Resonances and Dissonances

Resonances and dissonances: moments of echo and reverberation, rupture and interruption. In the increasingly fractured contemporary world, these competing, overlapping, and often incongruous concepts invite renewed attention to how past events, ideas, and practices continue to shape the present. Resonance, in this sense, functions not merely as retrospective recognition but as a mode of historical cognition, shaping how individuals, communities, and institutions understand and respond to cultural and political events. Dissonance, by contrast, may emerge from closeness to difference or from similarity, challenging assumptions about continuity and coherence. Resonances and dissonances are now, more than ever, a dynamic central to the ways we might grapple with the conditions of modernity and its aftermaths.
Papers might consider how resonances and dissonances function historically, informing societies, groups, and individuals; how postcolonial histories and legacies reshape the resonances of the French language; how literary and philosophical texts from Mallarmé to Duras, from Glissant to Mbembe, register the tension between fragmentation and continuity. What does it mean for two things to resonate? To what extent are resonances a product of retrospective interpretation? How is dissonance generated? Is it born of similarity, difference, or their interaction? We invite participants to consider some of these questions and more through their work at our study day.

Visit the Postgraduate Study Day page for all the details and the call for papers.

The deadline for abstract submissions is 30 January 2026.