IGEL 2006 CALL FOR PAPERS

IGEL, the International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature and Media, will have existed 20 years when it holds its 10th biennual conference in Munich in 2006. Obviously we will have occasion to celebrate -- and will do so in style!

The conference takes place from Saturday 5th to Wednesday 9th August 2006, in the renovated monastery on the picturesque Lady's Isle (Fraueninsel) in Lake Chiem, at the foot of the Alps, near Munich, Germany. You can see some other pictures of the conference location at: http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/igel/Newsletter15.htm#Munich.

Please send your proposals for papers, for a symposium or a workshop to the address below not later than 31st March 2006. Abstracts for papers should be about 300 words, and include the name(s) of the author(s), institutional affiliation, mailing address, and email address. For a proposed symposium or workshop, please provide a 300-word description of the topic, the full details of the organizer as above, and in addition the names of contributors, their institutional affiliations, mailing address, and email address, and the titles and abstracts of their proposed contributions.

Papers will be scheduled for 20 minutes, with an additional 10 minutes for questions and discussion. A symposium or workshop will be scheduled for 1 1/2 or 2 hours, depending on the number of participants.

Next to the usual papers, workshops and symposia there will be a round-table with the founding fathers/mothers of the association on the future of empirical studies. There will also be a plenary debate on the views of Denis Dutton, editor of the journal Philosophy and Literature (published by Johns Hopkins University Press). Professor Dutton has agreed to attend.

Plenary speakers will include: Elizabeth Long (Rice University), Norbert Groeben (University of Cologne), James Pennebaker (University of Texas), Margrit Schreier (International University of Bremen), and William St Clair (Trinity College, Cambridge University).

Topics are invited in the following and related fields:

• Literary reading processes (emotion, cognition, personality, etc.)
• The social role of literature and related media (e.g. film, theatre, Internet, multimedia, virtual reality)
• Literature / media from an evolutionary perspective
• Early literary / media socialization
• Pedagogical and educational aspect of literature and the media
• The processes of literary/media production, distribution and reception
• The role of literary and other cultural institutions: past, present and future
• The empirical study of historical reception and historical readers
• Digital methods of research on literature and the media (text analysis, corpus studies, hypertext models, etc.)

Proposals should be submitted by March 31st 2006. They should be sent by email to:

Willie van Peer
Department of Languages and Communication
Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU)
D-80539 Munich
Germany
vanpeer@daf.uni-muenchen.de

A decision on acceptance will be provided by April 10th 2006.

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