Annual meeting

AJLS 33rd Annual Meeting

Media Temporalities

November 21–22, 2025, University of Chicago

Call for Papers and Panels

The 33rd Annual meeting of the Association of Japanese Literary Studies will be convened at the University of Chicago on November 21 and 22, 2025. We anticipate beginning around noon on 11/21 (Friday) and concluding in the evening of 11/22 (Saturday). The theme of this conference is media temporalities in and around Japanese literature, broadly conceived. Under this rubric, the paper/panel proposals may consider a wide range of possible questions including (but not limited to):

- Structures of time in literary narratives, poetic forms, or performance, including questions of citation, memory, repetition, continuity and discontinuity.

- The interplay between texts (literary and others) and the unfolding of events in historical or nonhistorical time.

- The interweaving of multiple scales of time, from the instantaneous to the lifetime of organisms to the half-lives of radioactive substances to the scales of the worldly, the unworldly, and the other-worldly.

- The temporalities of production, circulation, and consumption of literature and kindred media (including film, anime, manga, television, drama, among others). 

- Philosophies of time and temporality and their role in literature and related cultural forms. 

- The time(s) of literary history, literary theory, and literary criticism, especially as they relate to discourse about “origins,” “crisis,” and “end times.”

- The temporalities of reception, including reading and watching, archiving, performance, recording, playback, and attention.

- The impact of new technologies on the representation of temporality in literature and other media, or on how temporality is conceived disciplinarily and/or methodologically.  

We especially encourage proposals from graduate students and early-career researchers.

Please submit your 250-word proposal for a single paper or 500-word proposal for a panel (three presenters and a discussant) at the link below by May 15, 2025, along with the following information:

·         Tentative titles of the paper(s)/panel

·         Names, ranks, and institutions of the presenter(s) and discussant (if applicable)

·         Language of presentation (English or Japanese)

Submission website:  https://ceas.wufoo.com/forms/ajls-2025-paper-submissions/ 

We will notify applicants of the results in late June 2025.