From its origins in racialised heredity science to its violent implementation in 20th-century state policies, eugenics has shaped how modern societies imagine health, heredity, and the value of life. Literature has long played a key role in this history – at times reflecting or affirming eugenic ideals, at others exposing their violence or imagining forms of life beyond them. 

This seminar explores literary genealogies of eugenics: how texts have contributed to, critiqued, or reworked eugenic thought. By speaking of ‘genealogies,’ we mean not only historical lineages but also critical trajectories that trace how biopolitical logics emerge, persist, and are re-narrated across time. At the same time, we focus on the ‘afterlives’ of eugenics: how its assumptions continue to shape bodies, identities, and futures in literary form.

Early 20th-century writers such as H. G. Wells, Thomas Mann, and Knut Hamsun integrated notions of vitality, racial improvement, and degeneration into their literary worlds, offering insight into the intellectual climate that fostered eugenic ideologies. More recent literature returns to eugenics with a critical and affective lens, engaging trauma, memory, and bioethical dilemmas. Works such as Uwe Timm’s “Ikarien,” Dolen Perkins-Valdez’s “Take My Hand,” and Claire Keegan’s “Small Things Like These” retrospectively confront the entanglements of medicine, state power, and institutional abuse in contexts ranging from postwar Germany to 1970s Alabama and Catholic Ireland. Other texts, like Leilani Muir’s autobiographical account “A Whisper Past” and Layli Long Soldier’s poetry address intergenerational and Indigenous experiences of colonial eugenics. Speculative fiction, including Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go,” imagine futures shaped by genetic selection and reproductive coercion.

This seminar invites papers that explore the intersections of literature and eugenics across genres, geographies, and historical moments. We particularly welcome critical and creative engagements with the ethical, aesthetic, and political dimensions of this entanglement. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• How do literary texts reckon with past eugenic violence?
• In what ways does literature resist or reproduce the classification of bodies as unfit, defective, or less-than-human?
• How do narratives interrogate racialised, gendered, or ableist norms rooted in eugenic thought?
• What role do narrative forms, metaphors, or temporalities play in tracing the persistence (or return) of eugenic logic?
• How do speculative or autobiographical genres respond to eugenic histories and futures?

Please note that abstracts should be submitted via the ACLA submission portal (https://www.acla.org/annual-meeting/seminars-2026/submit-paper-proposal) by 2 October 2025! 

ACLA 2026 will take place in person at the Palais des Congrès de Montréal, Canada, from 26 February to 1 March 2026. More information: https://www.acla.org/annual-meeting.