Call for Papers 

The International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature (IGEL) invites submissions to the 2022 biennial conference across all areas of the empirical study of literature and media, including but not limited to, cognitive processing of literature, literature/media and culture, aesthetics, neuroscience and literature, literary reception, reading and emotion, historical study of literature, and corpus analysis of literature. The theme of this year’s conference is diversity and inclusion, so papers related to this topic will be given priority. The deadline for submission is February 24th, 2022.  

This year, due to remaining concerns about the COVID-19 virus, the conference will be conducted entirely online. Spoken presentations will be pre-recorded videos of approximately 20 minutes to be delivered (with captions) about 2 weeks before the conference. During the conference sessions, a synchronous, online Q&A discussion of the video will be conducted by the presenter. The platform we will use for the conference is called Concordance (via the Discourse software), and you can read more about it on the IGEL website here: https://igelsociety.org/concordance/ Poster presentations will also be delivered through this platform.

The review committee requires a summary of the presentation. The summary should be 600-800 words and contain a short introduction, a description of the methods as appropriate, and a brief conclusion. Acceptance decisions will be communicated to the authors by April 15, 2022

Submission Requirements

  • Name of First author (First, Last and Title)  
  • Email of First author 
  • List co-authors: 
  • Title of Presentation: 
  • Three to five relevant keywords 
  • Short Description (100 words max) 
  • Long Abstract (800 words max 
  • Please indicate the format (poster, paper, symposium paper) by ticking the appropriate box 
    • Poster 
    • Paper 
    • Symposium Paper 
  • All presentations will be pre-recorded with synchronous, online Q and A session 

More Information

Symposia

Format: A symposium includes a minimum of three and a maximum of four speakers. To submit for a symposium, use the following guidelines:

  • Name of Contact author (First, Last and Title)  
  • Email of the contact person  
  • List all presenters
  • Title of Symposium
  • Three to five relevant keywords 
  • Short Description of Symposium (100 words max) 
  • A List of Speakers (Including Affiliations) 
  • Titles and summaries (200-300 words) of each speaker’s contribution
  • Please indicate the format as symposium paper by ticking the appropriate box 
  • Just like the spoken presentation, all symposia presentations will be pre-recorded with synchronous, online Q and A session 

    Chair/discussant may also serve as speaker, i.e. fill one of the maximum of four slots in a symposium. Accepted symposium proposals will then have to be submitted following the same guidelines as regular proposals by using the online registration described above. 

    Outstanding Student Paper Award

    IGEL will give an Outstanding Student Paper Award. In order to be considered for this award, the first author must be a graduate student, and the student’s supervisor must send a recommendation to Shannon.whitten@ucf.edu 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. 

    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 schemes) → 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 reviewing process needs to be blind) 
      • Comments may be made by reviewers to authors about the need to improve English use, but a bad command of the English language is not a reason to reject a proposal.  

    Inquiries about the submission process: Shannon.whitten@ucf.edu