The sixth conference of the International Association of Literary Semantics (IALS) will take place at Kent, from Thursday 3 to Saturday 5 July 2014.
2014 will mark the 22nd anniversary of the first IALS conference in 1992, which was also held at Eliot College at the University of Kent, as well as the celebrations for Kent’s 50th anniversary. In keeping with the spirit of marking milestones, the theme of the conference will be general, and diachronic in orientation. The organisers be interested in any abstracts that make use of language-based explorations of how literary works get and/or make their meanings, and, particularly, in discussions of potential future directions for work at the language/literature border (for example, within the domain of multimodality).
Confirmed keynote speakers include Professor Dr Beatrix Busse (University of Heidelberg), Dr Billy Clark (University of Middlesex), and Professor Astrid Ensslin (Bangor University).
Abstracts for 20-minute papers (plus 10 minutes discussion) may be submitted by email to IALS2014@kent.ac.uk, preferably as an attachment in Word or similar. Abstracts should be no longer than 300 words (excluding title and references), and should be sent by 31 January 2014. Proposed abstracts should include your full name (including any academic title), postal and email addresses, and university affiliation if applicable. Where relevant, please also state whether you are a registered student (BA, MA, or PhD) and identify the university and department in which your are studying.
Please contact the organising committee in relation to any questions that might arise, or with proposals for panels.
For further details and future updates, please see the conference website:
http://blogs.kent.ac.uk/conference-literary-semantics/