Kate Zambreno is one of the most audacious and innovative writers today. Moving between the essay and the diary, autofiction and criticism, Zambreno’s writing foregrounds the instability of genre. Their literary oeuvre reveals a sustained engagement with some of the most pressing feminist issues of our times: how to live (and write) a feminist life during late-stage capitalism? How to be a mother and an author while in the adjunct loop? How to remain hopeful in the face of climate catastrophe and the encroachment of fascism?

In their well-known Heroines (2012), Zambreno poses the question of a self that is multiply affected by others, written, as it were, in collaboration. In the resolutely autotheoretical Drifts (2020), they write the overconnected body of the pregnant subject. In To Write As If Already Dead (2021), half study of Hervé Guibert, half memoir of the 1990s New Narrative, they produce a book that is a friendship. In their more recent Tone (2023), the text literally performs a conversation with their friend and artist Sofia Samatar. Thus, Zambreno’s writing enacts a resistance to closed forms, challenging the idea of literature as a well-defined, consumer product. Rather, their work stands in the interruptions and cracks of life, presenting a self that refuses to be read linearly and who is in the process of constant reinvention and revision, in dialogue with others.

For all its relevance and inventiveness, Zambreno’s work remains critically underexamined. This symposium seeks scholars working on Zambreno’s writing to explore the questions their work poses. We welcome interdisciplinary proposals engaging with (but not limited to) Zambreno and the following topics:

• Life-writing and autofiction 

• Embodied feelings: Trauma, grief, vulnerability, and precarity

• Economies of care

• Illness, medicalization, and the clinical gaze

• Pregnancy, motherhood, and caretaking

• Eco-anxiety, the more-than-human and non-human animals

• Material feminism, new materialism, and the posthuman condition

• Fragmentary writing, the diary, and citationality 

• Feminist reparation, relationality, and friendship 

• Posthumanist education

Inspired by Zambreno’s commitment to relationality and to thinking through friends and colleagues, we envision this symposium as a space for sustained dialogue and critical exchange.

Our confirmed keynote speaker is Dr. Chloe Green (Australian National University).

Please send a 200-300 word abstract and a brief bio to zambrenosymposium@gmail.com by July 1st. Acceptance of proposals will be notified by July 15th. The conference will be held online on October 23rd 2026. There will be no registration fee.

Organizing committee: Rubén Peinado Abarrio (University of Zaragoza), Laura de la Parra Fernández (Complutense University of Madrid), and Sofía Martinicorena (Complutense University of Madrid).