information and updates
CFP / Registration / Peer Seminars / Housing
We invite you to join us in St. Louis, Missouri, USA, on September 25-27 for the 47th annual gathering of the International T. S. Eliot Society.
To register please use this link.
You must be a current member of the Society to register.
Our system will not allow nonmembers to register. Please join (or rejoin) us!
Early registration deadline: September 4.
Accommodations: The conference hotel will be familiar to any of you who have attended our gatherings in St. Louis. It’s no longer called “The Parkway” (it joined the Hilton Hotels group a few years ago). It’s now the Doubletree by Hilton, St Louis Forest Park, at 4550 Forest Park Avenue, St. Louis, MO 63108. The link for making a reservation at the Conference Rate is here (the cutoff date for conference rates is 4 September); the room cost ($159.00 or $169.00 plus tax) includes a complimentary breakfast buffet as well as parking at the rate of $15.00 per car per night.
This year’s keynote speaker will be Paul Saint-Amour, Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania.
The conference will include a reception, sponsored by Washington University’s Department of English, in Duncker Hall; a formal lunch at the St. Louis Woman’s Club; “Eliot Aloud,” our regular homegrown reading; and other engaging activities still being planned.
Call for Papers and Peer Seminar Participants
The International T. S. Eliot Society invites proposals for papers to be presented at our Annual Meeting, to be held September 25-27, 2026 in St. Louis, Missouri. Clearly organized proposals of about 300 words (submitted in MS Word, Google Docs, or PDF form), on any topic reasonably related to Eliot, along with brief biographical sketches, should be emailed by June 5 to [email protected], with the subject heading “conference proposal.”
We will be holding three peer seminars, too—described below. Participants will pre-circulate short position papers to their seminars (c. 1200-1500 words) by September 2.
These discussion-based seminars will meet in the morning of the first day of the conference. Enrollment is limited to 12 people per seminar, on a first-come basis. Please enroll by July 15th, by sending an email with the subject line “peer seminar” to [email protected] (include contact information in your email).
Each year the Society presents the Fathman Young Scholar Award to the best paper given by a new Eliot scholar. Graduate students and recent PhDs are eligible (degree received in 2022 or later for those not yet employed in a tenure-track position; 2024 or later for those holding a tenure-track position). If you are eligible for the award, please mention this fact in your submission. The award, which includes a monetary prize, will be announced at the final session of the meeting.
Peer Seminars
1. Teaching Eliot, led by Charles Andrews
Among the many perils of our new technological age is the move toward speedy, computer-generated prose and bland robotic summarization. Eliot’s densely allusive poetry, drama, and prose stands in opposition to those machine-created forms of impersonality, requiring slow, careful, and communal forms of reading. This seminar intends to create space for asking: how do we teach Eliot in the 21st century? In what ways do challenging literary works benefit our students and allow us to reconceive our pedagogies? Topics related to AI—as a tool or as an obstacle—are welcome. But, any other topic related to Eliot and pedagogy is also encouraged, as well as any other topic pertinent to teaching literature in our age of literary studies extinction. Practical, theoretical, and hypothetical ideas for workshopping are warmly invited for this seminar.
2. Four Quartets, led by Christina Lambert
In Mortality and Form in Late Modernist Literature (2014), John Whittier-Ferguson considers Eliot’s Christian poetry and presents “an edgy, unsettling, and unsettled Eliot” whose work “remains avant-garde and, if we can recover its essential strangenesses, experimental enough to be praised as perpetually modern.” This seminar proposes to read Four Quartets in light of this claim. How do we take into account Eliot’s religious beliefs, while recognizing, both in form and content, the fundamental sense of wrestling the poem presents? Papers for this seminar may tackle a small bit of ground in the Quartets from any angle. Together we will consider the formal and thematic tensions that rest at the heart of Eliot’s last major poem. “For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”
3. Vulnerable Eliot, led by Annarose Steinke
From Prufrock pondering his trouser length to Sweeney in the bath with “hams” exposed, moments of physical and emotional vulnerability abound in Eliot’s poems. The release of Eliot’s letters to Hale now reveals a side of “the English Lion” not always apparent in his public-facing prose and broadcasts. This seminar invites papers exploring vulnerability in Eliot’s life and work. Participants may consider Eliot himself showing vulnerability, vulnerable characters and situations, vulnerability as a critical lens, or any other way they’d like to connect Eliot and vulnerability. As public discourse positions vulnerability as both a threat to global security and a vital means of human connection, what might a “vulnerable Eliot” bring to our conversations?
You may reserve your spot in any seminar by simply sending an email, by July 15th, indicating your preference to [email protected]. Please use the subject line “Peer Seminar.”
