EGSS/EBSS 2025 Conference: Call for Papers

R/evolution: Radical Change and Gradual Transformation in Literature and Culture

Université de Montréal

April 11–13, 2025

Important Notice for Those Who Have Already Submitted an Abstract:
Due to a technical issue that may have affected some submissions, we kindly ask anyone who has already submitted an abstract to confirm their submission by sending their full name and the title of their abstract to egss.conferences@gmail.com.

Thank you for your understanding and cooperation!

The English Graduate Students’ Society (soon to become the English and Bidisciplinary Students’ Society) at l’Université de Montréal currently solicits proposals for paper presentations at its 2025 annual conference. The conference theme, “R/evolution,” invites us to considers the frictions and affinities between evolution and revolution, as we trace radical change and gradual transformation in literature and culture.

The essence of R/evolution lies in a dynamic interplay of subtle shifts and profound disruptions, a force simultaneously propelled forward while anchored in echoes of the past. It embodies both the quiet hum of gradual transformation and the loud upheavals of radical change. As Jacques Derrida observes: “A revolution repeats, and it even repeats the revolution against the revolution. The Eighteenth Brumaire concludes from this that men make their own history, that is the condition of inheritance. Appropriation in general, we would say, is in the condition of the other and of the dead other, of more than one dead, a generation of the dead. What is said about appropriation is also valid for freedom, liberation, or emancipation.”[1]

Revolution conjures visions of radical change, the dismantling of norms, and the bold forging of new paths. Evolution, on the other hand, speaks of adaptation, continuity, and the gradual reshaping of the familiar. As Joseph Carroll suggests in his analysis of the adaptive function of literature, “The Human Revolution produced an exponential increase in the human capacity to manipulate its own ecology, including its social organization, and that revolutionary alteration in human power rendered the total human environment still more unstable, more variable and complex, more rapidly changing, than it had ever been before.”[2] Hence, where do these forces meet? How do they inform one another through narratives, histories, and cultural imaginaries? How do r/evolutionary ideas change over time? What role do incremental changes play in the most r/evolutionary moments? How do individuals and communities experience and narrate these intertwined processes? We invite you to explore the layers of meaning within r/evolution, from the seismic shifts of r/evolutions past and present to the quiet r/evolutions of personal or creative transformation.

We invite scholars to engage with the interplay between revolution and evolution across literature and the humanities. Submissions are welcome from a range of disciplines, including but not limited to: literary and cultural theory, digital humanities, film, visual arts, translation and adaptation studies, migration studies, critical studies in race and ethnicity, Indigenous studies, queer studies, gender and feminist studies, critical disability studies, supernatural studies, studies in speculative and science fiction, migration studies, and studies in popular culture and non-canonical genres. The EGSS/EBSS also encourages abstracts from undergraduate students; accepted papers will be organized as an undergraduate panel to be delivered at the conference.

Possible topics might include:

• literary representations of evolution and/or revolution
• temporalities of change
• cultural transformation via resistance and/or adaptation
• legacies of r/evolution and cultural memory
• speculative imaginings of r/evolutionary futures
• embodied experiences of transformation
• aesthetic challenges to conventions of genre
• the intersectionality of r/evolution
• technological advancements and cultural, social, and/or personal transformation
• literature’s role in critiquing, inspiring, and/or documenting r/evolution

We ask those interested in delivering presentations of 15–20 minutes (or of shorter duration for undergraduate students) to submit abstracts of 250 words and a bio via Google Form (https://forms.gle/Ueqcx2s6cBpFG5yH7) by March 20, 2025.

We seek originality and creativity, inviting you to take intellectual risks, challenge paradigms, and reimagine the very concepts of revolution and evolution. For more information about the conference, visit https://udemegss.wordpress.com/call-for-papers-2/call-for-papers-2022/. For any queries, please contact the conference organizers at egss.conferences@gmail.com.

Our conference is hybrid and open to all—you may attend either via Zoom (link to be shared at a later date) or in person at l’Université de Montréal.

[1] Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994), 134.

[2] Joseph Carroll, “The Human Revolution and the Adaptive Function of Literature,” Philosophy and Literature 30, no. 1 (2006): 40.