2027 Society for Textual Scholarship Conference Call for Papers: Cultural Connectivity
The University of Georgia, Athens, GA, May 26–28 2027
This interdisciplinary conference invites researchers to explore the collective lives of texts: the communities, collaborations, institutions, and networks through which textual objects are created, circulated, preserved, transformed, and interpreted. We welcome work on the many forms that textual collectivity has taken across periods and media—from archives, print cultures, editorial and artistic circles, and literary movements to oral and folkloric traditions, activist networks, technological communities, and other collaborative practices of textual production.
The conference asks, broadly, what becomes visible when we understand textuality as a collective practice. How do communities make texts, and how do texts in turn make or sustain communities? Who participates in the production and transmission of a textual record, and whose labor, testimony, or presence remains unacknowledged or difficult to recover? How do collective practices shape what is preserved, circulated, edited, remembered, or lost?
These questions also invite us to consider the larger cultural and historical work performed by textual forms. Institutions represent themselves through documents and archives; communities establish and contest identities through shared practices of writing, reading, and transmission; material forms and technologies condition what can be recorded, circulated, and remembered. At a moment when textual production is increasingly distributed across digital platforms and the boundaries among authors, editors, readers, and technologies are being continually redrawn, textual studies can help us understand not simply the meanings texts carry but the social relations through which those meanings—and the textual record itself—are made.
Keynotes and plenary panels will give particular attention to the textual cultures of the American South, including regional traditions of testimony, folklore and vernacular expression, and the print and editorial collectives through which Southern texts and cultural formations have been produced and transmitted.
We invite presentations that engage with related topics, including (but not limited to):
- Print and editorial collectives
- Testimonies and testimonial textualities
- Regional textualities
- Borderlands and transnational textualities
- Diasporic networks and textualities
- Folkloric texts
- Text and/as performance
- Inscriptions of collective sounds or speeches
- Textual strategies of protest or reform movements
- Community archiving
- Data sovereignty
- Social and sociotechnical dimensions of digital textuality
- Collective responses to artificial intelligence tools in textual practices
- Collective authorship
- Textual traces of multi-species collectives
We welcome proposals from scholars across the humanities and related fields, including literary studies, history, art history, archival studies, media studies, digital humanities, and cultural studies.
Proposed session formats may include workshops/seminars, panels, roundtables, and individual papers.
Please submit a 250-word abstract with a brief bio by March 1, 2027, to societyfortextualscholarship@gmail.com.