From June 3–5, the Society for Textual Scholarship (STS) will host its annual conference in New York City. This year’s interdisciplinary conference invites scholars to explore the rich and evolving relationship between Textual Studies and Memory Studies, two fields that while historically distinct offer vital and complementary insights into the construction, transmission, and contestation of cultural memory. In an era marked by the disruption and reconfiguration of once-stable social, cultural, and political structures, the questions raised by both disciplines feel increasingly urgent: How is the past preserved, edited, and transmitted through texts (where “text” is broadly conceived)? What role do textual forms, variants, and materialities play in shaping collective memory? How do acts of remembrance and forgetting manifest in the physical and digital traces of culture?
Textual Studies has long been concerned with the integrity, transmission, and material history of texts, offering tools/methodologies to analyze how texts change over time, how editorial decisions shape meaning, and how archives and canons are constructed or challenged. Memory Studies in turn investigates the social, cultural, and political processes through which the past is remembered, suppressed, or reimagined. Together, these fields and their associated methodologies open up powerful ways of thinking about texts as both artifacts of memory and instruments of its ongoing negotiation.
The STS invites paper and session proposals to be submitted by February 1 to societyfortextualscholarship@gmail.com. For the full CFP, please visit https://textualsociety.org/2026-conference-call-for-proposals/.
