At the beginning of June 2025, the International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature (IGEL) will hold its 21th international conference in Austin, Texas (USA). The broad theme of the conference will be “Creativity, Story Experience, and Reflection”. Submissions related to this theme will be given priority, but proposals from all areas of the empirical study of literature and media are welcome.
The deadline for submission is 1 December 2024.
Registration
Registration fees depend on the number of attendees and this will be announced after the deadline for submissions. The estimate cost ranges from 145 to 300 $. Reduced rates for attendees who participate online will also be announced.
Keynote Speakers
Venue
Austin, Texas, is a welcoming and vibrant city, currently the 7th fastest growing metro area in the U.S. Known as the “Live Music Capital of the World,” Austin has a rich history that blends Texan traditions with a contemporary, progressive culture.
The conference will take place at Huston-Tillotson University in Central East Austin, a 15-minute drive from the Austin-Bergstrom International airport and a 5-minute drive to downtown Austin, depending on traffic. Huston-Tillotson University is the first university to be founded in Austin, Texas, and a historically Black college (HBCU). It is located within a 5-minute walk of a vibrant part of East Austin with restaurants, breweries, food trucks, live music venues, and hotels. You can check out the location here. Outdoor enthusiasts will enjoy the nearby Lady Bird Lake and the expansive Zilker Park, including the 3-acre Barton Springs Pool (12,000 square meters), where an underground spring keeps groovy Austinites cool and chill. Austin’s central location also allows for easy day trips to other major Texas cities like San Antonio and Dallas. For more information, please visit this link or Soon’s Austin Checklist.
How to reach Austin
Austin is accessible by air through the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, which is located just southeast of the city center. The airport provides a wide range of domestic and international flights, connecting Austin directly with major cities across the United States and global destinations. For travelers arriving by air, the airport offers numerous services and transportation options, including taxis, rideshares (e.g., Uber and Lyft), and a public transit system to efficiently reach downtown Austin and surrounding areas. By car, the airport is about 30 minutes away from the city center.
Call for Papers
The call for papers is available under this link. All spoken presentations will be pre-recorded videos of 15-20 minutes to be submitted one month before the conference. During the conference sessions, presenters will give a 5-minute summary of their work and 15-20 minutes will be dedicated to Q&A. The Concordance platform will be used for hosting the program, videos, abstracts, posters and online discussions and networking. You can read more about it here. Proposals for paper and poster presentations must contain a short introduction, a description of the methods as appropriate, and a brief conclusion.
Paper and Poster Submission Requirements
Submit your proposal via the registration form here. You will be asked to provide the following information:
- Name of first author (First, Last and Title) and affiliation
- Email of corresponding author
- List co-authors (names and affiliations)
- Title of presentation
- Three to five relevant keywords
- Relevant Theme or Themes (see list below)
- Short description (100 words max; anonymized to allow for blind review)
- Long abstract (800 words max, references excluded; anonymized to allow for blind review)
We also welcome theoretical papers (as long as they are focused on the field of empirical literary studies) and works in progress. For works in progress, we particularly recommend the poster format.
Symposia Proposals
Besides paper and poster proposals, we are again actively encouraging submissions of symposia proposals.
Format: A symposium includes a minimum of three and a maximum of four speakers. To submit for a symposium, use the following guidelines:
- Title of symposium
- Short description of symposium (100 words max)
- Name (first, last and title) and email address of symposium organizer
- Three to five relevant keywords
- Relevant Theme or Themes (see list below)
- A list of speakers (including affiliations)
- Titles and summaries of each speaker’s contribution (200-300 words, references excluded; anonymized to allow for blind review)
All symposia presentations follow the same format as other paper presentations (pre-recorded presentations on Concordance with synchronous Q&A sessions during the conference).
Themes
Prospective conference attendees are asked to select one or more themes that match the topic of their presentation. Prospective conference attendees are also free to propose a more narrow theme by including a title and a short description (max 100 words).
- Entertainment research, e.g., emotion, hedonic/eudaimonic framework, parasocial interactions, etc.
- Socially conscious or social justice-related story or literary experiences
- Experiencing stories with technology, e.g., extended reality (XR), including research on boundary conditions of narrative engagement
- Health and psychological benefits of story and literary experiences, including media use for coping
- Narrative engagement (or absorption or involvement) research
- Narrative persuasion research
- Empirical Ecocriticism, e.g., climate and animal (non-human, nature) narratives
- Computational approaches to literary and narrative research
- Reading processes and education
- Literary processes, e.g., foregrounding
- Cultural issues in narratives
- Reflection processes or psychological processing after story or literary exposure - Poetry reading or writing processes
- Shared reading
Submission form
Please send all submissions via this link. Acceptance decisions will be communicated to the authors by 15 February 2025.
Acceptance Policies
- Proposal needs to be relevant to our society’s mandate and members
- Proposal needs to be of high quality (therefore paper proposals need to be anonymized, so authors cannot be accepted or rejected on name alone)
- Proposal can be empirical (naturalistic, experimental or computational) or theoretical (but pertaining to the field of empirical literary studies) in nature
- We will not accept more than one proposal from the same author (the only exception being authors who can clearly show that they are working in two different research areas) → this policy is to prevent senior researchers from dominating the conference
- We are an inclusive society, which means early career researchers or researchers from economically-disadvantaged countries will not be discriminated against
- The review process is blind
Outstanding Student Paper Award
IGEL will continue its tradition of recognizing outstanding student presentations. In order to be considered for the Outstanding Student Paper Award, the first author must be a graduate student, and the student’s supervisor must send a recommendation to igelaustin25@gmail.com describing the student’s contribution to the research project. First authors should indicate the eligibility of their submission using the provided checkbox during the submission process.
Bursaries
IGEL will provide bursaries for early career researchers with no travel funds. The amounts and requirements are listed below:
Amounts:
- max €200 for continental applications / €400 for intercontinental applications, plus:
- Waived conference fee
- Waived conference dinner fee
- Waived 1 year IGEL membership fee
Requirements:
- Paper or poster accepted for presentation
- CV (including current position and affiliation)
- 300 words introduction letter, stating your position (MA student, PhD student or post doc), your country of residence, your motivation for visiting the conference in person and whether or not you were able to secure any other financial support.
There are 3 bursaries available for IGEL 2025, 2 for in-person attendance and 1 for online attendance. The bursary for online attendance covers only the registration fee and the 1 year IGEL membership.
If you are eligible and would like to request a bursary, please write to Marloes Mak within this timeframe: 15 February 2025 – 15 March 2025. Decisions about the bursaries will be communicated by 15 April.
Additionally, if you can’t receive a bursary, it is possible to work at the conference in exchange for waived conference registration fees. Contact us for more information.
Important Dates
- Symposium proposals and abstracts submission deadline: 1 December 2024
- Acceptances will be sent out on: 15 February 2025
- Early-bird registration deadline: 15 April 2025
- Registration deadline: 15 May 2025
Organisation
The 2025 IGEL conference is organized by the following IGEL-associated scholars
- Guan Soon Khoo, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Instruction at the University of Texas at Austin, School of Advertising and Public Relations in the Moody College of Communication
- Tine Riis Andersen, PhD candidate University of Stavanger, Norway, and Trnava University, Slovakia.
- Cristina Loi, Postdoctoral researcher at the University of Basel, Switzerland.
- Giulia Scapin, PhD candidate VU Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and University of Haifa, Israel.
Contact
Inquiries concerning the conference can be sent to the organizing committee at: igelaustin25@gmail.com