Bridges and Borders: Material Actualities
Pittsburgh, PA and online
Organization: Carnegie Mellon University
Bridges and Borders: Material Actualities
March 19-21, 2026 | Proposals Due by January 15th, 2026
Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, PA) and on Zoom
Bridges and Borders is an annual, interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference presented by the Carnegie Mellon University Department of English in collaboration with the Department of Languages, Cultures, and Applied Linguistics.
CONTACT: bridgesandborders@andrew.cmu.edu
KEYNOTE SPEAKER: TBA.
CALL FOR PROPOSALS
We are tethered to reality through the material world. Yet competing interpretations, motivations, and claims to truth muddle our ability to (co-)construct and engage in a meaningfully shared sense of reality. The theme of this year’s Bridges and Borders conference is Material Actualities. Material actualities can be understood as narratives, generally accepted facts, or theoretical frameworks that help us to engage with and make sense of expectations, beliefs, and material reality. This year’s theme invites participants to explore how our navigation through physical, interpersonal, and/or intrapersonal networks, as well as the representation of those networks, is complicated by what is intended, expected, or believed as compared to what can be broadly accepted as “true.” We welcome papers, roundtable discussions, creative pieces, workshops, and pre-constituted panels that interrogate the tensions, alignments, and divergences between the realms of the material and cultural and to examine the ways that writing, art, film, speech, and media build toward or curtail social and/or material change in various contexts.
Participants are welcome to consider:
Materiality, “truth,” and fiction in literary, cultural, and rhetorical contexts
How political and social realities are changing
How practitioners make texts relevant to new and multidisciplinary audiences and how the relationships between text and audience shift based on time, medium, and/or sociocultural context
How practitioners or audiences make texts relevant to new and multidisciplinary realities
In what ways the process of creation engages with, blurs, troubles, or transcends the concept of authorial “intent” and/or the material constraints or affordances of different physical environments
With this call for papers, we are asking, broadly: What is the role of immateriality and/or fiction in relation to material actualities and material realities? How are different disciplines influenced by material actualities, and how are material actualities in turn influenced by those disciplines? How can multidisciplinary approaches productively help us understand material actualities? What is the creation process of material actualities compared to “imagined realities”? How do various simulacra reflect or otherwise alter our engagement with the material reality? How do objects or histories travel across borders into new circumstances or in response to new exigencies?
For this year’s hybrid conference, we invite proposals for papers, roundtable discussions, creative pieces, workshops, and pre-constituted panels from graduate students by January 15, 2026.
We welcome proposals from disciplines across the Humanities such as Literary and Cultural Studies, Rhetoric, and Languages, Cultures, and Applied Linguistics, as well as the following fields and disciplinary interests:
Archival or Museum studies
Archives of multilingual communities
Censorship
Comparative literature
Creative writing
Critical race studies
Curation and preservation
Drama and performance studies
Education and pedagogy
Ethnography
Film and media studies
Gender and sexuality studies
History
Infrastructure(s)
Institutional funding and defunding
Institutional studies
Language documentation
Language revitalization
Linguistics
Mobilities and spatial formation
Political theory
Second Language Acquisition
SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS
Submission Types
Research Presentation: Participants present research from coursework, dissertation, or extracurricular projects. Works in progress welcome!
Project Showcase: Participants display, read, or otherwise showcase something they have created (e.g., a poem, a creative work, a website, a document design project).
Preconstituted Panels or Roundtable Sessions: Participants submit a preorganized panel, typically made up of 3-4 paper presentations. We welcome panels that grow from graduate seminars with students at the same university or branch out across disciplinary and university boundaries.
Please submit abstracts or proposals of 250 words or fewer by Thursday, January 15th 2026 via the link on our website: https://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/english/research-and-publications/bridges-and-borders.html or this Google Form: https://forms.gle/HUWAYHSnKzG4FvKS7.
This conference will be held in a hybrid format, with presentations delivered both in-person on Carnegie Mellon's campus in Pittsburgh, PA, and on Zoom. Please indicate your preference for presentation modality when submitting.
https://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/english/research-and-publications/bridges-and-borders.html
bridgesandborders@andrew.cmu.edu
Elizabeth Dieterich and Chap Morack