classical studies

Decadence: Rhetoric and Aesthetics of Decline from Ancient Empire to the Age of Polycrisis

Conference open to scholars of all stages

Venue: British School at Rome, Rome

Dates:21-22nd January 2027

Following a successful symposium in 2025 on the subject of civilisational origins, we are delighted to announce our next event, Decadence, a conference about what happens to civilisations, societies, and cultural movements when they reach and then exceed their peak.

Appropriately for a word broadly defined as “having a mixed character,” the idea of “hybridity” has elicited contradictory interpretation since its inception in the Greek word hybris. While the word could mean miscegenation, shame, wantonness, outrage, and even violence, the term carried the alternate but equally valid connotation of thinking and moving beyond human limitations. Despite a shift fromclassical beliefs through Christianity, hybrid figures such as the centaur and satyr continued to proliferate throughout the Renaissance, evoking both wonder and terror. While sometimes considered blasphemous, these classical hybrids were also allegorized to fit into Renaissance ethical and religious frameworks.

About the Conference
In light of our deeply polarized times, the American Academy of Religion, Western Region (AAR/WR) invites scholars, practitioners, educators, and community leaders to submit proposals for its Annual Conference. This year's theme is Moving Beyond Boundaries and Silos Toward Interconnection. It reflects AAR/WR's foundational commitment to inter-religious, inter-disciplinary, and inter-generational dialogue.
 

Skenè Research Centre
Interdisciplinary Theatre and Drama Studies
Università di Verona

as part of the agreement with

Dipartimento di Filologia, Letteratura e Linguistica
Università di Pisa

Theatre and Anthropology

Theoretical Approaches to Text, Performance,

and Theatrical Practices

Verona (IT), November 19-20, 2026

Conference venue  
Dipartimento di Lingue e letterature straniere,
Polo Zanotto, Aula Co-Working
via S. Francesco 22,
Verona, Italy

While tragedy and horror are often treated as distinct genres, both traditions ask audiences to look steadily at what ordinarily repels them. From unburied corpses and undead monsters to violated kinship and failed agency, these spectacles produce fear, pity, disgust, and sorrow alongside fascination. This session explores what might be understood as a tragedy–horror continuum, examining the aesthetic, affective, and ritual overlaps between tragic and horrific representation across historical periods and media.

Who owns mythological creatures? What do they do in modern literature? Based on the reemerging prevalence of mythological influences in popular culture – cf. Madeline Miller, Jennifer Saint, Rick Riordan, etc. – it can be read that monstrosity is having a cultural renaissance and reimagining. With new interpretations and uses of mythology, what happens when a lens of modern feminist or queer theory is applied to these stories?

Call for Papers

Imagining the Global Past:
Antiquities, Early Modernities, and the Humanities Today

Research Symposium, May 17–18, 2027

University of Washington Division of the Humanities

Keynote Speakers: Russ Leo (Princeton, English Literature) and Andrew Hui (National University of Singapore, Comparative Literature and Sinology)

Organizer: Rhema Hokama (University of Washington, English Literature and Religious Studies)

A small number of additional abstracts (on disability in German Literature) are currently being sought for an edited volume to be published by Metzler Publishing House (an imprint of Springer Nature). The volume adopts a comparative approach and examines representations of disability and/or addiction in German-language and Japanese literature. Interested scholars are invited to send a brief abstract or topic proposal as soon as possible to habib.tekin@hotmail.com and hayashih@kansai-u.ac.jp by 2.7.2026.

CFP: Special Issue of The Australasian Journal of Popular Culture (15.2 2026) on K-Pop, deadline 15th June 2026.

Manuscripts and Textual Criticism (Panel / In-Person)Presiding Officer: Kathryn Vulic (Western Washington University)

Geomythology is an emerging field invented by the geoscientist Dorothy Vitaliano in 1968 but has ancient roots in figures such as the mythographer Euhemerus (3rd century B.C.) as well as modern predecessors like Robert Hooke (1635-1703), the “English Leonardo,” and Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), the father of modern paleontology. It has been featured in recent panels at literary and scientific conferences. Geomythology seeks to discover proto-scientific information in ancient and medieval myths, legends, and tales. Often, this information is encoded in stories originally told by eyewitnesses to make sense of traumatic events such as volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and tsunamis.

Submissions open: June 15, 2026 – August 1, 2026

Nesir: Journal of Literary Studies welcomes submissions for its October 2026 issue, which seeks to reconsider how literature translates bodily experience into writing and visibility, and how the body, in turn, discloses and shapes literary meaning.

One of the fundamental limitations of English literature before 1800 is that in order to study this literature it must have survived to us in some form: it must have been preserved, intentionally or accidentally, in whole or in part, and usually in some form of archive. This call seeks papers that reflect on or account for the impact of this archival presence in premodern studies. How has or does the need for our texts to have been archived impact the field, whether broadly or through its effect on the understanding of a particular text, author, or genre? How does reading “after the archive” in this subfield differ from similar readings in other subfields, or from readings that do not consider the significance of the archive?

ERC Advanced Grant AGRELITA

The Reception of Ancient Greece in pre-modern French Literature and Illustrations of Manuscripts and Printed Books (1320-1550): How invented memories shaped the identity of European communities

Direction : Catherine Gaullier-Bougassas

https://agrelita.hypotheses.org/