CALL FOR PAPERS 

ACCUTE 2027

York University, Tkaronto/Toronto

28-30 May 2027

DEADLINE: 4 December 2026

The 2027 Conference CFP for the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE) is now OPEN. We are accepting proposals of 250 words to our General Call for Papers, Member-Organized Panels, Creative Writing Panels, and Joint-Sponsored Panels. Please use the Online Submission Form to submit your paper proposal. 

You do not need to be an ACCUTE member to propose a paper, but if your paper is accepted, you will need to be a member to register for and attend the conference.

Graduate Students and Contract Faculty who are members of ACCUTE will be eligible for a partial travel reimbursement as funds allow.

GENERAL CALL FOR PAPERS 

ACCUTE’s General Call welcomes papers in all fields of English studies. Submit no more than one 250-word proposal, including a 50-word abstract and a brief biographical note using our Online Submission Form by Friday, 4 December 2026. NOTE: Members may submit one proposal to the General Call for Papers and one additional proposal to one organized panel call of their choice.

Please contact info.accute@gmail.com if you have any questions about the submission process.

MEMBER-ORGANIZED PANELS

ACCUTE members have developed calls for panels on a broad range of topics. You will find the list of Member-Organized Panels to which you can apply directly in the pages below. Submit your 250-word proposal, including a 50-word abstract and a brief biographical note using our Online Submission Form by Friday, 4 December 2026. Please ensure you include the title of the panel to which you are directing your submission. Proposals that are not accepted for inclusion on a Member-Organized Panel will still be considered as part of our General Call for Papers.

CREATIVE WRITING PANELS

Creative Writing Panels are presented in collaboration with the Creative Writing Collective (CWC). Submit your 250-word proposal, including a 50-word abstract and a brief biographical note using our Online Submission Form by Friday, 4 December 2026. Please ensure you include the title of the panel to which you are directing your submission. Proposals that are not accepted for inclusion on a Creative Writing Panel will still be considered as part of our General Call for Papers.

JOINT-SPONSORED PANELS

Joint-Sponsored Panelsare intended to foster links between ACCUTE and other scholarly associations. Panelists are not required to be ACCUTE members so long as they are members of good standing in the co-sponsoring association, but only ACCUTE members will be eligible for travel funding. Submit your 250-word proposal, including a 50-word abstract and a brief biographical note using our Online Submission Form by Friday, 4 December 2026. Please ensure you include the title of the panel to which you are directing your submission. Proposals that are not accepted for inclusion on a Joint-Sponsored Panel will still be considered as part of our General Call for Papers.

Organized Panel Overview

Member-Organized Panels

Reimagining Indigenous Storytelling for the 21st Century

Jennifer Komorowski, Western University, jkomoro2@uwo.ca

Indigenous peoples across Turtle Island have a long history of oral storytelling which is used

to pass on cultural knowledge, philosophies, laws, and histories. This panel welcomes

submissions that discuss the ways in which contemporary Indigenous storytelling continues

to be carried on in new and exciting ways, including podcasts, literature, film, video games,

and more.

Literature in the Digital Age Workshop

Aman Grewal, University of Guelph, agrewa17@uoguelph.ca

How do readers participate in online communities to interpret, classify and discuss books? What

can these conversations reveal about how literary meaning is produced? Building on the

ACCUTE 2026 panel, “Literature in the Digital Age: Reading, Writing and Reviewing Across

Platforms,” this collaborative workshop explores reading as a social practice by bringing theories

of the implied reader and interpretive communities into conversation with contemporary digital

reading spaces.

Participants will collaboratively investigate how meaning emerges through interactions among

texts and readers in contemporary online communities. Working with a shared corpus of literary

texts, participants will examine reader reviews and discussions across platforms such as

Goodreads, Reddit and Instagram. Through close analysis and collaborative discussion,

participants will identify how readers interpret texts, negotiate competing meanings, classify

books and draw on shared conventions or expectations within online communities.

Learning outcomes include identifying patterns of literary interpretation, classification and

meaning making in online reader discourse; developing strategies for using digital platforms as

sources for studying literary reception; and critically reflecting on the methodological

opportunities and limitations of studying digitally mediated reading communities. Participants

will leave with practical strategies for analyzing online reader discourse and new ways of

thinking about literary meaning as a collaborative and socially situated practice.

Canadian Energy Humanities and the Health Humanities in Conversation

Shane Neilson, McMaster University, neilss@mcmaster.ca

Alec Follett, University of Waterloo, alecjfollett@gmail.com

In 2026, one of the panel organizers published “Not Poetry’s Job? Moritz’s Immanent Critique”

in Living History: Essays on A.F. Moritz. (PQL, 2026). Two conclusions of the article were: (1) the

health humanities are not thinking about energy enough, and (2) the energy humanities tend to list health outcomes in an actuarial fashion rather than focus closely on the body. In other words, there is a lack of both in each. As a consequence, we (Alec Follett, an energy humanities scholar, and Shane Neilson, a health humanities scholar) will co-moderate a panel that seeks papers from Canadian health humanists and energy humanists who also want to explore the gaps and connections between these two fields. For example, what is lost when close noticings of bodies is ignored in favour of thinking through systems and macroeconomics – is there a hidden cost? Does hyperfocusing on the body avoid reckoning with extractivism, a major cause of current and coming damage to human, animal, and plant bodies? Is the burgeoning theory of geotrauma a way to intelligibly connect the health humanities and the energy humanities? Does the ‘literary’ do different work for either field? Or, are there more connections between fields than we presume?

Time and Intensity in Contemporary Literature

Tom Halford – Grenfell Campus, Memorial University of Newfoundland, halford.thomas@gmail.com

This panel aims to consider how authors manipulate time through narrative. Stories help

readers to engage with kairos or deep time, but we need to move through chronos or

chronological time to get to such moments. In The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of

Fiction, Frank Kermode writes, “chronos is ‘passing time’ or ‘waiting time’—that which,

according to Revelation, ‘shall be no more’—and kairos is the season, a point in time filled with

significance, charged with a meaning derived from its relation to the end” (47). Often, but not

always, these moments of kairos are experienced through a particular kind of intensity. For

contemporary examples with scholarly work already completed, one might look to the writing of Lisa Moore and the critical work of Tracy Whalen in “An Aesthetics of Intensity: Lisa Moore’s

Sublime Worlds”, where she argues that “Moments of intensity and vulnerability are for the

most part redemptive” (2). This panel hopes to probe and consider narrations of time in

contemporary literature. Why and how do authors reach kairos through narrative? Are these

moments redemptive? How does a an author achieve particular kinds of intensity in their

Fiction?

Women In(ter)text

Annalise Quesnelle, Brock University, annalisecq@gmail.com

Julia Kristeva describes texts as “a mosaic of quotations” (37). Yet if writing proceeds

intertextually, those inheritances are not reproduced equally. As Sara Ahmed writes, “citation is

feminist memory” (15), making citation integral to feminist genealogies. Adrienne Rich

describes the woman who turns to writing seeking possibilities, only to encounter “the image of

Woman in books written by men” (21). Inheritance is also a problem of textual self-understanding: how do women recognize or revise themselves as writers and subjects through available texts? Extending this problem to contemporary scholarship, Michaele L. Ferguson’s Bandita: Iris Marion Young and the Politics of Reading, Writing, and Citation (2026) theorizes citation as reproductive labour, arguing that dominant traditions are sustained through established citational habits, while feminist traditions require deliberate and ongoing labour to remain visible. Women In(ter)text takes this unequal reproduction as its starting point.

Topics could include, but are not limited to:

• Women writers revising male-authored texts;
• Textual self-fashioning through feminist rewriting;
• Recovering forgotten or suppressed feminist predecessors;
• Quotation, collage, appropriation, or plagiarism as feminist strategies;
• Translation, archives, and intermediality as forms of feminist inheritance.

The aim is to bring these approaches into conversation around the possibilities of feminist textual Inheritance.

Asian Canadian Speculations

Ryanne Kap, University of Calgary, ryanne.kap@ucalgary.ca

In the recent collection Asian Canada is Burning (2025), editors Rose Ann Torres, Ian Liujua

Tian, and Coly Chau imagine “Asian Canadian” as “a process of encounter rather than a given

‘identity’ we are born into” (6). This positioning signals a turn away from what Asian Canadian

literature has historically signified—that is, its groundedness in histories of exclusion and

essentialisms—and toward framings of Asian Canadianness that embrace flexibility, hybridity,

and potentiality. How might speculative literature from Asian Canadian writers help us envision such a turn? What can imaginative reworkings of race and nationhood teach us about our current moment and the state of Asian Canadian identity writ large?

This panel invites both traditional papers and creative submissions (short stories, poetry, creative nonfiction, etc.) that explore speculative elements in Asian Canadian literature. Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

• Asian futurism
• Ecofuturism
• Reproductive futurism
• Posthumanism
• Techno-Orientalism
• Speculative nonfiction
• Sci-fi and cli-fi

Special Issues of Cultural and Critical Production in Canada (2027)

Bart Vautour, Dalhousie University, bvautour@dal.ca

Marissa Carroll, Dalhousie University, marissa.carroll@dal.ca

Following a productive initial panel at the 2026 ACCUTE conference in Montreal, we invite

additional proposals for papers on “Special Issues” of literary, cultural, and/or critical production

in Canada. Often a “Special Issue” marks a shift in a field, seeks to consolidate a new

methodology, or brings writers/artists/critics together around an event, location, or topic. While

an individual “Special Issue” may loom large in the history of a given field, rarely has the “Special Issue” been considered as a distinct mode of production in a sustained or comparative way. “Special Issues” interrupt the regular publishing program of a periodical but remain legible within the periodical’s scope of influence. They often borrow an anthologizing impulse without fulfilling the function of the anthology. They are often manifesto-like collections that announce and consolidate key voices within an emerging field. By bringing the tools of periodical studies and bibliography together with varied histories of cultural production and critical collaboration, we hope to continue building connections among the myriad “Special Issues” that have been

published in the long history of cultural production in Canada with an edited collection of essays

in mind. Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Modernist “little” magazines
• Event-based special issues
• Unique modes of collectivist publication
• Collaborative editing
• Aesthetics/Politics
• Frequent editors of special issues
• Conference proceedings
• Commemorative special issues
• Publication networks
• Archival practice
• Special issues of Creative Writing journals
• Special issues of Dual-purpose (creative/critical) journals
• Special issues of peer review journals (Canadian Literature, ECW, SCL, ESC, Canadian Poetry, etc.)

Writing Iran from a Distance: Woman, Life, Freedom, Multiculturalism, and the Limits of Diasporic Representation

Mahdiyeh Ezzati, McMaster University, mezzatik@uwo.ca

“Woman, Life, Freedom” began as a Kurdish slogan, travelled through Persian, and many

English-language accounts of it were written both inside and outside Iran. Recent examples,

among them Arash Azizi’s What Iranians Want: Woman, Life, Freedom, Fatemeh Jamalpour and

Nilo Tabrizy’s For the Sun After Long Nights: The Story of Iran’s Women-Led Uprising,

Maryam Shojaei’s Azadi Means Freedom: Fighting for Gender Equity through the World’s Most

Popular Game, and Bänoo Zan and Cy Strom’s Canadian-published anthology Woman, Life,

Freedom: Poems for the Iranian Revolution, approach the movement, and Iran’s linguistic and

ethnic plurality (Kurdish, Baluch, Azeri, Arab, Lur, and others), in different ways. What happens

to the movement, and to Iran’s multiculturalism, when they are represented from a distance,

across barriers of language and access? How does writing about the Islamic Republic’s violence

shape, or crowd out, attention to violence elsewhere, including in Gaza, where a UN commission has found genocide and Israel rejects the finding? And how do the January 2026 uprising, the war that followed, and divisions within the diaspora shape what is said and what is left out? We welcome papers on life writing, reportage, poetry and anthologies, translation, graphic narrative, testimony, social media, archives, and diasporic rallies. Postcolonial, feminist, translation, and affect approaches are encouraged. We invite divergent positions.

Finding Humour within Our Trauma

Precious Gauthier, McMaster University, gauthp2@mcmaster.ca

Humour is used cross-culturally to cope with and heal from life’s traumas, particularly for

racialized and marginalized people. In texts like Laughing Without an Accent, Funny in Farsi,

and She Memes Well, racialized women combat the traumas of oppression through the

intentional use of humour to address and reconstruct prejudiced narratives regardless of the

genre in which they write. In Hybrid Humour, Graeme Dunphy investigates humour as an

expression of racialized experiences, arguing that humour “lends itself to the study of the

culturally hybrid,” writing, “If laughter is the best medicine, it follows that painful experience often begets an incisive wit” (7). Humour becomes a gateway into addressing painful traumatic

experiences that racialized peoples have experienced in the hopes of seeking justice and

healing, and in literature allows authors to engage in difficult conversations.

Humour circulates continuously during good and bad periods, constructing both individual

impacts and collective social experiences. Furthermore, trauma is not a solely private

experience of harm, but a culturally fused experience constrained within the same framework of power and humour that defines community itself, which modifies and interferes with natural life while shaping discourse and human conditions.

Submit abstracts of 250 words by November 30th, 2026.

Whose Voice? Literature, Language Models, and the Classroom

Mahdiyeh Ezzati, McMaster University, mezzatik@uwo.ca

Language models were trained on literature, among much else. They can now produce a close

reading in seconds and, given a student’s past writing, increasingly imitate that student’s voice.

So whose voice is it? This panel joins literary studies and teaching to ask what we can say that

computer science and copyright law cannot. How do models read, imitate, and mistranslate

literary texts, and whose languages and literatures do they flatten or omit? What becomes of

authorship, voice, and affect when prose is generated without a speaker? How do we assess

writing when voice can be imitated? Does AI serve students writing in English as a first and as

an additional language alike? And who benefits when teachers use AI to mark?

We welcome papers on literary theory, translation, authorship and consent, assignments, policies, and failures, across Canadian college and university contexts, including equity, diversity, and inclusion; Indigenous protocols; contract and sessional labour; and fiction that imagines machine minds. Postcolonial, affect, and critical pedagogy approaches are encouraged. We invite enthusiasm, skepticism, and refusal alike.

Indigenous Futurisms

Isabella Lirette, Dalhousie University, isabella.lirette@dal.ca

In the introduction to Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction Dr. Grace Dillion defines Indigenous futurisms as an “emergent movement” of science fiction that “invites discerning readers to realize that Indigenous science is not just complementary to a perceived western enlightenment but is indeed integral to a refined twenty-first-century sensibility” (2-3). Building on this momentum, this panel welcomes participants to consider a broad range of Indigenous futurisms to examine how Indigenous-authored narratives imagine, gaze towards, and/or destabilize the future. In other words, how does Indigenous futurism circulate within or against non-Indigenous literary and cultural networks? Though participants are welcome to consider works of Indigenous sci/cli-fi, this panel equally welcomes papers that take up futurism in other ways. Following the lead of Dr. Krista Collier-Jarvis and Dr. Naomi Simone Borwein, this panel acknowledges how the traditional paper may be restrictive and, as such, invites submissions of both the traditional conference paper and “culturally rooted explorations of the topic” (Collier-Jarvis and Borwein; ACCUTE Call for Papers 2026).

Topics can include (but are not limited to):

• Climate futurism
• Decolonizing potential of apocalypse
• Challenging apocalypse narratives
• Representations of time as non-linear
• Indigenous joy
• Imagining resistance
• Nation-specific frameworks
• Anthropocene narratives

Non-traditional Research Methods in Humanities Studies

Alexandra Lukawski, Western University, alukawsk@uwo.ca

We invite ACCUTE members to submit abstracts on “Non-traditional Research Methods in

Humanities Studies” for general consideration. As Humanities programs attempt to grow and

find their place in the changing Academic landscape, interdisciplinary research has become an

oft-used method to carve out a path in the field. This roundtable panel offers a space for

researchers to share and discuss their “non-traditional” methods in the Humanities research

space. Audiences will have the opportunity to learn about a variety of research methods being

employed in the Humanities.

• All type of research methodologies are welcome, which may include:
• Performance-based research
• Social science methodologies (surveys, experiments)
• Archival and Historical work
• Geographical and mapping work
• Digital humanities
• Virtual reality or gaming
• Interviews, focus groups
• Medical humanities research

The goal of the session will be for panelists to share the methodologies they employ, how they

use them, and any challenges/ victories this methodology has brought. We will then open the

floor to questions, as well as a discussion around the concept of “non-traditional” methodology

(is there such a thing?).

Critical Ecologies within Polycrisis

Jay Ritchie, Dalhousie University, jay.ritchie@dal.ca

Benjamin Anderson, Dalhousie University

In Nolan Oswald Dennis’s 2021 installation garden for fanon, a bioactive system of worms

consumes The Wretched of the Earth, prompting a consideration of the nonhuman networks that sustain Fanon’s revolutionary appeal; Jacqueline Mills’ experimental documentary Geographies of Solitude (2022) applies horsehair from Sable Island directly onto the celluloid she uses to film the island’s equine inhabitants; Clare Goulet’s poetry collection Graphis scripta / writing lichen (2024) studies lichen as metaphor’s biological analogue; Balenciaga models walk down performance artist Santiago Sierra’s runway carved from a peat bog during Paris Fashion Week 2022 – each are instances of artists and writers collaborating with ecological systems as aesthetic critique. Critical ecological engagements have emerged as a response to the polycrisis of late-stage capitalism, prompting artists to invite the ecologies destabilized by resource extraction, global warming, and forever wars into their processes. This panel invites critical investigations into the intersections of art, literature, and ecology in the contemporary. It is especially interested in papers that challenge Western-centric notions of the nature/culture divide, situate art and writing in transnational and multilingual contexts, consider modes of meaning-making which decentralize logos, and contest greenwashed practices that are divorced from a critique of capital.

After the Epiphany: Recovery, Repetition, and Literary Time

Foster Gareau, Concordia University, foster.gareau@concordia.ca

A life is changed in an instant—or so the story goes. Conversion, epiphany, recognition: these familiar literary moments promise a clear before and after. Yet what follows such moments can be slower and less conclusive than the narrative of revelation allows. Is transformation ever as sudden—or as complete—as literature makes it seem? This panel considers the aftermath of revelation as a problem of literary form and time. From spiritual autobiography and modernist fiction to contemporary poetry, addiction memoir, and queer life-writing, how do writers reckon with the distance between insight and sustained change? What becomes of plot when recovery has no clear endpoint, conversion calls for renewed commitment, or insight fails to produce action? How might repetition, habit, relapse, and ordinary duration complicate narratives of progress? What might lyric, serial, fragmentary, or nonlinear forms make visible?

We welcome scholarly and creative-critical work across periods, genres, and traditions. Possible

approaches include confession and anti-epiphany, ritual and recurrence, narrative closure, and the expectations placed upon stories of change. We are especially interested in how literary

conventions make certain kinds of transformation legible while leaving others difficult to tell.

The session will combine brief scholarly presentations with moderated discussion.

Loneliness and The Novel

Busra Copuroglu, Western University, bcopurog@uwo.ca

In recent years, loneliness has gained traction as a research topic across a wide range of

disciplines, including neuroscience, sociology, philosophy, ethnology, film studies, and cultural

history. Many scholars contend that, due to the rise of individualism under capitalist modernity,

loneliness has come to be a characteristic feature of modern life, especially in Western societies.

Loneliness has been a prevalent theme in the novel, revealing complex emotions (i.e., grief,

existential loneliness, jealousy, nostalgic longing etc.). While experiencing loneliness in life can

be painful, reading a novel about loneliness can also make one feel less lonely.

This panel welcomes submissions that explore depictions of loneliness in the novel. Potential

questions to consider include, but are not limited to: How might the depiction of this negative

emotion transform or inform the novel and novelistic conventions (i.e., the uses and distribution

of free indirect discourse, direct speech, and descriptions etc.)? What do stories of loneliness

reveal about the world around us? Can reading novels about loneliness an lonely characters

function as a self-help tool for the reader?

Negotiating Feminist Agency: Arab and/or Muslim Feminisms Amid Colonial Feminism, Authoritarianism, and Local Patriarchies

Alia Wazzan, Brock University, aw21us@brocku.ca

In the aftermath of 9/11 and the launch of the US-led Global War on Terror (GWOT), Leila Ahmed’s concept of “colonial feminism” illuminates how women’s rights have been mobilized to justify colonial domination (Women and Gender in Islam 151). Deepa Kumar and Hester Eisenstein use the term “imperial feminism,” to point to white feminists’ legitimization of militarism and war, and Khaled Beydoun links such politics to “gendered Islamophobia,” terms that are inseparable from the long tradition of “gendered-Orientalism” (Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire 98; Feminism Seduced 194; The New Crusades 9). Drawing on this feminist discourse, postcolonial feminists, including Lila Abu-Lughod and Robin Riley, have examined representations of Muslim women through categories such as the “oppressed Muslim woman” and the “terrorist Arab woman” (Do Muslim Women Need Saving?; Depicting the Veil). In response, feminist scholarship has foregrounded Arab and/or Muslim women’s agency while challenging the colonial epistemologies shaping their representation. Transnational feminist Nadje Al Ali identifies the challenge of advocating women’s rights and social justice while resisting Islamophobia and racism, without defending discriminatory practices or becoming “a mouthpiece of imperialist feminists and neoconservative politicians” advocating women’s liberation in the Middle East (“Prof. Nadje Al Ali’s Inaugural Lecture”).

This panel invites presentations that explore the challenge of “drawing the line” between local patriarchy and “colonial feminism,” including how these intersect. We particularly welcome contributions examining how Arab feminist movements and scholars have negotiated these tensions during and after the Arab Spring, and we welcome proposals from non-Arab speaking countries and scholars. Presentations can be in the following areas:

• Postcolonial feminism
• Cultural Studies
• Critical Studies of Neoliberalism
• Gendered Orientalism
• Arab and/or Islamic Feminisms
• Sociology and Anthropology
• Other relevant fields in the humanities and social sciences

“Breaking Boundaries and Crossing Borders: Resistance, Rebellion, and Reclamation in the Works of Stephen Graham Jones”

Bernadette V. Russo, Mount Saint Vincent University, Bernadette.Russo@msvu.ca

New York Times bestselling author, Stephen Graham Jones (Blackfeet), has published well

over 35 books, 270 short stories, and 5 graphic novels since his first novel, The Fast Red

Road, in 2000. Refusing author categorization, such as genre, niche, or ethnicity, Jones has

made a point of writing across various genres and styles. Through his writing, Jones

frequently addresses complex issues of settler colonialism, patriarchy, and

intergenerational trauma within Indigenous communities in subtle, yet powerful

techniques and themes. For his work with horror, Jones has been the recipient of numerous

accolades, including most recently the following: the Nebula Award for Best Novel for The

Buffalo Hunter Hunter in 2026; the Bram Stoker Award for The Buffalo Hunter Hunter in

2025, My Heart Is a Chainsaw in 2022, The Only Good Indians in 2021; and the Ray

Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy & Speculative Fiction for The Only Good Indians

in 2020. This panel seeks to discuss and explore the various ways in which Jones

transcends the constraints of traditional literature, settler-colonialism, and patriarchy.

Resonance and Relation: Music and Literary Practice

Eric Schmaltz, Dalhousie University, ens@dal.ca

Shannon Brown, Dalhousie University, sh734796@dal.ca

This panel invites proposals for papers focused on the intersection of music and literature.

Recent scholarly publications explicitly situated at the intersection of literary and sound studies

produced by Paul Watkins, Jason Camlot, Klara DuPlessis, Deanna Fong, Cole Mash, Katherine

McLeod, and others indicate that this area is largely established in Canadian scholarship. These

projects also indicate, in direct and indirect ways, an interest in a nexus point between music and literature, especially in Canadian and Indigenous cultural contexts. There is a long and diverse genre history in Canada involving the meeting point between literary practitioners and music, including poetry in performance, collaborations with musicians and ensembles, the incorporation of instruments, the deployment of electroacoustic and digital instruments and tools, experimental recordings, iterative and improvised readings, and more with notable practitioners such as Lillian Allen, Oana Avasilichioaei, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Kaie Kellough, Tanya Tagaq, bill bissett, a.rawlings, Penn Kemp, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Wayde Compton among many others. We invite paper proposals situated at the intersection of music and literature, emphasizing Canadian and Indigenous cultural contexts, addressing topics that may include but are not limited to collaborations between writers and musicians, poets working with music and sound, sites of poetic sonic performance, creative processes involving composing and writing, improvisation, and more.

Guided Reading: Form, Interface, and Authority from Page to Platform

Zahra Barzegar, York University, zahrabrz@yorku.ca

Katrina Vogan, York University, kvogan@yorku.ca

Literary forms, peritexts, and interfaces do not simply present texts. They position readers,

distribute interpretive authority, and make some relations legible while obscuring others. This

panel considers how these guiding structures shape encounters with poetry and other literary

genres across page, stage, screen, and platform. We invite papers on visual, spatial, and material

poetics; lineation, typography, sequencing, and rhythm; annotation, scholarly editions, study

guides, and digital companions; websites, platforms, and algorithmically guided reading;

performance and adaptation; literary pedagogy; accessibility and disability studies; and the

racial, colonial, ecological, or institutional politics of interpretive authority. We are especially

interested in papers that trace a specific formal or mediating feature to the interpretive,

pedagogical, or political work it performs. How do formal and mediating structures guide

reading without determining it? Whose authority is amplified or constrained when editorial,

visual, or digital frameworks direct attention? How do readers and audiences resist, repurpose, or reorient these pathways? We especially welcome historically grounded work on poetry and

poetics, alongside work across genres, periods, regions, and media. Treating guidance as part of

literary form, this panel asks how modes of presentation shape interpretation, teaching, and

public literary culture.

EDI, Academia, and Community Roots

Mohammad Sharifi, Fanshawe College, msharifi@FanshaweC.ca

Chinelo Ezenwa, Memorial University, cezenwa@mun.ca

A recent report of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Science and Research

recommends that Canada’s federal granting agencies eliminate all references to equity, diversity,

and inclusion (EDI) in awarding federal research funding. The report’s characterization of EDI as

“discriminatory” and harmful to research quality reflects a broader backlash that invites urgent

critical attention. Rather than remaining trapped in an exhausting cycle of defending EDI, this panel asks a more generative question: what happens when we reconnect EDI with its grassroots, community-based roots? EDI did not originate as a top-down institutional project. It emerged from communities confronting exclusion and building collective forms of access, recognition, care, and justice. Yet, as universities, governments, and other institutions adopted EDI, its language and practices have narrowed into compliance measures, branding, and performative displays of diversity. Is EDI ineffective because its principles have failed, or because institutional systems have contained and politicized them? Can we (re)-imagine EDI beyond bureaucracy, corporate optics, and defensive debate?

We invite proposals from scholars, artists, and community members that explore EDI as a living,

evolving practice. We welcome work across literary studies, cultural studies, creative writing,

disability studies, gender studies, Indigenous studies, Black studies, migration studies, etc.

Possible topics include:

• Grassroots histories and futures of EDI – rediscovering, regenerating, and reinventing the

roots of EDI;

• Connections between academia and communities – How can we bridge the gap?
• Institutionalization, performativity, tokenism, and anti-EDI backlash – the effects of co-

opting EDI by institutions;

• Fostering solidarity, collective care, joy, abundance, and radical resilience through EDI;
• Embedding teaching and research practices that resist exclusion and practice EDI rather

than preaching it.

Roughing It in Exile: The Politics of Impossible Homes and Possible Belongings

Titilola Aiyegbusi, University of Toronto, titi.aiyegbusi@mail.utoronto.ca

Mark A. McCutcheon, Athabasca University, mccutcheon@athabascau.ca

Dionne Brand’s writing “asks us to work towards providing a different account of the state of the world; it calls us to notice the place of our world and our place(s) in the world; and it demands that we broaden our understanding of its damages, its joys—and its potential” (Aiyegbusi and McCutcheon, 12). The ethical and political impulses of Brand’s literary imagination demand  accountability and self-consciousness of readers and invite them to interrogate their relationship and responsibilities to the world. But these same impulses in Brand’s work also decolonize hegemonic social structures of home and away, country and city, nation and world—all while articulating desire for just and liveable forms of community. Brand’s work elaborates the  impossibilities and possibilities of life in exile. As Myriam Chancy observes in her book, Searching for Safe Spaces, exile is a condition that is “more complex than the philosophical quest of coming to terms with one’s individual self” (Chancy, 1); it also involves reckoning with how exile “create[s] an entirely new reality that in some cases is benign and reassuring but more frequently, with the modern writers in particular, disturbing and chaotic” (Dahlie, 210). The diasporic, exiled entity must constantly negotiate with loss and shifting meanings of “home”.

This entity, as such, must negotiate the fissures between identity and nationhood, seeking to either hold them together or rip them apart.

For this panel, we invite scholars who approach literary production in Canada through this exilic

lens—however theorized—who recognize and study the various origination points of Canadian writers, the past identities formed in past homelands, and the way these identities are inflected by the Canadian experience across generations. We would especially welcome contributions that attend to the tension between returning to a native home or making a new one; contributions about writers publishing in Canada who interrogate individual and collective responsibilities; and/or contributions that theorize literature as means of community belonging and social transformation.

Navigating Intimate Rupture in Memoir: Graphic Non-Fiction and Prose

Catherine Umolac, Lakehead University, cumolac@lakeheadu.ca

Shoilee Khan, York University, shoilee.khan@gmail.com

Memoir is undergoing a profound paradigm shift as writers confront moments of rupture that

carry overwhelming personal and political weight. Trapped by language that is both politicized

and slippery, contemporary memoirists navigate moments where language fails. Central to this

evolution is the representation of intimate ruptures—fractured moments of grief, memory, and

structural collapse—where standard modes of expression break down. This panel explores how

authors of memoir across graphic non-fiction and prose navigate these rupture points.

In memoir, the writer as artist confronts pivotal moments of intimate rupture. Works such as

Sarah Leavitt’s Tangles, Teresa Wong’s All of Our Ordinary Stories, Prachi Gupta’s They Called

Us Exceptional and In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado demonstrate how genre and

form adapt to loss, cultural dissonance, and inherited silence. In an era where language feels

insufficient to convey specific, painful experiences, writers must navigate tenuous silences while

negotiating complex, often incommunicable family dynamics.

We invite papers examining the ways in which memoir, both prose and graphic, represent grief,

silences, omissions, memory lapses, cultural disconnect, and generational fracture. What happens when prose can no longer sustain the weight of a fractured reality? How do images, gutters, and white space speak where words fail? How do memoirists contend with moments of intimate Rupture?

Object-Oriented Views of the Contemporary Novel

Mik Tampold, McMaster University, tampoldm@mcmaster.ca

Description: As colonial and capitalist forces continue to structure the globalized world, it

becomes pertinent to interrogate the novel as a form of literature inextricably linked to the

subjective western values that buttress these ideologies. As Larissa Muraveva writes, there is

now a drive among decolonial literary authors to “overcome Eurocentric models of writing [and]

explore alternative narrative methods” (2025, 11). One of these potential methods, employed by

writers such as Rachel Cusk, Renee Gladman, and Teju Cole, is to treat the novel’s subject as a

listener whose own reasons for action remain alien to the reader. By both focusing on others and

obscuring the protagonist’s will, these writers’ texts present a more object-oriented form of the

novel. If we extend this metaphor via the speculative realism of Graham Harman, Levi Bryant,

and Timothy Morton, and the more political, agential, embodied territory of Katherine Behar and

Michelle Kohler’s object-oriented feminism, what alternative forms do we see the novel take

against both the subject’s allure and connectivity at large? How can these forms stand against

colonial and capitalist forces? We welcome presentations on many contemporary permutations of

the novel, including but not limited to autofiction, the dialogic novel, and the novel-in-stories.

The Socio-politics of AI and New Media in Theatre/Performance

Karl Jirgens, University of Windsor, Karl.Jirgens@uwindsor.ca

This panel will cover new or under-discussed media intersections of art and technology including AI, plus electronically-enhanced, multi-media productions of modern/contemporary artists. Such artists may include but are not limited to: Karel Čapek, Ayad Akhtar, Robert Lepage, Samuel Beckett, Laurie Anderson, Vera Frenkel, Charles Bernstein, Tomson Highway, R. Murray Shafer, and/or Janet Cardiff & George Miller. This “Round Table” panel will feature 3-4 panellists who each will speak for approximately 10-12 minutes followed by a discussion period addressing questions such as; “Is media always political?” &, “Does AI and theatre/performance shape socio-political-economic conditions?” – This panel encourages commentary of new media uses in the theatre/performance productions of BIPOC and 2S-LGBTQ+ artists while considering modes of resisting against injustice, while analyzing so-called “social-justice.”

“A morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs”: #DarkAcademia and its Violences

Albana Stafa, York University, stafaalb@yorku.ca

The COVID-19 pandemic saw the resurgence of Donna Tartt’s 1992 The Secret History via

#Booktok, a hashtag where Tiktok users posted their reading during lockdowns. User discussions led to discovering connections between Tartt’s narrative form and subsequent novels such as If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio and Babel by R.F. Kuang, where elite university campus settings harboured a gothic beneath their ivory surfaces. The various plot similarities and motifs were coined “#DarkAcademia”. What began to saturate such discussions, however, was interest in the imagery associated to the elite spaces the stories inhabit rather than critical analysis of their violences.

Today, #DarkAcademia, permeates social media as an aesthetic. On Tiktok, one may find

thousands of photo sequences of wood-panelled libraries and tweed jackets, each switching to

the beat of Ghost’s “Mary on a Cross”, under the hashtag. Pinterest’s search bar suggestions are

more succinct, where #DarkAcademia is followed by “Outfit” or “Interiors.” On Youtube, hours

of “Dark Academia Ambience” videos appear to AI images of darkened university windows.

By flattening the discussion of #DarkAcademia to such images, does the aesthetic romanticize

the settings the genre once sought to critique, or was this imbedded within the genre from the

beginning?

Embodied Approaches to Teaching Literature

Anjalee Nadarajan, York University, anjalee9@my.yorku.ca

Michael A. Bucknor, during his plenary speech on dub poetry and the Black sonic fantastic,

noted how literature has the power to physically move us, to make us sway to its

word-rhythms. Engaging with literature is not only a visual-mental process. It is also an aural

experience. But can our engagement with literature be further embodied?

This roundtable invites literature teachers to consider how we can ground literature as a

physical practice. Given that our discipline seems to be nearly swept away by the tide of

generative AI summaries and plot points, is there anything to be gained from reading or

writing something by oneself? As literature teachers, we suspect that there is a lot, but how

can we convey that to our students?

On this day at least, we have one advantage over gen AI: our existence as physical beings.

How can we incorporate our five senses and capacity to feel in our pedagogy? As literature

teachers, we can no longer afford to teach as though the five-paragraph essay or the research

paper is the sine qua non of student excellence. We now have a chance to reconsider old

modes of pedagogy, but how will we seize this moment?

What Lies Below Deck: Mermaids, Monsters, and Aquatic Imaginaries

Kathryn Franklin, Institute for the Study of University Pedagogy, University of Toronto, Mississauga campus, katie.franklin@utoronto.ca

With the success of recent television shows such as Widow’s Bay, the Newfoundland-set Below,

the summer blockbuster extravaganza of The Odyssey, and Loghan Paylor’s Canada Reads win

for The Cure for Drowning (2024), aquatic creatures have seemingly waded onto mainland and

into the spotlight. But what might this resurgence reveal about our contemporary moment? This panel argues that mermaids, undines, sirens, kelpies, sea hags, nereids, and other hybrid aquatic beings offer more than figures of fantasy or monstrosity, rather they provide a framework for exploring and challenging boundaries, hierarchies, and even national identities and borders. Moving between human and nonhuman, and land and water, these physical grotesques often inhabit the boundaries between worlds, and potentially disturb fixed categories of identity, belonging, and nationhood. Their liminality therefore offers alternative ways of thinking about ecological precarity, technological domination, gender, and embodiment. Can a mermaid pedagogy challenge the machine-led “reverse centaur” (Doctorow, 2026) by imagining forms of knowledge and relationality that resist technological feudalism and artificial intelligence? What can aquatic narratives teach us about uncertainty, fluidity, and nationality? And what happens when we look beneath the surface to uncover the histories, and power structures that sustain the worlds above deck?

This panel welcome papers on aquatic imaginaries from across literature, television, film,

folklore, popular culture, and pedagogy.

Bot Slop versus Book Reading: A Provocation for Discussion

Mark A. McCutcheon, Athabasca University, mccutcheon@athabascau.ca

Nina Paulovicova, Athabasca University, npaulovicova@athabascau.ca

So-called “ai” has proven toxic ecologically, economically, and culturally. AI is a neoliberal tool

consolidating structures of racial capitalism (Robinson) and certain taxonomies of knowledge,

and inflicting “severe vulnerabilities and systemic erosion of economic and political structures”

(Kasirzadeh), This destructive tool represents a defining part of a fascist project (Hogan). In its

unprecedentedly scaled IP theft and redeployment of both stolen works and its own cannibalized throughput, “gen ai” recirculates fascist misprisions of art and discourses of “civilization” that we must pay attention to as drivers of fascism’s spread. While an earlier generation of Nazis mounted “degenerate art” shows to demonize the oppressed, “gen ai” scales up the demonization—its form and content argue the devaluation of all art as essentially degenerate. “Gen ai” and other surveillance technologies of late disaster capitalism (Klein) wage war on the public goods of art, culture, and knowledge, even as education administrations and cultural industries push this tech. AI slop disrupts cultural production; artists and cultural workers are among the most vulnerable groups impacted by AI globally (Kirkwood & Pettigrew). The digital medium already leaves knowledge more vulnerable to manipulation; relative to the digital’s fragile first decades, maybe centuries-old print and millennia-old paper are still the future, after all. What new models do we need—or what older models might we reboot—to cultivate authentic intelligence in these panoptic times? Fuck1 “ai.” Discuss.

Note: Respectfully, we cite the late Sarah Mann’s theorization of this word as a visceral,

anticapitalist vehicle for critique, as argued in her award-winning 2011 undergraduate thesis

“Fucking media.”

Relation Across the Global South

Susanna Joseph, University of Toronto, susanna.joseph@mail.utoronto.ca

In Mobilizing India, cultural theorist Tejaswini Niranjana proposes that the “norming of the

comparative axis” in global diasporic studies needs to be questioned. “How do we read each

other,” she asks, “so that we do not appear simply as footnotes to Western history?” (14). Her

intervention raises a broader question for comparative literary and cultural studies: How might

we read across the Global South without always positioning its cultural formations primarily in

relation to the West? Movements of cultures, peoples and literatures between various locations in

the global South constitute an alternative frame of reference that departs from the West-South

orientation of much of traditional comparative studies.

This panel invites papers that bring locations in the global South into conversation with each

other rather than primarily with the West. It seeks to investigate how seemingly disparate or

entangled histories, geographical locations and literary forces may be brought to converse with

each other without the mediating force of the West. Regions may be conceived broadly and may

include but are certainly not limited to Asia, Africa, Caribbean, Latin America, and the Middle

East.

Creative Writing Panels

Literary Drag: The Queer Art of Making a Self

Daryl Bruce, Dalhousie University, daryl.bruce@dal.ca

Shannon Brown, Dalhousie University, sh734796@dal.ca

In describing his approach to On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong calls his

embrace of the ornamental sentence discarded by literary modernism a kind of “literary drag.”

Vuong’s phrase speaks to drag’s capacity to make expressions of identity a spectacle and to

expose the work involved in troubling heteronormativity. “Literary drag” invites the notion of

writing as performance, one in which the self is dressed, rehearsed, exaggerated, revised, and

indulged.

This panel invites writers of prose, poetry, and/or hybrid forms to consider literary drag

as creative practice. In a time when the colloquial phrase “speak your truth” is circulated with

urgency, how do queer writers navigate telling “truths” in their writing? How do queer writers

complicate singular and linear “truths” about identities? What does it even mean to be a queer

writer? How does the site of literary production offer simultaneously potential and tension-filled

spaces for presenting oneself queerly? These questions “drag” the freedoms of literary

performance, particularly when authenticity becomes a measure of artistic legitimacy.

We welcome creative readings accompanied by reflections on craft and process.

Contributions might consider the selves writers invent, the voices they borrow, and the

expectations they upset. What happens when the performance slips?

Creative Writing Emergencies

Glenn Clifton, Sheridan College, glenn.clifton@sheridancollege.ca

This panel invites papers on how the pedagogy of creative writing can address the political

and environmental crises in which we find ourselves. Historically, the Iowa model of the creative writing pedagogy tended to depoliticize the classroom and teach form, staying neutral regarding the content of student writing. Widespread criticisms of that workshop model have highlighted how this seeming neutrality punished marginalized voices whose perspectives were more likely to register as “political.”Most of those criticisms of the traditional workshop have focused on revamping the form of workshop to make a less toxic environment for student feedback—an approach that is ultimately still neutral as regards the content of student writing. Yet students—who hope to become emerging writers but know they are emerging into an emergency—crave tools that will help them address the moment in which they find themselves. Writers and writing students are already politically engaged—how do we teach each other to write the political struggles of our age with courage and sophistication?

We invite papers that discuss course structures, prompts, pedagogical theories, research

creation—any dimension of how creative writing addresses the multiple crises of our

political moment.

“Like a Laughing String: A Round Table on Failing”

Samantha Annie Bernstein, York University, sbernst@yorku.ca

In “To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing,” Yeats urges his friend to “Be secret and

exult, / Because of all things known / That is most difficult.” Is it possible for one’s literary

work to “come to nothing”? If so, what does this look like? If not, why not? How can we

persevere, as Stephen Marche asks in On Writing and Failure, through repeated rejections

or the sense of pointlessness that can pervade the experience of writing? How do creative

writing professors work with students to help them define what success or failure means to

them? This panel invites writers at any stage of their careers to prepare a short

presentation on the idea of artistic failure, which will open into a generative and supportive

discussion of how and why we write.

Topics might include:

• Receiving and coping with rejection letters
• Moving on from projects that aren’t working
• Inclusion in / exclusion from / creation of literary communities
• Historical examples of writing about rejection / failure
• Obstacles to creative production
• Writing as political intervention
• Pedagogical approaches to a sustainable writing practice

BIPOC Reading and Conversation

Gillian Sze, Concordia University, gillian.sze@concordia.ca

The Writing Thru Race Conference took place nearly 33 years ago, but issues of

identity and belonging continue to be important for Canadian writers. This creative

writing panel will bring together both emerging and established BIPOC writers for a

literary reading and discussion. Writers will read from their latest or forthcoming work.

Afterwards, there will be a discussion about creative concerns and formal

experimentation. This includes questions such as, what has changed across

generations of BIPOC writers in Canada? What are our literary concerns today? How

has writing used or resisted technology? Where can one find belonging and community

in CanLit?

You Probably Think This Song Is About You: Real People and Nonfiction

Robyn Read, Sheridan College, robyn.read@sheridancollege.ca

When I’ve recently encouraged students to submit their creative nonfiction work to be

considered for publication, I’ve been surprised by a common hesitation: they’re worried

about their depictions of real people “getting out there.”

Although social media is ubiquitous, the “real” on these platforms is self-selected and

glossed over. On the other hand, when students follow “be specific and detailed” (as

classic a piece of writing advice as “write what you know”) it can make them feel

vulnerable. Students composing compelling and undeniably original work is something

to fight for with the onset of A.I. But students may wonder if it’s risky in an era where

every little thing can be criticized and make one subject to public scrutiny or even

cancellation.

This creative writing panel seeks short readings of new work in creative nonfiction and

short presentations about teaching creative nonfiction. These readings and

presentations will be followed by a roundtable discussion about writing and teaching

creative nonfiction, stemming from the central question: how can writers be ambitious

and authentic when writing about their real lives in an era when we’re being conditioned

to be artificial?

Decolonizing The Self

Suzzanne Bakr, Concordia University, bakrsuzanna@gmail.com

This panel aims to bring together creative writing projects that explore the act of

decolonizing a selfhood through writing practices. As Claudia Rankine discusses in her essay

“The First Person in the Twenty-First Century,” the construction of self “becomes a process in

motion determined by indeterminacy through a strategy of fragmentation” (133-4). Can a self

exist apart from a colonial history? How can we map the need for freedom in diasporic

communities when it can so easily fall for a nationalistic yearning to become the colonizer?

Where does the writing intercept a selfhood that is then intrinsically transformed through the

creative process? We are seeking papers that break the boundaries of narrative and form as we

know them, a challenge to colonial bodies and frameworks. The creative act creates a critical

space where the self can become and unbecome, prevail and fail to isolate a pure self untouched by a colonial history. We are looking for creative works that seek to consolidate the “I” and find new ways to interact with embodied archives, acts of resistance, and decolonial initiatives through creative discovery.

Joint-Sponsored Panels

Victorian Nostalgia / Nostalgic Victorians

Co-sponsored by the North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA)

Nicole Dufoe, University of Toronto, nicole.dufoe@utoronto.ca

By the turn of the twentieth century, writes David Lowenthal in The Past is a Foreign Country,

“all Britain seemed bent on a nostalgic quest,” building Tudor-style pubs and penning English

Ballads. The Victorians lived through seismic shifts in technology, science, and empire that

destabilized not only the presumptive supremacy of Britain on the world stage, but the centrality of the human race itself within the large sweep of history; it is little wonder, perhaps, that they took comfort in a more insular past, from Thomas Carlyle’s medieval monks to William Morris’s agrarian utopias. Nostalgia is often contradictory: fueling xenophobia, suppression, and even fascism, but also fostering conservation, creativity, and community. This panel will consider

papers that approach nostalgia in Victorian literature and culture with curiosity and originality.

Possible questions to pursue include: How does the impulse to look backward complicate

Victorian ideals of progress and expansionism? What are the social/political/nationalist

implications of (re)creating imagined British pasts? How do aesthetics of nostalgia shape form in

Victorian art and literature? And, what might twenty-first-century nostalgia for the Victorian

period, in Britain, Canada, and beyond, reveal about our own precarious present?

Dramatic Literature: A Roundtable on Teaching Drama in English Departments

Co-sponsored by the Canadian Association for Theatre Research (CATR)

Robin C. Whittaker, St. Thomas University, rwhit@stu.ca

Department of English Language and Literature, St. Thomas University, Fredericton, NB

With most practical theatre training enshrined in post-secondary theatre programs, how has the

teaching of dramatic literature changed, and to what end, in English Departments in recent years? The published playscript is the nexus at which theatre creation meets the study of literature. It is therefore, historically, also the nexus at which literary criticism converses with performance studies, literary biography meets theatre history, text and body are analyzed as one, and theory is reformed (and performed). In dramatic literature classrooms, how are considerations of the place of literary studies, literary criticism, theatre practice, theatre historiography, performance theory, textuality, and embodiment altering?

This call seeks interested participants for TWO (2) iterations of a 90-minute Roundtable, one

running during ACCUTE 2027 and the other running during CATR 2027. Preference is for

selected participants to attend both iterations as members of both associations, though

consideration may be made for those seeking to be part of only one. Please submit a 300-word position paper describing your interest in the topic; the place of drama/theatre pedagogy in your English Department and how this has/hasn’t changed in recent years; and any tailored exercise, assignment, or approach you use (if any) when teaching drama/theatre to English literature students, including note of any assumptions or surprises you have encountered. As well, please indicate your interest in participating in both iterations of the roundtable as a member of both associations, or if you are able to attend only one.

Beyond the Valley of the Tropes: Twenty-First-Century Representations of Los Angeles

Co-sponsored by the Canadian Association for American Studies

Peter Robert Brown, Mount Allison University, pbrown@mta.ca

In Landscapes of Desire: Anglo Mythologies of Los Angeles (2000), William Alexander

McClung explores twentieth-century representations of the city in the dominant culture. His

analysis joins other accounts of representations and interpretations of Los Angeles: Mike Davis’s

discussion of Los Angeles as the “land of sunshine” or the home of noir in City of Quartz and as

the “ecology of fear” elsewhere and Reyner Banham’s four ecologies, “surfurbia,” “foothills,”

“the plains of Id,” and “Autopia” to name two famous instances. McClung’s critical assessment

illustrates how such interpretations risk obscuring the city and those who live there.

Over the past quarter of a century, there has been much academic and scholarly work that

complicates such interpretations by drawing on and examining the social and cultural diversity of the city. This panel invites papers that consider twenty-first century representations of Los

Angeles, especially those that trouble and challenge the kinds of interpretations mentioned

above. These panel welcomes analyses of different cultural productions, literature, film, and

popular music, for example. The panel seeks to explore representations of Los Angeles that

recognize the complexities of the place and that question clichés and stereotypes.

The Canon and its Afterlives

Sponsored by the ACCUTE Graduate Student Caucus

Bailey Schaan, University of Alberta, bschaan@ualberta.ca

Julian Quigg, University of British Columbia, mjulianquigg@gmail.com

More than thirty years after the publication of Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon: The Books

and School of the Ages, the idea that English literary studies should revolve around “canonical”

works is now largely considered regressive and out of date. This traditional conception of the

canon has been extensively critiqued and expanded (Showalter; Guillory; Bourdieu), yet the

notion of canonicity remains embedded in the field and continues to impact graduate research,

teaching, and professionalization. Early career scholars are often told that their research interests are either “too canonical” or “not canonical enough.” At the same time, many English programs still hinge upon an often-unspoken requirement that graduate students have a strong working knowledge of the canon, in order to critique, revise, or think beyond it. Familiarity with

canonical texts also remains a key marker of disciplinary expertise and teaching qualifications.

These ongoing debates raise questions about what place, if any, the canon has in the future of the field: Should scholars reinterpret canonical texts through new theoretical lenses? Should the

canon be expanded/revised to center more historically marginalized authors? Or is it time to

abandon the concept of the canon altogether?

This roundtable invites proposals for 5-10 minute presentations, which will be followed by a

collaborative discussion about the enduring influence of the canon in graduate education and

literary studies. Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• History/theory of canon formation
• Canon and genre
• The new canon
• Revisiting canonical texts
• Teaching within and beyond the canon
• Graduate research interests and employment prospects
• The canon’s role in comprehensive exams (and other assessments)
• The Canadian canon/Canada’s place in the English literary canon
• Canonization and cultural nationalism
• Political backlash to changing curricula
• Anthologies, prizes, and assigning value to writing

Victorian Popular Literature and the Politics of Taste

Co-sponsored by the Victorian Studies Association of Ontario (VSAO)

Kaitlyn Fralick, Queen’s University, 17kf2@queensu.ca

Jen Rastall, Western University, jrastall@uwo.ca

Literary value has long been debated through hierarchies of high- and low-brow “tastes.”

Margaret Oliphant, in writing for Blackwood’s, condemned several popular “feverish

productions,” whose readers were “too foolish” to be “injured” by such “rubbish.” As evolving

print technologies and markets transformed publishing, however, popular literature increasingly

challenged these hierarchies. Today, scholars continue to reconsider the boundaries of the

literary canon and the cultural hierarchies that sustain it.

We welcome papers that explore Victorian popular literature and the negotiation of

literary “taste.” How did writers and publishers navigate debates about literary merit and

commercial success? How did popular genres reflect or challenge prevailing cultural values and

social hierarchies? Possible topics include:

• Literature and commercialization
• Contemporaneous criticism of genre fiction (e.g., sensation, detective, the Gothic, penny

dreadfuls)

• Popular generic boundaries and narrative experimentation
• Effects of evolving publishing technologies (e.g., illustration, serialization) and material

contexts (e.g., circulating libraries, periodical publication) on literary production

• Gender and the perceived dangers of popular literature
• Moral concern with criminality and social transgressions in popular literature
• Representations of reading and literary judgement
• Depictions of racialization and imperialism in popular literature
• Popular authorship and celebrity
• Neo-Victorianism: the afterlives of Victorian popular genres

Un/Bound: The Periodical and the Book

Co-sponsored by the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP)

Sarah Bull, Toronto Metropolitan University, sarah.bull@torontomu.ca

Periodical studies has often defined its object against the book: open where the book is

closed, ephemeral where the book endures, collective where the book privileges a

single name. In the nineteenth century, however, these forms were entangled. Novels

appeared in parts before they appeared in volumes; weeklies reprinted extracts from

books; subscribers had magazines bound, discarding wrappers and advertisements;

and readers with scissors and paste made books from newspaper clippings. Those

discarded wrappers often hawked books: book publishers filled periodicals’ advertising

columns, and founded or acquired periodicals to serialize their authors and promote

their lists. Colonial newspapers and reprint houses, from Toronto to Calcutta, rebound

metropolitan fiction into different forms for different markets.

We invite papers that consider where boundaries between periodical and book were

drawn, crossed, and confused in the nineteenth century. How did publishers, editors,

authors, advertisers, binders, and readers move material between them, and who paid

or profited in transit? What did the bound volume conceal, and the loose number

reveal? What held books and periodicals together, and what came apart when bonds

broke? How do archives and databases bind or unbind the nineteenth-century press

anew? Work on any region or genre of the nineteenth-century press is welcome.