic. A wealth of examples could be provided here.
These artists lead us to wonder whether artificial intelligence constitutes, in itself, a form of collective unconscious – a vast reservoir of traces, narrations and gestures, aggregated without a subject – which is the bearer of a shared memory.
See above (par. b) the reference to Mnemosyne Atlas by Aby Warburg and the film Never Look Away (Werk ohne Autor, 2018) by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck: two works that illustrate, each in its own way, the operating force of a collective unconscious in the production and reception of images.
Some reflections must certainly be addressed to Carl Gustav Jung and his theory of the collective unconscious, Die Archetypen und das kollektive Unbewusste (1934). However, distinctions must be made on the quantitative universality of AI data and the qualitative nature of Jung’s archetypes. 

• The mirror

In the autobiographical field, the acephalous machine implies a decentralized memory made of fragments and splinters, like many reflections in a shattered mirror.
The tale The Metamorphosis of Orante, by Perrault, illustrates with acuity the dangers of passive mirroring.

It is the story – of Venetian origin – of Orante, a portraitist gentleman, and his very chaste loves with a pretty girl called Calliste. She never tires of the improvised and flattering portraits he dedicates to her. But one day she falls ill with smallpox, and her lover gives back to her a disfigured image of herself. Furious, she strikes him with an awl, and Orante shatters into a thousand pieces, which no longer send her a single portrait, but a thousand images of her ugliness. Love appears, gathers the fragments and turns Orante into a mirror. Love looks himself into it, observes himself, is pleased with what he sees and falls in love with himself (Perrault C., 1981 [1697]: 215-216 – the translation is mine).

This allegorical tale sheds light on the precariousness of certainties and the centrality of desire. It is not the proliferation of reflections that reveals the truth of the subject, but it is desire – that invisible, uncertain motor, always a step behind – that constitutes the nucleus of the person.
In contrast to the ‘moral’ of Perrault’s tale, Gerhard Richter uses the mirror according to a unitary logic, placing it beside the paintings dedicated to the Birkenau cycle (2014). This device allows the works and the viewer to reflect themselves into it and to perceive that the process can be reproduced ad infinitum. This mnemonic bathing ensures that the individual presence and historical reminiscence meet in a space of silent resonance.
Hence the essential question: how can the individual interact with artificial intelligence without losing that world of aspiration, of the unsaid? How to preserve, before an acephalous machine – without a body, without unconscious, without cracks – the space of the void, of expectation, of the incomplete as the foundation of every subjectivity?

• Conclusion: towards an exegesis of the algorithmic self

These reflections show the extent to which self-narration has undergone changes in the last decades. There has long been awareness of the identification process of the ‘I’ through the gaze of the other. However, AI introduces a previously unknown form of dialogue: every answer is pre-established, stemming from an immense archive that is anonymous for specialists and non-specialists alike.
Yet, we notice that AI proposes multiple versions of the same content. Could this plurality open up a space of subjective freedom? Perhaps. Because the user could be able to practise an exegesis, select, interpret, recompose – and thus affirm his/her own voice even if it originates from impersonal material.
This freedom requires vigilance: preserving the world of latent expectations. Before the acephalous machine, we must keep the space of questions alive – as Lacan proposes – and not surrender to the illusion of a total answer.


Bibliography
Theodor Adorno, M. Horkheimer 1944, Dialectic of Enlightenment, New York, Social Studies Association, Inc.

Cristina Baldacci 2016, Archivi impossibili, Cremona, Johan Levi Editore

Beatrice Barbalato 2008, “La teatralizzazione dell’io. Narciso sul web. I Blogs o l’esplosione dell’anti-autorialità”, in (B. Barbalato ed.), La documentazione autobiografica come patrimonio culturale, Mnemosyne n. 1, Presses Universitaires de Louvain

– 2024, “La Mémoire, l’archivage, la serendipité”, 119-134, in Beatrice Barbalato, Antonio Castillo Gómez, Nathalie Frogneux, Verónica Sierra Blas (eds.), Hégémonie et périphéricité dans les écritures autobiographiques : textes, contextes, visibilité, Mnemosyne o la costruzione del senso, n. 17, PUL

Samuel Beckett 1998 [1953], L’Innommable (1953), Paris, Éditions de Minuit

Sophie Calle 2003, M’as-tu vue?, Paris, Éditions du Centre Pompidou/Éditions Xavier Barral

Italo Calvino 2023 [1994], “Collezione di sabbia”, 5-10, “Il tempio di legno”, 178-180, in id., Collezione di sabbia, Milano, Mondadori

Juan Antonio Carrasco 2025, “Les frontière de la technologie et l’avenir de l’IA”,  41-58, in  Franck Debos dir., L’éthique de l’intelligence artificielle,  Great Britain, ISTE Editions Ltd

Émile Cioran 1956, La tentation d’exister, Paris, Gallimard

Guy Debord 1967, La société du spectacle, Paris,  Buchet-Chastel

Jacques Derrida, Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews, Cambridge, Polity Press

Jacques Derrida 2003 [1963], L’Écriture et la différence, Seuil, Paris.

-2003 [1963], “Cogito et histoire de la folie”, 51-52, a conference initially held at the Collège philosophique, on 4 March 1963, and resumed in L’Écriture et la différence (ed. 1967), Paris, Éd. Du Seuil

Friedrich Dürrenmatt 1985 [1976]), La morte della Pizia, transl. by R. Colorni, Milano, Adelphi, 1988 (Das Sterben der Phythia, Diogenes verlag ag Zürich)

Umberto Eco 1964, Apocalittici e integrati, Milano, Bompiani

Martin Heidegger (1983 [1947]), Lettre sur l’humanisme, Paris, Aubier

Carl Gustav Jung 1977 [1934], Gli archetipi dell’inconscio collettivo, It. transl. by E. Schanzer and A. Vitolo, Bollati Boringhieri

Mathieu Jung 2025, “‘Qu’importe qui parle’. Autour de la fonction-auteur”, Acta fabula, vol. 21, n° 1, Essais critiques, Janvier 2020, URL: http://www.fabula.org/acta/document12586.php, page consulted on 28 September 2025. DOI: https://10.58282/acta.12586)

Jacques Lacan 1974 [1964], “Du sujet supposé savoir”, 256-271, in Id. Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de lapsychanalyse, Livre XI, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, Ed. Le Seuil

Philippe Lejeune 1998, “Autobiocopie”, 13-34, in Id., Les brouillons de soi, Paris, Ed. Du Seuil

– 2000, Cher écran, Paris, Éd. Du Seuil

Pierre Lévy (1994), L’intelligence collective. Pour une anthropologie du cyberespace, Paris, La Découverte

Herbert Marcuse (1968 [1964]), L’homme Unidimensionnel, Paris, Editions de Minuit

Michel de Montaigne 1962[1580/1582/ 1588], Essais, Paris, Gallimard

Georges Perec 1978, Je me souviens, Paris, Hachette
Charles Perrault 1981 [1697], “La métamorphose d’Orante”, 215-216, in Id., Contes, suivis du Miroir ou la Métamorphose d’Orante, Presented, edited and annotated by Jean-Pierre Collinet, Paris, Gallimard
Denis Poussart 2004, Le métavers : autopsie d’un fantasme – Réflexion sur les limites techniques d’une réalité synthétisée, virtualisée, Université du Québec.
202403-OBV-Pub-Métavers_LimitesTechniques.pdf

Gerhard Richter 2015, Birkenau. 93 Details aus meinem Bild ‘Birkena’, Köln, König

Chiara Rossi 2025, Dal soggetto supposto sapere al sapere senza soggetto: una prospettiva psicoanalitica sull’Intelligenza Artificiale – PSICOANALISI, PSICOTERAPIA, SOCIETÀ

Stuart Russell 2020 [ 2019], Human Compatible Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control, Penguin Publishing Group

Michel Tournier 2004 [2002], Journal extime, edition reviewed by the author, Paris, Gallimard

Abel Warburg, Atlas Mnémosyne (1921 et 1929), Warburg Institute, London
Frédéric Weinmann 2018, “Je suis mort”. Essai sur la narration autothanatographique, Paris, Seuil

Films
Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, Never Look Away (Werk ohne Autor), 2018
Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck, Eternal You, 2024


Submission of entries
Entries must be submitted by 15 June 2026 to:
beatrice.barbalato@gmail.com; irenemeliciani@gmail.com.
They must include:

• A synopsis (max 250 words), with reference to two texts
• A brief CV (max 100 words), possibly accompanied by two personal publications (articles, books, videos)

 
Acknowledgment of acceptance will be communicated by 30 June 2026.
Once confirmation of acceptance is received, the synopsis must also be translated into English (250 words, without repeating the references).
Admitted languages
Communications can be presented in Italian, Spanish, French or English. No simultaneous translation is available: therefore, a passive understanding of these languages is recommended.
 
Please take care in adhering to the required format for the synopsis and the CV.
 
 
Enrolments
From 1 to 30 September 2026    180,00€
From 1 to 20 October                    220,00€
 
Enrolments cannot be accepted in loco
 
Graduate Students
From 1 to 30 September 2026        140,00 €
From 1 to 20 October                      170,00€
 
Enrolments cannot be accepted in loco

Series on Travel Writing

Deadline for Submissions: August 1, 2026

Tinta regada (Spilled Ink)a multilingual publication, invites submissions for a Series on Travel Writing (Literatura de viajes). 

The editors of the literary magazine of the Instituto Nuevos Horizontes welcome personal commentaries, essays, poetry, short story and other forms, in any language, up to 2,500 words.

Send questions and submissions to nuevos.horizontes.uprm@gmail.com. 

We publish four issues per year and welcome texts for this series on a rolling basis. 

Potential topics to consider:

• Study away experiences
• Poetry, literary impressions, short stories
• Photo essays
• Language memoirs
• Digital aspects of contemporary travel 
• Reflections on distance, culture, identity and belonging
• Literary & film tourism 
• Teaching experiences
• Culture shock (and reverse culture shock)
• How travel reshapes notions of home 
• Reflections on historical sites
• Writing and travel as spaces of personal growth and transformation
• Ethical considerations in travel and tourism
• Urban vs. rural travel narratives
• Travel writing as a means of preserving local traditions and stories 
• Sustainable and responsible travel

https://www.uprm.edu/nuevoshorizontes/2025/08/24/literatura-de-viajes