Seminar Title:
Based on a True Story: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Retelling What Really Happened

Organizers:
Dr. Priscilla Charrat Nelson, Providence College
Dr. Claire Rodan, University of Maryland

Paper submissions are currently open.

What does it mean for a novel, film, play, television series, podcast, or other work to be “based on a true story”? The phrase is at once familiar and unstable: it promises access to reality while announcing transformation; it invokes evidence while authorizing invention; and it can signal historical responsibility while also functioning as commercial appeal.

If, as Linda Hutcheon argues, adaptation is “repetition without replication,” what happens when the source being repeated is not a prior text but a historical event, criminal case, family history, or lived experience?

This seminar examines how “true stories” become narrative objects across media, genres, languages, historical periods, and cultures. Moving beyond fidelity-based models of adaptation, we approach the “true story” not as a stable origin but as a contested field of documents, memories, archives, photographs, rumors, testimony, journalistic accounts, and collective investments.

We are particularly interested in the ethical and aesthetic problems involved in transforming lived experience and historical reality into narrative. What responsibilities do writers, filmmakers, and other creators assume toward victims, witnesses, survivors, historical subjects, and communities? How do adaptations negotiate the tension between factual accuracy and narrative force? What happens when a work invents dialogue, motive, interiority, or closure where the historical record remains ambiguous or silent? When might retelling become an act of recovery or witnessing, and when might it become appropriation, sensationalism, or exploitation?

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• adaptations of historical events into novels, films, plays, television series, comics, podcasts, or digital media
• true crime and the representation of criminal cases
• adaptation, collective memory, postmemory, trauma, and witnessing
• autobiography, memoir, life writing, and the boundaries between lived experience and fiction
• autofiction, documentary fiction, docudrama, biopics, and historical novels
• archives, photographs, legal documents, interviews, recordings, testimony, and footage as narrative sources
• invention, speculation, and narrative gaps in representations of real events
• ethics of representing victims, witnesses, survivors, and marginalized communities
• commodification of suffering, violence, trauma, and victimhood
• political scandals, wars, trials, disasters, and acts of violence as adapted narratives
• comparative approaches to the same true story across different media, languages, cultures, or national contexts
• the relationship among adaptation, narrative authority, historical truth, and public memory

We welcome papers from comparative literature, film and media studies, adaptation studies, memory studies, life-writing and autobiography studies, trauma studies, cultural studies, history, and related fields. Comparative, interdisciplinary, transnational, and multilingual approaches are especially encouraged.

Ultimately, the seminar asks: What is at stake when real lives and historical events are transformed into narrative form? How do such adaptations shape public memory, redistribute sympathy, produce knowledge, claim authority, or transform suffering and lived experience into aesthetic and commercial forms?

Submission Information

Proposals should be submitted through the ACLA 2027 seminar submission system.

Seminar page and submission information:
https://www.acla.org/seminar/6ed0d071-0a52-46d8-9a2a-dcf74fdcf33e

For questions about the seminar, please contact:

Dr. Priscilla Charrat Nelson
Providence College
pcharrat@providence.edu

Dr. Claire Rodan
University of Maryland
cchen200@umd.edu

We welcome submissions from scholars working across periods, regions, languages, cultures, and media.