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[CFP] “Layers: Physical and Cultural Constructions of Space in the English-Speaking World”, Strasbourg 16-17 octobre 2025

Le colloque aura lieu les 16 et 17 octobre 2025 à la Maison Interuniversitaire des Sciences de l’Homme – Alsace (MISHA), Campus Esplanade de l’Université de Strasbourg. Les communications pourront être présentées en anglais ou en français. L’appel est accessible ci-dessous et également par le lien suivant: https://search.unistra.fr/actualites/cfp/

Layers: Physical and Cultural Constructions of Space in the English-Speaking World

Strates: constructions physiques et culturelles de l’espace dans le monde anglophone

International conference organised by SEARCH (Savoirs dans l’Espace Anglophone: Représentations, Culture, Histoire)

Conférence internationale organisée par SEARCH (Savoirs dans l’Espace Anglophone: Représentations, Culture, Histoire)

The University of Strasbourg, 16-17 October 2025

Keynote lectures: 

Jeremy Davies (University of Leeds)

Laurent Olivier (Musée d’archéologie nationale de Saint-Germain-en-Laye)

Call for papers

In connection with the SEARCH research group’s focus on “Spaces, territories and landscapes in the English-speaking world”, this conference aims to explore the notion of layers as an epistemological and representational prism through which to apprehend the temporalities of human and non-human spaces, understand the physical, cultural and social processes that shape them, as well as uncover the traces of the past embedded in them, in order to foster an interdisciplinary dialogue between earth sciences, geography, history, archaeology, literature and the arts. 

One of the most vivid ways of addressing the current environmental crisis consists in suggesting that humanity’s ability to shape and alter the surface of the earth has led to a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. Although the formalization of such an epoch is a matter of debate among earth scientists, the notion introduced in 2000 by Crutzen and Stoermer points to the relevance of the trope of layers as a means to articulate human temporalities with non-human ones as well as reflect about the historical pregnancy of the spaces inhabited and experienced by humans. Literally, layers may refer to the actual geological strata through which physical landscapes are formed. They may also refer to the successive processes through which humans have shaped landscapes and territories from generation to generation (Hoskins 1955, Ingold 1992, Tilley 1994, Massey 2005). They may also be understood as the strata of historical time, as with the Annales school’s tripartite distinction between the “longue durée” of geographical and environmental time, medium-term social and economic evolutions, and the superficial course of human events, or Foucault’s archaeology of the history of thought and structures of knowledge (Braudel 1949; Foucault 1966 and 1969). Discursive and physical layers, as markers of human and geological history, have often connected scientific and imaginative modes of apprehending the world. Thus, the development of stratigraphy in the eighteenth century, coupled with significant archaeological discoveries in the Mediterranean world, appears to have sparked a fascination with the buried strata of the past among generations of artists and writers afterwards. More recently, experimental cartographies have brought together writers, artists and geographers in attempts to recover the strata hidden under the names and landmarks of official maps (Solnit 2010, Manolescu 2018).

Physical landscapes are formed and evolve through layers, geological layers in the long term, but also layers of human activity, often ignored, willfully or not, by the following generations. William Cronon (1983) has shown how Native Americans had worked and shaped the land in what would become New England before the arrival of European settlers, which contradicts the colonial discourse of terra nullius. The denial of previous human activity having shaped the landscape of the New World was foundational in the creation of the National Parks system, supposedly tasked with the conservation of a sublime wilderness unspoiled by human activity (Black 2012). Yet, reading those landscapes from a diachronic perspective can be a precious tool to unearth previous practices, beliefs, or knowledge and thus enrich place-based histories (Chevallier 1976). The process identified by Indigenous studies scholars as “resurgence”, through which Indigenous people are not only “transforming the colonial outside,” but also “re-investing [their] own ways of being,” (Simpson 2011, p.17, Corntassel 2018), may be a way to reveal overlapping geographies (Barnd 2017) as well as “alternative spatial imaginations” (Paasi 2012). Literature records similar phenomena, when the past thought to have been erased resurfaces (Margaret Atwood, Surfacing, 1972) or when deep time is explored through a careful consideration of the landscape from the Ice Age to the Anthropocene (Kathleen Jamie, Surfacing, 2019).

But those layers of soil, practices, imaginations are not only added through the passage of time, they can be subtracted as well, intentionally or not. For instance, contemporary concerns about climate change have led to reconsidering the harmful impacts of unbridled urbanization. Thus, the last decades have seen a movement to remove layers of asphalt and other artificial materials in order to render cities less susceptible to floods and heat islands. On the other hand, the climate crisis itself has led to the gradual thawing of the permafrost, jeopardizing the future of the planet through loss of habitat and the threat of liberated viruses (Larsen et al. 2021). 

The concept of layers is integral to literary analysis, and highlighting “layers of meaning” is central to the discipline. Beyond the metaphor in this commonplace phrase, the connection between layers and literature is perhaps most obvious in the context of reception studies. Different readers in different times and places make up the complex and interrelated strata of interpretation, and as texts travel through time and space, either as translations or successive editions, new levels of meaning gradually accumulate. The critical edition of texts can be seen as resulting from the need to manage layers of interpretation by documenting them, by synthesizing them, or even by silencing them. As Howard Felperin explains, for instance, by the end of the eighteenth century, “Shakespeare’s texts and its meanings had become inaccessible to precisely the extent that the notes, commentaries, and prefatory materials of an entire century had endeavoured to make them available” (Felperin 1990, 11): the interpretive tradition was felt to obscure the texts rather than to make them available and readable. More recently, it has been claimed that “unediting” texts is necessary to recover the meaning of early modern texts “filtered through eighteenth-century and Victorian sensibilities” (Marcus 1996). Can the renewal of book history and manuscript studies in that field over the last decades be seen as an archeological process of recovery, or is it merely adding another layer of interpretive gestures? Rewritings of established works and myths which put marginal characters or events within the existing narratives at center stage may also be of interest. In Longbourn (Baker 2013), the rewriting of Pride and Prejudice (1813) brings the staff to the forefront of the narrative, leading not only to a thematic but also a geographical shift. A new layer of interpretation is created, yielding in turn a multiplicity of readings. 

The concept of layers may also refer to social strata and class hierarchies in the construction and articulation of a social order. As defined by US sociologist William Lloyd Warner (1941), social stratification reflects a social organization that is based on multiple criteria – income, professional status or status of power – but that does not rely on a clear-cut opposition deriving from the domination of one group over another. This conception thus departs from the Marxist approach of social classes. Hence social layers might be perceived and analyzed as more permeable than social classes since they allow the possibility of upward/downward mobility.

We welcome contributions focusing on social, cultural, historical and physical processes of layering and resurfacing in the English-speaking world. While layers may be especially conceived as a means to articulate spatial and historical processes, and to reflect about the processes of construction of territories and landscapes, literary, sociological and artistic approaches to the notion are also invited. Perspectives from the environmental humanities, postcolonial studies, geocriticism and geohistory are encouraged.

Submission guidelines: please send an abstract of 200 to 250 words, as well as a short bio (max 150 words), by March 31, 2025, to Sandrine Baudry (baudry@unistra.fr), June Misset (jmisset@unistra.fr) and Hélène Ibata (hibata@unistra.fr)

Bibliography/ Bibliographie:

BARND, Natchee B. Native Space: Geographic Strategies to Unsettle Settler Colonialism (Corvallis: Oregon State University, 2017)

BLACK,  George. Empire of Shadows: the Epic Story of Yellowstone (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2012)

BORDERIE, Quentin et Ferréol SALOMON. Urban Geoarcheology (Paris : CNRS éditions, 2024)

BRAUDEL, Fernand. La Méditerranée et le Monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II (Paris: A. Colin, 1949)

CORNTASSEL, Jeff, ed. Everyday Acts of Resurgence: People, Places, Practices (Daykeeper Press, 2018)

CRONON, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England (Hill and Wang, 1983)

CRUTZEN, Paul and STOERMER, Eugene. “The ‘Anthropocene’ ”, IGBP Newsletter, n° 41, May 2000, p. 17-18.

DAVIES, Jeremy. The Altered Landscape: Literature, Environment and Industry in Britain, 1799–1825, forthcoming.

—-. The Birth of the Anthropocene (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2016)

DERRIDA, Jacques. Spectres de Marx : l’État de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle Internationale (Paris : Galilée, 1993)

FELPRIN, Howard. The Uses of the Canon: Elizabethan Literature and Contemporary Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990)

FOUCAULT, Michel. Les mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966)

FOUCAULT, Michel. L’archéologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969)

GRANDJEAN, Nathalie. “Introduction. Le personnel est géologique ! Écoféminismes à l’ère de l’Anthropocène” Ecoféminismes 41 (2024), 7-14.

HERINGMAN, Noah. Deep Time: A Literary History (Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2023)

HOSKINS, William George. The Making of the English Landscape (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1954)

INGOLD, Tim. “The Temporality of the Landscape”, World Archaeology 25 (2): 152-174.

MANOLESCU, Monica. Cartographies of New York and Other Postwar American Cities (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)

MARCUS, Leah. Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton (London, New York: Routledge, 1996)

MASSEY, Doreen. For Space (London: Sage, 2005)

MENELY, Tobias et Jesse Oak Taylor, eds. Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017)

MORETTI, Franco. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History (London and New York: Verso, 2005)

PAASI, Anssi. “Border Studies Reanimated: Going Beyond the Territorial/Relational Divide.” Environment and PlanningA 44 (10): 2303–09.

PERALDO, Emmanuelle, ed. Literature and Geography: The Writing of Space throughout History (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016)

SIMPSON, Leanne Betasamosake. Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-creation, Resurgence and a New Emergence (Winnipeg: Arp Books, 2011)

SOLNIT, Rebecca. Infinite City. A San Francisco Atlas (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2010)

TILLEY, Christopher. A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments. (Oxford: Berg, 1994)

WARNER, William Lloyd. Yankee City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1941)

ZIMMERMAN, Virginia. Excavating Victorians (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008)


OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Bénédicte Meillon (18 mars 2025). [CFP] “Layers: Physical and Cultural Constructions of Space in the English-Speaking World”, Strasbourg 16-17 octobre 2025. Écopoétique. Consulté le 21 juin 2025 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/13hvr


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