CFP: Translating Ruins: Mutable Grounds, Mediated Encounters, and Mobile Precarities

We are delighted to invite scholars from all disciplines to contribute to the forthcoming edited volume with Routledge: Translating Ruins: Mutable Grounds, Mediated Encounters, and Mobile Precarities. 

In an era of climate crisis, extractivism, war, forced displacement, migration, and rapid urban change, ruins have become pervasive. Contemporary ruin scholarship has moved beyond the aesthetic of Ruinenlust (‘ruin lust’) to recognise ruins as critical thresholds that illuminate entanglements of pasts, presents, and futures (López Galviz et al., 2017). This edited volume examines how translational practices – broadly conceived as complex semiotic practices that are materially grounded and embedded in sociohistorical, ethical and creative relations – engage with historical and contemporary ruins, and how such practices shape the reconstruction, reinterpretation, remembrance and governance of contested ruin-sites, wider processes of ruination, and forms of ruin-related heritage.

We invite critical and practice-based contributions that engage with the complexities of translating ruins. We especially welcome proposals from Translation Studies, Critical Heritage Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Memory Studies, Urban Studies, Cultural Geography, Art History and Visual Culture, and related fields.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:  

  • The transformation of ruins into museums, monuments, heritage sites, and immersive multimedia formats. 
  • The redevelopment or repurposing of ruins into green spaces, public facilities, cultural infrastructures, or commercial complexes – spaces that may themselves enter new cycles of decay and renewal.  
  • Multilingual and multimodal interpreting and translation practices within ruin-related museums, heritage sites, communities, or institutional settings.  
  • Activist or community-based translation practices, or artistic interventions in sites of historical or ongoing ruination.  
  • Intermedial and multimodal representations and translations of ruins and ruin narratives across diverse platforms and formats, including social media, blogs, travel vlogs, livestreams, and digital archives.  
  • The translation and resignification of ruin-related textual fragments, archival materials, photographs, and other material remnants. 
  • The translation of narratives that foreground the material presence and historical specificity of ruins, and the lived experience of those who built, inhabited, or survived ruins. 
  • The transposition of ruin objects to new sites and interpretive contexts (e.g., travelling exhibitions, diasporic archives).   

Submission details:

Please submit a proposal of up to 300 words as a single Word document (.doc or .docx) to translatingruins@gmail.com with the subject line: “[Your Name] – Chapter Proposal”. 

The Word document should include: 

  • A provisional chapter title 
  • An abstract (maximum 300 words, excluding references) and up to five keywords 
  • A short biographical note (maximum 150 words), including your affiliation and contact details
  • A brief statement indicating whether the proposed chapter will include any line illustrations, photographs, or tables, and whether colour reproduction will be required

The deadline for abstract submission is 23 February 2026. Full chapters are due 30 September 2026.

Contact Information

Yaqi Xi (yaqi.xi@warwick.ac.uk), University of Warwick, UK.

Shaoyu Yang (shaoyu.yang@warwick.ac.uk), University of Warwick, UK.

Contact Email

translatingruins@gmail.com

Attachments

CfP_Translating Ruins

CFP: Bibliographical Society of Canada Conference, June 2026

The Many Hands of Book History
Conference of the Bibliographical Society of Canada / Société bibliographique du Canada
8-9 June 2026, University of Toronto

The Bibliographical Society of Canada invites proposals for its annual conference on the theme, The Many Hands of Book History. Drawing on Robert Darnton’s foundational article “What is the History of Books”(1985), this conference turns toward the expanded, evolving, and interdependent networks that shape book history. Darnton’s Communications Circuit model traced the movement of books through multiple hands and bibliographers today continue to stretch, challenge, and reimagine that circuit. This year’s theme considers books not simply as paper, ink, and binding, but as profoundly collaborative objects shaped at every stage by labour, creativity, culture, ownership, and interpretation.

We invite participants to explore the diverse social, material, and cultural processes through which books—broadly conceived—have been created, preserved, circulated, and transformed. We encourage papers that explore interactions between any hands involved with the book, including creators, artists, printers, illustrators, binders, publishers, booksellers, readers, collectors, archivists, scholars, and communities. We also welcome contributions that provoke new methodological, material, and theoretical questions—especially from disciplines and practitioners who may not always identify themselves as “book people.”

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Materiality and Meaning: How formats, illustration, binding, decoration, wear, repair, and digital remediation shape the interpretation, circulation, and preservation of textual objects.
  • Books as Collaborative and Communal Objects: The ways in which book creation fosters shared identities, reflects or silences human experience, and emerges from the labour and creativity of diverse communities.
  • Research Centered on Marginalized Voices: Studies of book culture by, for, and/or from 2SLGBTQIA+ communities, BIPOC communities, persons with disabilities, women, and/or religious or cultural groups.
  • Analogue and Digital Materialities: From parchment, paper, ink, and leather to bits, bytes, algorithms, and born-digital forms; questions of reprinting, digitization, open access, and remediation.
  • Tools, Methods, and Approaches: Bibliography, critical theory, scientific analysis, digital humanities, artificial intelligence, data-driven research, and other interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary methods.
  • Pedagogy and Practice: Teaching with books and cultural heritage materials; hands-on learning; community-engaged scholarship; and the impact of archival and material encounters on students, communities, and other learners.
  • The Diverse Forms and Functions of “The Book” Across Time and Place: Manuscripts, archives, zines, artists’ books, digital platforms, print ephemera, community publications, and experimental or hybrid forms.

This conference emphasizes welcoming participation across fields and career stages, including students, early-career researchers, conservators, librarians, book artists, digital humanists, bibliographers, and scholars working within or alongside book history and bibliography. Proposals may engage with material, visual, scientific, technological, or community-based approaches; with Canadian or international contexts; and with intersectional, cross-cultural, and transnational perspectives.

Proposals:

Proposals for twenty-minute conference presentations, entire panels (three presentations), or hour-long workshops may be submitted in English or French. Proposals, which must be submitted via the online form, must include the following elements:

  • Title of presentation/panel/workshop
  • Abstract indicating argument, context, and methods (max. 250 words)
  • Bio (50-100 words) including full name, professional designation (e.g., graduate student, faculty, librarian, researcher etc.), and institutional affiliation or place

In order to accommodate financial and accessibility issues, this conference will be presented in a limited hybrid capacity. Please specify whether your proposal is for an in-person or online presentation when submitting. Priority will be given to in-person presentations, and online presentations must be recorded and submitted prior to the conference.

Applicants to the Emerging Scholar Prize must also include:

  • Cover letter (1 p.) explaining the applicant’s suitability for the prize
  • CV (max. 3 pp.)
  • Proof of student status or of graduation within the past two years (copy of diploma, student identification, or official or unofficial transcript)

Deadline: 30 January 2026

For more information: https://event.fourwaves.com/bsc/pages 

CFP: “Sound Recordings” – Journal Sources. Materials & Fieldwork in African Studies

We are pleased to announce a call for papers (in French, English, and Portuguese) for a special issue on the theme: “Sound recordings,” coordinated by Charlotte Grabli (CNRS, Centre d’histoire sociale des mondes contemporains) and Aïssatou Mbodj-Pouye (CNRS, Institut des mondes africains), to be published in the journal Sources. Materials & Fieldwork in African Studies

This issue of Sources ambitions to bring together multiple disciplinary perspectives on one or more sound sources produced in Africa. Whether issued from old collections or produced today, audio materials are attracting growing interest in African studies, particularly thanks to the promotion by institutions, researchers, activists and artists of forgotten or difficult-to-access sound and audiovisual collections. Recorded since the late 19th century, these sound objects are extremely diverse: linguistic material, songs and music, field recordings, radio archives, commercial records, film soundtracks, recordings of trials, political speeches, sermons, cassette letters, digital voicemails, etc. Their circulation has increased with the possibilities for duplication offered by cassette technology, and even more so with the digital revolution. Audio recording is also often one of the tools available to social science researchers, and sound objects have become part of the range of objects collected during fieldwork. However, the specificities of the sonic nature of these materials are rarely questioned. Particularly in the case of African and diasporic contexts, it is important to develop methods of listening and analysing that can grasp the multidimensional nature of recordings, the power relations and forms of agency that mark the processes of production, circulation and archiving.

The call is available in English: https://journals.openedition.org/sources/4217

In French: https://journals.openedition.org/sources/4206 

In Portuguese: http://journals.openedition.org/sources/4229 

Proposals should be sent before February 10, 2026 to the following addresses: charlotte.grabli@cnrs.fr, mbodj@cnrs.fr, sources@services.cnrs.fr 

Please feel free to share this call for papers in your newsletters, on your websites, and on social media.

Contact Information

Charlotte Grabli, CNRS, Centre d’histoire sociale des mondes contemporains
charlotte.grabli@cnrs.fr

Aïssatou Mbodj-Pouye, CNRS, Institut des mondes africains
mbodj@cnrs.fr

Contact Email
sources@services.cnrs.fr

URL

https://journals.openedition.org/sources/4217

Call for Chapters: Dangerous Writings

Colleagues are invited to submit chapters for an edited collection of Dangerous Writings.

In October 2025, the Dangerous Writings symposium on the Ethics and Practicalities of Working with Risky Texts brought together scholars, archivists, practitioners, and creatives at the University of Manchester to consider the multiple forms of danger embedded in writing, curating, and reading. “Dangerous writings”, for example, include incendiary political texts or memoirs that reveal classified or confidential information, letters from prison and exile, have long served as catalysts for transformation. Yet they are also laden with numerous ethical, emotional, and sometimes legal implications for those who collect them, handle them, and/or encounter them.

This edited collection seeks to develop the conversations initiated at the symposium. At the heart of this endeavour lies a set of questions about power and responsibility. What does it mean to work with writing that unsettles or resists? How do archives, institutions, and researchers navigate the demands of care and risk? And what forms of knowledge or possibility open when we approach these materials with an ethical sensibility?

Contributors are invited to explore dangerous writings in all their complexity, whether through historical, sociological, literary, archival, or practice-based approaches. We are interested in chapters that illuminate how such texts are produced under conditions of constraint; how they challenge authority or institutional narratives; how they demonstrate forms of solidarity and resistance; and how readers, researchers, and custodians negotiate the emotional and professional labour involved in engaging with them.

Works across the social sciences that reflects these tensions are especially welcome. By thinking across disciplinary and institutional boundaries, we hope to advance understanding of what risky writing does and what responsibilities it generates for those who work with it.

Schedule

  • First full chapter drafts (approx. 8,000 words): September 2026
  • Editorial comments returned: November 2026
  • Revised final drafts due: February 2027
  • Proof-ready manuscript submitted to publisher: April 2027
  • Anticipated publication: Summer 2027

Expressions of Interest

Please signal your interest in contributing by emailing Jon Shute (with Emily Turner and Marion Vannier in cc) by Friday, 16 January 2026. At this stage, a brief provisional title and 250 word abstract will suffice.

New Issue: RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage

RBM, Vol. 26, Issue 2, Fall 2025
(open access)

Editor’s Note

Fact Check
Diane Dias De Fazio

Articles

Navigating Social Networks at the Margins: Women in Science Archives, Then and Now
Bethany G. Anderson, Mary Borgo Ton, Kristen Allen Wilson

Neutrality Unbound: The Value of Rare Book Collections in STEMM Classrooms
Chad Kamen

“If This Book Should Chance to Roam”: The Importance of Children’s Marginalia in Rare Books Collections
Elliott Kuecker, Katie Grotewiel, Zoe Thomas

Reviews

Gracen Brilmyer and Lydia Tang, eds. Preserving Disability: Disability and the Archival Profession. Library Juice Press, 2024.
Matrice Young

Andi Gustavson and Charlotte Nunes, eds. Transforming the Authority of the Archive: Undergraduate Pedagogy and Critical Digital Archives. Lever Press, 2023. Print/Open access.
Jeannette Schollaert

New Issue: OHA Journal

Issue No. 47, 2025
The Power of Oral History—Risks, Rewards & Possibilities
(open access)

Editorial and Contents

Peer-Reviewed Articles

Reports

Reviews

Awards

Awards report including:

  • Hazel de Berg Award for Excellence in Oral History 2024
  • Oral History Australia Book Award 2024
  • Oral History Australia Media Awards 2024

New Articles: Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

“Enrolled Deeds as Records and Archives in Jamaica“
Andrew Williams

“Enhancing Archives and Records Management in Low-Resourced Organizations through Experiential Learning“
Jinfang Niu

“Student-Designed Archival Pedagogy: A Workshop-As-Research Approach to Pluralizing Community Archives Education“
Magdalena Wiśniewska-Drewniak

“Archival Notations of the Norwegian Charter Material“
Juliane Tiemann

New Issue: Archives & Records

Archives & Records, Vol. 26, Issue 2, 2025

Articles

Records of resilience: preserving and promoting de-identified access to the Whitechapel Clinic records
E. Kate Jarman, Richard A. McKay & Richard Meunier

Digital records curation practices in Institutional Repositories (IRs) at selected public universities in Kenya
Juliet A. Erima & Elsebah Maseh

The evolution of archival policies and regulations in China: a topic modelling approach
Li Su & Yunjie Tang

An archive for a school for autistic learners: documenting a distinctive pedagogy
Andrew Alexandra & Mary Thomson

Perspectives from Russia: an interview with Natasha Khramtsovsky
Natasha Khramtsovsky

Toward understanding: practices as common ground and starting point reflections on perspectives from Russia: an interview with Natasha Khramtsovsky
Sherry Xie

How agreeing with or confronting canon can help us face the challenges of the information age?
Zhanna Rozhneva

Reviews

Family and justice in the archives: historical perspectives on intimacy and the law
edited by Peter Gossage and Lisa Moore, Montreal, Concordia University Press, 2024
Jessamy Carlson

History in flames: the destruction and survival of medieval manuscripts
by Robert Bartlett, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2024
Daniella M. Gonzalez

CFP: Text, Space, Memory: Italians Rewriting the Global and U.S. Souths

CfP for the panel ‘Text, Space, Memory: Italians Rewriting the Global and U.S. Souths’ at the Biennial Conference of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature ‘Building Spaces of Freedom’ (March 28-31, 2026 – Fisk University, Nashville, TN)

This panel investigates how Italian transnational communities, across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, have produced, negotiated and monumentalized cultural identity through literary texts, material practices and spatial imaginaries. Bringing together approaches from Italian studies, ethnic studies, literary analysis, spatial theory and material culture, the panel considers how Italian migrants in the Global and U.S. Souths used both texts and objects to articulate belonging, negotiate racial hierarchies and inscribe themselves into local landscapes.

We invite papers that explore how identity is shaped, contested, and remembered through:

1. Literature, Journalism, and Migrant Voices

  • narrative and poetic representations of Italian migration and settlement;
  • ethnic print cultures (e.g., community newspapers, serialized fiction, civic writing, public rhetoric);
  • writers, editors, grassroots intellectuals and cultural mediators who shaped local identities

2. Spatiality, Modernity and the Italian Imagination

  • spatial representations of modernity in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Italian literature or visual culture;
  • literary constructions of southern geographies (Mediterranean, Latin American and U.S. Souths);
  • the role of space in negotiating whiteness, marginality, or social mobility.

3. Material Culture, Craft, and Memorial Practices

  • Italian American memorialization practices (monuments, plaques, markers, commemorative objects);
  • Italian craft, artistic labor, and material expertise in the creation of southern monuments:
  • intersections between artisanal traditions, racial identity, and cultural memory.

4. Archives, Public History and Digital Humanities

  • community archives, material or textual;
  • digital approaches to migrant storytelling, spatial mapping or narrative circulation;
  • public-facing practices that connect literature, objects and community memory.

We welcome contributions from literary studies, Italian studies, ethnic studies, art history, spatial humanities, history and digital humanities. Papers addressing understudied archives, multilingual sources, or intersectional methodologies are especially encouraged.

Please submit a 250–300 word abstract and a brief bio (50–75 words) to the panel organizers, Matteo Brera (University of Padova / Seton Hall University) and Alessia Martini (Sewanee – The University of the South) at matteo.brera@unipd.it and almartin@sewanee.edu by December 12, 2025.

Contact Information

Dr Matteo Brera
Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Research Fellow
Università degli Studi di Padova / Seton Hall University
✉️ matteo.brera@unipd.it | matteo.brera@shu.edu
📞 +1 (934) 500-3088
🌐 http://www.msca-dashow.com

Contact Email

matteo.brera@unipd.it

URL

https://www.msca-dashow.com/news/sssl2026

CFP: International Committee for the History of Technology (ICOHTEC) Annual Meeting

Dear all,
I am pleased to share with you the call for papers for the upcoming ICOHTEC Annual Meeting, which will be held at the Democritus University of Thrace in Greece from 8–11 October 2026, in collaboration with the Laboratory of Technologies, Research & Applications in Education/ School of Humanities and the Ethnological Museum of Thrace in Alexandroupolis, Greece.

The theme of this conference, “Engaging the History of Technology”, invites critical reflections on how history of technology can engage with evolving methodologies, theories and pedagogies, and other branches of historical study to demonstrate that understanding technologies’ pasts are essential to navigating contemporary challenges. The conference, therefore, seeks contributions across spatial and epistemic boundaries: from the everyday and local to the geopolitical and planetary; from archival practice to classroom teaching and public engagement; and from discipline-specific research methods to interdisciplinary collaborations.

Contributors may engage with one or more of the following themes, or even suggest new ways of thinking about: 
1. The History of Technology between the Local, the Regional, and the Global:
• Circulation of technologies, expertise, and knowledge across borders
• Adaptation and appropriation of technologies in different cultural contexts
• Tensions between globalisation and localisation in technological change
• Regional networks and their role in shaping technological trajectories
• Colonial, postcolonial and decolonial dimensions of technology
• Networks of maintenance and repair

2. History of Technology, Historiography and Education:
• Methodological innovations in researching the history of technology
• Interdisciplinary approaches and their challenges
• Teaching the history of technology in universities and schools
• Public engagement and the communication of technological history
• The relevance of technology history to contemporary policy debates
• Digital humanities and new forms of historical scholarship

3. Intersections between the History of Technology and Other Fields of Historical Study:
• Technology and social history: class, labour, gender, and everyday life
• Technology and cultural history: representation, identity, and meaning
• Technology and environmental history: sustainability, resource use, and ecological change
• Technology and economic history: innovation, industrialisation, and development
• Technology and political history: governance, regulation, and power
• Technology and the history of medicine: cultural values, therapeutic practice, and material conceptions about the human body

4. Special Focus: Museums, Material and Intangible Cultural Heritage, and Public Engagement: 
Given our collaboration with the Ethnological Museum of Thrace, we particularly welcome proposals that engage with material and intangible culture, museum practices, and public history. We are interested in innovative session formats that:
• Explore tensions and synergies between academic and museum approaches to technological history
• Demonstrate object-based learning methodologies
• Address the challenges of communicating technological history to diverse publics
• Examine the role of museums in preserving and interpreting technological heritage
• Study visitor engagements with intangible heritage, particularly those of marginalised and silenced ethno-cultural communities
• Critically examine the funding relationships between private technological and industrial interests, and museum

We welcome proposals in the following formats:
Paper presentations
Individual and author teams’ presentations. Please, submit an abstract of up to 350 words.

Panel Sessions
Thematically coherent sessions of 3-4 papers. Panel organisers should submit a panel abstract (up to 400 words) describing the theme and its significance; after approval the conference committee and the panel organisers will issue a specific call for proposals (individual or author teams’ paper abstracts up to 350 words each).

Roundtables
Discussion-based sessions with 4-6 participants addressing a specific question or debate. Organisers should submit a description of the topic and format (up to 350 words); names and brief bios of participants (up to 100 words each); key questions to be addressed.

Graduate Student and Early Career Opportunities
ICOHTEC is committed to supporting emerging scholars. We particularly welcome submissions from graduate students and early career researchers. The conference will feature:
• Visual Lightning Talk Competitions for graduate students
• Mentorship opportunities pairing students with established scholars
• Book development workshops

Submissions of abstracts through the conference website
Opening: 15 December 2025
Deadline: 31 January 2026

Official conference website: https://icohtec2026.hs.duth.gr
Email address: icohtec2026@gmail.com

Please find attached the detailed CfP and feel free to circulate it with your networks.

Thank you very much.

Contact Information

Organising Committee, ICOHTEC 2026

Contact Email

icohtec2026@gmail.com

URL

https://icohtec2026.hs.duth.gr/