The Fourth International Poe and Hawthorne Conference will take place in Paris from July 1st to July 4th, 2025.

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.

The conference will open on the evening of Tuesday, July 1st, with a concert and opening cocktail at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Nation campus. Please e-mail Thomas Constantinesco (thomas.constantinesco@gmail.com) if you would like to join the event.

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.

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.

Full program available here.