7 – 11 July
University of Wollongong

The inaugural Australian Literary Studies Convention will be held at the University of Wollongong in July 2015. This is a landmark literary studies event that is being organised under the auspices of the Australasian Association for Literature (AAL), Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) and Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association (AULLA).

The convention will bring together members of all the major Australian literary studies organisations to celebrate the vibrancy and diversity of literary studies in this country. The convention will serve as the 2015 annual conference for AAL, ASAL and AULLA and the theme is Literary Networks. Papers should engage with literature and literary criticism as a network where a network, is understood very broadly as a group or system of interconnected people or things. Given that this conference seeks to bring together scholars who work in and between a variety of national literatures, literary, media and cultural histories, submissions are encouraged that engage with and exemplify the rich variety of critical and creative practices currently being undertaken under the aegis of ‘literary studies’ in a contemporary Australian context.

Papers might consider literature’s engagement with any of the following:

  • Acoustics, aesthetics or the visual
  • Affect, emotion or contagion
  • Animals, the environment or space/place
  • Appetite, consumption or food
  • Communities or creative practice
  • Communication, technology, transport or trade
  • Festivals, public events or publishing
  • Film, media, new media or television
  • Gender, sexuality or corporeality
  • Indigeneity, ethnicity, citizenship or diaspora
  • Institutions – writers, students or scholars
  • Neurology, cognition or the body
  • Reading, reception or research

Keynote Speakers

Due date for proposals: 31 January 2015
Notification of acceptance: 1 March 2015
Email: Leigh Dale – ldale@uow.edu.au

  • Proposal should include title, abstract (150 words), followed by name and email address, included in the email (not as attachments).
  • Abstracts should be accompanied by a 100-word biography, which starts with the presenter’s name.