Call for Papers: Ninth International Piers Plowman Society Conference
Boston College
Chestnut Hill, MA
1–3 April 2027
The program committee for the Ninth Meeting of the International Piers Plowman Society seeks submissions for our quadrennial conference, co-sponsored by Boston College and Harvard University, and hosted on Boston College’s campus in Chestnut Hill, MA, located six miles west of downtown Boston.
The conference will feature two invited keynote speakers: Rebecca A. Davis, Professor of English at the University of California at Irvine, will deliver the 2027 Morton W. Bloomfield Lecture, and Shannon Gayk, Professor of English at Indiana University, will deliver the 2027 Heinz Bluhm Memorial Lecture, both as conference plenaries.
The conference registration fee, to be announced later this year, will be designed to be affordable to each participant based on their career stage. Spanning a Thursday through a Saturday, the conference will include catered meals, coffee breaks, and a wine reception.
The International Piers Plowman Society is a professional organization of medievalists hosting a scholarly journal, the Yearbook of Langland Studies, and a quadrennial conference focused on William Langland’s dream vision Piers Plowman and its broader traditions of alliterative verse, social satire, and theological debate.
At the 2027 conference, we are keen to represent work from across the spectrum of late medieval English studies, poetics, and literary and cultural theory, not only work centrally focused on Piers Plowman. Possible threads include:
- “Bodies and Embodiment”: Langland is a writer of and about bodies without ever stating, precisely, what a body looks like. We invite engagements that explore the ways in which bodies communicate meaning in Piers Plowman and its larger literary tradition. Submissions might address “bodies and embodiment” as part of a body-soul pair, as the vehicle of spiritual allegory, as the material version of an abstraction, etc., and blend medieval perspectives on embodiment with modern theoretical engagements (e.g. disability studies, feminist studies, trans studies, premodern race studies, queer of color critique, new formalism).
- “Dreams and Visions”: Piers Plowman engages with a vast surround of medieval European visionary literature and dream interpretation. We invite submissions that address aspects of Langland’s poem related to its character as a dream poem or that discuss other texts in Latin, French, English, Welsh, or other medieval languages that have to do with dreaming, visionary experience, faculty psychology, or literary interpretation.
- “Ethics and Action”: We invite submissions on any aspect of ethics and/or action in Piers Plowman or other relevant texts. Topics may consider ethics and/or action in relation to, for example: medieval virtue ethics, embodied virtue, active vs. contemplative life, ethical action, idleness or sloth, will and desire or appetite, drama and biblical pedagogy.
- “Poetics and Stylistics”: We invite submissions on alliterative meter, personification allegory, sound studies, medieval or modern literary theory, and topics related to style. Submissions may treat Piers Plowman or other related or relevant poems, theorists, poetic manuals, etc.
- “Study”: We invite submissions on how scholars study and teach the poem today, as well as the forms of study and learning that the poem itself depicts and thematizes. Submissions may offer practical approaches to teaching the poem or may ask or examine how the poem itself understands learning, reading, and interpretation.
- “Langland and Theory”: We invite submissions on theoretical approaches to Piers Plowman and other relevant texts. Submissions may ask how Piers Plowman or other related texts offer their own “imaginative literary theory” through poetics, dramatization, or other textual or formal means. Or they might explore how these medieval texts resonate with or put pressure on a contemporary theoretical approach.
We invite single-paper submissions as well as submissions of pre-organized panels. Submissions can either be earmarked to one of the aforementioned threads or be at-large submissions. We particularly invite submissions from early-career researchers, including graduate candidates and untenured faculty members, as well as independent scholars at all career stages.
When submitting, please indicate whether you plan to attend the conference in person, or whether you prefer to (or are open to) participate in a fully-online panel.
Submissions should be emailed to piersplowman2027@gmail.com no later than 8 Sept 2026.
Find out more at https://piersplowman.org/
Organizing Committee:
Co-Organizers
Nicholas Watson (Harvard University)
Eric Weiskott (Boston College)
Local Planning Committee
Amy Appleford (Boston University)
Arthur Bahr (MIT)
Holly Crocker (Boston College)
Micah Goodrich (Boston University)
Adin Lears for IPPS (Virginia Commonwealth University)
Alex Mueller (University of Massachusetts at Boston)
