[csaa-forum] Call for Proposals: FILLM 30th Congress in Melbourne, December 2026

[Tom Clark]

Dear Colleagues, 

this is to announce the 1st Call for Proposals for the 30th Congress of the International Federation for Modern Languages and Literatures (FILLM). The Congress will take place 8-11 December 2026 at Victoria University in Melbourne, Australia, following an extremely successful 29th Congress at the University of Ghana in 2023. 

The conference theme is 'Talking Country,' a theme that speaks against taking country for granted. Countries are vessels for languages and literatures, as well as fields of conflict in which cultures may confront, avoid, or obliterate each other. For many Indigenous epistemologies, country is a term of immense importance. It names a locus of profound responsibility that present cultures owe to their futures and pasts. Meanwhile, multicultural praxis often chafes at the norms of country and nation that would confine languages, literatures, and cultures to fixed points in space and time. This theme is a call to reflect on the importance of country, and to debate its entailments for our fields of study

We are looking for proposals for individual presentations, for curated panel sessions, for practice-focused workshops, and for organisational business meetings. If you would be interested to submit a proposal, please follow the links on the Congress webpage: https://www.vu.edu.au/30th-FILLM-Congress. The deadline for this 1st CfP is 30 September 2025.

Registration, travel, and accommodation information will be available on that same webpage in the coming months.

This 1st CfP has been scheduled early, particularly to enable participation from colleagues and presenters who will be seeking funding support and/or visa approval to attend. Any proposal received by the 1st deadline, and which is approved by the scholarly peer review, is guaranteed to receive formal notice of approval no later than November 2025-allowing more than 12 months to make arrangements.

Please do join us in Australia for this global event! And please feel free to circulate this information among your networks.

Regards and best wishes,

Tom Clark,
Convenor of the FILLM 2026 Local Organising Group