The tenth annual Brandeis Novel Symposium (BNS), which will take place on Friday, October 23, 2026, invites proposals for papers on Han Kang’s 2014 novel Human Acts (original title: 소년이 온다, or A Boy Comes; English translation by Deborah Smith). The Brandeis Novel Symposium is a one-day conference that chooses a single novel as a point of focus for salient theoretical, historical, political, and narratological questions about the novel as a genre. (See the 2025 BNS websiteand this archive for more information about the BNS.)

In that spirit, we welcome proposals approaching Human Acts from any angle, in the original or in translation. Possible topics include: the relationships among history, trauma, memory, and commemoration; political unrest and uprising; Cold War postcolonialism; representation of bodies and subjectivities; and the novel’s reception in contexts including the South Korean novel and the contemporary global novel. Also invited are papers examining the role, affordances, and limits of the novel form in relation to political representation; genre, style, and point of view; and the politics and poetics of translation.

Please submit abstracts of no more than 250 words to Iana Seerung (iseerung@brandeis.edu) by June 15, 2026.