Nous avons le plaisir de vous communiquer l’appel à communication pour le colloque de clôture du thème « Living Matter(s) » auquel ont été consacrées les séances du séminaire VALE (Sorbonne Université) ces deux dernières années.

Le colloque se tiendra en Sorbonne les 9 et 10 avril 2026 et la date limite pour envoi des propositions est le 15 octobre 2025.

Très bel été à toutes et tous,

Le bureau de VALE

Living Matter(s)

International conference

Sorbonne Université, Paris

9-10 April 2026

Confirmed keynote speaker: Farah Karim-Cooper (Folger Shakespeare Library)

The Research Unit VALE (“Voix Anglophones Littérature et Esthétique,” UR 4085) at Sorbonne Université seeks proposals for its biannual symposium, which will take place on April 9-10, 2026, in Paris, France.

The title of this conference follows from a two-year seminar series (2023–2025) organised by the Research Unit VALE (“Voix Anglophones Littérature et Esthétique,” UR 4085) at Sorbonne Université on the topic of “Living Matter(s).” It purposefully echoes Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter (2010), which played a pivotal role in the material turn that has reshaped the humanities in recent years. In this foundational work, Bennett explores the vibrancy of matter and the ways in which it disrupts key dualisms inherited from Enlightenment thought: subject/object, culture/nature, animate/inanimate, life/death. Her aim is to acknowledge the movement, the inherent motion of the object—or rather, of the thing, of things—animated by a form of agency that Spinoza had already conceptualized as conatus. The recognition of the vitality and energy of matter signals a shift from conceiving the object as a passive object of knowledge to understanding the thing as an actant in Bruno Latour’s sense—that is, as a force of agency not necessarily aligned with, or reducible to, human intentionality. At the core of the work we intend to carry out, thus, lies the power of things, particularly their capacity to unsettle anthropocentric epistemologies and frameworks while raising the question of human responsibility and the possibility of political action in a more-than-human world. To this end, this conference seeks to expand the inquiry beyond the historical scope delineated by Bennett, in order to explore how the life of matter animates literary, artistic, and cultural productions across the Anglophone world, from the early modern period to the present.

This conference builds on prior discussions held during the VALE seminar series, including explorations of the life of gold in early Modern England (C. Faraday), the materialities of colour in eighteenth-century textile dyeing (A. Fennetaux), Benjamin Rush’s science of the mind in post-Revolutionary America (M. Jonik), the philosophy of metabolism in Thomas Huxley and Claude Bernard (C. Bognon-Küss), as well as the material turn in law and literature (G. Olson), microcosmic matter in contemporary Anglophone fiction (L. Campos), and the racial materiality of film (K. Dootson). In the wake of such materialist inquiries, we invite paper and panel proposals on “Living Matter(s)” to reconsider the organicity of the oeuvre-as-corpus through matter’s intrinsic “animacy” (Chen 2012). Vibrancy and animacy alike allow us to move past the classic binarism between inanimate matter and animated life, calling for an approach to literature and the arts at the crossroads of disciplinary formations. Situated at the shifting frontier between the organic and the inorganic, the material and the immaterial, but also the human and the non-human, as well as the animal, the vegetal, and the mineral, this conference intends to be a site for a series of robust conversations between English, American, and Postcolonial Literary Studies, Performance Studies, Art History, Life Sciences, Chemistry, Medical Humanities and Environmental Humanities.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• The materiality of the body, including dimensions of race, gender, ability, and sexualities;
• Living matters / Dying matters;
• Religious matter and the sacred;
• The materiality of art (materials, pigments, media) and the artist’s gesture;
• The materiality of the book;
• The materiality of archives, including digital data;
• The relations between the material and the metaphorical;
• The aesthetics of matter and the matter of aesthetics;
• Environmental health and the entanglement of the human with its environments;
• Human and non-human animals;
• Viruses, microbes, and germs in literature and the arts;
• The energy of matter, from the microbiotic to the biopolitical and the planetary.

We invite both individual paper and group proposals. Please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words for 20 min-papers and 100-word bios to livingmatters2026@gmail.com by October 15, 2025. You will receive notification of acceptance by December 1st.

Organising committee: Thomas Constantinesco, Anne-Valérie Dulac, Charlotte Ribeyrol, Stella Granier, Gabriel Saada, Anna Shmatenko

Selective bibliography:

Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Indiana UP, 2010.

Alaimo, Stacy. Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times. Minnesota UP, 2016.

Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke UP, 2010.

Bennett, Jane. influx & efflux : writing up with Walt Whitman. Duke UP, 2020.

Chen, Mel Y. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Duke UP, 2012.

Chen, Mel Y. Intoxicated: Race, Disability, and Chemical Intimacy across Empire. Duke UP, 2023.

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome (ed.). Prismatic Ecology. Ecotheory Beyond Green. U of Minnesota P, 2013.

Dootson, Kirsty S. The Rainbow’s Gravity: Colour, Materiality and British Modernity. Yale UP, 2023.

Faraday, Christina. Tudor Liveliness. Vivid Art in Post-Reformation England. Yale UP, 2023.

Ingold, Tim. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. Routledge, 2013.

Luciano, Dana. How the Earth Feels: Geological Fantasy in the Nineteenth-Century United States. Duke UP, 2024.

Roque, Georges. La Cochenille, de la teinture à la peinture. Gallimard, 2021.

Tompkins, Kyla Wazana. Deviant Matter: Ferment, Intoxicants, Jelly, Rot. New York UP, 2024.

Young, Diana. Rematerializing Colour, From Concept to Substance. Sean Kingston Publishing, 2018.

Zhong Mengual, Estelle. Apprendre à voir : le point de vue du vivant. Actes Sud, 2021.