More details of our upcoming online conference:
https://ebsn.eu/2026-conference/
The conference organizers invite proposals for papers, panels, roundtables, and creative performances for the 14th Annual Conference of the European Beat Studies Network, which will take place via the online Google Meet platform, November 12-14, 2026.
Theme:
While most often addressed in terms of spiritual quest, countercultural impact, mobility, spontaneity and
authenticity, Beat writing is fundamentally shaped by and deeply invested in specific material conditions: bodies
and substances, print and sound technologies, economic precarity, infrastructure, objects, and media
environments. Accordingly, from mimeograph machines, cheap paperbacks, and tape recorders to drugs, clothing,
food, sexuality, and urban space, Beat aesthetics emerge as a profoundly material practice. At the same time, the
Beat idiom intersects, whether explicitly or obliquely and belatedly, with philosophical, political, and aesthetic
materialisms (Marxist, phenomenological, posthuman, ecological, and new materialist frameworks) that invite
renewed critical attention.
The conference proposes to rethink the Beats through the lens of materiality and materialisms, asking
how matter, human and nonhuman, shapes Beat aesthetics, politics, and afterlives. We invite contributions that
explore how Beat texts and practices are produced by, mediated through, and resistant to material conditions as
well as how Beat legacies continue to circulate materially across media, geographies, and generations. Rather
than treating “materiality” as mere backdrop or context, this conference proposes to foreground matter as agent,
condition, and collaborator in Beat production. How might a Marxian reading illuminate the economic
infrastructures and labor conditions underlying Beat publishing networks? What might a Benjaminian lens reveal
about reproducibility, aura, and the circulation of Beat texts? How might Deleuzian assemblage or Latourian
networks reframe the Beats as constellations of human and nonhuman actants—bodies, drugs, roads, printing
presses, tape recorders, borders?
We are particularly interested in approaches that foreground method as well as object: archival research,
media archeology, book history, performance studies, affect theory, and digital humanities are especially welcome. The conference also seeks to foster dialogue between established scholars and emerging researchers,encouraging experimental formats, collaborative and create work.On the occasion of the centennial of Allen Ginsberg’s birth, the conference also warmly invites papers and panels that celebrate and reexamine the enduring vitality of Ginsberg’s work and influence. We welcome contributions that revisit his poetry, performances, and public presence as well as the ongoing relevance of his poetics in contemporary cultural and artistic contexts. In keeping with the theme, we especially welcome reconsiderations of Ginsberg’s material practices—his notebooks, recordings, correspondence, activism, and embodied performance—and their resonance in contemporary poetic or political movements.
Possible topics include (but are not limited to):
• Material culture of the Beats: objects, clothing, food, drugs, tools
• Beat bodies, embodiment, sexuality, illness, addiction, and labor
• The Beats and media technologies: print, little magazines, mimeographs, tape recorders, radio, film
• The Beats and sound, voice, performance, and acoustic materiality
• Reading the Beats in the age of AI and digital remediation
• Beat infrastructure and space: roads, cities, trains, borders, landscapes
• The Beats and economic materialities: poverty, precarity, publishing economies, copyright
• Beat writing and philosophical materialisms (Marxism, phenomenology, materialist feminism, new
materialism)
• Environmental materiality in Beat texts
• Beat archives, manuscripts, marginalia, notebooks, drafts
• Transnational material afterlives of the Beats
• Beat materiality beyond literature: music, visual art, performance, film
• Preservation, digitization, and the ethics of Beat archival work
• The material politics of race, gender, and sexuality in Beat writing
Deadline for abstracts: June 15, 2026
Responses will be given by: July 15, 2026
Papers will be limited to 20 minutes. Abstracts should clearly outline how the topic will be addressed, the texts
that will be studied, and what the presentation will cover regarding the topic and the problem presented. Please,
submit abstracts (250-300 words) and a short bio note to conference administrator Raven See at [email protected]
before June 15, 2026.
Conference Organizing Committee:
Tomasz Sawczuk, University of Bialystok (Poland)
Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo, University of Murcia (Spain)
Conference Administrator:
Raven See
