Call for Papers — LFA/AAS 2027: Love/Hate/Relate: Adaptation and Affect

Call for Papers:

LFA/AAS Joint Conference 2027:
Love/Hate/Relate: Adaptation and Affect 

Thursday and Friday, February 11-12, 2027

Since this year’s joint LFA/AAS conference falls between Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day, we invite you to consider the range of intellectual and emotional reactions adaptations continue to inspire among hardened academics and their students, colleagues, and friends. We aim to spark conversations that may well begin with unapologetic expressions of enthusiasm (“I’ve always loved/hated such and such adaptation…”) leading to the immediate pivot we ask of our students who express such preferences (“…because…”).

If you’ve cherished strong feelings about specific adaptations or kinds of adaptations or adaptations generally that you’ve felt inhibited from sharing at conferences, here’s your chance to go public in a conference that will provide a safe zone for expressing those feelings. We ask only that the reasons you give for your loves, hates, or more complicated relationships be logical, or at least readily communicable, and that you’ll be open to the lively debates we expect will arise from all our presentations.

We invite scholars from all disciplines to submit short (eight-to-ten-minute) presentations on why you love or hate the adaptations or adaptation practices that you do, how your preferences have changed over the years, what you do when you’re confronted with disagreements, or why you resist the aphorism de gustibus non est disputandum and defend your loves and hates against contrary opinions. More specific approaches might include considerations of questions like these:

  • Do fans make the best adapters, or is critical distance essential to satisfying adaptations?
  • What do adaptations about love or hate reveal about their (or their creators’) relations to their sources?
  • What is, or should be, the relationship between appreciating and analyzing adaptations?
  • What is, or should be, the role of expressions of love or hate in the adaptation classroom?
  • Is it possible to teach adaptations you don’t have strong opinions about?
  • What kinds of communities are shared or contrary evaluations likely to produce?
  • If Henry Jenkins is an acafan, are there adaptation scholars who aren’t acafans?
  • What’s the relation between intertextual reference, obligatory inclusions, and “fan service” within adaptations of popular media?
  • How can recent theories of affect and embodied cognition in intermedial studies be reconciled with individual reactions of love or hate?
  • How might contemporary language around interpersonal relationships inform structural metaphors around adaptation? Can an adaptation be “clingy” or “ghost” its source? Are there “pick-me” or “performative” adaptations?

We particularly encourage joint submissions or pre-formed roundtables that already incorporate fundamental differences of opinion about adaptations of well-worn texts from the likes of Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Frankenstein, or the D.C. and Marvel Comics Universes.

Please submit abstracts using this Google Form by 1 December 2026. All inquiries may be directed to adaptationjointconference@gmail.com. We will notify everyone whose proposals are accepted for presentation
by mid-December.