Call for Papers 

Multisensuality and Language Across Media, Cultures, and Histories International Scientific Conference 

When: November 14–15, 2025 Where: Online 

“Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words.” — Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments 

This online conference explores the connections between multisensuality and language – as spoken, written, visual, tactile, or embodied experience – across cultural and historical contexts, and through diverse media forms. 

How do we perceive language through the senses? How is language shaped by sound, touch, vision, or movement? How do linguistic experiences intersect with bodily sensations, emotional intensities, and sensory environments? 

We invite proposals from scholars interested in how language and sensation interact in everyday life, history, education, art, film, literature, performance, and media. We encourage interdisciplinary approaches drawing from cultural studies, linguistics, film and media studies, education, history, and related fields. 

Topics may include (but are not limited to): 

• Sensory dimensions of speech, writing, or translation 
• Voice, tone, accent, and listening as affective or embodied experiences 
• Tactile and visual aspects of language (e.g., sign language, typography, calligraphy) 
• Language learning and teaching as multisensory practice 
• Synaesthetic metaphors and sensory imagery across genres and contexts 
• Embodied forms of expression combining language with senses 
• Affective linguistics and the emotional life of language 
• Language in sensory history or sensory memory 
• Media, cultural, or historical representations of language as sensory experience

Please send a proposal of max. 500 words and a short bio note (with your affiliation, research profile, and contact details) by October 15, 2025 to the email: multisensuality@gmail.com Notifications of acceptance will be sent by November 1, 2025. 

Participation in the conference is free of charge. Selected papers are planned to be published in a scientific journal as a special issue or in a monograph. 

The conference will be held online and in English. 

For more information, visit: https://multisensualityandlanguage.weebly.com/ 

Organizers: 

Sprachenzentrum, University of Vienna 

University of the National Education Commision, Kraków 

Koszalin University of Technology 

Pomeranian University in Słupsk 

Organizing Committee: 

Joanna Łapińska, PhD (Sprachenzentrum, University of Vienna) 

Natalia Giza, PhD (University of the National Education Commision, Kraków) 

Kamila Kalista, PhD (Koszalin University of Technology) 

Bernadetta Żynis, PhD (Pomeranian University in Słupsk) 

Łukasz Trzeciak, PhD (Pomeranian University in Słupsk)