Call for papers: Graduate Conference — Mutations at UC Berkeley
Berkeley
Organization: UC Berkeley
We are pleased to announce our upcoming graduate conference, Mutations, which will take place at the University of California, Berkeley on February 12–13, 2026, with our prestigious Keynote Speaker Prof. Christy Wampole from Princeton University. You’ll find the conference abstract and further details below.
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Mutation refers to a process by which matter is changed. French and francophone authors are no strangers to mutation: from Rabelais’s grotesque bodies to Baudelaire’s changing Paris, from 20th-century autofiction writers experimenting with written form to francophone Pacific writers facing nuclear fallout and genetic mutation, the French-language tradition employs mutation in myriad forms to interrogate what we are. And as languages, cultures, and bodies within and beyond the Francophonie encounter one another, these deformations may also manifest through various artistic techniques. Often burdened with negative connotations, mutation evokes notions of uncontrollable and random genetic shifts that disrupt perceived norms, and hybrid monstrous figures. Yet, mutation’s acknowledgment of change, however negative, can also be an essential mechanism for adaptation, survival, and evolution.
As a uniting conceptual thread, mutation offers a framework for engaging the complexities of our current moment marked by environmental degradation, mass displacement, political instability, and economic volatility. Mutation’s arsenal of techniques – distortion, refraction, diffraction, reflection, reproduction, replication – provides a wide array of examples for discussing these pressing issues. Potential papers under this mutation frame could explore topics such as: transformation of information dissemination and representation in the digital age, or the existence of fluid and flexible identities in the contemporary era. If mutations frequently occur at the margins, how might we understand them from the perspective of human and non-human beings marginalized in these border spaces? Mutation also foregrounds the limits of representation and the dissolution of fixed meanings: what aesthetics of mutation exist? More broadly, mutation unsettles categories and challenges boundaries, whether corporeal, cultural, or geographical – how can it help us rethink division and articulate “becoming”?
This graduate student conference, which will take place at the University of California Berkeley on Feb 12-13, 2026, invites interdisciplinary papers in English or in French that consider mutations from the perspective of cultural and literary studies with a focus on French and Francophone contexts. We also invite abstracts from graduate student scholars in film and media studies, comparative literary studies, postcolonial studies, art, history, philosophy, and social sciences, and any other field considering mutation in innovative and interdisciplinary ways as they relate to French and Francophone culture and experience or Franco-global exchanges. We ask that interested applicants send a 300-word abstract and a 50-word personal bio by November 10th to bfgsa@berkeley.edu. You can find all this information on the conference website at this link.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
Speculative futures: post-catastrophe landscapes and the ongoing present
Ecological mutations: contamination, toxicity, survival
Nuclear mutations and the aesthetics of fallout
Hybridity across borders: bodies, lands, languages
Linguistic mutations, translation studies
Queer mutations in body, society, politics
Mutation in the Global South and de- and postcolonial mutations
Animal studies: extinction, species mutations, animal-human relations, animal imaginaries
https://bfgsa0.wixsite.com/mutations2026
Berkeley French Graduate Student Association