Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium (hybrid format)
7-8 June 2024
submission deadline: 31 January 2024
Call for Papers
We are pleased to announce the call for papers for Lived Experiences, the international two-day PhD conference that takes place in Brussels, Belgium, on June 7th, and online on June 8th, 2024. This conference aims to create a platform for doctoral students specializing in literary studies, literary translation studies, and theatre studies to showcase their research and engage in discussions on the profound impact of personal narratives and lived experiences in shaping creative works. It provides an excellent opportunity for emerging scholars to actively participate in scholarly dialogues, share their findings, and contribute to the broader academic discourse.
Theme and Scope
Numerous scholars have explored how the book as a medium shapes the ways in which authors practice life writing. In “Putting Lives on the Record: The Book as Material and Symbol in Life Writing” (2017), Anna Poletti proposes an innovative approach to biography studies focusing on that centrality of “the book as both a medium and a symbol” to both “the practice and the scholarship of life writing” (Poletti, 460). However, a reading strategy, which emphasizes the relationship between a life writing practice and its medium/form, can be applied not only to book-based practices, but also to writing grounded in lived experience across various media, media combinations, and culturally defined forms of writing.
Recently, life writing studies took an intermedial and transcultural turn (Rippl, 147), marked by publications such as the volume Intermediality, Life Writing, and American Studies: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, edited by Nassim Winnie Balestrini and Ina Bergmann (2018), Experiments in Life-writing: Intersections of Auto/biography and Fiction, edited by Lucia Boldrini and Julia Novak (2017), and Anna Poletti’s (2020) monograph Stories of the self: Life writing after the book. Even more recently, Claudia Jünke and Désirée Schyns published Translating Memories of Violent Pasts: Memory Studies and Translation Studies in Dialogue (2023), a collection of essays from memory studies and translation studies investigating the exploration of memories of violence through the practices of interlingual and intercultural literary translation. As Jünke and Schyns highlight in their introduction to the last-mentioned work, cultural translation already implies a form of remembering: the target text always retains its dual context. It connects the past of the source to practices of rewriting and dynamics of cultural transmission in the present.
Lived Experiences seeks to further our understanding of the ways different (combinations of) media, genres, and writing practices (e.g., literary translation) can allow for different expressions and explorations of personal experience. It aims to focus on lived experiences as a catalyst for (literary) creativity, with texts using the conventions and the material, modal, formal, and symbolic affordances of media, genres, and writing practices in creative ways to express specific forms of lived experiences (such as traumatic, formative, or shared cultural experiences). By bringing together scholars of life writing and other literary practices in which lived experience plays a central role, it invites participants to reflect both on how media and genres shape creative forms of life writing and how the need or desire to represent, analyze, or simulate lived experiences can inform practices of literary creation.
We encourage participants to explore diverse aspects of lived experiences within the realm of literature and other media, including but not limited to:
- Autobiographical narratives and memoirs: Analyzing the ways in which personal stories intersect with creative expression and exploring the relationship between fact and fiction.
- Representations of marginalized and underrepresented voices: Investigating how literature becomes a platform for amplifying and centering marginalized experiences and challenging dominant narratives.
- Trauma, resilience, and healing: Examining the depiction of lived experiences of trauma in literature and other media and exploring the transformative power of storytelling in the process of healing and resilience.
- Cultural heritage and identity: Exploring how creative works reflect, preserve, and redefine cultural identity and heritage.
Lived experiences in translation: Investigating the role of language mediation in shaping and representing diverse lived experiences across linguistic and cultural boundaries.
Submission Guidelines
We invite doctoral students to submit abstracts for a 20-minutes presentation, providing the following information:
- Title of the Paper
- Abstract (250–300 words)
- Brief Biography (100 words)
Please submit your abstracts via email to lived.experiences2024@gmail.com no later than January 31st, 2024. Please also indicate your affiliation and your preference for presenting your paper either in person or online.
The conference will be held in English. Participation is free of charge.
Important Dates
- Submission Deadline: 31 January 2024
- Notification of Acceptance: 21 February 2024
- Conference Date: 7–8 June 2024
Selected papers presented at the conference may have the opportunity to be published in a special issue of the Journal for Literary and Intermedial Crossings (JLIC), based at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.
For further inquiries, please contact us at lived.experiences2024@gmail.com.
You can also visit our website for more information: https://livedexperiences2024.com/
References
Balestrini, Nassim Winnie, and Ina Bergmann, editors. Intermediality, life writing, and American studies: Interdisciplinary perspectives, Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG, 2018.
Boldrini, Lucia, and Julia Novak, editors. Experiments in Life-writing: Intersections of Auto/biography and Fiction. Springer, 2017.
Jünke, Claudia and Désirée Schyns, editors. Translating Memories of Violent Pasts, Routledge, 2023.
Poletti, Anna. “Putting Lives on the Record: The Book as Material and Symbol in Life Writing”. Biography, vol. 40, no. 3, 2017, pp. 460–484.
Poletti, Anna. Stories of the self: Life writing after the book. NYU Press, 2020.
Rippl, Gabriele. “Ekphrastic Encounters and Word-Photography Configurations in Contemporary Transcultural American Life Writing”. Intermediality, life writing, and American studies: Interdisciplinary perspectives, 2018, pp. 147–166.
