CFP: Beyond the Self: Life Writing and the Nonhuman (19th-20th centuries)

Dear colleagues,

Please find below the call for papers for the symposium “Beyond the Self: Life Writing and the Nonhuman (19th-20th centuries).” A longer version of the call is available online here.

The symposium will take place at Université Paris Cité on 11-12 March 2027.

Please feel free to circulate this call widely among colleagues and networks. 

The deadline for paper proposals is 15 July 2026.

All the best,

Clara-Louise Mourier, Emma Thiébaut, Maëlle Nagot & the Scientific Committee

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Beyond the Self: Life Writing and the Nonhuman (19^th-20^th centuries)

11-12 March 2027, Université Paris Cité

Call for papers (abridged version)

‘I now know that I’m made of nonhumans’, Timothy Morton and Dominic Boyer write in Hyposubjects: On Becoming Human (2021: 18). Since the late twentieth century, criticism has shown the self to be entangled in ever-proliferating forms of life and matter (Haraway 2008). While the idea of the instability of the ‘I’ is anything but new, recent scholarship has built on the contributions of life sciences and physics to supply fresh insight into the porosity of the human subject.

Such a reconceptualization inevitably impacts our understanding of human agency. As Ina Batzke, Lea Espinoza and Linda Hess argue in the introduction to Life Writing in the Posthuman Anthropocene, ‘integrating the human with other kinds of animate and inanimate matter implies that agency ceases to be regarded as an exclusive property of humans’ (Batzke et al. 2021: 3–4).

These observations, in turn, problematize the status of the writing subject, particularly in autobiography – a genre traditionally founded on the belief in an autonomous, self-contained individual. The posthumanist and materialist turns have offered thorough reappraisals of autobiographical literature, going so far as to dissect each of its components: Stephen Abblitt asks whether autobiography is still relevant ‘when the autos is decentered, the bios is opened to a more multispecies interpretation of life, and even graphe can no longer be assumed’ (Abblitt 2019: 507).

That is why this conference chooses the broader term of ‘life writing’, following a practice initiated by Marlene Kadar’s seminal collection Essays on Life Writing. In her introduction, Kadar argues that the category of ‘life writing’ could serve as a useful taxonomy for autobiographical works by marginalized social groups defined by race or gender (Kadar 1992: 7). We are interested in how far this category can be expanded, as human and nonhuman, biological and nonbiological forms – from microorganisms and fungi to flowers, mammals, insects, minerals, and objects – all intersect with or engage in the writing of life and lives.

This conference thus welcomes proposals on any and all creatures of flesh, mesh, stone, or wood. We encourage scholars at all career stages to think creatively about who or what is capable of life writing in the Anglophone world. Since much of the recent scholarship on the question of nonhuman or posthuman lives focuses on contemporary  texts, the goal of this symposium is to expand our horizons by looking back towards both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. We invite contributions that trace subjectivity, agency, and self-narrative back to the early days of the Industrial Revolution, or acknowledge the circulation and legacy of turn of nineteenth-century ideas in more recent literary texts.

Possible topics may include, but are not limited to: 

●      Human / humanist selves, their limits and redefinitions

●      Nature diaries

●      Catalogues and notebooks of botanical or ethological research

●      Letters to, from, or between (non)human agents

●      Representations of illness, disease, bacteria, microorganisms that make, inflect, or disrupt human / nonhuman trajectories

●      Material traces of animal, plant, and mineral life understood as auto/biographical inscription

●      Sedimentation and fossilization as life writing

●      Petroculture and the impact of fossil fuels on self-inscription

●      ‘it’-narratives or fictional (auto)biographies of objects

● The vibrant materiality (Bennett 2010) of book, paper, and manuscript in life writing

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words, along with a short biography, tolifewriting.nonhuman@gmail.com by 15^th July 2026.

Scientific committee

Edouard Marsoin, Associate Professor of American Literature, Université Paris Cité

Clara-Louise Mourier, PhD candidate, Université de Lille / Université Paris Cité

Maëlle Nagot, PhD candidate, Université Paris Cité / University of Surrey

Laure de Nervaux-Gavoty, Associate Professor of English Studies, Université Paris-Est Créteil

Kimberley Page-Jones, Associate Professor of British Studies, Université de Bretagne Occidentale

Lucy Ella Rose, Lecturer in Victorian Literature, University of Surrey

Cécile Roudeau, Professor of American Literature, Université Paris Cité

Emma Thiébaut, PhD candidate, Université Paris Cité 

Bibliography

Abblitt, Stephen (2019), ‘Composite Lives: Making-With Our Multispecies Kin (Imagine!)’, A/b: Auto/Biography Studies, 34:3.

Alaimo, Stacy (2010), Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Allen, Thomas M. (2026), Vital Moments: Life, Matter, and Time in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Batzke, Ina, Espinoza Garrido, Lea and Hess, Linda M. (eds) (2021), Life Writing in the Posthuman Anthropocene, Cham: Springer.

Bennett, Jane (2010), Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham: Duke University Press.

Bennett, Jane (2020), Influx and Efflux: Writing up with Walt Whitman, Durham: Duke University Press.

Bonnell, Jennifer and Kheraj, Sean (eds) (2022), Traces of the Animal Past: Methodological Challenges in Animal History, Calgary: University of Calgary Press.

Brant, Clare (2021), ‘The Sentience of Sea Squirts’, in I. Batzke, L. Espinoza Garrido, and L. M. Hess (eds), Life Writing in the Posthuman Anthropocene, Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp. 123–56.

Brant, Clare (2025), Underwater Postcards, Nottingham: Shoestring Press.

Butler, Judith (2020), Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, London: Verso.

Butler, Judith (2021), Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, 1st edn, London: Routledge.

Carpenter, Edward (1916), My Days and Dreams, Being Autobiographical Notes, London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd.

Carson, Rachel ([1962] 2002), Silent Spring, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Fanon, Frantz (2021), Black Skin, White Masks (trans. R. Philcox), London: Penguin Books.

Haraway, Donna (2008), When Species Meet, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman (2020), Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World, New York: New York University Press.

Kadar, Marlene (ed.) (1992), Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Mbembe, Achille (2003), ‘Necropolitics’, Public Culture, 15:1.

Menely, Tobias and Taylor, Jesse O. (eds) (2017), Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times, University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press.

Morton, Timothy and Boyer, Dominic (2021), Hyposubjects: On Becoming Human, London: Open Humanities Press.

Tompkins, Kyla Wazana (2024), Deviant Matter: Ferment, Intoxicants, Jelly, Rot, New York: New York University Press.

Weheliye, Alexander G. (2014), Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human, Durham: Duke University press.

WomanShare (1976), Country Lesbians: The Story of the Womanshare Collective, Grants Pass, OR: WomanShare Books.