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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World Biofictionalists Essay Collection

In October of 2026, Bloomsbury will publish World Biofictionalists in Translation: Literature as Existential Map, which contains interviews with famous biofictionalists from sixteen countries. Having been working on this book for nearly three years, I realize that there is a desperate need for a scholarly study about a wide array of national traditions. To that end, I am planning to edit a collection of essays (with either Bloomsbury or Routledge) titled World Biofictionalists.

Here is my vision for the book. Essays would be between 5000 and 7000 words, and they would focus on a key biofictionalist or biofiction from your country. For instance, who would be considered one of the most important biofictionalists from Japan, Morocco, Romania, or Australia? Kyoko Nakajima, Hassan Najmi, Florina Ilis, or Peter Carey would certainly be possibilities. In your essay, you would do an analysis of either the author or a specific work, but the larger goal would be to offer readers a way of thinking about the biofictionalist and/or biofiction in relation to your country. To do this essay, scholars must have a commanding grasp of both biofiction scholarship and the country’s national literature.

In addition to the essay, scholars should include a list of the ten best or most impactful biofictions from your country. The listed works need not be translated into English, but if they are not translated, please provide the title in the original language as well as your English translation.

I have not yet settled on a particular press for this book, and there is a reason why. Bloomsbury tends to publish books of no more than 110,000 words, whereas Routledge is open to books as long as 300,000 words. If I get an overwhelming response, then I will probably publish this book with Routledge, but if I only get about fifteen to twenty essays, then I will probably publish it with Bloomsbury.–

Michael Lackey (he, his, him)

https://umn-morris.academia.edu/MichaelLackey

Distinguished McKnight University Professor

Distinguished University Teaching Professor

University of Minnesota, Morris

104 Humanities Building

600 East 4th Street

Morris, MN 56267-2132
320-589-6263
lacke010@morris.umn.edu

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Second Call for Proposals: ‘Talking Country’

To present at the 30^th Congress of FILLM Congress

At Victoria University (Melbourne) in Narrm, Australia

8-11 December 2026

Deadline for Submissions: May 31, 2026

This is the 2^nd Call for Proposals to present at the 30^th Congress of the International Federation for Modern Languages and Literatures (FILLM). Theme for the Congress is Talking Country: we are looking for individual presentations, panel sessions, and academic skills workshops, and other proposals that can respond strongly to this theme. This will be an expressly “on-country” Congress, where presenters will attend in person.
Supporting this bid are two FILLM members, supported by Victoria University (Melbourne) as the host venue:

• South Pacific chapter of the Association for Commonwealth Language and Literature Studies (ACLALS).
• Australasian Universities Languages and Literature Association (AULLA).

Australia has much to offer the global conversation for languages and literatures, as well as much to learn from it. This continent boasts the world’s oldest continuous discursive traditions, with transmissions of culture and law spanning more than 65,000 years. By some measures, it is one of the most successfully integrated multicultural societies of late modernity. At the same time, though, Australia is a country struggling to come to terms with its colonial legacies of violence and expropriation—and with ongoing problems of discrimination and prejudice. The lack of care for Aboriginal language preservation since 1788 has been an especially egregious failure of government and society.

Congress Theme and Subthemes

Talking Country is a theme that speaks against taking country for granted. Countries are vessels for languages and literatures, as well as fields of conflict in which cultures may confront, avoid, or obliterate each other. For many Indigenous epistemologies, country is a term of immense importance. It names a locus of profound responsibility that present cultures owe to their futures and pasts. Meanwhile, multicultural praxis often chafes at the norms of country and nation that would confine languages, literatures, and cultures to fixed points in space and time. This theme is a call to reflect on the importance of country, and to debate its entailments for our fields of study—including:

• Interplay and interrelation (and conflict and ignorance) of languages and literatures, operating between and within countries.
• Intersections between country or nation and other modes of cultural identification—examples include gender, race, religion, sexuality, and wealth.
• Nation–affirming agendas and their normative consequences for languages, literatures, and cultures.
• Various ways that Indigenous and multicultural contributions are reconfiguring received understandings about country and culture, as well as various forms of resistance to these changes.
• Agendas for decolonisation and for worldwide efforts to preserve languages and cultures of expression.
• Ecologies of places and cultures, including ecolinguistics and ecopoetics.
• Ontologies underpinning comparative language and literature studies.
• Interrelations between ancient or lost country, future or imagined country, and present or contingent country.
• Countries talking, countries as voices and authors, countries as narratives and texts.
• Challenges that ideas about country pose to education about languages and literatures.

Submitting a Proposal

If you wish to present an individual paper (up to 18 minutes content), a panel session (85 minutes, including discussion time), or an academic skills workshop (85 minutes), please do so via our conference submissions portal. Please note the information requested and relevant word limits for proposals, as the portal sets these out.

The portal will ask you for explicit information about your submission’s proposed participants, the type of presentation you propose, and how it will address the Congress theme—as well as its title and abstract.
This 2^nd CfP round closes 31 May 2026

. Proposals received on or before that date will receive an outcome no later than 31 July 2026, affording presenters lead-time to plan travel and seek any funding support. If you will need a formal invitation letter for visa, funding, or other purposes, please indicate this need in the portal when you submit your proposal.

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CFP-“Letters as Paratexts in the Early Modern World” (6/1/2026)  Special Issue, The Journal of Epistolary Studies

This special edition of The Journal of Epistolary Studies takes up the use of letters as supplements and enhancements to the early modern book writ large, and how epistolary, book, and material culture can and did work together in the early modern world. In particular, this edition seeks to consider the socio-cultural functions and meanings of epistolary material embedded in print and manuscript culture. The editors are interested in thoughtful engagement with historical material, close readings of texts and paratexts, the circulation, networks, and behavior of using epistolary material, and critical reconsiderations and complications of these categories.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Dedicatory epistles and epistles to the reader
• Appended letters
• Epistolary material in frontispieces and other illustrations
• Letters, their circulation as books of letters, and informal publications (commonplace books, scribal publications, circulation of books, etc.)
• Personal dedications in books
• Graphic, textual, and layout choices in epistolary texts and/or their paratexts
• The gendered, racialized, and otherwise embodied realities of publication and epistolary culture in early modernity
• The economics of early modern epistolarity and print
• Critiques of epistolary and paratextual scholarship conventions

The special edition editors construe early modernity broadly, and welcome submissions concerning the period 1350-1800. They also look forward to submissions with global perspectives and investigations.

Submission guidelines: Please submit a 500-word abstract and a 200 word biography to  drbarrytorch@gmail.com and hannah.sparwassersoroka@mail.mcgill.ca with subject line “Journal of Epistolary Studies Submission” by 15 June 2026.

Deadline: Abstracts due 15 June 2026.

Deadline to submit full articles: 1 November 2026

Projected appearance of special journal edition: Fall 2027

Contact Information

Hannah Sparwasser Soroka (ABD, McGill University) – hannah.sparwassersoroka@mail.mcgill.ca

Dr. Barry Torch (Independent Scholar) – drbarrytorch@gmail.com 

Call for Article Proposals: Special Issue of The Journal of Epistolary Studies on “Letters as Paratexts in the Early Modern World” [Announcement]

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CFP – In Her Words: Women Artists and Life Writing before 1920

Pigott Theatre, The National Gallery, London, 2 October 2026

Deadline for Submissions: June 1, 2026

Organisers: Dr Susanna Avery-Quash, Senior Research Lead: Partnerships, Networks  and Initiatives, National Gallery; Dr Rebecca Birrell, Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow, University of St Andrews, and Bye Fellow, Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge; Prof Linda Goddard, Professor of Art History, University of St Andrews; and Harriet Loffler, Director of The Women’s Art Collection, Murray Edwards College

For centuries, women artists have produced autobiographical accounts of their lives and careers, using diaries, letters and other types of writing as a means of resistance, reflection, and self-fashioning. Taking a broad geographical approach, this symposium will address how women artists navigate their artistic identities through writing. We aim to explore women artists’ life writings not simply as biography or confession, but as creative and strategic sites of agency, where women articulate alternative scripts for the artistic life. 

The conference is a collaboration between the National Gallery, London, the Women’s Art Collection, Murray Edwards College, Cambridge, and the University of St. Andrews. It will build on an earlier symposium at Murray Edwards College, supported by the Association for Art History and taking place on 19 June 2026, which concentrates on women artists’ life writing from the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. This second conference, hosted at the National Gallery, will focus on the period before1920. 

In connection with the Gallery’s collection, Artemisia Gentileschi’s powerful letters are among the first known writings by a woman artist, while Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun’s Souvenirs are often described as the first published retrospective memoir by a woman artist. Rosalba Carriera and Berthe Morisot also wrote diaries and letters, while Rosa Bonheur’s (Auto)biography presents a fascinating case of a co-produced narrative by Bonheur and her artist-partner Anna Klumpke. 

Inspired by these or by other examples, we invite short papers on any aspect of women artists’ life writing before 1920, regardless of geography, from those engaged in the field, including curators, writers, critics and researchers. 

Topics could include, but are not limited to: 

• Women artists’ autobiographical self-fashioning, via diaries, letters, memoirs, and other forms of writing
• Critical considerations of how we use women artists’ life writing in research and curatorial projects
• Matrilineal and intergenerational links as expressed or forged through life writing
• Collaborative life writing projects and shared themes linking women artists’ writings across time
• Crossovers between life writing and genres including fiction, poetry and criticism
• Travel writing

Please send proposals (max 200 words or 1500 characters) and a brief bio (max 100 words or 600 characters) for a 15-20 minute paper by completing the form Call for Papers – In Her Words: Women Artists and Life Writing before 1920 – Fill out form by 1 June. 

Participation in the conference is free of charge for speakers (lunch and refreshments included). Standard-fare travel expenses outside London and overnight accommodation will also be paid for, as necessary.  Contact Information

Emily Bell

Research Events Coordinator, National GalleryContact Emailemily.bell@nationalgallery.org.ukURLhttps://forms.office.com/pages/responsepage.aspx?id=_75f7EjwvEG4-inMCdzIyFYWDm-…

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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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Writing Travel in the Twenty-First Century: Mobility and Authenticity in a Time of Crisis

University of Surrey, 27-28 September 2026

deadline for submissions: June 15, 2026

Rune Graulund / University of Southern Denmark

contact email: 

graulund@sdu.dk

Travel is no longer what it used to be. Slow travel, flight shame, sustainable travel, eco- and antitourism, staycation and microadventures are but some of many recent terms testifying to a growing awareness that mobility has become inextricably intertwined with planetary concerns, regardless of whether it is a commute to work, long-distance globetrotting, or an escalating population of refugees and asylum seekers. In a post COVID-19 world where some tech billionaires build their own private rockets to go to Mars (SpaceX), while others develop alternate realities (Meta) that will supposedly render physical mobility obsolete, the form, meaning and destination of travel shifts as never before. 

This PGR/ECR symposium calls for papers that investigate recent transitions in the way travel is written, documented, and imagined. How have digital and other new media transformed, challenged or perhaps entirely replaced the travel ‘writing’ offered by the traditional print form? In the planetary emergency, the cost of mobility is inseparable from the manner in which the mobile individual relates to the planet, and its future. Traditional print formats of ‘writing travel’ – travel  books, essays, articles, letters and postcards – have undergone radical change as a range of digital media and forms (microblogging, texting, podcasts, video essays) and platforms (Instagram, YouTube, Travelblog, TikTok) have fundamentally altered the manner in which travel is narrated, distributed and consumed.  Similarly, while many colonial, gendered and racialized travel writing tropes of earlier eras have been challenged and, in some cases, eradicated from contemporary travel writing practices, others linger on (‘authentic’ travel, adventure, exoticism, tourism). Repackaged to seemingly fit current norms of equality and sustainability, these persisting tropes promise a cosmopolitanism and freedom of movement that addresses the wrongdoings of imperialist, colonial or other oppressive regimes. Yet they often still rely on, profit from, and sometimes extend the very power structures they were meant to redress. Finally, this symposium welcomes papers that investigate the manner in which the cost of individual mobility is now inseparable from the impact on the planet at large, both now and in the future. Given the undeniable environmental impact most forms of travel have, is there a place for travel writing in a truly sustainable society? Is so-called ’eco-travel writing’ genuinely possible or is it just an exercise in rebranding and greenwashing a deeply compromised genre? And if it is possible, what are the forms, style, itineraries, agendas and practices that contribute most effectively to environmentally aware travel writing?

Presentations could therefore address (but need not be limited to):

• Slow travel
• Microadventures
• Flight shame
• Ecotourism
• Anti-tourism
• Post-tourism
• The new communities of travel writers/readers enabled by new media
• Revenge travel
• Mindful travel
• Travel and the digital
• Extreme travel
• Space tourism
• Travel narratives of crisis
• Refugee and migrant travel writing
• Postcolonial and decolonial travel
• Neo-imperial travel
• Footsteps travel 

We therefore invite from PGRs and ECRs abstracts of c. 250 words for 15 minute papers addressing these or similar themes: these should be sent to either Rune Graulund at the Southern Denmark University (graulund@sdu.dk), or Carl Thompson at the University of Surrey (c.thompson@surrey.ac.uk) by June 15 2026.

General queries about the symposium can also be directed to either Rune or Carl.

There will be no charge for the symposium and we also hope to be able to cover the accommodation costs and UK travel of all participants, thanks to funding from the Independent Research Fund Denmark. However, the budget is limited. To ensure we can maximise access and participation, therefore, we would be grateful if participants whose institutions or studentships offer expense allowances draw on these resources to cover some or all of their costs.

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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

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Life Writing in Education: Past and Present in Japan

Date:　Saturday, 13th June, 0.00- Hawaii/ 12.00- in Germany/ 18.00- in Taipei/ 19.00- in Japan

Seminar duration: 120 minutes.

Speakers: Atsushi Goto (Miyagi University), Patrick Shorb (Kansai International University), Toma Konishi (Japanische Schule in Hamburg e.V., Naniwa Writing Education Association (Naniwa Sakubun-no-Kai)), Kakuko Matsumoto (Mukogawa Women’s University)
Moderation: Ayako KAWAJI (Kobe University)

    This seminar will examine a type of narrative-style writing education in Japan aimed at children and young people, “Seikatsu Tsuzurikata.” First, we will explore the theories and practices of the period from the 1910s onwards, which could be described as the ‘prehistory of life writing in schools.’ Next, we will outline the characteristics of the educational approach known as ‘Seikatsu Tsuzurikata’ from the 1930s to the 1950s.　In the latter half, we will examine contemporary practices, including ‘Seikatsu Tsuzurikata’ in primary education and the musical narrative approach in correctional clinical education. Through this examination, we hope to gain an understanding of the breadth and depth of narrative-style writing education in Japan.

Details:
https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.h.kobe-u.ac.jp/ja/z/news_and_event/2026-06-13-1136__;!!PvDODwlR4mBZyAb0!RbZ87m122_f2cBGQiMCaHPYb9DWJH006AgIZ60oDStlA1tCq1HCt1hC9fFrhh6x_P89un6ODNb0ZDCQHUL6eCgTefQ$

Registration (Google Form):
https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdqk-UHDUGm7rZCLF936NUDtYwoZ5ylcr16WtObc5WPiNLkUQ/viewform__;!!PvDODwlR4mBZyAb0!RbZ87m122_f2cBGQiMCaHPYb9DWJH006AgIZ60oDStlA1tCq1HCt1hC9fFrhh6x_P89un6ODNb0ZDCQHUL67dupP2w$

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Sussex Retold: Sounds, Sites Stories (6/19/2026) A creative conference

Registration opens for the Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research’s innovative symposium retelling Sussex heritage for progressive futures

Artists, story-tellers, scholars, land-workers and policy-makers will gather at the University of Sussex to share work and ideas at a creative conference, Sussex Retold: Sounds, Sites Stories, on Friday, 19 June 2026.

Register here!

The day offers a timely investigation into the diversity of Sussex heritage and how the past can be used for progressive futures.

Speakers will include Anooshka Rawden, Cultural Heritage Lead for the South Downs National Park Authority; Alinah Azadeh, artist, writer and local cultural activist; Caroline Lucas, former MP and now Professor of Practice in Environmental Sustainability at the University; Matthew Bird, Director of Love Our Ouse; Libby Drew, Knepp Wildlife Foundation Director and Charlie Cain, National Trust Ranger, Saddlescombe Farm.
Also to savour will be stalls, walks and workshops (final line-up TBC), including:

• Dance displays by Brighton Morris (first formed at the University in 1967) who promote an inclusive approach to tradition
• ‘Prehistoric Sussex on a Plate’, with ancient food grains; 
• Creative writing inspired by Neolithic ‘Whitehawk Woman’
• Singing together to ‘re-sound The Long Man of Wilmington’
• A walk to the students’ forest food garden via the campus rewilded patch.

Have a go at step-dance or soak in a meditative local ‘birdbath’. Discover more about Sussex Gypsy Roma and Traveller heritage with historian Janet Keet-Black. Take a look at exhibits from The Keep’s Copper family archive, renowned local singers from Rottingdean.

The day will also premiere a site-specific ‘promenade’ drama about the history of Sussex-campus land by award-winning playwright Sara Clifford, known for her work on the class struggles and hidden histories of the local area. 
Things will end with music from

The Wilderness Yet, acclaimed young Sussex-infused folk stars, at Falmer’s The Swan Inn barn.

Organised by the University of Sussex’s Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research in partnership with the Sussex School for Progressive Futures, the day is the culmination of a two-year project Sussex Retold, working with local partners to develop practical solutions to challenges in the local culture and environment.

Further details about the Sussex Retold conference and how to register can be found here.

Sussex Retold is supported by the Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research and the South Coast Sustainability group within the Sussex Sustainability Research Programme. We also acknowledge and thank: the sponsorship of the charity Sussex Traditions, the support of the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Impact Acceleration Account (IAA) programme, and the work of the Research Professional Services team in the Faculty of Media, Arts and Humanities.

This event is part of the Summer of Research 2026, a two-week festival of researcher-led talks, workshops and events, supporting and sharing our fantastic research here at Sussex. Find out about and sign up for other exciting events here!

Dr Sam Carroll and Prof Margaretta Jolly

Sussex Retold: Sounds Sites, Stories.

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CFP–Life Writing
 6/30/2026; 11/5-7/2025
SAMLA, Atlanta, USA
Deadline for Submissions: June 30, 2026

Studies of life writing attend to how we read and engage self-representationality, the capaciousness of lives and literatures turned textual, while demanding that readers attend to histories, languages, and experiences that are unfamiliar or different from their own. This panel welcomes presentations on any aspect of life writing; projects related to the conference theme, “Hospitality,” are especially welcome. The production of identities and subjectivities across histories, from genres like narratives of enslavement and captivity, auto/biographies, cookbooks, and commonplace books, to contemporary iterations in memoir, social media, and narrative justice, challenge expectations for how lives can be documented and shared. As we read and analyze life writing, we bear witness to the witness; we examine how life writers understand and represent selfhood; we consider the types of boundaries or barriers these life writers encounter–including those that are cultural, temporal, linguistic, spatial, geographic, political, and sexual; and we negotiate the ethics of life writing, in particular, as we address inherent implications of reading stories of others’ lives. Because self-representational texts arguably move beyond the representation of an autonomous autobiographical self to the relational subject as they consider historical events and people that construct and contextualize identity, a panel focused on life writing studies pays particular attention to how authors (re)present themselves, their worlds, and their lives.
By June 30, please submit an abstract of 250 words, along with presenter’s academic affiliation, contact information, and A/V requirements, on Ballast. This panel is being convened by Nicole Stamant, Agnes Scott College; with questions, please email nstamant@agnesscott.edu.
—
Nicole Stamant, PhD
(pronunciation)
Fuller E. Callaway Professor of English
Affiliated Faculty: Department of Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies
Buttrick Hall, Room 216

Agnes Scott College
141 E. College Ave.
Decatur, Georgia 30030Pronouns: she/her/hers
404.471.6062 (phone)
nicolestamant.agnesscott.org
 
Managing Editor, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies
Author, Memoirs of Race, Color, and Belonging (2022), now in paperback!, and Serial Memoir: Archiving American Lives (2014)
President, SAMLA  (South Atlantic Modern Language Association)

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Travel and Tourism

Mid-Atlantic Popular/American Culture Association Conference

November 5-6, 2026

Baltimore, Maryland

deadline for submissions: June 30, 2026

traveltourismmapaca@ymail.com

Travel and Tourism Studies as a discipline continues to gain popularity in academia, in part because of its inter-disciplinary nature. The Travel and Tourism area seeks papers that discuss and explore any aspect of travel and/or tourism. Topics for this area include, but are not limited to, the following:
– travel and gender/race/class
– personal travel narratives
– heritage tourism
– material culture and tourism
– the impacts of the political climate on travel
Please feel free to consider a wide range of materials, texts and experiences. Applicants are encouraged to consider multi-media (or other alternative format) presentations if those formats would better suit their topics, and may also propose 3- or 4-person panels and roundtables. Submit a brief (300 words) abstract at mapaca.net by June 30, 2026.
Students (both undergraduate and graduate) and independent scholars are encouraged to apply.

Please feel free to send questions to Chair Jennifer Erica Sweda traveltourismmapaca@ymail.com

For general information: mapaca.net

Contact Email traveltourismmapaca@ymail.com

URL http://mapaca.net

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Call for Papers:
Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly
Cluster on Refusal in Migrant and Refugee Lifemaking

Deadline for Abstracts–July 1, 2026

Convener: Monisha Das Gupta
Submission length: 6,000-8,000 words, including the list of references

This call aims to bring together scholars across disciplines and interdisciplines to tackle the stan

ce of refusal on the part of refugees and migrants to speak the language of the state and international bodies that govern their movement and provide aid. We invite scholars to approach everyday, legal, and epistemic refusal through life writing by and for those on the move, those who are confined, and those who insist on living in places rendered disposable.

We define life writing capaciously. Following life writing scholars, we ask contributors to examine non-fiction first-person or biographical creative expression, including ephemera, and to dwell on silences, in addition to conventional genres such as memoirs, letters, testimonies, and oral or life histories. We ask contributors to turn readers’ attention to the ways in which migrants tell their own stories, name their experience, and choose their form and audience. Biographical approaches to institutions and corporations are welcome.

We encourage authors to reflect on their published work on refusal in the context of state-sanctioned mobility, immobility, or displacement, or submit new work. The provocation to think about how migrant or refugee researchers are themselves transformed when working and writing about migrants or displaced people can be a generative line of inquiry.
The cluster considers the slipperiness of the designations—migrants, immigrants, and refugees. It troubles the boundaries between forced and voluntary migration. And, it makes space for what scholars call “internal migration.” How have people documented or narrated their movement within spaces bounded by modern nation-state borders as they navigated structural violence? What about those who have collectively refused to flee life-threatening circumstances? Those who have survived genocide in Gaza, for example, refuse their displacement and dispossession. Across Oceania, Indigenous people refuse their designation as climate refugees as sea levels rise, insisting that the land, freshwater, and ocean feed their identity and the survival of future generations.
 
Please send your abstracts (250 words) to dasgupta@hawaii.edu by July 1, 2026. Authors will be notified whether their abstracts have been selected for the cluster by July 15, 2026.

Full articles (6000-8000 words) are due by October 15, 2026.

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Beyond the Self: Life Writing and the Nonhuman (19^th-20^th centuries)

11-12 March 2027, Université Paris Cité

Deadline for Submissions–July 15, 2026

Call for papers (abridged version)

‘I now know that I’m made of nonhumans’, Timothy Morton and Dominic Boyer write in Hyposubjects: On Becoming Human (2021: 18). Since the late twentieth century, criticism has shown the self to be entangled in ever-proliferating forms of life and matter (Haraway 2008). While the idea of the instability of the ‘I’ is anything but new, recent scholarship has built on the contributions of life sciences and physics to supply fresh insight into the porosity of the human subject.

Such a reconceptualization inevitably impacts our understanding of human agency. As Ina Batzke, Lea Espinoza and Linda Hess argue in the introduction to Life Writing in the Posthuman Anthropocene, ‘integrating the human with other kinds of animate and inanimate matter implies that agency ceases to be regarded as an exclusive property of humans’ (Batzke et al. 2021: 3–4).

These observations, in turn, problematize the status of the writing subject, particularly in autobiography – a genre traditionally founded on the belief in an autonomous, self-contained individual. The posthumanist and materialist turns have offered thorough reappraisals of autobiographical literature, going so far as to dissect each of its components: Stephen Abblitt asks whether autobiography is still relevant ‘when the autos is decentered, the bios is opened to a more multispecies interpretation of life, and even graphe can no longer be assumed’ (Abblitt 2019: 507).

That is why this conference chooses the broader term of ‘life writing’, following a practice initiated by Marlene Kadar’s seminal collection Essays on Life Writing. In her introduction, Kadar argues that the category of ‘life writing’ could serve as a useful taxonomy for autobiographical works by marginalized social groups defined by race or gender (Kadar 1992: 7). We are interested in how far this category can be expanded, as human and nonhuman, biological and nonbiological forms – from microorganisms and fungi to flowers, mammals, insects, minerals, and objects – all intersect with or engage in the writing of life and lives.

This conference thus welcomes proposals on any and all creatures of flesh, mesh, stone, or wood. We encourage scholars at all career stages to think creatively about who or what is capable of life writing in the Anglophone world. Since much of the recent scholarship on the question of nonhuman or posthuman lives focuses on contemporary  texts, the goal of this symposium is to expand our horizons by looking back towards both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. We invite contributions that trace subjectivity, agency, and self-narrative back to the early days of the Industrial Revolution, or acknowledge the circulation and legacy of turn of nineteenth-century ideas in more recent literary texts.

Possible topics may include, but are not limited to: 

●      Human / humanist selves, their limits and redefinitions

●      Nature diaries

●      Catalogues and notebooks of botanical or ethological research

●      Letters to, from, or between (non)human agents

●      Representations of illness, disease, bacteria, microorganisms that make, inflect, or disrupt human / nonhuman trajectories

●      Material traces of animal, plant, and mineral life understood as auto/biographical inscription

●      Sedimentation and fossilization as life writing

●      Petroculture and the impact of fossil fuels on self-inscription

●      ‘it’-narratives or fictional (auto)biographies of objects

● The vibrant materiality (Bennett 2010) of book, paper, and manuscript in life writing

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words, along with a short biography, tolifewriting.nonhuman@gmail.comby 15^th July 2026.

Scientific committee

Edouard Marsoin, Associate Professor of American Literature, Université Paris Cité

Clara-Louise Mourier, PhD candidate, Université de Lille / Université Paris Cité

Maëlle Nagot, PhD candidate, Université Paris Cité / University of Surrey

Laure de Nervaux-Gavoty, Associate Professor of English Studies, Université Paris-Est Créteil

Kimberley Page-Jones, Associate Professor of British Studies, Université de Bretagne Occidentale

Lucy Ella Rose, Lecturer in Victorian Literature, University of Surrey

Cécile Roudeau, Professor of American Literature, Université Paris Cité

Emma Thiébaut, PhD candidate, Université Paris Cité 

Bibliography

Abblitt, Stephen (2019), ‘Composite Lives: Making-With Our Multispecies Kin (Imagine!)’, A/b: Auto/Biography Studies, 34:3.

Alaimo, Stacy (2010), Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Allen, Thomas M. (2026), Vital Moments: Life, Matter, and Time in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Batzke, Ina, Espinoza Garrido, Lea and Hess, Linda M. (eds) (2021), Life Writing in the Posthuman Anthropocene, Cham: Springer.

Bennett, Jane (2010), Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham: Duke University Press.

Bennett, Jane (2020), Influx and Efflux: Writing up with Walt Whitman, Durham: Duke University Press.

Bonnell, Jennifer and Kheraj, Sean (eds) (2022), Traces of the Animal Past: Methodological Challenges in Animal History, Calgary: University of Calgary Press.

Brant, Clare (2021), ‘The Sentience of Sea Squirts’, in I. Batzke, L. Espinoza Garrido, and L. M. Hess (eds), Life Writing in the Posthuman Anthropocene, Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp. 123–56.

Brant, Clare (2025), Underwater Postcards, Nottingham: Shoestring Press.

Butler, Judith (2020), Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, London: Verso.

Butler, Judith (2021), Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, 1st edn, London: Routledge.

Carpenter, Edward (1916), My Days and Dreams, Being Autobiographical Notes, London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd.

Carson, Rachel ([1962] 2002), Silent Spring, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Fanon, Frantz (2021), Black Skin, White Masks (trans. R. Philcox), London: Penguin Books.

Haraway, Donna (2008), When Species Meet, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman (2020), Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World, New York: New York University Press.

Kadar, Marlene (ed.) (1992), Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Mbembe, Achille (2003), ‘Necropolitics’, Public Culture, 15:1.

Menely, Tobias and Taylor, Jesse O. (eds) (2017), Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times, University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press.

Morton, Timothy and Boyer, Dominic (2021), Hyposubjects: On Becoming Human, London: Open Humanities Press.

Tompkins, Kyla Wazana (2024), Deviant Matter: Ferment, Intoxicants, Jelly, Rot, New York: New York University Press.

Weheliye, Alexander G. (2014), Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human, Durham: Duke University press.

WomanShare (1976), Country Lesbians: The Story of the Womanshare Collective, Grants Pass, OR: WomanShare Books.

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CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS
Late Diagnosis and Neurodivergence: Autoethnographies and Creative Narratives of Recognition
Edited by Tess Ezzy | University of New England
Proposals due: 31 July 2026 |
Final works due: 30 November 2026

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About the Collection
For many adults, a late diagnosis of autism, ADHD, OCD, or another form of neurodivergence is less a clinical event than a hermeneutic one. It is the moment when a life becomes newly legible: when childhood memories, failed relationships, fractured work histories, and years of exhaustion can be reread through a different framework. Behaviours previously interpreted as inadequacy or failure become intelligible as neurodivergent experience.
Late Diagnosis and Neurodivergence: Autoethnographies and Creative Narratives of Recognition explores this moment of reinterpretation through a combination of autoethnographic scholarship and creative practice. The volume brings together scholars, writers, and artists whose work reflects on the experience of discovering neurodivergence in adulthood — and the profound rewriting of self that follows.
Rather than separating creative and scholarly contributions, the collection integrates both forms across its thematic sections, allowing poetry, lyric essay, visual art, and academic writing to speak directly to one another.

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Key Themes
The collection is organised around the following questions:

• How does late diagnosis reshape personal narratives of childhood and identity?
• How do neurodivergent individuals reinterpret experiences of masking, burnout, and difference after diagnosis?
• What role do gender, race, culture, and social expectation play in delayed recognition of neurodivergence?
• How can creative practice express aspects of neurodivergent experience that resist traditional academic language?
• What new forms of knowledge emerge when lived experience and scholarly inquiry intersect?

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Collection Structure
The volume is organised thematically across four parts, each integrating scholarly and creative contributions:
Part I – Recognising Neurodivergence The moment of diagnosis and the journey toward recognition.
Part II – Rewriting the Past Reinterpreting childhood, schooling, and adolescence through the lens of neurodivergence.
Part III – Masking, Labour, and Burnout The social expectations placed on neurodivergent individuals prior to diagnosis, and the costs of compliance.
Part IV – Identity, Community, and Belonging How diagnosis reshapes identity, self-understanding, and connection to others.

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What We’re Looking For
We welcome contributions across the full range of scholarly and creative forms, including:

• Autoethnographic essays
• Lyric nonfiction and creative nonfiction
• Poetry
• Hybrid and experimental writing
• Visual art (with accompanying artist statement)
• Collaborative or multimodal work

Contributors need not hold academic positions. We particularly welcome work from neurodivergent scholars, writers, and artists whose lived experience informs their practice, and are committed to representing diverse voices across gender, race, culture, class, and geography.

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Submission Guidelines
Please submit the following:
1. Proposal (500 words maximum) Your proposal should describe the contribution you are offering, its thematic focus, and the form it will take (essay, creative nonfiction, poetry, visual art, hybrid work, etc.). Please indicate the part of the collection your contribution speaks to most directly, though we welcome work that moves across sections.
2. Writing Sample (for creative contributions) If you are proposing a creative or hybrid contribution, please include a writing sample of up to 1,000 words (or equivalent for visual work). This should be representative of your voice and approach, but need not be the proposed piece itself. For poetry, please include 2–3 poems.
3. Author Bio (100 words maximum) Please include a brief biographical statement written in the third person, noting your institutional affiliation (if any), your relevant scholarly or creative practice, and any connection to neurodivergent experience or advocacy you wish to share. Disclosure of personal neurodivergent experience is welcomed but entirely optional.
Submissions should be sent to tcaloped@myune.edu.au with the subject line Late Diagnosis CFP – [Your Name].

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About the Editor
Tess Ezzy is a researcher at the University of New England whose work explores neurodivergence, cultural representation, and lived experience across literature, media, and contemporary culture. Her research sits at the intersection of cultural studies, disability studies, and narrative scholarship, with a particular focus on neurodivergent perspectives on embodiment, identity, and storytelling. She is the founding series editor of a forthcoming Routledge series on Critical Neurodivergent Studies, and the founder of the Neurodivergent Methods Lab — an interdisciplinary research initiative dedicated to developing creative, autoethnographic, and practice-based approaches to studying neurodivergence. Her forthcoming monographs include Making a Spectacle of the Self and Critical Neurodivergent Studies (Vernon Press, 2027).

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Enquiries
For informal enquiries about fit or scope, please contact Tess Ezzy at tcaloped@myune.edu.au. We are happy to discuss ideas prior to submission.

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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

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C A L L  for  P A P E R S

«AvtobiografiЯ. Journal on Life Writing and the Representation of the Self in Russian Culture (6/30/2026)» Open Access Journal

The international, peer-reviewed and open access journal «AvtobiografiЯ. Journal on Life Writing and the Representation of the Self in Russian Culture» is now accepting submissions for its fifteenth issue.
«AvtobiografiЯ» is a journal devoted to the representation of the self in Russian culture. Its Advisory and Editorial Board are comprised of internationally renowned scholars in the field of Russian and Slavonic Studies. The journal welcomes contributions on any topic related to Life Writing and Auto-Biography and related genres in Russian literature, history, art and culture. The editors are particularly keen to theoretical and interdisciplinary articles, and welcome contributions about Russophone literature and other Slavonic cultures.
Proposals must be sent to the address: info@avtobiografija.com. The deadline for submissions is the 30^th June 2026. All necessary information, including style notes and submission guidelines, are on the journal’s website: http://www.avtobiografija.com/

AvtobiografiЯ has been recognized as “Classe A” journal in the assessment carried out by ANVUR, the agency designated by Italy’s Ministry of Education and Research for evaluating research institutions and scientific output.

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Call for Papers

Late Diagnosis and Neurodivergence: Autoethnographies and Creative Narratives of Recognition

Edited Collection

deadline for submissions: July 1, 2026

contact email: 

Tcaloped@myune.edu.au

Book Overview

In recent years, increasing numbers of adults have received diagnoses of autism, ADHD, OCD, and other forms of neurodivergence later in life. For many, diagnosis becomes a moment of profound reinterpretation. Experiences of childhood, education, social life, and work are reconsidered through a new framework of neurological difference. Behaviours previously interpreted as failure, difficulty, or personal inadequacy often become legible as forms of neurodivergent experience.

Late Diagnosis and Neurodivergence: Autoethnographies and Creative Narratives of Recognition explores this moment of recognition through a combination of autoethnographic scholarship and creative practice. The volume brings together scholars, writers, and artists whose work reflects on the experience of discovering neurodivergence in adulthood.

Late diagnosis often involves the process of rewriting one’s own life narrative—reinterpreting childhood memories, schooling experiences, relationships, and patterns of work or burnout through a new understanding of neurodivergence. Autoethnography provides a powerful method for exploring this process because it situates lived experience within broader cultural and institutional structures.

Alongside scholarly essays, the collection will include poetry, short creative nonfiction, visual art, and hybrid experimental forms that capture the emotional and sensory dimensions of neurodivergent experience. These creative contributions will be integrated throughout the volume rather than confined to a separate section, allowing creative and critical work to speak to one another.

By combining critical reflection with creative expression, the collection demonstrates how neurodivergent lived experience can generate new forms of knowledge that challenge traditional academic boundaries.

Key Themes

The collection explores several central questions:

• How does late diagnosis reshape personal narratives of childhood and identity?
• How do neurodivergent individuals reinterpret experiences of masking, burnout, and difference after diagnosis?
• What role do gender, race, and social expectations play in delayed recognition of neurodivergence?
• How can creative practice express aspects of neurodivergent experience that resist traditional academic language?
• What new forms of knowledge emerge when lived experience and scholarship intersect?

Proposed Structure

Rather than separating creative and scholarly work, the volume integrates both forms across thematic sections.

Part I – Recognising Neurodivergence

Exploring the moment of recognition and the journey toward diagnosis.

Possible contributions:

• Autoethnographic essays about discovering neurodivergence in adulthood
• Short reflective narratives
• Poems capturing moments of recognition or misrecognition
• Visual work representing diagnostic journey.

Part II – Rewriting the Past

Contributors reinterpret childhood and adolescence through the lens of neurodivergence.

Possible contributions:

• Autoethnographic reflections on schooling and misrecognition
• Creative nonfiction about childhood experiences
• Poems exploring memory and reinterpretation
• Narrative fragments revisiting past events

Part III – Masking, Labour, and Burnout

Examining the social expectations placed on neurodivergent individuals prior to diagnosis.

Possible contributions:

• Essays on masking and social performance
• Creative writing about workplace experiences
• Hybrid essays combining theory and narrative
• Visual or experimental representations of burnout

Part IV – Identity, Community, and Belonging

Exploring how diagnosis reshapes identity and connection to others.

Possible contributions:

• Essays on neurodivergent identity formation
• Creative reflections on community and belonging
• Poetry exploring self-recognition
• Hybrid creative-critical work

Contribution to Scholarship

This volume contributes to growing interdisciplinary work in neurodiversity studies, disability studies, narrative scholarship, and the medical humanities by foregrounding lived experience as a site of scholarly insight.

By combining autoethnography with creative practice, the book challenges traditional academic boundaries and highlights the importance of narrative, art, and creative expression in understanding neurodivergent experience.

The collection demonstrates how neurodivergent perspectives can reshape both methodology and form, producing scholarship that is simultaneously analytical, reflective, and creative.

Audience

The book will appeal to scholars and students in:

• Disability Studies
• Cultural Studies
• Sociology
• Narrative Studies
• Medical Humanities
• Creative Writing
• Education

It will also interest readers engaged in neurodiversity advocacy and community storytelling.

About the Editor

Tess Ezzy is a researcher at the University of New England whose work explores neurodivergence, cultural representation, and lived experience across literature, media, and contemporary culture. Her research sits at the intersection of cultural studies, disability studies, and narrative scholarship, with a particular focus on neurodivergent perspectives on embodiment, identity, and storytelling. She is the founder of the Neurodivergent Methods Lab, an interdisciplinary research initiative dedicated to developing creative, autoethnographic, and practice-based approaches to studying neurodivergence. Her work examines how neurodivergent ways of thinking, feeling, and sensing the world reshape cultural narratives and research methodologies.

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Call for Papers — Truth or Dare: Canadian Graphic Auto/Biography

Deadline: January 31, 2027 (Pacific Time)

Submission Length: Articles and graphic essays (6,000–8,000 words) and interviews (7,000–9,000 words)

Guest Editor: Melissa Jacques (University of British Columbia, Okanagan)

In 2022, Canadian Literature published a special issue on Canadian comics based on “80 Years and Beyond,” a two-day virtual symposium hosted by Western University. Both the conference and the special issue showcased the rich history of comics in Canada, from the Golden Age of Canadian comics (1940–1946) through to the explosion in independent comics in the late twentieth century and beyond. In their introduction, guest editors Candida Rifkind and Zachary J. A. Rondinelli acknowledged the practical limitations of representing Canadian comics in a single issue and called on others to continue working toward a “reorientation of the Canadian comics conversation, which has long languished in the rhetoric of nationalism and patriotism” (9).

This special issue on comics aims to answer their call while, at the same time, focusing on comics that fall under the rubric of life writing, broadly conceived. Tentatively titled “Truth or Dare,” after a game that pushes at the limits of truth and invites risk, the issue hopes to capture the incredible risk-taking of contemporary Canadian nonfictional graphic narratives. Consider politically informed biographies like Guy Delisle’s Hostage (2017) and Sarah Leavitt’s Agnes, Murderess (2019); graphic memoirs like Miriam Katin’s We Are on Our Own (2006), Geneviève Castrée’s Susceptible (2013), and Kate Beaton’s Ducks (2023); and speculative memoirs like Arizona O’Neill’s Opioids and Organs (2026); to texts that address history and experience through a method akin to Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation” (11), like the four volumes of katherena vermette’s A Girl Called Echo, Lee Lai’s Cannon (2025), and Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas’ The Lost Haida Manga (2026).

One guiding premise of this special issue is that comics are intrinsically suited to telling stories about lived experience that challenge narrative conventions governing time and space. This expansiveness—achieved through tensions between text and image, between panel and gutter, between the diegetic and the extradiegetic, and even between fact and fiction—makes possible complex forms of representation and engagement. As comics scholar Juliet J. Fall has argued, “reading comics is an embodied, codified, learnt and culturally-situated activity. Viewer involvement takes place through the distinctive devices, vocabulary and grammar of comics: parts are observed while the whole is sensed and constructed” (17).

Canada is a real international comics powerhouse, even beyond what “Canadians” produce. To read comics as a culturally situated activity within Canada, then, means engaging with work that both recognizes and extends beyond our borders. To that end, we invite contributions on contemporary Canadian writers and illustrators who are producing graphic auto/biography, memoir, and cultural history. In addition to essays on specific creators and texts, we welcome contributions including, but not limited to:

• essays on Canadian publishers like Drawn & Quarterly, whose roster includes award-winning work by Canadian as well as international writers and illustrators;
• essays that explore the relationship between comics and pedagogy, such as the inclusion of graphic nonfiction in elementary-, middle-, and high-school curricula;
• essays that explore the unique contribution of comics within post-secondary programs like narrative medicine or health humanities;
• autobiographical contributions about the teaching of graphic nonfiction in programs like creative writing and visual art; and
• essays on recent film adaptations of Canadian graphic memoirs, like Chester Brown’s Paying for It (dir. Sook-Yin Lee, 2024) or Sarah Leavitt’s Tangles (dir. Leah Nelson, 2026), which premiered this year at Cannes.

In addition to traditional essays, we invite interviews and graphic essays on any aspect of Canadian comics relevant to our contemporary experience.

Works Cited

Fall, Juliet J. “Worlds of Vision: Thinking Geographically through Comics.” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, vol. 20, no. 1, 2021, pp. 17–33, https://doi.org/10.14288/acme.v20i1.2037.

Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe, vol. 12, no. 2, 2008, pp. 1–14. Project MUSE, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/241115.

Rifkind, Candida, and Rondinelli, Zachary J. A. Introduction. Past, Presents, and Futures of Canadian Comics, special issue of Canadian Literature, no. 249, 2022, pp. 5–10, https://doi.org/10.14288/cl.vi249.197406.

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Submission Guidelines

Submissions should be sent online through our Open Journal Systems (OJS) portal.

All submissions to Canadian Literature must be original, unpublished work. Essays should follow current MLA bibliographic format (MLA Handbook, 9th ed.).

Please limit images accompanying submissions to those receiving substantial attention in the article. Contributors will be required to obtain permission to reproduce images in their article and pay for any permission costs. The journal will provide a template for permission requests; such requests must be completed before publication. Please send high-quality images as separate attachments along with your article file.

Please review our full submission guidelines prior to submitting.

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Contact Us

Feel free to contact the guest editor (melissa.jacques@ubc.ca) or Canadian Literature (can.lit@ubc.ca) with any questions.