CALL FOR PAPERS   
Workshop: Literature and Sport – Genre and Gender
10 December 2025 University of Aosta Valley/online

The University of Aosta Valley is happy to announce a hybrid workshop on Literature and Sport – Genre and Gender to be held on 10 December 2025.

Keynotes
Dr. Roberta Grandi, University of Aosta Valley, Italy
Prof. Armela Panajoti, University of Vlora “Ismail Qemali”, Albania
Prof. Angelika Reichmann, Eszterházy Károly University, Hungary

Fuelled by such critically acclaimed films as Chariots of Fire (1981), Million Dollar Baby (2004) or Invictus (2009), recently re envigorated discussions of representation have a growing interest in sports in visual media. This interest has produced such insightful analyses of sports’ role in performing gender as for instance Viridiana Lieberman’s Sports Heroines on Film (2015) or various chapters in Sports, Film and National Culture (2021). Nonetheless, no systematic study of this aspect is discernible in literary studies, though relevant texts, like Bernard Malamud’s The Natural (1952) or Naomi Benaron’s Running the Rift (2010), abound. In this workshop, we discuss sport(s) in Anglophone fiction, with the aim to analyze the various forms of representations—cultural, social, political—featuring sports in literatures in English since the late 19th century. We scrutinise, specifically, the interrelationships of gender, genre and sports, bearing in mind that genres are “cultural categories” associated “with the cultural practices of the society [i.e. social groups] in which they are produced,” and thus “[w]hen writers make use of a genre which has traditionally been an avenue of expression for another […] group, they attempt to make that form of expression relatable to other […] groups of people.”

With a view to publishing the proceedings of the workshop and the ESSE seminar held in Lausanne (2024) on a similar topic as a thematic volume with Palgrave Macmillan, the organisers invite proposals for 20-minute online presentations focussed on issues of gender in sports fiction, including but not limited to:
– Performativity of gender and sports
– Binary constructions in sports fiction: masculine vs. feminine; heterosexual vs. homosexual
– Sports and society: social interaction, power relations, and identity construction—local, national, regional, international—through sports;
– The rhetoric of sports: heroes, celebrities and sports discourse in the public sphere;
– Gender (under)representation in sports literature

Please submit your 250-word abstracts and a short bio-note (about 100 words) to Angelika, Armela and Roberta at reichmanna@gmail.com; armelap@assenglish.org and r.grandi@univda.it by 20th September 2025.

Submission deadline for manuscripts (5-7,000 words including notes and Works Cited, parenthetical notes in MLA style): 15th February 2026.

Please note that the organisers are also planning to submit the Palgrave book proposal by 15th February 2026.