Flux and Flow in Irish and Scottish Literatures. Late-19th century to present (Boulogne-sur-Mer)

Call for Papers: International conference

Flux and Flow in Irish and Scottish literatures (late-19th century to present)

9-10 April 2026 Boulogne-sur-Mer (ULCO, UR 4030 HLLI)

Organising committee:

Julie Gay and Lea Sinoimeri Keynote Speaker: John Brannigan, University College Dublin

This conference seeks to explore the pervasive influence of the flux and flow of seas, oceans, rivers and other waterways on Irish and Scottish literatures from the late 19th century to the present. The rise of the “blue humanities” as part of what is often referred to as an “oceanic turn” in the humanities has turned critical attention towards the centrality of seas and oceans in the shaping and understanding of our real and fictional worlds. As Blum and Brannigan have argued, thinking from the vantage point of the sea invites an alternative epistemology that flows beyond landlocked and nation-bound frameworks, to embrace the connective, plural and interwoven currents of oceanic and riverine dynamics. Indeed, while initially blue humanities were mainly interested in oceans and seas, critics such as Steve Mentz have recently called for a more “inclusive” approach to the field, which would be open to multiple forms of water such as rivers, ice, vapor but also coastal spaces, islands and archipelagos (2023b, 143), encouraging the development of a “poetics of planetary water” (140).

“Archipelagic modes of thought” (Brannigan 2020, 82) with their inherent relationality, fluidity and entanglement between human and more than human worlds have become essential to contemporary critical discourse. In the wake of the “liquid” (Chen 2013) and “material” (Coole and Frost 2010) turns, the notions of flux, flow, and fluidity have proliferated, becoming emblematic of our “liquid modernity” (Bauman 2000). Yet, as Blackmore and Gomez remind us, “liquidity and flow are not straightforward concepts”, but instead “tropes and metaphors loaded with histories and ideologies whose usage is never innocent” (2020, 2). To engage with these terms demands an acknowledgment of flux and flow as both material processes and powerful metaphors, ones that have shaped the literary, cultural and political histories of the Irish and Scottish islands from the late 19th century to the contemporary era.

Critical scholarship by Lehner (2011), Brannigan (2014) and Campbell (2018), among others, has emphasised the generative potential of an archipelagic approach to the study of Irish and Scottish literatures. This body of work highlights the necessity of intertwining national and transnational perspectives to uncover the rich dialogues between Irish and Scottish authors and to interrogate the entrenched tropes of fluidity and flow. We are particularly drawn to the “alternative modes of connection, belonging and community” (Brannigan 2020, 82) that surface with the ever-shifting flux and flow of oceans, seas and rivers. Moving our attention away from the spatial imaginaries of land and nation, the conference will seek to explore the distinct singularities of Irish and Scottish literary traditions from the perspective of the “sea between” (Cuevas-Hewitt 2007, 240), with its constant flux of unstable relations and connections.

In recent decades, contemporary Irish and Scottish authors have increasingly turned their gaze to seascapes, coastal margins and riverbanks. Nicholas Allen’s analysis of the “liquid” aesthetics of modern Irish authors have opened interesting paths, suggesting a “sea-tangled”

lens through which to engage with contemporary literature. How might we articulate these emerging forms of “flowing” aesthetics? If the ideas of flux and flow have been important aesthetic and semantic tropes since the 19th century, how does their invocation in contemporary discourse resonate with the aesthetic register of the fin de siècle and early twentieth century modernism when seascapes, archipelagic imaginaries and coastal edges became charged symbols of both dissolution and renewal, reflecting shifting political, economic, and aesthetic paradigms?

Finally, how might flux and flow counter static notions of the aesthetic itself as a domain of permanence and limitlessness? These twin concepts refer to similar, but distinctive processes. To the idea of perpetual motion of fluid matter that is carried in ‘flux’, ‘flow’ adds that of a gradual deformation, erosion and loosening structure of solids. Together, they point to a double process of continuity, transformation and ruination, emphasising the archipelago as a space of transnational connection and ceaseless material mutation.

We invite contributions that explore the multiple ways Irish and Scottish writers have perceived and addressed the perpetual flux and flow of aquatic worlds, from the late 19th century to the present, and the poetic modes and aesthetic principles that have emerged from this engagement. Contributions might address, but not be limited to, the following topics:

• -  Comparative studies of Irish and Scottish aquatic literatures

• -  Coastal, maritime and archipelagic imaginaries in Irish and Scottish fiction, poetry and

  drama.

• -  Material perspectives and metaphorical modes of representation of oceanic currents

  and river flows

• -  Modernist legacies in contemporary representations of the sea and the ocean

• -  Maritime flow and material textuality

• -  Flux, flow and new energies in literature

• -  The archipelago and the poetics of relation

• -  Flux and flow and generic boundaries: hybridity, experimentalism, intermediality

• -  Narratological perspectives on flux and flow

• -  The flux and flow of language in Irish and Scottish literature

-  Flux and flow and transnational poetics

The conference will take place in Boulogne-sur-Mer on Thursday 9 April and Friday 10 April 2026.

Paper proposals of about 300 words, accompanied by a title and a short biographical note, should be sent by 1 October 2025 at the latest to the conference organisers:

lea.sinoimeri@univ-littoral.fr julie.gay@univ-littoral.fr
A decision will be given by mid-November.

Conference Advisory Board:

Marion Bourdeau, Université Lyon 3
Catherine Conan, Université de Bretagne Occidentale Lesley Graham, Université de Bordeaux
Marie-Odile Hedon, Aix Marseille Université Philippe Laplace, Université deFranche-Comté Hélène Lecossois, Université de Lille

Camille Manfredi, Université de Bretagne Occidentale Fiona McCann, Sorbonne Université
Marie Mianowski, Université Grenoble Alpes Alexandra Poulain, Sorbonne Nouvelle

Selected Bibliography:

Stacy Alaimo, Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2016.

Nicholas Allen, Ireland, Literature, and the Coast: Seatangled, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2020.

Besson Cyril (dir.), Scotland and the Sea, in Études écossaises 19 (2017), https://doi.org/10.4000/etudesecossaises.1151.

Hester Blum, ‘The Prospect of Oceanic Studies’, PMLA, 125.3 (2010), 670–77.
 John Brannigan, Archipelagic Modernism. Literature in the Irish and British Isles, 1890-1970,

Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2014.

John Brannigan, “‘[P]art of the nature of things’: Towards an Archipelagic and Maritime History of Literary Modernism”, The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 50, Back to the Twenties: Modernism Then and Now, (2020), pp. 81-94.

Alexandra Campbell, Archipelagic Poetics: Ecology in Modern Scottish and Irish poetry, PhD thesis, 2018, https://theses.gla.ac.uk/9102/

Cecilia Chen, Janine MacLeod and Astrida Neimanis, Thinking with Water, Montreal, McGill- Queen’s University Press, 2013. 


Diana Coole, Samantha Frost (eds.), New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, Duke University Press, Durham, 2010.

Marco Cuevas-Hewitt, ‘Sketching Towards an Archipelagic Poetics of Postcolonial Belonging’, Budhi, 1 (2007), 239-246.

James D. G. Davidson, Scots and the Sea: A Nation’s Lifeblood, Mainstream Publishing, 2005. Alexandra Ganser and Charne Lavery, Maritime Mobilities in Anglophone Literature and Culture,

Palgrave Macmillan Cham, 2024, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91275-8. A Floating Commonwealth

Archipelagic English
Stefanie Lehner, Subaltern Ethics in Contemporary Scottish and Irish Literature: Tracing Counter-

Histories, 2011.
An Introduction to the Blue Humanities

Lisa Blackmore, and Liliana Gomez, Liquid Ecologies in Latin America and Caribbean Art, New

York and London, Routledge, 2020.

Blair, Lindsay, and Camille Manfredi, “Re-Viewing and Re-Imagining Scottish Waters in

Word and Image”, Angles, 17 (2024), https://doi.org/10.4000/11qj3.

Christopher Harvie,

, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008.

John Kerrigan,

, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008.

Steve Mentz,

Glenda Norquay and Gerry Smith, eds, Across the margins: Cultural identity and change in the

, New York, Routledge, 2023.

—. “A poetics of planetary water: The blue humanities after John Gillis”, Coastal Studies &

Society 2.1 (2023), 137-152.

Atlantic archipelago, Manchester, Manchester university Press, 2002.

Peter D. O’Neill and David Lloyd, eds, The Black and Green Atlantic: Cross-Currents of the African

and Irish Diasporas, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.