If literature has long played a central role in defining what it means to be human, posthumanist thought urges us to reconsider that definition in the face of unprecedented technological, ecological, and cultural transformations. Rather than announcing the ‘end’ of the human, posthumanism interrogates the category itself, foregrounding humanity’s entanglements with other species, material environments, and technological systems. In doing so, it challenges human exceptionalism and exposes the historical contingency and political implications of the ‘human’ as a normative construct.

From a comparative perspective, literature emerges not simply as a site for representation but as a critical medium through which changing imaginaries of the human are negotiated, contested, and transmitted across linguistic and cultural contexts. As Mads Rosendahl Thomsen has argued, literary texts are uniquely equipped to explore what he terms the ‘new human,’ tracing ‘subtle links between “old human” identity and visions of change, and to see how a number of related questions concerning the relationships between individual and collective, normality and improvement, and memory and future, find different expressions.’

These literary and comparative concerns are inseparable from processes of meaning -making, mediation, and transfer. Translation continues to shape the circulation of posthumanist ideas across languages, cultures, and media, even as contemporary developments in automation and machine intelligence increasingly intervene in translational practices themselves. Together, such shifts reconfigure the role of the translator and raise urgent questions concerning agency, authorship, labour, and ethics.

The conference will feature a keynote by Professor Mads Rosendahl Thomsen (Director of TEXT: Centre for Contemporary Cultures of Text, Aarhus University), titled ‘One More Blow to Human Exceptionalism: Language Models and the Posthumanism that We Had Not Seen Coming So Fast.’

We invite contributions for posters and 15-minute papers that build on the concept of the ‘new human’ to reflect on themes including, though not limited to, the following:

• Literary genealogies of the posthuman;
• Human enhancement, cloning, AI, and posthuman ethics;
• Multispecies, vegetal, and environmental imaginaries;
• Translation, automation, and AI-assisted writing;
• Hybridity, monstrosity, and non-normative bodies;
• Feminist, critical race, and intersectional posthumanisms;
• Posthuman themes across genres, periods, and languages;
• Digital culture, new media, and virtual environment

Please send proposals of around 300 words to <smlc-pgr-conf@glasgow.ac.uk>, including your name, affiliation, and a brief biography by 15 March 2026. Participants will be notified by 3 April 2026. Attendance is free and the conference will be hybrid. The conference will take place on 22 May 2026 at the University of Glasogw.

This conference is orgainised by Research Centre for Comparative Literature and Translation, University of Glasgow.

For enquiries, please contact:

Yidan Hu, y.hu.4@research.gla.ac.uk

Iris Lipari, i.lipari.1@research.gla.ac.uk