2026 CFP

Call for Papers: COEDA 2026 – Echoes and Emergences

October 16-17, 2026 (Friday and Saturday)

Department of English Language and Literature

Seoul National University

Texts contain echoes. They carry forward the voices, forms, and figures of what came before—sometimes as faithful inheritances, sometimes as distortions, sometimes as reinventions. But an echo is never identical to its source; in returning, it alters. What emerges is thus more than mere repetition, but something reshaped by the distance it has travelled—across time, languages, and communities of readers. To attend to echoes is thus to attend to emergence: to the ways inherited forms and ideas, once taken up and reworked elsewhere, begin to answer back to their origins, and in doing so disrupt, redefine, and revitalise the very sources and traditions from whence they came.

The interplay of echoes and emergences operates not only within texts but also across broader sociocultural, historical, and linguistic contexts. Echoes reverberate through postcolonial inheritances, diasporic memory, transnational practices, and inter-Asian literary genealogies; they also emerge in how language itself is studied, circulated, and reimagined in an age of computational mediation. COEDA is itself one such echo, and one such emergence as well. Since its inaugural meeting in Seoul in 2018, the conference has since circulated through Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and back again, emerging each time with new voices and new questions. Each iteration continually reimagines what the coalition represents and what English studies, when practiced from within Asia, can become. In 2026, COEDA’s return to Seoul for the third time not only marks the beginning of a new cycle, but also a moment to reflect on the productivity and generative power of echo and emergence as sites of epistemic reconfiguration, reinterpretation, and transformation.

We invite papers that explore the interplay between echoes and emergences across literary, cultural, historical, theoretical, and linguistic inquiries. How do inherited forms travel, mutate, and take on new meanings as they move across texts, languages, forms of media? How do different spaces and localities shape the way writers and speakers work within and against existing structures? What new voices, methods, and modes of thought emerge from this traveling? We welcome contributions from a range of disciplines and interdisciplinary perspectives.

Possible fields of inquiry may include, but are not limited to:

• Echo and emergence as tropes and motifs

• Repetition, return, and recursion

• Memory and contested historiography

• Tradition, revival, and reinvention

• Postcolonial and decolonial inheritances• Translation, adaptation, and transcultural circulation

• Intertextuality and literary genealogy

• Intergenerational trauma and knowledge

• Sonic, visual, and material echoes

• Emergent subjectivities and political imaginaries

• Ecological time and the Anthropocene

• Critical theory’s genealogies and afterlives

• Nonlinear temporalities

• Affect and resonance

• Generative AIs as echoes

Please submit a paper title, a 250 word abstract, and a short bio (up to 150 words) in a Word document to coeda2026@gmail.com by June 8, 2026. Please plan for a presentation of around 15-20 minutes.