Call for Proposals: Queer Bibliography: In the Making (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 11.-13. Juni 2025)

We are delighted to share the call for proposals for „Queer Bibliography: In the Making,“ the third iteration of this conference, which was initially established by Malcolm Noble and Sarah Pyke in 2023.

The conference will be hosted at Newcastle University in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the United Kingdom and online on 11-13 June, 2025. The conference committee is extremely grateful to SHARP and to the Bibliographical Society, both of which have generously provided funding. This allows us to continue to keep this conference free to attend, as well as to support some travel grants for postgraduate students. The deadline for submissions is midnight on 31 January; prospective speakers will be informed of the outcome by the end of the day on 28 February.

Queer Bibliography: in the Making invites participants to consider queerness in the processes of (re/un)making material texts.

Bibliography is primarily concerned with how material texts fall together, and the lives of those texts (long or short). The processes of production, reproduction, transmission, and reception are all central to bibliographic study; as is the work of the people engaged in these processes. Such people might include typefounders, papermakers, printers, bookbinders, scribes, scrapbookers, zine makers diarists, collectors, librarians, editors, publishers, archivists, and other agents of literary, textual, and material invention. Recent scholarship calls for material texts to be examined as if they were in the process of continual (re/un)making. Many individuals, groups, and organisations can be said to make, un-make, and re-make texts – sometimes across significant geographic and temporal distances; sometimes known to one another, sometimes not; sometimes in communion, and sometimes in opposition.

We invite participants to consider how these processes, and their makers and respondents, might be considered from the perspective of Queer and Trans Studies.

Participants will be invited to submit a 2000-word pre-circulating paper, before presenting in panels of 10-minute papers. We also welcome alternative presentations, in whatever form they may take. Two days of panels, conversation, and discussion will be followed by an optional workshop on 13 June, led by artist and scholar Kadin Henningsen. This workshop will draw on the previous two days’ discussions, and participants will work together to produce a printed object encapsulating this year’s theme of “in the making.”