INTERNATIONAL SCHOLARLY CONFERENCE "MEDIA ARCHEOLOGY & LITERARY STUDIES"

Interest in literature is evident in both the tradition and the current research practice of media archaeology – from the role of German Romanticism in Friedrich Kittler’s writings to Erkki Huhtamo’s topos studies. Likewise, literary scholars draw on media-theoretical approaches, employ the field’s vocabulary, and investigate the entanglements between literature and other media.

We aim to create an opportunity for presenting research that links these areas, for reflecting on these research practices, and for undertaking theoretical inquiry into their methods and possibilities. We reach out to researchers working in literary studies, media archaeology, media studies, comparative literature, theatre studies, performance studies, cultural studies, history, and related fields. We consider this conference as a chance to explore, map, and propose research directions – an occasion to bring together diverse perspectives, vocabularies, methodologies, and objects of study.

SUGGESTED AREAS OF INQUIRY INCLUDE:

• Media archaeology and literary studies research: aims and areas; theoretical inspirations; tools, methods, perspectives, and research trajectories
• Media archaeology as literary study – literary study as media archaeology: literary sources in media archaeology; media in literature; literature as a medium; the medium as a metaphor; topos studies (E. Huhtamo)
• Literary / media practices and materialities: material dimensions of literature; tools and techniques of inscribing and recording; literary and reading practices; remediation; intermediality; transmediality; circuits of literature and media; the culture of attractions
• Literary and technological imagination: alternative and speculative media histories; dead and imaginary media; literary expressions of technological hopes and anxieties; historical media ecologies
• Senses and prostheses: the senses in literature and media; histories and theories of mediating vision, hearing, taste, smell, and touch; sensory experience in reading and media use; sensuous theory; media archaeology and literary studies in relation to disability studies
• Media old and new: media-archaeological thinking (J. Parikka) in reflections on new media and contemporary literature
• Media and literature in artistic practice and cultural animation: media art; curatorial and educational practices

We also welcome proposals that fall within the conference’s thematic scope but are not explicitly listed among the suggested topics.

The languages of the conference will be Polish and English.

The duration of a presentation should not exceed twenty minutes.

Submissions

Please send abstracts (up to 300 words) along with short bios to: media.lit.conference@gmail.com.

Submission deadline: March 31, 2026

Conference fee: 250 PLN / 65 EUR / 70 USD

Organizing Committee Agnieszka Pałucka, MA – agnieszka.palucka@doctoral.uj.edu.pl

Bartosz Nowak, MA – bj.nowak2@uw.edu.pl

Academic Committee

Professor Magdalena Siwiec

Professor Roma Sendyka

Professor Małgorzata Radkiewicz