Time, Memory and Forgetting in the Western

Two-Day Symposium | 10–11 September 2026 | University of Essex, UK

Deadline for submissions: 30th April 2026

To submit: 250 word outlines for all submission types via email to richard.parker@uc.cl

“There will come a time when you believe everything is finished; that will be the beginning.”— Louis L’Amour, Lonely on the Mountain.

The Western functions under great temporal pressure: it is a historical genre untethered from history; a compendium of stories of personal struggle that insists on the mythological interchangeability of their characters; a mythological cycle that purports to stand for the legal basis of a nation. The Western’s myths take place at the end of time, at the start of time, upon a timeless and momentary temporal plane. How can we catalogue the types of time in the Western?  How can we theorise their interrelation? What durational spaces do other voices open up in the monolithic clock-time of the official Western? What time is High Noon?

This two-day symposium aims to bring together scholars working across literature, film and media studies, history, Indigenous studies, gender and sexuality studies and the environmental humanities to explore how time and memory structure the Western as a genre and cultural formation. We are especially interested in work that approaches the Western as a mutable form, continually revising its own histories through formal experimentation and political critique.

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

• Transnational, comparative, and global Westerns and their distinctive approaches to temporality
• Memory, recollection and forgetting in Western narratives
• Flashback, retrospection and unreliable testimony
• Time pressure, deadlines and constrained temporal frameworks
• Historical rupture, revision and counter-history
• Speculative, non-linear or alternative temporalities
• Indigenous and decolonial approaches to time and history
• BIPOC re-tellings and revisions of the Western
• Women’s Westerns and feminist temporal critique
• Representations of gender variance and queer memory
• Nostalgia, anti-nostalgia and settler-colonial memory
• Contested Western histories and archival practices
• Landscape as temporal archive or mnemonic space

We welcome papers on literary and cinematic Westerns, as well as work engaging television, digital media, graphic narratives and cross-cultural or transnational approaches to “the West.”

Fifteen-minute paper proposals, panels, five-minute position papers and creative interventions are all welcome.

Further details regarding submission guidelines, presentation formats, and venue information will be circulated in due course.

This symposium is jointly organised by Dr Richard Parker, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and Dr Jordan Savage, University of Essex, UK.