​​The 1st NEOLAiA International Conference on Narrating (Hi)Stories in Decentring Europe is an interdisciplinary conference jointly organised by partner universities of the Alliance of European Universities NEOLAiA, will explore hybrid narrative forms tied to lived experiences and memory, particularly in relation to historical crises and disruptions. With this analysis, we seek to reinterpret the concept of Europe through boundary-transcultural and counter-factual narratives, including themes like hegemony, migration and decolonization, to foster a more decentred understanding of Europe. This call for papers encompasses a wide range of narratives—oral and written, factual and fictional, individual and collective—found in texts such as autobiographies, memoirs, biographies, works of fiction, collective narratives and national stories. The range of subjects under examination are, among others:

  • History and life-writing  

  • History and memory narratives 

  • Relations between fiction and document: fact-fiction, ego-document and ego-history, etc. 

  • Hegemonic narratives and subaltern communities’ stories 

  • Oral narratives as a source of knowledge and as a strategy for meaning-making 

  • Narrative identities and traumas, narrative therapy 

  • Facts and their discursive representations: boundaries, borderliners, hybrid entities 

  • Material history and literary history 

  • Post-truth and post-factual societies  

  • Narratives, media and remediations: written, visual, multimedia and cross-media narratives  

  • Historicity of narrative paradigms: continuity and discontinuity in narrative models within literary history 

  • The role of memory in shaping multilingual identities in Europe

  • Language, trauma, and memory in literature and in historical narratives

  • Language, translation, and multilingual realities in the European context

  • English in European higher education: pragmatic adaptation and negotiation in multilingual settings 

  • Sociolinguistic perspectives on language use in European societies

We invite 200-word abstracts with 4-6 keywords for 20-minute paper presentations (+10 minutes for discussion) in one of the conference languages (English, Spanish, or French). Proposals, together with a short biographical note (60-70 words, including your name, institutional affiliation, and e-mail address), must be sent as an email attachment to narratinghistories.neolaia@gmail.com. 

The deadline for abstract submissions is March 28, 2025.