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.

Inquiries concerning the conference can be sent to the organizing committee at: igel2027conference@gmail.com

Registration costs in Euro | Swiss Francs

Donations

Donations are welcome from IGEL members who can afford to pay a bit more to support these travel bursaries, so that IGEL can continue to support early career researchers with no travel funds in future conferences.

IGEL is an inclusive society, which means there are cost-reductions available for early career researchers and researchers from economically-disadvantaged countries. There is also a limited amount of bursaries available, which include registration costs and a maximum 400 CHF for early career researchers with no travel funds. If you want to request cost reduction please indicate that in the submission form.

If you want to request cost reduction or bursaries and are unsure whether you are eligible, please contact the organizers (igel2027conference@cluttergmail.com) before April 2nd. Decisions about the bursaries will be communicated on April 23rd.

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.

A paper proposal will be for a paper of 20 minutes with 10 minute discussion, whereas a panel proposal would be for 3 to 4 papers within one session of 1,5 hours. Panels can span multiple sessions, in case larger groups of researchers would like to work together to present research that fits the same theme. 

The conference will be hybrid, so you can present your work, without being physically present in Basel if for some reason you are unable to travel. All sessions will be accessible remotely and we will ask presenters to record presentations so
we can archive them on our members-only platform Concordance, so they can be accessed after the conference.
 

The full call for papers can be found here.

• Proposal needs to be relevant to our society’s mandate and members, therefore it can be empirical or theoretical (but pertaining to the field of empirical literary studies) in nature
  • Our society‘s mandate specifies that we support empirical research of any kind, may it be qualitative or quantitative in nature (including ethnographic methods as well as computational ones), into literature and the reception of literature and other narrative media (meaning we also welcome research on narrative film, games, interactive fiction)
  • With this year’s conference theme focused on Shifting Attention, we also want to emphasize that we take a broad view of the term literature, and welcome research on any type of narrative fiction
• Proposal needs to be of high quality (therefore paper proposals need to be anonymized, so authors cannot be accepted or rejected on name alone)
  • The review process is blind
• We are an inclusive society, which means early career researchers or researchers from economically-disadvantaged countries will not be discriminated against
  • We want to emphasize here that IGEL is an inclusive and kind community, so if you just conducted your first empirical study, are in the middle of conducting your first empirical study or are preparing an empirical study for the first time, we especially encourage you to submit a proposal. For works in preparation or in progress we recommend submitting a poster proposal, as this is the format that allows for the most time for feedback.
  • We will not accept more than one proposal from the same author (the only exception being authors who can clearly show that they are working in two different research areas) → this policy is to prevent senior researchers from dominating the conference

Send submissions via the submission form. The submission form should be filled out by the corresponding author, panels should decide on one person responsible for the submission. 

Papers and posters: Abstract of no more than 300 words (excluding title and references)

Panels: Description of the panel (max. 300 words) and abstracts for the individual presentations (3-4 contributions, max. 200 words each)

Other panel format: Short description (max. 200 words) 

Abstracts will be pasted into the submission form and should not contain any information about the author(s). There should be no more than 3-5 references included. Please note that submissions that exceed the word-limit will not be considered. 

If you have any further questions about the submission form or format, please do not hesitate to reach out: igel2027conference@cluttergmail.com