4th International Poe and Hawthorne Conference Paris, July 1-4, 2025
Université Paris Cité / Université Sorbonne Nouvelle / Sorbonne Université
The Fourth International Poe and Hawthorne Conference will take place in Paris from July 1st to July 4th, 2025.
The conference will open on the evening of Tuesday, July 1st, with a welcoming reception at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Nation campus.
Plenary addresses and sessions will take place at several venues: On Wednesday, July 2nd: Université Paris Cité On Thursday, July 3rd: Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Maison de la Recherche On Friday, July 4th: Sorbonne Université, Pierre and Marie Curie campus. See Conference Sites for more information on how to get there.
The conference will conclude with an optional péniche dinner on the evening of July 4th.
The topic of the conference, “dis/embodiment,” is an attempt to recover the messiness of bodies and their materiality, to move beyond the ontological rift between matter and spirit, and to embrace the oxymoronic resistance to the mind/body divide—in other words, to move beyond allegory, and even hermeneutics tout court, and devise ways of reading that destabilize our interpretative grounds. The writings of Poe and Hawthorne, perhaps more than others, unsettle our senses and blur the limit between life and death, the corporeal and the non-corporeal, the body and the ghost, the human and the non-/post-human. In that sense, the slash in this title is less a marker of disjunction than an invitation to find new modes of articulation between bodies and what they are not, or not quite, or not any more. See the conference Call for Papers for details.
The conference will feature plenary addresses by Richard Kopley, Distinguished Professor of English, Emeritus, Penn State DuBois, and Joel Pfister Olin Professor of English and American Studies, Wesleyan University.
The Fourth International Poe and Hawthorne Conference is sponsored by LARCA UMR 8825 (Université Paris Cité, CNRS), PRISMES (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle), VALE (Sorbonne Université), HCTI (Université Bretagne Sud), the Poe Studies Association, and the Nathaniel Hawthorne Society. We are also grateful to Meilan Solly for giving us permission to use her illustration.