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SAVE THE DATE: The Biennial Conference of the Society for Novel Studies will take place on May 13-16 2027. Theme: “Novel Geographies” Hosted by the University of British Columbia, Point Grey Campus, on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territories of the Musqueam people Conference website and abstract submission portal will be launched in July 2026; please stay tuned! CFP for the Society for Novel Studies 2027 Biennial Conference The Biennial conference of the Society for Novel Studies will take place at the University of British Columbia, on the traditional, unceded, and ancestral territories of the Musqueam people, from May 13-16 2027. The conference’s theme, NOVEL GEOGRAPHIES, traces the varied traditions of the novel as a form that has migrated and morphed across different geographical, cultural, and linguistic sites. It is an opportunity to engage with novelistic practices embedded across different locations and in different languages—from the Anglo-American Atlantic to the Transpacific, from West to East, from the Global North to the Global South. If scholars have traced the origins of the novel to genres as diverse as European chivalric romances and the Oriental tale, the novel today likewise flourishes in multiple geographical locations across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. How have new novelistic forms—for instance, the Afropolitan novel, Indigenous Futurisms, or the Latin American dictator novel—emerged in and been shaped by their different milieus? At the same time that the novel has taken hold across different geographies, it is also a genre deeply engaged with the production of place, territories, and environments. We are interested in how novels have told stories about geography and space—for instance, of histories of migration, displacement, and refugees; of the decimation of environments from extraction and climate change; of the institution of geopolitical borders and their transgressions; of different novelistic settings from the local to the global, the rural to the urban, the material to the imaginary; of the different media ecologies that have shaped the genre. “Novel Geographies” sees the novel as a genre that exists in and travels across space, as well as a genre that interrogates the relations between place and power.
We encourage whole panel (3-4 scholars) proposals as well as individual 15-minute paper proposals that engage our theme. We also welcome proposals committed to the study of the novel more broadly. Sample topics might include:
Please note that to broaden participation as much as possible we ask people to appear no more than ONCE on the program as a panelist or presenter. Seminar presenters can chair panels, but cannot present on them. For Full Panel proposals, please include a list of participants, contact info, paper titles, and a 300-500 word abstract of the session. Author bios are limited to 50 words. Please make every effort to include a chair for your panel. Panels that feature members from different institutions and ranks (including non-tenure track, postdoc, and/or grad student panelists) are preferred. For Individual Paper proposals, please submit contact info, a 250-300 word abstract of your paper, and a 50-word bio. Identify your paper with one of the topics from the CFP. Deadline for proposals: 15 November 2026 The Society for Novel Studies (SNS) exists to further the study of the novel as a genre and to examine the role of fiction in engaging, formulating, and shaping the world. |
