Deadline: September 22, 2026
Contact: Amanda Smith, UC Santa Cruz
Email: ams@ucsc.edu

My colleague Lisa Blackmore and I are organizing an in-person seminar for the 2027 American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting titled “Watering the Fields: Porous Hydrocritical Practice in Precarious Times.”

The seminar asks how humanistic and artistic water research can move beyond conventional academic formats and communities. We welcome work on collaborations among humanities scholars, artists, activists, scientists, legal practitioners, and communities; river co-learning arenas and water schools; countermapping, data, and digital humanities projects; and creative practices of hydrocommoning. We are particularly interested in candid reflection on the successes, failures, tensions, timescales, and institutional conditions of interdisciplinary and publicly engaged work.

The seminar will take place at the University of Houston, May 20–23, 2027. Paper proposals must be submitted through the ACLA portal by September 22, 2026:

https://www.acla.org/seminar/32e46b85-ca34-4059-908d-a2973b31e76e

Please consider submitting a proposal and/or forwarding this call to others who may be interested.

Posted on August 8, 2026