Posted by Sandro Eich on 2025-11-14

BACLS is pleased to announce our first graduate conference,

New Work in Contemporary Literary Studies,

which will take place at the University of Leeds on May 20th 2026. This will be a hybrid conference. 

Participants will be invited to contribute to a special issue of the soon-to-be-relaunched journal Alluvium, to be published after the symposium. 

For Timothy Bewes, we have entered a ‘postfictional age’ that has seen the erosion of the boundaries between reality and fiction, while Anna Kornbluh argues that much contemporary fiction and criticism has ceded ground to an aesthetic of ‘immediacy’ imposed by the economic imperatives of ‘too late capitalism’. What does it mean to study literature in the ever-changing now? And what does this study teach us about the contemporary moment?  

BACLS is a scholarly association that brings together academics and practitioners from across the UK and beyond in order to explore the current moment and its contexts. BACLS is not restricted to Anglophone literary studies, and ‘British’ refers to the location of the organising scholars, rather than the range of the association. ‘Literary studies’ is similarly intended to open up the association to scholars working on the contemporary in literature and cognate disciplines. A non-exhaustive list of potential topics for the conference includes: 

• Issues of periodisation: what is contemporary about the contemporary? 
• Single-author papers on key contemporary authors from across global literatures. 
• Issues in/of the contemporary.  
• Genres of contemporary literature, including autofiction, autotheory, sad girl lit, etc.  
• Contemporary writing and reading practices, including digital forms of creation and reception. 
• Critical theory in the 21st century.
• Comparative world literature, postcolonial studies, media theory, cultural studies.
• Contemporary publishing. 
• Book workers and their role in the publishing industry.  
• Literature and the academy: close reading, teaching texts, etc.  

Postgraduate and early career researchers are invited to submit proposals for short (10-minute) papers on topics broadly related to contemporary literature and global literary studies. Abstracts should be no more than 250 words and include a short biography of no more than 50 words. Proposals should be sent to: bacls2025@proton.me by midnight on 4th January 2026. Presenters should specify whether they are planning to attend in person or online. Decisions will be communicated by the end of January. 

 

We are planning to offer a very limited number of travel bursaries for UK-based researchers without access to travel funding. If attending in person, please also specify whether you would like to be considered for a bursary. Please note that this will have no bearing on our consideration of your proposal, and that we cannot guarantee any bursaries at this point. A separate round of applications for the bursaries will follow early next year.

Please contact the organisers for any questions regarding the event:

Best wishes,

BACLS Graduate Representatives

Max Shirley (University of Westminster) - M.Shirley@westminster.ac.uk

Liam Young (Loughborough University) - L.Young4@lboro.ac.uk

Alberto Andrés Calvo (University of Leeds) – fkrk8490@leeds.ac.uk 

 

(Title image taken from Wikipedia, Cavie78, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brotherton_Library_reading_room,_University_of_Leeds,_27th_June_2014.jpg,CC BY-SA 4.0).