Three peer seminars are lined up for the 2026 meeting of the International T. S. Eliot Society in St. Louis, from 25-27 September.

They are:

Four Quartets, led by Christina Lambert

In Mortality and Form in Late Modernist Literature (2014), John Whittier-Ferguson considers Eliot’s Christian poetry and presents “an edgy, unsettling, and unsettled Eliot” whose work “remains avant-garde and, if we can recover its essential strangenesses, experimental enough to be praised as perpetually modern.” This seminar proposes to read Four Quartets in light of this claim. How do we take into account Eliot’s religious beliefs, while recognizing, both in form and content, the fundamental sense of wrestling the poem presents? Papers for this seminar may tackle a small bit of ground in the Quartets from any angle. Together we will consider the formal and thematic tensions that rest at the heart of Eliot’s last major poem. “For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”

Vulnerable Eliot, led by Annarose Steinke

From Prufrock pondering his trouser length to Sweeney in the bath with "hams" exposed, moments of physical and emotional vulnerability abound in Eliot's poems. The release of Eliot's letters to Hale now reveals a side of "the English Lion" not always apparent in his public-facing prose and broadcasts. This seminar invites papers exploring vulnerability in Eliot's life and work. Participants may consider Eliot himself showing vulnerability, vulnerable characters and situations, vulnerability as a critical lens, or any other way they'd like to connect Eliot and vulnerability. As public discourse positions vulnerability as both a threat to global security and a vital means of human connection, what might a "vulnerable Eliot" bring to our conversations?

and Teaching Eliot, led by Charles Andrews

Among the many perils of our new technological age is the move toward speedy, computer-generated prose and bland robotic summarization. Eliot’s densely allusive poetry, drama, and prose stands in opposition to those machine-created forms of impersonality, requiring slow, careful, and communal forms of reading. This seminar intends to create space for asking: how do we teach Eliot in the 21st century? In what ways do challenging literary works benefit our students and allow us to reconceive our pedagogies? Topics related to AI—as a tool or as an obstacle—are welcome. But, any other topic related to Eliot and pedagogy is also encouraged, as well as any other topic pertinent to teaching literature in our age of literary studies extinction. Practical, theoretical, and hypothetical ideas for workshopping are warmly invited for this seminar.

Participants usually submit a 4-5 page position paper ahead of the conference, and these papers are circulated amongst the group, which then meets for a discussion-based seminar on the first day of the conference.

You may register for any seminar by simply sending an email indicating your preference to tseliotsociety@gmail.com. Please use the subject line “Peer Seminar.”