Opportunities & Call for Papers

Call for Papers — What We Desire: Critical Perspectives on Beauty, Pleasure, and Value, 2026 ESA Conference

Deadline

February 20, 2026

at 11:59 PM

The English Student Association (ESA) is pleased to share the call for papers for this year’s conference, What We Desire: Critical Perspectives on Beauty, Pleasure, and Value, scheduled to take place on Friday, May 1, 2026, at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Submission Guidelines:

Email abstracts to [email protected] by Friday, February 20, 2026.
Abstract Length: 250 words for individual papers; 300-350 words for panels.
All submissions should include a brief biography (50-100 words), contact information, and 5 keywords that categorize your research.
Formats: Individual papers (10-15 minutes), panels, roundtables, or creative presentations.

About the conference

The ESA of the CUNY Graduate Center invites proposals from students across all departments and disciplines for a critical investigation into the question of desire through beauty, pleasure, and value. Among the questions this conference asks is, how is desire formed by the systems, memories, and material conditions through which value is produced, circulated, and lived? How does desire shape our understanding of value itself? We invite interdisciplinary, critical and/or creative approaches that examine the politics of desire and value. The conference will feature a keynote by Professor Joseph Albernaz (Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University).

Areas to explore might include, but are by no means limited to:

Art, aesthetics, and authorship within capitalist structures
The pedagogy of values and desires
Biopolitics of pleasure and pain
Beauty and ugliness in environmental or ecological contexts
Speculations of value in time, memory, and inheritance
The relationship between the sensuous and the critical
(Re)claiming beauty, pleasure, desire

This event is co-sponsored by the Center for the Humanities, the English Student Association (ESA), and the Doctoral and Graduate Students’ Council at the CUNY Graduate Center.