Call for Papers

The consolidation of food studies as a serious academic discipline has coincided with the extraordinary proliferation of food-related cultural forms—ranging from memoirs, cookbooks, and culinary novels to food documentaries, blogs, and digital platforms. These developments remind us that food is not merely a biological necessity, but a symbolic system that mediates between the material and the cultural, the everyday and the aesthetic, the policy and the political. Food operates simultaneously as a sensory artefact, an archive of memory, and a site of political contestation. As anthropologist Brillat-Savarin famously suggested in 1825, “Tell me what you eat, I will tell you what you are.”

Within South Asia, food has long been situated at the intersection of ritual practices, caste and religious identities, public policies, class structures, and gendered divisions of labour. To eat—or not to eat—becomes a way of marking belonging and exclusion, community and difference. Foodways are not simply culinary practices; they are deeply implicated in the distribution of power and resources, in the formation of cultural identities, and in the everyday negotiation of inequalities. The long and painful histories of famines across the region have also revealed how the absence of food and the politics of hunger become constitutive of cultural memory and collective imagination.

At the same time, food is a vital resource for creative and aesthetic expression. The growing archive of food-related narratives—whether in literary texts, films, oral histories, or performance—foregrounds the ways in which taste, smell, and other sensory registers generate cognitive and affective mappings of collective histories. Memories of food, both individual and communal, enable new forms of storytelling that interweave the intimate with the historical. Culinary narratives often become modes of resistance, of asserting marginalized voices, or of negotiating global processes such as colonialism, migration, and neoliberal market cultures.

Food studies thus opens up new possibilities for interdisciplinary scholarship across the humanities and social sciences. It compels us to rethink established methods of research and writing by taking seriously the everyday acts of cooking, eating, and narrating. The culinary, as both practice and representation, poses important theoretical and methodological questions: How can the accepted methodologies in humanities and the social sciences make way for the sensory, the ephemeral and the exhaustible? How do recipes function as literary or political texts? What are the aesthetic strategies of culinary memoirs, food poems, or novels with embedded recipes? How does food media—whether digital, televisual, or cinematic—reshape our cultural imaginaries? And how might the histories of migration -- both voluntary and involuntary --  and diaspora be retold through foodways and their representations?

This conference seeks to bring together scholars working on these questions to examine food not only as a cultural object but also as a category of analysis—one that illuminates the intersections of power, identity, creativity, and affect. To that end, we invite literary scholars, scholars of film, art and sound, sociologists, anthropologists, historians, as well as food entrepreneurs, creative artists, writers and activists to explore, question, analyze  and re-imagine the vicissitudes of the culinary in both its material and representational forms. 

While the primary focus of the conference is South Asia and its diasporas, we also invite contributions that take up comparative or global perspectives, situating the South Asian experience within wider debates in food studies.

We welcome submissions on themes including, but not limited to the following:

• Poetics of the culinary in South Asian literatures
• Food, language, and discourse
• Politics and poetics of food memories
• Politics of food production
• Politics and poetics of taste and/or smell
• Food, colonialism, and Orientalism
• New media and food
• Emerging literary forms: culinary novels, food memoirs, recipe-text hybrids
• World literature and food
• Food, feasts, and famines in progressive literatures
• Caste, class, and South Asian foodways
• Dalit literature and food
• Famine histories and materialities
• Cultural representations of famine
• Food, religious/ethnic identity, and state formation
• Domestic labour, food, and gender
• The culinary in women’s writings
• Food and films
• Neoliberalism and new food cultures
• New spaces of food consumption
• Food as resistance, resistance as food
• Cookbooks and recipes: politics and poetics
• Food and nationalism
• Food, migration, and the South Asian diaspora (with special interest in indentured labour diaspora foodways)
• Abstracts of up to 300 words are invited.
• Submissions must be original and unpublished.
• Abstracts must not reveal the identity and the professional designation of the author (s).
• Abstracts should be sent in Word and PDF formats, using Times New Roman, 12 pt, single-spaced.
• Please include in the body of the email:
  • Full name
  • Institutional affiliation and designation
  • Contact email address

 Submission Guidelines

Submission Email ID: conference.aulanglit@gmail.com 

Important Dates

• Deadline for Abstract Submission: October 31, 2025
• Notification of Acceptance: November 30, 2025
• Full Paper Submission: January 5, 2026
• Conferece Dates: January 15-16, 2026

Publication

Selected papers will be considered for publication in an edited volume by a renowned international publisher or in a peer-reviewed journal (details to be announced).

Registration (National/International):

Full-Time Academics and Professionals: INR 1500/30 Euros/30 USD

Independent Researchers, PhD Students: INR 750/25 Euros/25 USD

Students (UG & PG): INR 250/20 Euros/20 Euros/20 USD