New Doctoral school of film and intermedial studies at the Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania, Cluj-Napoca

Published in August, 2026

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We are delighted to announce the launch of our new DOCTORAL SCHOOL OF FILM AND INTERMEDIAL STUDIES at the Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania, Cluj-Napoca.

 

This has been a longtime dream of ours that has finally come true. Our university has been a vibrant hub for intermedial studies for years, specializing in research on cinematic intermediality conducted within our Centre for Cinematic Intermediality and Visual Culture and within a series of research projects. The international conferences we have organized attract participants from all over the world. We have regularly published selections of works resulting from these conferences in our international scientific journal (Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies) and in many edited volumes (most recent: Affective Intermediality. Moving Images Between Media, Sensation and Reality, Palgrave-Macmillan, 2026).

 

Now, we have this exciting opportunity to enlarge the framework of our research through this dedicated PhD School, which connects film studies with the study of intermediality. We believe that researching intermediality in the digital and postdigital era – in which moving images have become an integral part of everyday existence – is not just an academic option for the study of film, but a critical necessity for understanding the hybrid media landscape of our everyday reality and the cognitive, aesthetic, and affective processes generated by the dynamics of media networks. Moving images have long since crossed the threshold of cinemas, entering art galleries and everyday life. We live in a social and cultural context in which life is constantly mediated and re-mediated, and cinematic experiences are ubiquitous. This Doctoral School aims to offer a vision of cinema and the dynamics of media in constant interdependence and change, connected to social practices. See further details on our website.

 

studies. Enrolment starts in September. There will be 3 PhD positions with scholarships, 3 without a scholarship but tuition-free, and also some tuition-paying positions.

 

If you are interested in being part of such a PhD programme and would like to learn more about this, please write to the Director of the School, Ágnes Pethő, at this email address: petho.agnes@kv.sapientia.ro

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Looking at Writing, College Art Association, CAA 115th Annual Conference in New York,

3–6 February 2027 (Affiliated Society: IAWIS)

Published in July, 2026

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CFP deadline: 31 August 2026

Tilo Reifenstein, York St John University, UK, t.reifenstein@yorksj.ac.uk

Avril Tynan, University of Turku, Finland, avril.tynan@utu.fi

 

Recognising the image in or of the text necessarily blurs the identity and task of the reader-viewer. Different approaches to reading, including close reading, surface reading (Best & Marcus 2009), and slow reading (Newkirk 2012) not only affirm their participation in looking, but raise questions of how they relate to their image-bound counterparts: close looking, gazing, viewing.

 

Looking at the image of text has recently received renewed scholarly attention, especially in view of a re-invigorated interest in writing’s material qualities. Juliet Fleming (2016), for example, outlined a cultural graphology that pays attention to spaces and ink, while Anne Royston (2019) drew out the proximity of artist’s books and theory. Artists who write and writers attuned to the image of/in their texts enable us to explore the effects of reading as a form of looking and vice versa. Can we also transpose these conditions of looking to our encounters with others, whose faces and actions we read (or misread)? Our concepts and approaches to looking, like reading, are shaped by conventions of normativity. But what sort of looking-reading emerges from feminist, postcolonial, queer or crip perspectives? Who is the reader-viewer if we suspend the distinctions and assumptions of literacy and sightedness?

 

Through what Mieke Bal (1991) described as ‘beyond the word-image opposition’, this panel engages with acts of looking at/with/in written texts and explores experiential, ethical and methodological consequences of reading-looking and looking-reading. It considers how acts of looking provoke or perpetuate asymmetries and tensions between the looker and the looked-at.

 

KEY DATES

31 August: Deadline to submit your presentation title, 250-word proposal, 2-page CV (max) to the session using the “Submit an Abstract to this Session” button at https://collegeart.org/programs/conference/proposals (from 27 July onwards). Note that you’re required to have a CAA account, though membership is not necessary at this step. Please see the useful submission information offered at the above link.

 

16 September: Deadline for session chairs to finalize session and inform submitters of decisions via email. Accepted submitters will receive an email to access their own SC after 25 September.

 

Please don’t hesitate to direct any queries to Tilo or Avril.

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Textual Embodiments: Remediating Meaning Across the Disciplines 

Rome Link Campus University, September 11-12, 2026

Published in May, 2026

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Eighteenth-century philology, as the science of editing and interpreting texts, while evolving in compartmentalised disciplines within the modern university curricula, formalised the analysis of written and visual works according to a shared methodology. Throughout its long history, philology has gone through important changes in the understanding of each component of the hermeneutic circle: author, text and reader. All periods in which philology was formalised as a discipline, i.e. the Hellenistic period, the Renaissance, and the second half of the eighteenth-century in Göttingen have elaborated a methodology in response to important changes in the material production and dissemination of texts. A focus on the technology of writing, the critical evaluation of the manuscript tradition, and the manufacturing of printed books and critical editions have all accompanied its evolution in response to the ground-breaking technological innovations of the time mediating culture transfer. As we are undergoing a new technological revolution with the production and dissemination of digital texts, this conference shall focus on the question of mediality in the production and circulation of texts, artistic works and performances from all periods. What is the role of each medium (writing, printing, digital textuality, artistic practice, embodied performance) in shaping communication strategies, literary and journalistic genres, as well as interactions and synergies with other media accompanying the written text? Which communities are involved in these exchanges? The topics proposed shall ideally contribute to a transhistorical, intermedial and interdisciplinary reflection.

 

Among the possible topics:

-the circulation of manuscript texts (including collections of poems, libri amicorum, albums, diaries, etc.)

-text/image dynamics from antiquity to the contemporary period. -genres of periodical fiction and non-fiction

-digital editions of manuscript texts

-the evolving structures of the English language in relation to specific media

-the history of reading, writing and publishing

-the mediators of culture-transfer (printers, booksellers, illustrators, colonial agents)

-serialization (of printed texts and visual narratives)

-the evolving media landscape through the lens of aesthetics

-performativity in conceptual art, experimental theatre, modern dance

-literary narratives foregrounding specific media

-self-reflexive transmedial adaptation studies.

 

Please send a 250 word abstract to Alberto Gabriele a.gabriele@unilink.it and Carlo M. Bajetta at c.bajetta@univda.it by June 15 2026.

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Inaugural Max Nänny Lecture 

Published in March, 2025

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IAWIS and ASCA (The Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis) are pleased to announce the inaugural Max Nänny Prize Lecture, to be given by Dr. Catherine Gander of Maynooth University, our 2023 Max Nänny Prize recipient. The event will take place on Friday March 28, 2025, 16:00-18:00 (CET) at the University of Amsterdam, Oudemanhuispoort, room C2.17 and on Zoom. Please see IAWIS newsletter dated March 7th for further details. Dr. Gander will discuss her research on documentary poetics.

 

Extending the Document: Contemporary Transmedial Poetics

This lecture offers some thoughts from a current research project of the same name. Thinking about the turn in documentary poetry toward formal and medial hybridity on and beyond the page, I take as my starting point Muriel Rukeyser’s lifelong advocacy of the aesthetic and political potentiality of contact between models of knowledge and creativity, encapsulated in her repeated dictum that “poetry can extend the document”.

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I consider contemporary poetry that works in a documentary vein to materialise (and dematerialise) language in various ways, often via visual, installation, and conceptual art. I'd like to think about how practitioners of transmedial poetics – Layli Long Soldier, Cecilia Vicuńa, Bhanu Kapil, and Claudia Rankine among them – adapt docpo techniques (e.g. parataxis, quotation, collage, found material, etc.), and adhere to its ideological investment in social justice in order to open new, shared, embodied spaces between verbal and visual textualities.

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It is no coincidence that the majority of these poetic experiments at the intersections of word and image are by BIPOC or BAME poets, and by female and non-binary poets in particular. So the lecture will explore how the transgressive, transformative, and resistive capacities of transmedial poetics create new ways to respond to social realities and injustices that include racism, femicide, displacement, migration, exile, and extractive, settler colonialism.

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International conference in March 2025 

Published in November, 2024

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The international conference “Mourning Arcadia: Afterlives of the Pastoral Elegy in the Literature and the Arts of the English-Speaking World” will be held at Université de Picardie-Jules Verne (Amiens, France) on 13-14 March 2025.
 

Word-and-image proposals welcome!

Deadline: 30th November
 

https://pastoralelegy.wordpress.com

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Remembering Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe 

Published in September, 2024

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Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, artist, critic, theorist, and teacher, a long-time member of IAWIS/AIERTI and member of its Board from 2006 to 2010, died in Gainesville, Florida, on 14 August 2024.

He was 79. 

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Inspired by Barnett Newman’s Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1951, MOMA), Gilbert-Rolfe produced paintings exploring geometric abstraction which are now in some of the nation’s most important museums: the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Albright-Knox Gallery, and the Hammer Museum, among others. Born in Tunbridge Wells, England, on 4 August 1945, he earned a degree in painting from the Tunbridge Wells School of Art and a teaching certificate from the Institute of Education, University of London. In 1968 he moved to the United States, earned an MFA from Florida State University in 1970, and settled first in New York and then in California, where he taught at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena from 1986 until his retirement in 2015. One of the initial co-founders (along with Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson) of the influential journal October and a regular contributor to Artforum, Bomb, and Critical Inquiry, Gilbert-Rolfe wrote prolifically on modern and contemporary art, as well as on literature, film, photography, architecture, and theoretical issues. His Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime (1999), which included his seminal essay on “Blankness as a Signifier,” was crucial in steering the idea of the sublime toward technology. He discussed this subject in formal and informal contexts at IAWIS conferences in the early 2000s.

 

Gilbert-Rolfe was a passionate advocate of inter-art relations and wrote frequently on the interactions between images, texts, and music. As a member of the Board of IAWIS/AIERTI, he was instrumental in setting up the Max Nänny Prize for the best article in word and image studies and also the policy of the association’s support of smaller conferences outside the triennial conference. He was a committed educator, teaching at the California Institute of the Arts from 1980 to 1986 and then at the Art Center, where he was Chair of the department for eleven years. He held visiting posts at numerous institutions, including Princeton, Yale, CUNY, and the Royal Academy Schools in London. Members of IAWIS/AIERTI will remember him for his stimulating conversation and his droll sense of humor: the statement on his website describing the importance of uncertainty to his painting —“ I should like my paintings to be made out of uncertainty, or to make uncertainty be an active force.  There’s too much certainty around in art […] (I’m sure of that)” — is typical of his irony toward both others and himself. The irony, however, should not obscure the seriousness with which he thought about the connection between the work, the viewer, and the world, a theme that is evident in his teachin and writing, as well as his painting.

 

Gilbert-Rolfe earned many honors in the course of his career, notably the College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art and Architectural Criticism (1998) and National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim fellowships (1989, 1997). He is the author or co-author of seven books and he trained many students who have gone on to flourishing careers. In IAWIS/AIERTI he was likewise a supporter of young scholars. With his passing, we have lost someone who greatly enriched our Association by combining the practice of art with reflection on it and on its importance in the world.

— Michèle Hannoosh, University of Michigan​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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ESSE Conference 2024 

Published in January, 2024

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Dear IAWIS members,

We are pleased to anounce the CFP for the next ESSE conference organized by SAUTE, the Swiss Association of University Teachers at UNIL Lausanne, Switzerland, https://essenglish.org/). 26-30 August 2024

Literatures in English, Cultural and Area Studies

     Seminar 43. Word and Image in Process: Adaptation, Repurposing and Re/Trans-mediation
       [in person]

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This seminar invites speakers interested in diverse transformations of words and images in the process of adaptation, remediation and transmediality. While adaptation involves broader cultural contexts, repurposing puts the stress on the conceptual or ideological agenda of the adaptor. Remediation converges around mediality showing how one medium is adapted, absorbed, and transformed by other media. Transmediality, and transmedia story-telling, refers to the ways in which narratives are developed across various media platforms. We are interested in the complexity of the processes, their rhizomatic proliferation and aesthetic effects. We invite researchers working in the broadly conceived field of word/image relations including more traditional forms of literature/visual arts and film to new media, such as computer games and graphics, video, digital art.

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Convenors:
• Ewa Keblowska-lawniczak (Wroclaw University, Poland) freeway.bohemia@gmail.com
• György Szönyi (Szeged University, Hungary) geszonyi@lit.u-szeged.hu

• Liliane Louvel (University of Poitiers, France) liliane.louvel@wanadoo.fr

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We hope you'll be interested in this seminar ! If that is the case, you may send a 250-word abstract and a brief bio to the three e-mails mentioned above by 31 January 2024.