USS Conference. Narrating Knowledge: Science in Anglophone Literatures
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The United Students Society (The Department of North American Literature and Culture, University of Łódź) invites you to participate in its 13th student conference:
Narrating Knowledge: Science in Anglophone Literatures
Saturday, 24 October 2026
The Faculty of Philology, University of Łódź, ul. Pomorska 171/173
Rooms to be announced (the conference is on-site only)
Keynote speaker:
Anna Shmatenko, MA
(Sorbonne Université / Research Unit VALE)
"Surgeons must be very careful
When they take the knife!
Underneath their fine incisions
Stirs the Culprit – Life!"
(Emily Dickinson)
From the first proto-scientific literary reflections, through the ‘mad scientist’ trope – the Frankensteins and the Rappaccinis – up to our era of hyperobjects and slow violence, how has literature conceptualized and represented the scientific? The locus of outsized ambition, a toy in idle hands – a ‘cat’s cradle,’ as Kurt Vonnegut would have it – has science progressed beyond reckoning or control? Or has it been harnessed by Big Tech? Might it nevertheless offer hope to a world holding its breath before the next pandemic?
How does literature, old and new, approach science? In the thirteenth conference organized by the United Students Society – an extracurricular reading group under the auspices of the Department of North American Literature and Culture at the University of Łódź – we seek to investigate the range of representations of the scientific in its broadest sense: natural philosophy, medicine, technology, mathematics, physics, biology, astronomy, chemistry and alchemy, etc.
We invite doctoral candidates, as well as undergraduate and graduate students to submit abstracts related to anglophone literatures that include, but are not limited to, literary representations of:
● the fears and hopes attached to the scientific
● science and its financial entanglements
● the ethics of scientific experimentation
● scientific breakthroughs and catastrophes
● gendered science
● science and the military
● science and nature / environmental science
● science in the transhumanist and posthumanist context
● pseudoscience as a literary genre
● the scientific gaze
● the scientific sublime
● science as a source of metaphors
● visions of future science and technology
● literary responses to major scientific revolutions
● medical humanities
● surveillance technologies
● variations of the ‘mad scientist’ trope
Please send an abstract of 150-200 words and a short bio (30-50 words) to the following address: [email protected]. The deadline for the submissions is September 15, 2026. Notification of acceptance: by the end of September. There is no conference fee.
dr Krzysztof Majer (head of the conference committee)
dr hab. Justyna Fruzińska, prof. UŁ
Gabriela Gryz (conference secretary)
Helena Sitarek
Zofia Klimecka
----
Conference logo by Justyna Fruzińska
Narrating Knowledge: Science in Anglophone Literatures
Saturday, 24 October 2026
The Faculty of Philology, University of Łódź, ul. Pomorska 171/173
Rooms to be announced (the conference is on-site only)
Keynote speaker:
Anna Shmatenko, MA
(Sorbonne Université / Research Unit VALE)
"Surgeons must be very careful
When they take the knife!
Underneath their fine incisions
Stirs the Culprit – Life!"
(Emily Dickinson)
From the first proto-scientific literary reflections, through the ‘mad scientist’ trope – the Frankensteins and the Rappaccinis – up to our era of hyperobjects and slow violence, how has literature conceptualized and represented the scientific? The locus of outsized ambition, a toy in idle hands – a ‘cat’s cradle,’ as Kurt Vonnegut would have it – has science progressed beyond reckoning or control? Or has it been harnessed by Big Tech? Might it nevertheless offer hope to a world holding its breath before the next pandemic?
How does literature, old and new, approach science? In the thirteenth conference organized by the United Students Society – an extracurricular reading group under the auspices of the Department of North American Literature and Culture at the University of Łódź – we seek to investigate the range of representations of the scientific in its broadest sense: natural philosophy, medicine, technology, mathematics, physics, biology, astronomy, chemistry and alchemy, etc.
We invite doctoral candidates, as well as undergraduate and graduate students to submit abstracts related to anglophone literatures that include, but are not limited to, literary representations of:
● the fears and hopes attached to the scientific
● science and its financial entanglements
● the ethics of scientific experimentation
● scientific breakthroughs and catastrophes
● gendered science
● science and the military
● science and nature / environmental science
● science in the transhumanist and posthumanist context
● pseudoscience as a literary genre
● the scientific gaze
● the scientific sublime
● science as a source of metaphors
● visions of future science and technology
● literary responses to major scientific revolutions
● medical humanities
● surveillance technologies
● variations of the ‘mad scientist’ trope
Please send an abstract of 150-200 words and a short bio (30-50 words) to the following address: [email protected]. The deadline for the submissions is September 15, 2026. Notification of acceptance: by the end of September. There is no conference fee.
dr Krzysztof Majer (head of the conference committee)
dr hab. Justyna Fruzińska, prof. UŁ
Gabriela Gryz (conference secretary)
Helena Sitarek
Zofia Klimecka
----
Conference logo by Justyna Fruzińska
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Where is it happening?
ulica Pomorska 171/173, 91-404 Łódź, Polska, ulica Pomorska 171/173, 91-404 Łódź, Polska, Lodz, Poland
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
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