SECAC, October 21–24, 2026
Abstracts Due: April 6, 2026

Since the 18th century, printed text and illustration enabled viewers to travel virtually, populating landscapes with imagined histories and images. Across genres, these specters began to inhabit contemporary spaces, transforming the living landscape into a palimpsest where traces of past human creativity could be encountered asynchronously. This session invites papers that examine how ghosts, specters, and traces, literal or metaphorical, mediate human experience across historical and technological contexts. We are especially interested in how evolving technologies over the past two centuries have reshaped our understanding of presence, authorship, and authenticity.
Possible topics include: literary haunting and historical memory; virtual travel; imagined geographies; spectral authorship; the afterlives of texts, anxieties about AI and artificial creation; digital ghosts and archives; ethics of resurrecting voices/bodies/ideas through technology. By foregrounding ghosts and specters as critical frameworks, this panel seeks to explore how textual, visual, biological, or digital traces continue to shape how we understand creativity, history, and human presence in a world of fluctuating technological mediation.

Please upload abstracts to the submission portal by Wednesday, April 1: https://secacart.org/page/WinstonSalem2026

Email questions about the session to Laura.golobish@bsu.edu and nephillips@bsu.edu