This is the third of four planned annual conferences, each focusing on one of the four elements: Air, Water, Earth, and Fire. The theme for the 2026 conference is Earth.
Throughout the history of humanity, earth, with all its lifeforms, has had a crucial significance and impact on human existence, from providing essential resources, to symbolizing Mother Earth and home, or bringing forth earthquakes, draughts and landslides, and being a main motivation for violent conflicts and occupations. Whether hunter-gatherers’ communities, the pioneers of the agricultural revolution, or inhabitants of urban and industrial centers, human cultures have always relied on stable relationships to earth and its resources and have strived to tame changes in these through different means, including trade, religion, or technology. With its rural and wild, cultivated and gardened forms, earth has enticed and inspired, as well as threatened and harmed, which has also led humanity to search for new lands, or to imagine alternative earths and lifeforms.
This conference invites scholars to explore how literature, on its own or in comparison to other humanities disciplines, has captured these shifting affective responses to earth and all its lifeforms in any literary genres, fiction and non-fiction, from any historical and geocultural areas, such as classical, medieval and modern literatures, Nordic and global.