'It is not down on any map; true places never are' - Herman Melville

From Ariadne’s thread, to the Grail Quest, to Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs, to Pokemon Go, the tension between losing and finding is integral to cultural and artistic expression. The scholarly process often requires the following of clues and finding passage through complexity to recover and discover knowledge. What makes something worth searching for? What kind of methodologies allow for or impede the recovery of forgotten texts, artefacts, or histories? We invite postgraduate and early career scholars working across all disciplines and time periods to exchange findings here in St Andrews. SEGC 2026 will take place at the University of St Andrews, 22nd - 23rd May 2026. Please note, attendance at the conference will be in-person only.

We welcome submissions for academic research or creative practice research papers on the theme of Lost and Found across disciplines and periods, as well as joint submissions for three-person panels. From creative practice researchers, we welcome presentations of your creative practice in addition to a critical presentation of your research. Please submit abstracts for 20-minute presentations of 250 to 300 words, along with brief biographical notes (about 50 words) <a href="https://forms.gle/64waHTMSCdw64a9h7">to this form</a> no later than 2nd February 2026. Please see the submission guidelines linked in the form for full details on what to include in your proposal. 

Responses to the theme might encompass, but are not limited to:

● Journeys and navigation (exploration, travel, tourism, migration, diaspora, pilgrimages, quests, True North, wayfinding, landmarks, maritime culture, peripatetic criticism)
● Form and genres (riddles, urban legends, apocrypha, spiritual tracts, elegy, memoir, bildungsroman, self-help, survival narratives, detective fiction, investigative journalism)
● Language and communication (translation, adaptation, misreadings, omission, archaisms, cryptography, tradition, oral histories and transmission)
● Tropes (lost children and orphans, adoption and found families, faith and/or conversion, mistaken identity, red herrings, separation and reunion, hero’s journey, Happily Ever After, the flaneur, tricksters, misfits, fish-out-of-water)
● Self and psychology (belonging, misplacing, finding/losing yourself, moral compass, grief, innocence and experience, carelessness, neurodivergence, unconscious and subconscious, epiphany)
● Space and place (hidden histories, sanctuaries, refuge, city as archive, gentrification, utopia and dystopia, The Otherworld, lost worlds, outer-space, labyrinths and mazes)
● Archive and archaeology (lost or recovered texts, palimpsests and pentimento, fragmentology, antiquarianism, treasure hunting, ephemera, provenance and repatriation, heirlooms, material memory, gift economies)
● Power and control (colonisation, appropriation, theft, forgeries, censorship, gatekeeping, exile and displacement, Subaltern studies, reclamation, (de)extinction and (re)wilding)
● Temporality (rebirth and reincarnation, lost/wasted time, nostalgia, amnesia, anachronism, apocalypse, futurity, glitch/lag)
● The esoteric (secrets, symbology, cults and cult status, secret societies, conspiracy theories, cryptozoology, ghosts, spirits, visions)

We especially encourage queer, BIPOC, disabled, working class, and other marginalised scholars to apply. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by 28th February. For more information, contact us at segc@st-andrews.ac.uk. We hope you'll find youself with us this May.