Our Future

The MIRCAALT research group is pleased to announce its first doctoral seminar for young scholars, which will take place at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid during the upcoming month of April. It will focus on “Queering the Limits” in the broadest sense of the phrase.

In the wake of a world increasingly shaped by disconnection, fragmentation, and social resistance, the MIRCAALT research group foregrounds a critical need to interrogate the normative limits that have long defined literary and cultural discourse. Queering the limits means resisting closure. It means holding space for contradiction, taking Walt Whitman’s lines “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes)”. But furthermore, it means holding doubt, sorrow, resilience, vulnerability. In this sense, literature becomes a crossroads where relationality, interdependence, and ethical entanglement can flourish; where the boundaries between the personal and the political, the external and the internal, the textual and the material, are blurred. This gathering of early career researchers aims at building a transdisciplinary community committed to critical inquiry as we bend, push and, literally, queer the limits of many fields that surround literary works. We welcome works that traverse areas such as queer studies, indigenous and diasporic literatures, ecocriticism, disability and trauma theory, feminist ethics of care and affect studies, and beyond. We especially invite contributors that interrogate power, unsettle privilege, and foreground marginalized perspectives.

In alignment with MIRCAALT's objective of promoting English Literature Studies in an environment that is welcoming and enriching for both experienced and young researchers for the organization, the MIRCAALT Young Scholars Seminar takes over this task and aims at creating a collaborative space where young researchers may address their topics of interest, concerns and expectations regarding the academic field among peers. This seminar’s organizing committee seeks to reflect effectively those objectives, and therefore it presents itself as a communal effort beyond the MIRCAALT limits. It is a collaboration between the young members of this research group and other junior scholars who belong to Philobiblion: Young Researchers of Hispanic Literature Association, also based at UAM. This seminar is part of the nationally funded project PID2024-1600044OB-I00: Intersectional Maternities: Matrifocal Narratives and New Types of Family in Anglophone Literature (MILA).