2025 PAAS CONFERENCE 1st CfP
Polish Association for American Studies 2025 Annual Conference
hosted by
the Department of the History of American Literature and Culture, Institute of English Studies, Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland
MEMORY AND TRUTH IN AMERICA
25-27 September 2025
The First Amendment to the US Constitution guarantees freedom of speech and freedom of the press, in accordance with the recognition that truth is the foundation of American (or any) democracy. In 1804 Thomas Jefferson wrote: “[…] to open the doors of truth, and to fortify the habit of testing everything by reason, are the most effectual manacles we can rivet on the hands of our successors to prevent their manacling the people with their own consent.”
220 years later, these words are worth remembering more than ever. The United States and the whole of the Western world exist in a “post-truth era,” with liberal democracies threatened or in decline globally. Thanks to online communication and social media, “the people with their own consent” have never been more informed and misinformed at the same time. However, answering the question of how truth is endangered in the US, the literary critic Michiko Kakutani pointed out in her 2018 book The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump that the beginning of this “truth decay” began decades ago with multiple cultural and technological forces contributing to it. Yet, thinking beyond this recent period, it is safe to say both attitudes to truth in fiction and non-fiction in America have evolved since the country’s inception.
Memory Studies is a rapidly expanding interdisciplinary field of research which has been continually refocusing and reinventing itself for over forty years, with memory increasingly understood as fluid and dynamic: “a process rather than a reified object” (Bond, Craps and Vermeulen). This conference, devoted to the theme of “Memory and Truth in America” hopes to contribute to it from the perspective of literary and cultural studies, as well as history and social and political sciences. Considering the complicated relationship between truth and memory, in the context of the entire cultural history of the United States, we invite proposals for 20-minute papers or panels on texts of culture in various media, from print literature and comics to film, TV series, and video essays (among others), addressing (but not limited to) the following topics:
• “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth”: the (im)possibility of objectivity
• the tension between fact and fiction
• formal representations of the workings of memory in poetry and in fiction
• individual/private versus collective/cultural memory
• transgenerational memory and truth
• memory, rememory and re-membering
• memory and truth in life-writing
• self-honesty in representation: metanarratives, metafictionality, metatextuality
• unreliable narrators, misrepresentations, manipulations
• testimonies in non-fiction
• memory versus truth, forgotten truths, disrupted memory
• official national memory versus painful pasts
• contested memories and commemoration
• excluded histories and the practice of counter-memory
• memory versus amnesia, historical facts versus nostalgic revisions
• American myths, dreams and simulacra
• conspiracy theories, denial of historical facts
• trauma and body memory
• memory and distant past in American narratives
• memory and recent past in American narratives
• truth, memory and the environment
• the Anthropocene, climate change and truth
• American landscapes as sites of memory in fiction and poetry
• truth, memory and migration
• truth, memory and gender; #MeToo reckoning in the “post-truth era”
• truth, memory and race
• truth and memory in the American South
• memory and (visions of) the future: American “futures past,” Jameson’s archaeology of the future, retrofuturism, Native American futurism, Afrofuturism/Afro-pessimism
• Donald Trump’s presidency in American fiction
• the impact of AI on truth in American fiction and science-fiction
• other topics connected to American studies.
Sources:
Bond, Lucy, Stef Craps and Pieter Vermeulen, eds. Memory Unbound: Tracing the Dynamics of Memory Studies. New York: Berghahn Books, 2017.
Jefferson, Thomas to John Tyler, June 28, 1804. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. James P. McClure, vol. 43. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017. Kindle, loc. 18630.
Kakutani, Michiko. The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump. New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2018.
Kaplan, Brett Ashley, ed. Critical Memory Studies: New Approaches. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023.
Tota, Anna Lisa and Trever Hagen. “Introduction. Memory Work: Naming Pasts, Transforming Futures.” In: Anna Lisa Tota and Trever Hagen, eds. Routledge International Handbook of Memory Studies. New York: Routledge, 2016, 1-6.
Abstracts (ca. 250 words) together with a short bio (up to 100 words) should be sent to paas2025@uj.edu.pl by May 30, 2025. For panel proposals (of three or six papers), please include the title of your panel, the bios of each participant as well as the short bio of the panel chair. The conference is planned as an in-person event. The language of the conference is English.
Notification of acceptance will be sent by June 15, 2025.
Keynote speakers: to be announced in the 2 nd call for papers (mid-April).
Doctoral Workshop (September 24, 2025)
The auxiliary event for PhD students: The conference will be preceded by a workshop aimed at PhD students participating in the conference. The workshop will be devoted to research methodologies in American studies and conducted by Joanna Davis-McElligatt (University of North Texas).
Conference fee: 800 PLN (full fee; includes coffee breaks, lunches, and conference dinner) and 700 PLN (basic fee; includes coffee breaks and lunches).
Deadline for registration and payment of the conference fee: July 15, 2025.
Conference venue: Instytut Filologii Angielskiej, al. Adama Mickiewicza 9B and Auditorium Maximum, ul. Krupnicza 33, 31-120 Kraków
Conference email: paas2025@uj.edu.pl
Organizing Committee:
Michał Choiński
Matthew Chambers
Ewa Kowal
Conference Secretaries:
Anton Belenetskyi
Marcelina Noworyta