IGEL 2022 Conference Program

Welcome to IGEL 2022! We are happy to have you join us! This year’s conference is organized by Shannon Whitten and her team from the University of Central Florida in Orlando. We are sad that we cannot welcome you here in Orlando in person, but we have decided to make the best of this online situation and are going to do things a little differently this year.

The presentations for this year’s conference have all been pre-recorded and uploaded on the Discourse platform “Concordance”, which we share with some of our sister societies. Here is the link to the online program, which will help you navigate all of the presentations: https://discourse.igelsociety.org/t/igel2022-conference-schedule/178. You can pick and choose which presentations to watch before the conference to prepare yourself. During the conference we have planned time for the presenters to give a brief 5-minute summary of their presentation and the rest of their timeslot is dedicated completely to questions from the audience and discussion about the topic of the presentation.

If you are unable to come to one of the sessions, but you still would like to participate in discussions about the topics presented, you can use the Concordance platform for this. We encourage presenters to keep an eye on their presentation on Concordance and answer any questions posted there before, during and even after the conference, as the presentations will remain on the platform. Only registered participants of the conference will have access to this part of the Concordance platform.

Be mindful that the times in this PDF program refer to EST (Eastern Time Zone) but on Concordance you can see the times according to your time zone. At the end of this program you can find abstracts of all of the papers, organized per session. All abstracts are also available on Concordance.

Every day the conference will start with informal chats in our online Gathertown environment, where you can make an avatar, walk around to watch the posters that have been submitted and meet up with colleagues to catch up and talk in a more informal manner. Here is the link to the IGEL 2022 Gathertown.

CORE-ESL Workshops at IGEL

Multiple Labs Education in Empirical Literary Studies. Facilitating replication, collaboration and training 

We aim to broaden the scope of the empirical study of literature by translating instruments and materials in a broad range of languages and cultures. To that end we are currently setting up an international network of research groups to apply for a COST-Action Networking grant (www.cost.eu). With that grant we could stimulate cross-cultural replication within our field by developing a repository of Open Access measures, stimulus materials, protocols and data sets available in a wide range of languages. Ultimately, we would like to develop this endeavour into a course-based research experience for undergraduate students, in which we can teach undergraduate students research skills by involving them in multiple labs studies.  

During the IGEL conference we are organizing two workshops, one focused on the topic of cross-cultural research, and one focused on cross-cultural education in empirical literary studies. We are looking for researchers in our IGEL community who would like to help us brainstorm issues like:

• What would need to be the basic modules in an (online) minor that teaches empirical literary studies to undergraduate students?
• What resources would need to be available to researchers just starting out in empirical literary studies?
• What could we do as a network to promote our field in economically disadvantaged countries? And how could we support our colleagues coming from economically disadvantaged countries? 

We would like to talk to you about this, because after all, you are the experts! Perhaps you would even like to join the network and the grant application after our workshops. Everyone is welcome, from MA students to full professors, and from countries where ESL is well-established to countries where it is virtually non-existent. We need a variety of inputs to make this network work!

If you have any questions about participating in these workshops or about the network or cost-action application in general please contact: Moniek Kuijpers (Moniek.kuijpers@unibas.ch) or Frank Hakemulder (f.hakemulder@uu.nl)

Hope to see you at IGEL,

Moniek Kuijpers

Amir Harash

Frank Hakemulder

Shannon Whitten

DAY 1 – JULY 14

08:00 – 10:00: Coffee reception in Gathertown
Try the “Breaking the ice” Quizzes

10:00 –11:00: Opening Ceremony
Welcome by Shannon Whitten A few words from the President Explaining the conference set-up Announcements Poem reading by Martha Brenckle

Fifteen minute break
Stretch your legs and get away from your screen!

11:15 – 12:15: Symposium: “Working Towards a Broader Conceptualization of Transformative Reading: Shared Reading, Possible Selves, and Socioemotional Skills”
Giulia Scapin, Cristina Loi, Lovena Moneva, Tine Riis Andersen The aim of this symposium is to explore transformative reading (Fialho, 2019) in theory and practice. The transformative effects of literature on reader’s lives is a vibrant area of research in empirical literary studies. Starting point for the present contributions is the work of Fialho (2019), who, building on the work of Miall and Kuiken, developed and investigated the concept of transformative reading as a multilayered phenomenon, with various practical implications in society at large. But there are still questions that need further investigation: How and where can transformative effects be traced in the reader, and which role does a literary text’s style play? How do contemporary reading practices compare in this respect? What are the benefits of applying this framework across domains of education and health research?
Chair: Moniek Kuijpers

Fifteen minute break
What about a nice cup of tea and some stretches?

12:30 – 13:30: Keynote: Franziska Hartung

Title Stories as a window into the human mind   Abstract Humans spend an enormous amount of their time engaged in narratives, a behaviour that to our knowledge no other species developed. Some cognitive (neuro)scientists propose that our minds or brains are optimized for processing information in the form of narratives. Some even claim that the way in which we experience our own lives inherently carries a narrative character. Besides being entertaining and rewarding experiences, narratives teach us about the world, other people, even ourselves, and they help us make emotional, historical, and cultural connections. Over the past 15 years, empirical research on narratives has begun to gain a foothold in cognitive neuroscience. As cognitive neuroscientists, we have come to learn that our models of language, memory, and perception fall short of providing satisfactory accounts of our aesthetic experiences with narratives. I will present recent findings on narrative engagement that show that experiential, cognitive, and affective responses to narratives rely on different behavioural and neurobiological correlates. Moreover, each person seems to bring their own set of expectations, beliefs, and motivations, which shape their experience of stories depending on the story, the reader, the perception of the writer, and the circumstances. I will discuss the need for new models that account for the interaction of individual and situational aspects of narrative engagement.

Chair: Moniek Kuijpers

Fifteen minute break
Have you been outside today?

13:45 – 15:05:

Parallel Session 1:

Narrative Elements Chair: Carmen Tu	Poetry Chair: Amir Harash
Viewer’s Mental Framing of Fiction Film Jonathan Frome	Psychopoetics. Literary Studies on a New Footing Willie van Peer
Audience Understanding of and Allegiance to Fictional Antihero Characters in Television and Film Melissa Seipel	Poetry, Freewriting and the Self Discovery Process David Hanauer
Comparing Plot Structure and Character Agency in Mimetic vs. Diegetic Narratives Carmen Tu	Who likes medieval Hebrew Poetry? Amir Harash
Neurocognitive processes in narrative poetry reading Mesian Tilmatine	Procedures for Identifying the Figurative Forms that “Emerge” From Poetic Metaphors Don Kuiken

15:05-17:00: Reception in Gathertown
Depending on where you are: coffee, aperitif or nightcap