Celebrating H.G. Wells’s 160th/80th anniversaries of birth and death (1866–1946), this conference invites scholars from across literary studies, linguistics, film studies, political theory, sociology, history, philosophy, and other disciplines to examine modernity’s (con)texts through Wells, his contemporaries, and his followers. We aim to consider how their visions reshape understandings of the evolution and devolution of the human, humanity, and society.

            In many of his literary and non-literary texts, Wells diagnosed the shortcomings of class structures and anticipated modernity’s ills, imaginatively prefiguring many current ways of conceptualising the human in relation to the nonhuman. He started as one of the most prolific and versatile short story writers of the late nineteenth century, and he ended as one of the most celebrated sociological and political writers of the first half of the twentieth century. His views, shaped by a complex and troubled faith in science and reason, helped crystallize the formulation of pivotal documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. He died disillusioned that the new world which he had envisioned had not arrived, or worse, frustrated to see his darkest predictions materialise. Undermined and still overlooked as a literary figure by the modernists, who could not see eye to eye with him despite initial friendships, who is H.G. Wells for posterity, that is, our times? In asking this question, we recognize that Wells’s legacy cannot be confined to Anglophone literary history alone, and it still speaks urgently to contemporary crises of technology, social fragmentation and political imagination.

            We especially welcome approaches that could help us position Wells and other modernity/modernist writers within transnational literary networks and explore their influence on and dialogue with world literatures. These topics and others are most welcome, among the proposed conference focus points related to H.G. Wells: 

·        Author’s sources: from antiquity to Jonathan Swift, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan  Poe, and others.

·        Modernity and the new ways of writing: short story, scientific romance, science fiction.

·        Modern aesthetics and the fictional world: literary and linguistic patterns.

·        Representations of the human and humanity: ecocritical, cognitive, postcolonial, and other postmodern and post-postmodern re-readings.

·        Wells and international fantastic and science fiction: comparative perspectives across French (Jules Verne), German, and other contexts.

·        Wells’s legacy in Polish literature: Stanisław Lem and others.

·        Dialogues and contentions with Joseph Conrad, E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, and Henry James.

·        Literary and linguistic depictions of science, catastrophe, and war.

·        Shifting cultural concepts: evolution and devolution, tensions of power, ambiguities of colonial appropriation.

·        Intermedia reinterpretations: film, graphic novels, games, and other media.

·        Wells in translation.

·        Political thought and the concept of world state.

·        Models of femininity and social change.

·        Wells and his engagement with history and the future.

·        Utopias and dystopias of Wells and other writers.

 

 

Proposals for a twenty-minute paper (about 200 words) and a bio note (100 words) should be sent to hgwellsconference@uwm.edu.pl by 7th June 2026. Notification of acceptance by 15th  June 2026. Conference fee (non-refundable) payable by 28th June 2026. The account number will be provided upon acceptance.

 

 

Conference languages: English, French, and Polish

 

 

Standard fee:  180 Euro                  

Fee for PhD students, students and accompanying persons: 130 Euro

 

 

 

We look forward to seeing you in Olsztyn!