30th Congress of the International Federation for Modern Languages and Literatures (FILLM)
2026
Victoria University (Melbourne) in Narrm, Australia
8 - 11 December 2026
The International Federation for Modern Languages and Literatures (FILLM) proudly invites scholars, educators, and practitioners from around the world to the 30th FILLM Congress, hosted at Victoria University (Melbourne) in Narrm, Australia.
The theme for the congress is Talking Country: we are looking for individual presentations, panel sessions, and academic skills workshops, and other proposals that can respond strongly to this theme. This will be an expressly “on-country” Congress, where presenters will attend in person.
Talking Country is a theme that speaks against taking country for granted. Countries are vessels for languages and literatures, as well as fields of conflict in which cultures may confront, avoid, or obliterate each other. For many Indigenous epistemologies, country is a term of immense importance. It names a locus of profound responsibility that present cultures owe to their futures and pasts. Meanwhile, multicultural praxis often chafes at the norms of country and nation that would confine languages, literatures, and cultures to fixed points in space and time. This theme is a call to reflect on the importance of country, and to debate its entailments for our fields of study—including:
Interplay and interrelation (and conflict and ignorance) of languages and literatures, operating between and within countries.
Intersections between country or nation and other modes of cultural identification—examples include gender, race, religion, sexuality, and wealth.
Nation–affirming agendas and their normative consequences for languages, literatures, and cultures.
Various ways that Indigenous and multicultural contributions are reconfiguring received understandings about country and culture, as well as various forms of resistance to these changes.
Agendas for decolonisation and for worldwide efforts to preserve languages and cultures of expression.
Ecologies of places and cultures, including ecolinguistics and ecopoetics.
Ontologies underpinning comparative language and literature studies.
Interrelations between ancient or lost country, future or imagined country, and present or contingent country.
Countries talking, countries as voices and authors, countries as narratives and texts.
Challenges that ideas about country pose to education about languages and literatures.
1st Call for Proposals
Submitting a Proposal
If you wish to present an individual paper (up to 18 minutes content), a panel session (85 minutes, including discussion time), or an academic skills workshop (85 minutes), please do so via our conference submissions portal. Please note the information requested and relevant word limits for proposals, as the portal sets these out.
The portal will ask you for explicit information about your submission’s proposed participants, the type of presentation you propose, and how it will address the Congress theme—as well as its title and abstract.
This 1st CfP round closes 30 September 2025. Proposals received on or before that date will receive an outcome no later than 30 November 2025, affording presenters maximal lead-time to plan travel and seek any funding support. If you will need a formal invitation letter for visa, funding, or other purposes, please indicate this need in the portal when you submit your proposal.
We acknowledge the Ancestors, Elders and families of the Kulin Nation (Melbourne Campuses), the Eora Nation (Sydney Campus) and the Yulara/YUgarapul and Turrbal Nation (Brisbane Campus) who are the traditional owners of University land.
To learn more, please contact the Moondani Balluk Academic Unit on +61 3 9919 2836 or [email protected]
