Deadline: December 1st, 2026
Contact: Maria Job, University of California, Santa Barbara
Email: mariajob@ucsb.edu

Sixty years after the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which shed light on species decline as a result of pesticides like DDT, noticing silences in nature and employing the rhetoric of silence in environmental literature continue. However, there is a simultaneous effort by writers to rethink and reimagine the audibility of “silent” beings like plants, worms, and glaciers. While sound is not often thought of as a feature of literary media, close-reading for sound shows literature’s capacity to imagine sound, silence, and audibility. Keeping with this theme, this call invites abstracts that broadly think with the question: how have writers sounded life? And what are the ecological implications of sounding life? Papers can turn to sound studies scholars to consider life and sound conceptually and/or focus their attention on sounding in literary theory and criticism.

This conventional panel seeks 4-6 panelists, presenting for 10-15 minutes, and invites abstracts that show how panelists’ scholarly or creative work dialogues with sound studies, the politics of life, science and technology studies, and multispecies studies.

Posted on September 28, 2026