14-15 July 2025, Parliament Hall, St Andrews
‘Tis sixty years since’
2025 marks sixty years since the founding of Forum for Modern Language Studies in 1965. To celebrate, review, and renew the founding mission, the General Editors of Forum are hosting an Anniversary Conference, inviting selected speakers from across the subject communities served by the journal to explore ‘sixty’ and ‘the sixties’ envisaged in their many dimensions from the mediaeval to the modern period.
To focus on sixty and sixties immediately challenges the draw of literary history to ends and beginnings, be it the fin-de-siècle or the year 1200, and provides opportunities for fresh perspectives and connections. For Walter Scott, sixty years defined limit of living generational memory. His Waverley narrates events from the Jacobite rebellion ‘sixty years since’, marking a generational turning point that requires the narration of the past. Sixties as decades often mark intensely productive apotheoses: the 1860s are a high point of European Realism (Germinie Lacerteux (1865), Crime and Punishment (1866), Education Sentimentale (1869)); the 1760s sees Rousseau’s major works: La Nouvelle Heloise (1761), Emile (1762), Confessions (completed 1769). The sixties also express the sense of change and conflict in texts ranging from Achebe’s ‘African Trilogy’ (1958-1964), to Grass’s ‘Danzig Trilogy’ (1959-63), to Angela Carter’s ‘Bristol Trilogy’ (1966-71).
In cultural and intellectual history more broadly, the various decades of the sixties emerge as pivotal moments: in literary theory, the sixties take us from Mythologies (1957) to The Death of the Author (1967), from Structuralist Anthropologies (1958) to Writing and Difference (1967); in an earlier age they produced the Geneva Bible (1560). Taking stock of the productivity, critical reflection and sense of new departures in various sixties leads us to reflect on whether these decades present moments in which a generation of authors can take stock on what has gone before. Do they come of age to reject it and start something new, or arrive sufficiently late in a century to complete its major projects?
And if the sixties as decades give birth to iconic works, they also launch individuals in Dante (c.1265), Lopa de Vega (1562), Shakespeare (c.1564), Mme de Staël (1766) as indicative influential figures. To mark ‘sixties’ is thus to think of the generations of writers they produced, and to reflect on the significance of ‘sixty’ for them, their oeuvres, and their place in literary and cultural history. And from births, to biographies: we think of authors such as Theodor Fontane (1819-1898) who began their literary career in or near their sixties, or literary characters in their sixties such as Fontane’s own literary mirror of himself, Dubslav Stechlin. Sixty as an interpretative lens invites us further to revisit the category of ‘maturity’, or the ‘late’ phase of an author’s work, as in Petrarch’s Seniles, Letters of Old Age, begun when the author was 57 and written throughout the 1360s.
The aim of this anniversary conference is thus to explore sixty and sixties for the wealth of ‘cross-fertilization’ and breadth of coverage that Forum set out to foster in its founding statement in 1965.
Proposals should include an indicative title, an abstract of 250 words, your name, and current contract information, and be sent to forum-60@st-andrews.ac.uk by end of November 2024. Further information on the subjects and languages covered by Forum is available at: https://academic.oup.com/fmls
Authors of selected proposals will present their work in a 20-minute paper scheduled in panels over two days on 14-15 July 2025 at the University of St Andrews. Financial support is available in the form of waived conference fee and subsidized accommodation for speakers, and a limited number of travel bursaries for which doctoral candidates can apply.
Two, peer-reviewed special issues emerging from the conference are planned for 2026-7 and 2027-28. There will also be the opportunity for contributors to act as guest editors/co-editors to further shape these issues. Forum has therefore made funding available for selected guest editors to host a workshop to bring their issue contributors together when papers are in full draft. Anniversary Editors will also benefit from the expertise of Forum’s general editors (Articles, Special Issues, Forum Prize) in final preparation stages. Colleagues are invited to indicate their interest in guest editing one of these special issues in the covering email with their abstract.