annual conference

Postcolonial Bodies

University of Koblenz, Koblenz, Germany, 6-8 May 2027
Conference organizers: Silke Stroh and Nicole Maruo-Schröder (University of Koblenz)
Call for Papers deadline: 31 December 2026

Call for Papers

Colonial and postcolonial discourses have always been intensely concerned with matters of the body, and Post-colonial Studies has, particularly since the Millennium, repeatedly engaged with these issues in different contexts and from different theoretical angles.1  In other academic fields, research resulting from a long-standing pre-occupation with the body in Anthropology and the Medical Sciences has been added to by an increased (re-) focusing on the body in Cultural Studies, popular culture, Social Sciences, and the Humanities in general. Other disciplines, notably Cognitive Sciences and Philosophy, have added to this by emphasising issues of embodiment, corporeality, and viscerality.2  As a result, Body Studies, including fields such as Sensory Studies as well as Emotion and Affect Studies, has become a vibrant interdisciplinary research area that draws on and contributes to fields as different as, e.g., Literary Studies, Phenomenology, or Social Sciences.3 These wider developments are a fitting occasion to place a re-examination of the (post)colonial body at the centre of a GAPS conference. The conference aims to promote further dialogue between Body Studies and Postcolonial Studies, bringing insights from general Body Studies to bear on (post)colonial contexts and, at the same time, investigating how a postcolonial critical lens might contribute to the future development of Body Studies.

The confluence of Postcolonial Studies and Body Studies offers numerous opportunities for re-examining central aspects of colonial and postcolonial experiences. Key areas in the nexus of Postcolonial and Body Studies, such as mobility and migration; representation and display; racialization, marginalization, and violence; identity and intersectionality (gender, race/ethnicity, class, sexuality, etc); body performance and bodily practices; or medical, legal, political, ecological, and economic discourses about the body can be explored from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and approaches, both historically and with regard to current developments. We also explicitly invite didactic perspectives on the postcolonial body as one important area of exploration, concerning both school and university teaching. Possible topics for papers and panels include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • representations of the body, embodiment, and the senses in culture and literature
  • identities, inequalities, and intersectionality (race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, dis/ability, age, religion, nationality, etc.)
  • body politic / body politics (nations, borders, rights, restrictions, mechanisms of racialisation based on phenotypical features, etc.)
  • commodification of the body through enslavement, sexual exploitation, and other forms and contexts of (labour) exploitation
  • body performance and/in (e.g. social) media and on stage/screen
  • body practices (e.g., sports, fashion / dress codes / clothing), discipline and resistance
  • bodies, im/mobility, migration, travel, borders, practices of in/exclusion
  • violence and discrimination
  • vulnerability, medicine and health discourses (e.g., fear of disease and contagion, discourses of hygiene, appropriation of Indigenous medical knowledges, unequal access to medical care)
  • the dead body
  • colonised bodies on display (e.g., human zoos, human remains in museums)
  • posthumanism, transhumanism (human bodies, alien bodies, more-than-human bodies, artificial bodies, etc.)
  • concepts and genres such as the Gothic, the Sentimental, (Body) Horror and the like, in which the body plays a central role (likewise figures and images of the undead, the zombie or the invasion of the body)
  • the (material) body of postcolonial texts, archives, and corpora (which texts and documents are collected and made accessible? how and why?)
  • developing and promoting teaching practices in schools and academia that foster a critical postcolonial awareness of body discourses and practices 

You are welcome to submit abstracts (250-300 words) for individual papers (20 minutes), including a short bio note, to gaps2027[at]uni-koblenz.de by 31 December 2026. Panel proposals are also welcome; they should include a brief description of the panel and a 250-300 word abstract and bio note for each paper. All presenters must be GAPS members by the time of the conference. 

Work in progress in anglophone Postcolonial Studies – including M.A./M.Ed., PhD, and Postdoc projects as well as ongoing research projects in general – can be presented as papers or posters in the “Under Construction” section of the conference. Please submit abstracts for project presentations (250-300 words) indicating your chosen format (paper or poster), together with a short bio, by 31 December 2026.

A limited number of travel bursaries (200€ max. for participants from Europe; 1000€ max. for participants from outside Europe) are available for emerging scholars, part-time, or currently unemployed speakers who are, or will become, members of GAPS. If you wish to apply for a travel bursary, please mention this when you submit your paper or poster. The travel bursaries include a conference fee waiver. If you can pay for travel but cannot afford the conference fees, feel free to contact the GAPS president and briefly explain your needs. GAPS has a limited number of fee waivers for participants in financially precarious circumstances.

GAPS strives to create a conference in which everyone can participate in critical discussions of all topics. In particular, if a paper contains discussions of and/or representations of violence, presenters are encouraged to consider whether a content note might be warranted in order to prepare audience members. Content notes should be included in submitted abstracts for later inclusion in the conference program. Presenters are also encouraged to think critically about how they might choose to present such content (visually, orally, as text on a slide, etc).

If you have any questions or special requirements, including accessibility concerns, please do not hesitate to contact the organizers at any point.

The local organising team in Koblenz is headed by:

Prof. Dr. Silke Stroh & Prof. Dr. Nicole Maruo-Schröder

University of Koblenz | Faculty of Arts and Humanities (FB 2) | Department of English and American Studies

Postal address: Postfach 20 16 02 | 56016 Koblenz | Germany

Visitors’ address: Universitätsstraße 1 | 56070 Koblenz | Germany

E-Mail addresses: sstroh[at]uni-koblenz.de | nmschroeder[at]uni-koblenz.de | gaps2027[at]uni-koblenz.de

  1. E.g., S. Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (2000); M. Keown, Postcolonial Pacific Writing: Representations of the Body (2005); R.F. Romanow, The Postcolonial Body in Queer Space and Time (2006); T. Olaniyan & A. Quayson (ed.), The Postcolonial Body (2007); M. Falck Borch et al. (ed.), Bodies and Voices: The Force-Field of Representation and Discourse in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies (2008); C. Barker, Postcolonial Fiction and Disability: Exceptional Children, Metaphor and Materiality (2012); M.I. Romero Ruiz (ed.), Women’s Identities and Bodies in Colonial and Postcolonial History and Literature (2012); A.A. Coly, Postcolonial Hauntologies: African Women’s Discourses of the Female Body (2019); Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 22.5 (2020), spec. issue: The Body Now, ed. R. Duncan & R. Cumpsty; Gothic Studies 24.3 (2022), spec. issue: Decolonising Gothic, ed. R. Duncan; T. Chataika & D. Goodley (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Postcolonial Disability Studies (2024); E. Cleall, “Disability and Postcolonialism,” Postcolonial Studies 27.1 (2024); as well as GAPS’ own postgraduate forum “Queering Postcolonial Worlds” (2023) and the two resulting spec. issues Queering Postcolonial Worlds, ed. Rita Maricocchi et al. (gender forum 23.1 (2024)) and Envisioning Queer Racialized Self-Representations in the Americas, ed. C. Wieser-Cox et al. (AmLit – American Literatures 6.1 (2026)). ↩︎
  2. See, e.g., S. Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind (2005; A. Noë, Action in Perception (2005); M. Johnson, “What Makes a Body?”, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, New Series, 22.3, spec. issue: Symposium II: Words, Bodies, War (2008). ↩︎
  3. E.g., L. Blackman, Body: The Key Concepts (2008, 2nd ed. 2021); B.S. Turner, Routledge Handbook of Body Studies (2012); M. DeMello, Body Studies: An Introduction (2013); N. Richardson & A. Locks, Body Studies: The Basics (2014); D. Hillman & U. Maude (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature (2015); T.M. Foster (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Body (2022); C. Sherrard-Johnson (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to the Black Body in American Literature (2024); M. Bull, and L. Back (eds), The Auditory Culture Reader (2003); D. Howes (ed.), Empire of the Senses (2005); C. Classen (ed), A Cultural History of the Senses. 6 vols. (2014); C. Shilling, “The Rise of Body Studies and the Embodiment.” Horizons in the Humanities and Social Sciences: An International Refereed Journal2.1 (2016):1-14.; David Le Breton, Sensing the World: An Anthropology of the Senses (2022); S. Sekimoto & C. Brown, Race and the Senses: The Felt Politics of Racial Embodiment (2022); A. Kern-Stähler and E. Robertson (eds.), Literature and the Senses (2023); D. Howes, Sensorium: Contextualizing the Senses and Cognition in History and Across Cultures (2024). ↩︎