Deadline: December 1, 2026
Contact: Tom Nurmi, Associate Professor of English Literature and Culture, Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Email: tom.nurmi@ntnu.no

Despite urgent warnings about the ongoing worldwide degradation of soils – due to intensive farming practices, deforestation, pollution, and climate change – soil remains largely unthought outside industrial agriculture and certain subfields of the environmental sciences. While oceans, algae, microbes, and air have been reanimated by recent scholarship in the environmental humanities, soils have been only tangentially the focus. Still, work in environmental history has taken up critical soil studies in the past decade, building on early theorization by social scientists like Mary Douglas and Robert Bullard to examine human-soil relations and to explore the “relational materiality of soils” (Lyons et al. 2020). The emergent field of “Soil Humanities” has the potential to bridge disciplinary knowledge systems and research methodologies so as to more clearly articulate the affiliations between earth, organism, and social forms of expression like literature in our precarious age of environmental destruction and miscommunication.

This seminar at the 2027 ASLE conference brings together literary scholars in the environmental humanities to consider soil a contested site of reading that produces competing archives and registers certain knowledge systems while effacing others. Rather than cataloging cultural representations of soil, the seminar attends to soil as a living, historical infrastructure: both a bio-infrastructure entangled with ecologies above and below ground and a form that demands shifts in practices of reading to make it legible. In other words, the seminar asks how the presence of soil in various literary forms – e.g., poetry, short stories, drama, nonfiction, or the novel and its many sub-genres – enable us to reimagine the correspondences between the material and the literary, between dirt as substance and as figure, between territory and terroir. Because soil has become “an amalgamation of both matter and metaphor” (Bain, 2023), this seminar considers soil as solid ground and ungraspable matter: as that which sediments property and nationality and settler memory and that which pulverizes the solid categories we live by and resists capture as form, figure, concept, or power structure. How can soil be, simultaneously, the “bedrock of the settler colonial state” (Caison, 2024) and the material site for alternative non-extractive modes of stewardship?

We invite interested participants to submit abstracts of 250 words and bios of 100 words by December 1st 2026 in which they take up a single literary example of soil, broadly construed, and propose a “soil-reading” that thinks carefully about the relations between form, genre, and materiality as they take shape in the literary text. By soil, we include the flora and fauna of and from soil, agriculture and cultures of farming, dust, detritus, compost, graves, and many other extended conceptualizations of the term. Although our research backgrounds limit the geographic scope of the seminar to North American and European literary traditions, we encourage participants to take creative and experimental approaches to form, textuality, and soil to develop new directions for the future of soil humanities.

Posted on October 30, 2026