From June 23rd until June 26th 2027, the International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature (IGEL) will hold its 22nd international conference in Basel, Switzerland. The conference will be co-organized with the end-of-project conference for the SHARD project (Shared Reading in the Age of Digitalization). The broad overarching theme of the conference will be “Shifting Attention”. The deadline for submissions of panel/paper/poster presentations is December 18th 2026.

A detailed program will be added soon. 

The broad overarching theme of the conference will be “Shifting Attention”. This theme can be, purposefully, understood in different ways. First, it can be understood as shifts in attention during reading, inviting proposals about topics that have a longstanding history within the IGEL community, such as narrative absorption, foregrounding or narrative persuasion. Second, and perhaps more importantly, it can be understood as shifts in what we as researchers pay attention to within our research. With this we hope to invite proposals that critically address the key pillars of our community’s focus: Literature and Science. What do we mean with “literary reading”, what falls under the concept of “literature”? Which approaches do we use to capture effects of reading? In all of this, we hope to see shifts towards reader-centered research, the use of qualitative and ethnographic methods, and broadening, more inclusive conceptualizations of literature and literary reading.

Topics that papers might explore include, but are not limited to, the following:

• What is literature or literary reading according to readers?
• How are reading activities influenced by digitalization and AI?
• How can reading help people in unstable times? How is reading itself transformed by unstable times?
• How could literature be made more accessible, in classrooms or outside of them?
• What kind of methodological approaches could we borrow from related fields to expand our knowledge of literary reading and its effects?

Throughout the conference there will also be a special focus on Shared Reading research, because of the SHARD project’s focus on this form of reading together. This will be in the shape of a series of panels dedicated to different aspects of this topic. If you are interested in putting together such a panel, please let us know. We are open towards panel proposals that focus on face-to-face Shared Reading and those focused on Digital Social Reading. We are also open to receiving panel proposals in different formats: round table discussions, workshops, or a series of thematically linked lectures, for example. 
We welcome and prioritize paper proposals (or panel proposals) that explore all of the issues mentioned above, as well as those which address the general concerns of IGEL, namely empirical studies of literature and other narrative media and their reception. We also welcome theoretical papers, but they would have to be related to the field of empirical literary studies. 
Works in progress are also very welcome, but for those, we recommend sending in a poster presentation proposal. 
 

The full call for papers can be found here, soon.