This interdisciplinary conference invites scholars to explore the rich and evolving relationship between Textual Studies and Memory Studies, two fields that while historically distinct offer vital and complementary insights into the construction, transmission, and contestation of cultural memory. In an era marked by the disruption and reconfiguration of once-stable social, cultural, and political structures, the questions raised by both disciplines feel increasingly urgent: How is the past preserved, edited, and transmitted through texts (where “text” is broadly conceived)? What role do textual forms, variants, and materialities play in shaping collective memory? How do acts of remembrance and forgetting manifest in the physical and digital traces of culture?

Textual Studies has long been concerned with the integrity, transmission, and material history of texts, offering tools/methodologies to analyze how texts change over time, how editorial decisions shape meaning, and how archives and canons are constructed or challenged. Memory Studies in turn investigates the social, cultural, and political processes through which the past is remembered, suppressed, or reimagined. Together, these fields and their associated methodologies open up powerful ways of thinking about texts as both artifacts of memory and instruments of its ongoing negotiation.

We invite papers that engage with a wide range of topics, including (but not limited to):

• Texts (broadly conceived) as Sites or Agents of Memory and Forgetting
• Editorial Practice and the Politics of Remembrance
• Manuscripts and Memory work
• Scribal Memory / Print Memory / Digital Memory
• Text, Palimpsest, Memory
• Textual Ruins, Fragmentary Memory
• Text as Monument / Monuments as Text
• Archival Memory / Archival Forgetting
• Archives and the Future of Memory
• Memory, Materiality, and Textual Transmission
• Textual scholarship in Transitional Justice and Historical Reckoning
• Memory, Censorship, and the Re-writing of History
• Canon, Memory, Forgetting: What/whose texts are remembered, whose are forgotten? 
• AI and Memory / AI’s Memory
• Editing and Re-memory / Editing and Post-memory
• Artifacts as Memory Sites 
• Postcolonial and Decolonial Approaches to Memory 
• Diaspora and the Textual Transmission of Memory 
• Textual Memory and Decolonization 
• Queer Memory 
• Testimony, Trauma, and Textual Forms
• Aging Bodies / Texts of Memory
• Memory and the Textual Poetics of Care
• Memory in Marginalia, Annotations, and Paratexts

We welcome proposals from scholars across the humanities and related fields, including literary studies, history, art history, archival studies, media studies, digital humanities, and cultural studies.

Proposed session formats may include workshops/seminars, panels, roundtables, and individual papers. Please submit your proposal by 1 February 2026 to societyfortextualscholarship@gmail.com.

*All talks will be in person, but keynotes will be streamed for remote access.*

https://textualsociety.org/2026-conference-call-for-proposals/