MATLIT volume 12 (2027): Call for Papers

The "Forms" of Academic Work
Editors: Fabio Durão (UNICAMP) and Tim Lanzendörfer (Frankfurt University)

In recent years, humanities scholarship has turned intensively to considerations of its own various practices and infrastructures, the things the humanities do and the system in which they do them. One aspect that has received comparatively little attention is what can be called the question of the “forms” of academic work. Most recently, “form” has been proposed as an overarching concept capable of finding homologies between disparate sets of things, both textual and practical. “Forms”, as the proposed issue will understand it, designates the discrete things, objects, shapes, and configurations that emerge from and in interaction with academic practices and systems, from monograph books and journal articles to syllabi and keynote addresses to even breakroom chats and email exchanges. It also takes the guise of both “minor” and bureaucratic forms, such as footnotes, epigrams, letters of recommendation, lightning talks, office hours, and so on. The reach of forms, their historical and contemporary valences and the ways in which new medial opportunities and systemic infrastructural changes shape and reshape them have become an intriguing object of discussion and exploration. Academic work practices emerge to a great extent in particular forms, which in turn help shape humanities practices and humanities infrastructures, from our efforts to produce a certain size monograph to the need to write the prose of a funding application. But despite the fundamentality of these forms to our practices and professions writ large, the question of the relationship between form and academic work has been addressed only haphazardly, usually in individual examinations of specific forms and their work.

This issue of Materialidades da Literatura seeks to make amends in this situation by a discussion about the work of academic forms. Fundamentally, the persistence of such by-now almost transhistorical forms as the monograph, the journal article, the essay, the review, the grant application, the CV, and other more-or-less self-evidentially academic forms poses questions about how practices and forms interact with one another, how disciplines are shaped by historically persistent but by no means readily understood forms. At the same time, these transhistorical forms have been reshaped and revalued, resituated and sometimes fundamentally changed, by developments that also impact the larger infrastructures of academic work. Forms are, but have been taken to be, central to how we think and rethink our practices and the systems in which we labor, if often invisibly. Forms of qualification writing, for instance, are becoming awkward in a market interested in shorter monograph forms. Accustomed forms, such as the 7000 word essay, may come to appear less relevant against the backdrop of online publication of unlimited length. Digital teaching has created the need for new forms and revisions of the old; indeed, the affordances of the digital including the challenges of generative “AI” have barely been addressed in what they mean for academic work; and whether or not a lunch-break chat with a colleague is work or not is not clear. Indeed, not everything we do is readily perceivable as work, even though it generally takes recognizable form. Whether we are literary scholars reading Dickens, musicologists listening to Brahms, or sociologists going to football matches, often, the forms of our work are untransparently work, sometimes untransparently form. And that does not even address the fact that concrete forms which are the result of what is clearly work may be troubling in the larger system in which the humanities operate. Concrete forms of academic work meaningfully correlate with the perceived struggle against expressions of the academic humanities’ irrelevance: who but other humanities scholars read academic monographs, for instance? The insistence on greater public impact is often framed as concern over the forms of community engagement and outreach, including the role of social media and other forms of public presentation. The question of how forms are concretely distributed, often by international for-profit conglomerates, is ultimately about inclusivity, global barriers of access, and the appropriation of public value for private gain, a practice in turn afforded by the structure of academic work itself as understood largely for the production of objects in need of distribution. To understand these and other issues as problems of forms—bound up in the shapes and guises of our work—is a crucial step in rethinking what is possible in the humanities in the 21st century. The major intervention of this issue of MATLIT is that a fundamental (re-)consideration of the concrete forms of academic work is absolutely necessary to progress in thinking perspectives for the humanities’ future. Our aim is to think about how to most productively utilize existing forms and how to prospectively reshape and repurpose them, even as it imagines the work of future forms. 
We invite papers, including speculative ones, on the relations between academic work and its forms. Topics that might be covered include, but are by no means limited to and, may comprise aspects of multiple suggestions:

• The relation between the materiality of academic forms (their production, dissemination, physicality or digitality) and their epistemological and disciplinary functions.
• The affordances of specific forms, or academic forms in general, in relation to their various functions.
• Discussions of specific academic forms and their functioning in practice, in both historical perspective, as a matter of future speculation, and/or theoretically; this might include addressing pressing contemporary and future issues such as the impact of generative AI.
• The national and/or language contexts of academic forms, including their respective disciplinary specificity.
• The nature of academic forms as forms (understood in both narrow and capacious sense, philosophically, pragmatically, or otherwise) – including questions of what practices produce what forms, what counts as “form,” and related questions.
• The relationship between academic forms and their formalization, their becoming (unquestioned?) form in academic practices.

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Abstract submissions will be due on November 30, 2026
Notifications of acceptance/rejection will be sent by January 31, 2027.
Final version should be submitted by February 28, 2027
The issue will be published in March 2027.

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Proposals will follow a double-blind peer review process. MATLIT publishes articles in the following languages: Portuguese, English, and Spanish.
Authors must register and upload their files through the journal platform here: https://impactum-journals.uc.pt/matlit/user/register
For submission guidelines go to: https://impactum-journals.uc.pt/matlit/about/submissions.
Further information can be obtained by contacting the issue editors: Fabio Durão (fadurao@unicamp.br) and Tim Lanzendörfer (tlanzend@em.uni-frankfurt.de).
For technical issues, please contact the Executive Editor, Daniela Côrtes Maduro (cortesmaduro@hotmail.com)