29th Annual CLIFF Conference

Call for Papers

science—literature—technology
rupture, relation, constellation

29th Annual CLIFF Conference

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

March 21-22, 2025

Submission Deadline: November 30, 2024

Research begins with a question—an uncertainty—an openness. In both the sciences and the humanities, the core position of the researcher is one of uncertainty on the edge of knowledge and understanding. For this year’s CLIFF conference, the organizers invite research and thought on doubt, dubiousness, and rupture at the intersections of humanist disciplines, as well as on constellations of academic research, life, politics, ethics, science, and technology. This conference asks scholars to think comparatively not just among languages, but among modes of thought and investigation throughout and beyond the academy.

For our 29th annual conference, the Comparative Literature Intra-student Faculty Forum (CLIFF) invites 15-minute presentations based in literary analysis, critical theory, history, politics, philosophy, anthropology, translation studies, science and technology studies, and interdisciplinary work. The majority of our presentations will take the form of academic papers, but creative work, performance, and/or visual media are also acceptable. We are interested in exploring some of the following concepts:

  • Epistemology and perception through literature
  • Technology in literature, technologies of literature
  • Environmental humanities, climate criticism, eco-criticism
  • Artifact politics and new materialist agencies
  • Precarity and instability in political and social bodies
  • Rhizomatics, constellations, and alternative networked topologies
  • Temporal elements of thought and narrative
  • Literary histories of science and knowledge
  • Incompleteness, instability of archive and information
  • Uncertainty in memory
  • Economic precarity and ephemerality
  • Impermanence, permeability of political and material borders
  • Vagueness and ambiguity in translation
  • Deconstructing “The Two Cultures” of science and literature
  • Liminal spaces, third states, and the unspeakable
  • Rupture, crisis, paradigm shift
  • Theory and technology
  • Ambiguity of expression and unreliable narrators
  • Intersemiotics, representing the world through language
  • Abjection, subjectivity, and coherence
  • Dynamism, stasis, and disrupted binaries

Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be submitted as a PDF to cliff.complit@umich.edu by November 30, 2024. The subject line of your email should be “CLIFF 2025 Abstract–(Last Name).” Abstracts will be evaluated anonymously by the conference organizers.

We look forward to seeing your work!

Caroline Sullivan, Ben Woodworth

CLIFF Committee 2025