The 2021 annual conference will be held 8-10 April, with papers remaining online for the rest of the month. It will be hosted on the BSLS website, on Microsoft Teams (via the University of Liverpool), and on Wonder.
A live roundtable will bring together four recent winners of the BSLS annual book prize, to reflect upon the field and their own practice: Ursula K. Heise (UCLA), John Holmes (Birmingham), Gerard Passannante (Maryland), Claire Preston (Queen Mary, University of London). The roundtable will be followed by the announcement of this year’s book prize winner.
Other live events will include virtual cafés and pubs (with a quiz night), a movie watch-along, a PGR/ECR social on 7th April, and the AGM. Panels will be asynchronous, with videos, narrated PowerPoints and scripts hosted on the BSLS website and Teams. Each panel will have a dedicated Teams channel, with the text-chat function in each channel used to host the Q&A. A provisional conference schedule and list of the panels can be found here.
Our new facebook group will post previews and updates leading up to the conference. Please note that we will not be using Facebook for any of the actual conference events; if you don’t already have an account you will not need to create one.
There is no conference fee, but conference delegates will need to join/renew as members of the BSLS (annual membership: £25 waged/ £10 unwaged). Delegates will need to renew their memberships by 31st March to be assured timely digital access. Instructions on accessing the conference will be sent to members after this date.
It is very sad not to meet in person again this year, but we hope members will agree that we have an exciting conference to look forward to nevertheless! We hope to see you very soon – but don’t forget to join/renew by 31st March!
