2026 Royster Global Conference
Time: After / Before / Now
August 5–8, 2026
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
The Royster Society of Fellows (RSOF) at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill invites proposals for panels, workshops, individual research presentations, and artistic and or performance-based contributions for the 2026 Royster Global Conference centered on the theme Time: After / Before / Now.
Marking the 30th anniversary of the Royster Society of Fellows, this conference reflects on the temporal dimensions of scholarship, mentorship, creative practice, and community-building that have shaped RSOF’s past, inform its present, and orient its future. This milestone moment offers an opportunity not only to honor the Society’s history, but also to critically examine the evolving research, artistic practices, collaborations, and intellectual trajectories that the RSOF has fostered and continues to generate across disciplines, institutions, and global contexts.
We invite papers, panels, and workshops from across disciplines, methodologies, and creative practices that engage time as a concept, method, or problem. Contributions may approach time as an object of study, a methodological framework, a socio-political condition, or an intrinsic dimension of research and creative practice, or foreground shared questions, concepts, or practices. We especially encourage submissions that use time as a shared lens for interdisciplinary dialogue, collaborative inquiry, and imaginative rethinking across disciplines.
Potential submissions could include, but are not limited to, the following areas:
- Methods: Archives, data, and memory
- Time in and through scientific discovery: experimentation, iteration, failure, and breakthrough
- Temporal scales: planetary, evolutionary, historical, AI, automation, and acceleration
- Modeling the future: prediction, simulation, risk, and uncertainty
- Ethics and justice: Time, history, and power
- Afterlives of research: citation, reuse, replication, and failure
- Alternative temporalities: indigenous, migratory, futurity
- Crisis time: pandemics, disasters, and states of emergency
Submissions are open to all current or past Royster fellows in addition to doctoral students from international partner institutions.