See the full program, with abstracts here.
A short version of the program is available here.
This is our third of four planned annual conferences, each focusing on one of the four elements: Air, Water, Earth, and Fire. The theme for the 2026 conference is Earth.
Throughout the history of humanity, earth, with all its lifeforms, has had a crucial significance and impact on human existence, from providing essential resources, to symbolizing Mother Earth and home, or bringing forth earthquakes, draughts and landslides, and being a main motivation for violent conflicts and occupations. Whether hunter-gatherers’ communities, the pioneers of the agricultural revolution, or inhabitants of urban and industrial centers, human cultures have always relied on stable relationships to earth and its resources and have strived to tame changes in these through different means, including trade, religion, or technology. With its rural and wild, cultivated and gardened forms, earth has enticed and inspired, as well as threatened and harmed, which has also led humanity to search for new lands, or to imagine alternative earths and lifeforms.
This conference invites scholars to explore how literature, on its own or in comparison to other humanities disciplines, has captured these shifting affective responses to earth and all its lifeforms in any literary genres, fiction and non-fiction, from any historical and geocultural areas, such as classical, medieval and modern literatures, Nordic and global. We welcome papers on topics including but not limited to:
- the role of earth and landscapes in representing and shaping emotional responses to climate change
- the aesthetical and ethical dimensions of earth
- earth as metaphor for affective responses to places and spaces
- agency of earth and all its lifeforms
- alternative/imaginary earths and lifeforms
Our keynote speakers are:
- Emily Lethbridge, Associate Professor at Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies
- David Farrier, Professor at School of Literature, Languages and Cultures, Personal Chair of Literature and Environment, The University of Edinburgh
- Serenella Iovino, James Gordon Hanes Distinguished Professor in Humanities, Department of Romance Studies, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill