Society of Classical Studies 156th Annual Meeting
January 7 - 10, 2026
San Francisco, CA
Call for Papers for Panel Sponsored by Hesperides
Organized by
Germán Campos Muñoz (Northwestern University),
Julia Hernández (Yale University), and Adriana Vazquez (UCLA)
From Dispersion to Dialogue:
A Comparative Reception Studies Panel
While recent years have produced a wealth of scholarship on Ibero-American classical reception, scholars of reception studies working in this area still often frame our work, as Maya Feile Tomes has observed, in terms of a certain novelty and precarity. “When can a fledgling or ‘emergent’ field—she keenly asks—be deemed to have ‘emerged’?” (“The End of Emergence?” Classical Reception Studies Network Blog, October 2022).
One reason for this disciplinary anxiety may lie in the geographic and temporal distances that separate objects of study across a field as vast as that of classical reception within Latin American literary and cultural history. If so, a comparative framework may help us define lines of inquiry that could bring together perspectives and methods currently dispersed. How could a study of reception in, say, colonial Mexico resonate with a reception study in twentieth-century Brazil, aside from the relative geographical proximities of these two polities or beyond the very abstract fact that both exemplify forms of reception? Could we speak more concretely about a “field” of Latin American classical reception studies by interrogating disparate cases like these and thinking about their relationship in theoretical terms—for instance, analogous strategies of appropriation, comparable methodologies of adaptation and analysis, parallel forms of cultural anxiety, and so on?
This Hespérides SCS-sponsored panel aims to foster such a conversation by inviting presentations on classical reception in Latin America that take a comparative approach, broadly defined. This might include analyses of classical reception in different periods and across distinct regional and linguistic traditions, as well as more focused examinations (of a specific work or corpus), but within methodological or theoretical frameworks that could be productively extrapolated to other Latin American contexts.
Please send abstracts of no more than 500 words (excluding bibliography) for a 20-minute paper as an email attachment to contact@hesperideslusohispano.org with the title “Classical Legacies and the Ibero-global World” in the subject line by February 28, 2025. Ensure that the abstracts are anonymous and follow the SCS guidelines for individual abstracts (see the SCS Guidelines for Authors of Abstracts). Submissions will be reviewed by two anonymous referees, who will make final selections by the end of March 2025, with enough time that those whose abstracts are not chosen can participate in the individual abstract submission process for the upcoming SCS meeting. The language of the conference is English.