30/08/2026
📢 CALL FOR PAPERS
READ THE ROOM: The Annual Conference on Literature and Education
Inaugural Online Conference — "The Plot Thickens: New Directions in Literature"
The plot thickens whenever literature enters the classroom. A text becomes an encounter among readers, histories, cultures, institutions, and competing ideas about what reading is — and what it is for. At the same time, literary studies itself continues to change as new critical approaches, shifting canons, evolving technologies, and emerging forms of storytelling reshape how literature is written, read, interpreted, and taught.
This inaugural conference invites scholars, educators, teacher educators, graduate students, writers, and practitioners to explore where the plot is thickening across literature, literary studies, and literary education — and what new roles literature might assume in the formation of readers, writers, students, and citizens.
Proposals are welcome in any of three broad areas — literature and literary studies; education and educational practice; or the intersections between the two — and need not address both fields. The conference welcomes work across literary periods, genres, traditions, cultures, and media, as well as across educational levels, settings, and approaches.
🖋️ POSSIBLE DIRECTIONS
✦ Replotting the canon — new readings, revisions, retellings, adaptations, literary afterlives, and the recovery of neglected texts and voices
✦ Beyond the page — literature across film, theatre, performance, music, visual culture, digital media, and interactive storytelling
✦ Literature and AI — artificial intelligence, authorship, creativity, interpretation, and the future of reading and writing
✦ Rewriting the literature classroom — innovative approaches to teaching, interpreting, assessing, and experiencing literary texts
✦ New readers and new ways of reading — changing reading practices, digital and social media, youth reading cultures, and the place of close reading today
✦ Teaching across borders — the art of storytelling in intercultural, multilingual, multicultural, EFL, and ESL classrooms
✦ The classroom as literary space — teachers, students, mentors, schools, and education as represented in literature
Proposals that challenge these categories or imagine entirely new directions for literary study and education are also welcome.
📄 SUBMISSION FORMATS
• Individual papers (20-minute presentations): 250-word abstract, presentation title, and a short biographical note (~100 words)
• Pre-organized panels (three related 20-minute papers): a brief session description, title and abstract for each contribution, and a short bio for each participant
• Workshops or practice-based sessions (creative writing, poetry, drama, storytelling, performance, or innovative teaching practices): a description of the session, its intended audience, and its proposed structure and outcomes
🖥️ Online Conference: 8 February 2027
📝 Submission Deadline: 15 December 2026
🏛️ Hosted by Bar-Ilan University & Levinsky-Wingate Academic College
📩 SUBMIT PROPOSALS TO:
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
We look forward to proposals that ask new questions, revisit familiar texts from unexpected perspectives, and reconsider what literature can mean, teach, and become.
