The E. E. Cummings Society and the Society’s journal, Spring, invite abstracts for 20-minute papers for the 53rd annual Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900, Feb. 19-21, 2026, at the University of Louisville (https://artsandsciences.louisville.edu/news-events/conferences/louisville-conference-literature-and-culture). Considering Cummings’ ongoing appeal to and influence on an academic and mass readership from various critical perspectives (language, art, genre and culture, cultural divides, eco-criticism, zoopoetics, popular media, adaptation theory, and other approaches), the Society’s panel for this year would like to examine Cummings’ own new humanist aesthetics of “living form” in various art media (painting, poetry, music, dance, drama, etc.). 

This panel calls for papers that examine the “animal turn” in the works of Cummings. Papers for this panel will consider how Cummings rethinks and destabilizes the ethical and philosophical grounds of human exceptionalism. Studies that engage seriously with nonhuman animal presences in Cummings’ works will especially be encouraged. Collectively, papers in this panel will reconsider the limits of human-centered thinking in Cummings’ verbal and visual arts. How does the presence of the non-human world help inform Cummings’ poetics and his idea of biophilia and what it means to be human? Although the panel explores movement through the eyes of the poet and painter into the “living mirrors” of the natural and animal world, papers examining Cummings’ aesthetics from social, ecological, aesthetic, genre-based, translation, and multimedia perspectives are all welcome. Please send 300-word abstracts (double-spaced and titled) and a brief bio by September 14, 2025 to: gch7u@virginia.edu 

Gillian Huang-Tiller, Ph.D.

Professor Emerita of English

Dept. of Lang. & Lit.

University of Virginia’s College at Wise

1 College Avenue

Wise, VA 24293

gch7u@virginia.edu