Decodings Fall 2026 November Update

DECODINGS: Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts Newsletter                    Fall 2026, Vol. 33, No. 1 (November update)

SLSA/4S 2026 TORONTO: Technopower • Technoscientific Futures   https://www.4sonline.org/meeting.php
October 8 – 10, 2026, Sheraton Centre Toronto Hotel, 123 Queen St W, Toronto, ON M5H 2M9
Invited by the Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S), SLSA hosted integrated streams coordinated by Marcel O’Gorman and David Cecchetto within the 50^th-anniversary meeting (“Technopower”) of 4S in Toronto from October 8 to 10, 2026. This partnership with 4S was designed to generate new synergies, collaborations, and solidarity. Approximately 100 members presented during the SLSA streams. SLSA also sponsored an evening Awards Reception & Social Hour on Thursday, October 8, for attending members.

SLSA@4S coordinators Marcel O’Gorman and David Cecchetto and to the stream organizers who reviewed and arranged proposals were thanked for their contributions: Technology–David Cecchetto and Marcel O’Gorman; Ecologies–Irina Aristarkhova and Joshua DiCaglio; Play–Edmond Chang and Ashlee Bird; Art & Literature–Allison Dushane and Adam Nocek. There was a special presentation to Rajani Sudan, President, 2024-2026: “With gratitude for her extensive service as an SLSA officer, including as a conference organizer and mentor to junior scholars, and with appreciation for her co-editorship of Configurations.” Outgoing Executive Committee members–Member-at-Large Nat Mengist and to Outgoing Graduate Student Liaisons Damian Enyaosah, Christina (Ting-Ting) Shiea, Yangqiao Lu—were also thanked, and the 2026-27 Executive Committee members were introduced: President: Adam Nocek; 1^st Vice President: Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal; 2^nd Vice President: Paula Leverage; Members-at-Large: Katherine Buse, Steven Denison; Graduate student liaisons (2026-2027): Chase Bucklew, Mehulkumar Desai, Paris Weber, Zachary Yost.

2026 Awards  (with excerpts from judges’ commendations)
Bruns Family Prize (Prize Coordinator: Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal, Judge: Katherine Buse)
Zachary Yost in “Projector, Print, Program: A. K. Dewdney and the Media Paradigms of Recreational Science” traces the fascinating career of A. K. Dewdney, a professor of computer science by trade, who as a hobbyist spawned new recreational science movements in three separate media: film, print, and computer games ….The piece has the characteristics of much of the best work at SLSA: it rigorously and playfully discovers the sciences within the arts and vice versa, and it achieves this not by departing from humanistic methodologies but by insisting upon them.

Schachterle Prize (Prize Coordinator: Carol Colatrella, Judges: Lori Emerson and Alan Rauch)
Ethan Plaue in “’To modell out of a land of so much worth’: Model Thinking in Colonial New England.” American Literary History 38.1 (March 2026): 154-180, illuminates the unexpected contributions of Puritan intellectual culture to the scientific practice of modeling. At the intersection of American literary history, the history of science, and the history of architecture, this article stakes the claim that Puritan model thinking contributed at once to a scientific willingness to be selectively wrong and to the epistemologies of ignorance that are central to early American colonialism.

Michelle Kendrick Memorial Book Prize (Coordinating Judge: Rob Mitchell)
Sarah Dimick’s Unseasonable: Climate Change in Global Literature (Columbia University Press, 2024) was awarded the 2026 Kendrick Book prize. Set against the backdrop of the seasonal arrythmias caused by climate change, Dimick’s book is one of the first extended studies of the ways that phenology (the science of seasonality) could and should interface with humanistic scholarship. As phenology has gained new disciples over the past decade (due largely to concerns about how we track and make sense of climate change), its advancement has necessitated the use of archives typically under the purview of humanists, including diaries, paintings, photographs, poems, and films. Honorable Mentions: Lucinda Cole, The Fifth Plague: Cattle, Contagion, and the Medical Posthumanities, 1580- 1866 (Palgrave MacMillan, 2025), and Hannah Zeavin, Mother Media: Hot and Cool Parenting in the Twentieth Century (MIT Press 2025).

SLSA Special Commendation: Alison Knowles (1933-2025)
Alison Knowles is a foundational figure in experimental art. For more than six decades, her work profoundly shaped the ways we think about the relationships among art, technology, embodiment, participation, and everyday life. As a pioneering member of Fluxus, she consistently challenged conventional distinctions between art and life, object and event, human and environment, and artist and audience. Her performances, installations, books, scores, and participatory works were remarkably inventive in their use of ordinary materials and emerging technologies. At the same time, her work anticipated many of the questions about networks, interactivity, distributed authorship, and human–machine relations that are now central to SLSA’s interdisciplinary work.

When Knowles died in 2025, The New York Times published an extensive, richly illustrated obituary by Jori Finkel: “Alison Knowles, Artist Who Took Lunch to New Levels, Dies at 92. An early participant in the eccentric collection of artists known as Fluxus, she was perhaps best known for pieces centered on a humble tuna sandwich and a giant salad.” October 31, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/31/arts/alison-knowles-dead.html

Over her long career, Knowles collaborated with Fluxus colleagues such as Nam June Paik, Dick Higgins, Emmett Williams, and George Maciunas. She also collaborated with major figures in contemporary art and music, including James Tenney, Pauline Oliveros, Simone Forti, and John Cage. As the designer of Cage’s 1969 Notations anthology, she effectively collaborated with the 269 composers whose work and comments they presented.

Alison Knowles’s importance to the Society extends beyond her historical contributions. Her work offers an exemplary model for the kind of boundary-crossing inquiry that SLSA values. Throughout her life, she demonstrated how artistic practice can function as a form of research — experimental, materially grounded, collaborative, and attentive to the unexpected relations among bodies, objects, systems, and environments. Alison Knowles was an artist of exceptional achievement. She created a body of work that helped to expand the very terrain in which literature, science, and the arts can meet.

NOMINATIONS

Members interested in running for a two-year term as member-at-large to serve on the executive committee should email David Cecchetto dcecchet@yorku.ca and Katherine Buse <kbuse@uchicago.edu>. They also ask for nominations of graduate students who could be appointed by officers as graduate liaisons to the executive committee; up to three graduate student liaisons can serve in 2027-28. Each graduate liaison will receive a $300 conference travel grant to attend the 2027 meeting.

SLSA 2027, WASHINGTON DC

Theme: Habitability
Dates: November 18-21, 2027
Hosted by Texas A&M University

Submission site TBA

Organized by Josh Dicaglio and Dawna Schuld, SLSA 2027 will be a co-conference with the History of Science Society. SLSA sessions will be held at the Omni Shoreham and in the Texas A&M location in Washington DC as well as in other local venues. HSS and SLSA registrants will be able to attend meetings sponsored by both societies.

Habitability sits at the intersection of social and environmental concerns. In the wake of Hiroshima and under the shadow of the Cold War, the term had special consequence as a parameter for sustaining life on earth and beyond: for astronaut trailblazers during the twentieth-century space race and, potentially and imaginatively, for everybody else. Sixty years after the launch of NASA’s Apollo program we are reconsidering these concerns in a new era of space exploration, and asking what is habitable about the actual and virtual worlds we share today. Matters of habitability reconfigure ecological discourse, asking what makes a world habitable and, in turn, how worlds produce inhabitants. These queries generate fictional worlds and utopian creative enterprises. We welcome proposals on a range of subjects, but encourage submissions regarding the following topics:

• Space Exploration Then and Now
• Inhabiting Art
• Borderlands, Boundaries, and Uninhabitable Zones
• Performing Habitability
• Shared and Embodied Habitats
• Futurisms and Futurecasting
• Sustainability of Habitats
• Habitats of the Human and Nonhuman
• Digital Habitability
• Speculative Habitats and Worldbuilding
• New Communities and Utopias

Traditionally, SLSA accepts single submission papers, preformed panels, roundtables, and organized streams of panels. We welcome innovative and creative proposals, including book panels and submissions related to artistic projects. The facilities in DC will have limited space to display artistic works as part of the Book Hall; if you are interested in exhibiting (small, portable, or ephemeral) artworks, please note this in your submission.

We will begin reviewing proposals March 1 with a firm deadline for all proposals March 15.
Contacts: Josh Dicaglio jdicaglio@tamu.edu & Dawna Schuld dlschuld@tamu.edu

2027 Essay Prizes and Kendrick Memorial Book Prize
Details, including deadlines, procedures, and the names of prize coordinators, regarding the Bruns and Schachterle essay prizes and the Kendrick book prize, are on the SLSA website at https://litsciarts.org/awards/#awards

2027 Lifetime Achievement Award: Nominations should be sent to Paula Leverage <leverage@purdue.edu>, who will chair the Lifetime Achievement award committee; Katherine Buse and Dennis Summers will serve as members.

2027 Travel Awards           https://litsciarts.org/awards/#awards
SLSA will provide a limited number of travel awards for underfunded members presenting at the 2027 SLSA conference in Washington DC. Members of SLSA who present at the conference may apply for travel subventions by emailing their name, title of their SLSA presentation, an indication of how long one has been a member of SLSA, a postal address, and any information about their funding for the conference to the Executive Director carol.colatrella@lmc.gatech.edu by August 1, 2027; put SLSA DC Travel Grant in the subject line of the email. Please provide estimated travel expenses and the amount of support (if any) anticipated from other sources. If you have received travel support from SLSA in the past, please include information about that support (when and how much). SLSA officers will review applications and approve funds for as many as our budget permits; preference will be given to student members and those members most in need. Each person awarded funds will be mailed a US check after the conference; please make sure that you provide an accurate mailing address. SLSA funds can be used to defray hotel, registration, transportation, or other travel expenses.

SLSA MEMBERSHIP: Join or renew your membership for 2026   https://litsciarts.org/join-renew-membership/

Membership in the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA) connects you with a worldwide community of approximately 600 scholars, researchers, and artists interested in the multi-disciplinary study of the relations among literature and language, the arts, science, medicine, and technology. Each year the annual SLSA conference attracts hundreds of participants from many different disciplines, including the history, sociology, anthropology, rhetoric, and philosophy of science, technology, and medicine; literary history and criticism; art; art history; media studies; cognitive science, and a wide variety of fields in science, technology, engineering, and medicine. Members receive three issues of Configurations, the SLSA journal; four issues of Decodings, the online newsletter; and access to the LITSCI-L, a moderated email list that reaches over 1800 subscribers.

SLSA Book Series Proximities: Experiments in Nearness, from University of Minnesota Press
We are thrilled that the first volumes of the Proximities Series are now available! See https://www.upress.umn.edu/search-grid/?series=proximities Adjacencies abound. We are past the moment of merely thinking in terms of how opposites attract and nodes network. Today, disciplines and fields move consciously proximate to one another, in conversation and growing together. Further, the future is no longer sometime in the distance, but appears near to us, often grasped as an impending horizon of political, social, economic, and environmental catastrophe. Now more than ever, so much is so close. See the Call for Proposals (https://litsciarts.org/proximitiesflyer.pdf) for more information. Books in the Proximities series think proximately, that is, in disciplinary tandem, about the relationships within and between the arts, literature, and science, as well as how scholarship can best be in active dialogue with communities and the world around us today, and in the future. Published in association with the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, this series not only thinks across disciplines, but thinks about the continuities and crossings themselves, interrogating how and why their disciplinary proximities matter. Proximities publishes work that is crafted with nearness in mind: human nearness to one another and the world around us; nearness to one another’s thoughts; to our written and unwritten pasts; to critical trends and crises; to our futures ahead. This kind of scholarship powerfully catalyzes awareness of what it means to work interdisciplinarily by challenging assumptions about disciplinary thinking from the outside in, and the inside out. If interested in submitting a proposal, please contact the editors with a short description of your book project. Series Editors: David Cecchetto—York University (Toronto, Canada) dcecchet@yorku.ca and Arielle Saiber—Johns Hopkins University asaiber@jhu.edu. For information about other SLSA book series, see https://litsciarts.org/publications/

SOCIAL MEDIA AND WEBSITE REDESIGN: Wayne Miller, Electronic Resources Coordinator (wayne.miller@gmail.com), asks for new images for the recently redesigned SLSA website homepage (litsciarts.org). Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal and Ed Chang are developing SLSA social media. SLSA members interested in contributing to social media on behalf of the society are encouraged to email Ed (change@ohio.edu) and Ranjodh (ranjodhsingh.dhaliwal@unibas.ch).

Respectful Behavior and Freedom of Speech policies are posted here: https://litsciarts.org/awards/#slsa-policies

SLSA OMBUDSPERSONS: Any member interested in volunteering to serve as ombudsperson, should apply by emailing Carol Colatrella (carol.colatrella@lmc.gatech.edu); include a short statement of why you are interested in serving in this role and what experience you can bring the position. Current officers will review applications to make appointments. Each Ombudsperson is an impartial entity who strives to see that SLSA members and SLSA conference attendees are treated fairly and equitably. Any member/attendee can seek the advice of an Ombudsperson. The Ombudsperson is impartial, neutral, and confidential. The rights and interests of all parties to disputes are considered, with the goal of achieving fair outcomes. The primary responsibilities of the Ombudsperson are:

1. To work with individuals to explore and assist them in determining options to help resolve conflicts and problematic issues or concerns.
2. To bring concerns about the organization to the attention of leadership for resolution.

Ombudspersons: Marcel O’Gorman marcel@uwaterloo.ca and Kari Nixon mkarinixon@gmail.com

BOOK REVIEWS: Jay Labinger, the Configurations book review editor, will publish around 20 reviews per year, of books–on any topic–that are likely to interest a wide cross-section of SLSA members and Configurations readers. If you wish to propose a book for review, please email Jay (jal@its.caltech.edu) the author/title/publisher, a very brief description and statement of why it merits being reviewed in Configurations, and whether you would like to do the review yourself or, if not, any suggestions you may have for appropriate reviewers. Authors are welcome to propose their own recent book for review, with the same info. Jay will invite reviews via a posting on litsci-l, asking if anyone interested in reviewing one of them to contact him; the list of available books is posted at https://litsciarts.org/publications/ Check an issue of Configurations to see the preferred length and style for reviews. After a reviewer is matched with a book, Jay will ask for submission of the review within four months and will share the estimated date of publication.

The EUROPEAN Society for Literature, Science, and the Art is the sister organization of the international, USA-based Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts. SLSAeu welcomes colleagues in the humanities, the social sciences, the arts, and all fields of science, medicine, engineering, and computer sciences as well as independent scholars, artists, and scientists. https://www.slsa-eu.org/.

SLSA EXECUTIVE BOARD (2026-2027)

President: Adam Nocek, Arizona State University (Adam.Nocek@asu.edu)
Executive Director: Carol Colatrella, Georgia Institute of Technology (carol.colatrella@lmc.gatech.edu)
First Vice-President: Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal, University of Basel ranjodhsingh.dhaliwal@unibas.ch
Second Vice-President: Paula Leverage leverage@purdue.edu
Members-at-Large: Katherine Buse, Steven Denison
Graduate Student Liaisons: Chase Bucklew, Mehulkumar Desai, Paris Weber, Zachary Yost
Configurations Editors: Melissa Littlefield, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Rajani Sudan,  Southern Methodist University. Configurations Email address: configurations@smu.edu
Configurations Book Review Editor: Jay Labinger, California Institute of Technology (jal@its.caltech.edu)
Publications Committee: Pamela Gossin; Raymond Malewitz; Bruce Clarke
Electronic Resources Coordinator: Wayne Miller (wayne.miller@gmail.com)
Arts Liaison: Dennis Summers (dennis@quantumdanceworks.com)
Social Media Liaisons: Ed Chang (change@ohio.edu); Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal (ranjodhsingh.dhaliwal@unibas.ch)
Ombudspersons: Marcel O’Gorman (marcel@uwaterloo.ca); Kari Nixon (mkarinixon@gmail.com)
Past Presidents: Rajani Sudan, Southern Methodist University; David Cecchetto, York University, Toronto; Marcel O’Gorman, University of Waterloo; Ron Broglio, Arizona State University; Robert Markley, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Laura Otis, Emory University; Richard Nash, Indiana University; Alan Rauch, University of North Carolina-Charlotte; Bruce Clarke, Texas Tech University; Eve Keller, Fordham University; Jay Labinger, California Institute of Technology; T. Hugh Crawford, Georgia Tech; Susan Squier, Penn State; Sidney Perkowitz, Emory University; Stuart Peterfreund, Northeastern University; James J. Bono, SUNY-Buffalo; N. Katherine Hayles, Duke University; Mark Greenberg, Drexel University; Lance Schachterle, Worcester Polytechnic Institute; Stephen J. Weininger, Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
The Executive Director can be reached at (404) 894-1241 or carol.colatrella@lmc.gatech.edu.
Postal address: Carol Colatrella, Executive Director, SLSA, School of Literature, Media, and
Communication, Georgia Institute of Technology, 686 Cherry Street, Atlanta, GA  30332-0165

SLSA website: https://litsciarts.org