31 January - 1 February 2026: Student Conference "Critical Love Studies"
After our successful first student conference in February 2025, we are glad to invite students and anyone interested in the topic to this year's conference on "Critical Love Studies." Student conferences are a unique chance to engage with an array of presentations focussing on one overarching topic and discuss different perspectives and examples among students. They moreover provide insight into how an academic conference works and give the presenters a stage for their thoughts.
In 1924, the writer and philosopher Aldous Huxley opens an article in the British Vogue with the following words:
“La Rochefoucauld […] remarked of love: that there are people who would never have been in love if they had never heard love talked about. […] We may extend the scope of the maxim and say that even the people capable of spontaneously falling in love would not fall in love in the peculiar ways they do if they had never heard talk, or never read, of these particular ways of loving. For the fact is that there are fashions in love; fashions that last a little longer, it is true, than the modes in dress, but quite as tyrannous as these.”
This student conference is based upon the eponymous seminar that introduced the interdisciplinary field of Critical Love Studies by means of different theoretical approaches as diverse as affective equality, polyamory, romantic traditions or disability.
Even though, as Laurent Berlant phrases is, “[t]here is nothing more alienating than having your pleasures disputed by someone with a theory,” this seminar explored love in its constructedness. This includes, for instance, the material practices and embodied experiences of love in their interrelation with power and domination; the cultural contingency of the relation between sexuality and romance, or passion and love; consumer capitalism and the impact of film, television and literature on the ways in which we make sense of love and romance.
In the conference, students present conference papers on their analyses of different representations of love within the realm of British Cultural Studies through the prism of the theoretical frameworks discussed in class. Each presentation will be followed by a short discussion round.
The finalised programme can be downloaded as PDF here.
The book of abstracts can be downloaded as PDF here.
