VLS international conference 2025

Vegan Intersections: 

Literature, History, Theory

31 March-4 April 2025

Online via Zoom

Hosted by the University of Geneva

CALL FOR PAPERS

In the context of the Swiss National Science Foundation-funded research project, Vegan Literary Studies: An American Textual History, 1776-1900,” proposals are invited for the international Vegan Studies conference, “Vegan Intersections: Literature, History, Theory.” The conference will be conducted online over a series of half-days, in order to facilitate international participation, between 31 March and 4 April 2025. The conference will be organized around three themes: Literature, Art, and Cultural Production; Histories and Activism; and Ethical Vegan Theorizing. The conference language is English. There is no conference fee. Participation is free for both presenters and non-presenting attendees.

Vegan Studies has emerged in the past two decades as a discipline of the Humanities and Social Sciences at the intersection of Eco-criticism, Eco-feminism, Posthumanism, Critical Animal Studies, and Critical Race Studies. Across a variety of areas – history, society, cultural production, philosophy, ecology and environmentalism, food production, capitalism and labor, and religion – Vegan Studies engages the ethical refusal of carnism as a paradigmatic rejection of human exploitation of, and discrimination against, all other beings. The conference engages the widest definition of veganism in order to discuss intersections among a diversity of social justice issues from animal welfare to the abolition of chattel slavery, women's rights to vivisection, fashion reform to Temperance, pacifism to land reform, and from Utopian forms of communal living to religious doctrines. We welcome interventions that engage all historical periods.

CONFERENCE FORMAT

To fully exploit the affordances of the online format, all papers will be presented as plenary presentations. One, or at most two, short response papers will precede the open Q&A. Each session will be devoted to discussion, all participants having had the opportunity to read the full papers in advance.

The selection process will take place in three stages:
 

1) prospective participants are invited to submit a proposal for an individual paper, comprised of an abstract (300 words max.) plus 5 keywords and a bio of 150 words max.
DEADLINE: 15 November 2024

2) the participants selected will be invited to share their full paper (6-7,000 words excluding bibliography) for circulation one month in advance of the conference during which a short review of the main points will be presented.
DEADLINE: 3 February 2025

3) prospective respondents are invited to indicate their willingness to share feedback and comment on one of the papers circulated.
DEADLINE: 3 March 2025

PUBLICATION: participants will be asked to submit a final version of their paper, following the conference, for publication in a peer-reviewed, Open Access edited book.
DEADLINE: 15 May 2025

Please send PROPOSALS to Ms Megan Zeitz, megan.zeitz@unige.ch

and INQUIRIES to Prof. Deborah Madsen, deborah.madsen@unige.ch