Time, Memory and Forgetting in the Western

A Two-Day Symposium at the University of Essex

10-11 September 2026

Dr Richard Parker (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile) and Dr Jordan Savage (University of Essex) are excited to invite you to "Time, Memory and Forgetting in the Western". This symposium considers the role of the hegemonic American artform - the literary and cinematic western - on the global stage at a time when understanding narratives of power in the U.S.A. is more necessary than ever. 

This symposium engages with time, memory and forgetting as means of approaching and disputing hegemonic nationalisms; as reaching out to the speculative turn in contemporary art and literature; and as aesthetic and philosophical constructions in and of themselves.

We are also celebrating and exploring connections between our host site, the University of Essex, and the Western (and the Western United States) through our special event track "Dorn in Essex", looking at the work and legacy of the Gunslinger poet Edward Dorn and his time in Essex in the 1960s and 1970s, taking in the European student uprising of 1968. 

Scroll down to view both event CFPs!

We are delighted to be able to confirm three keynote speakers, who will be hosting plenary events at the symposium!

Erin Murrah- Mandril earned her Ph.D. at the University of Mew Mexico. She is an assistant professor of English and a core faculty member of the Center for Mexican American Studies. Her research focuses on Mexican American literary recovery and literary history, and she teaches American literature and Mexican American Studies courses. Her book In the Mean Time: The Temporal Colonization of Mexican America, (University of Nebraska Press 2020) examines Mexican American authors’ use of literary time to navigate U.S. colonization after the U.S. Mexico War. Her articles have appeared in Western American Literature, Arizona Quarterly, and Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies.

Neil Campbell is Emeritus Professor of American Studies at the University of Derby, U.K.  He published an interdisciplinary trilogy of books on the post-war American West: The Cultures of the American New West (Edinburgh University Press, 2000), The Rhizomatic West (2008) and Post-Westerns: Cinema, Region, West (both University of Nebraska Press2013). He co-edited the book series Place, Memory, Affect with Rowman Littlefield International, and has a volume within it, Affective Critical Regionality (2016). He edited Under the Western Sky (University of Nevada Press, 2018), a collection of essays on the fiction and music of Willy Vlautin and published Worlding the West (2022, University of Nevada Press). He is currently working on a new book Errant Wests.

Dr Jonathan Skinner is Reader in English and Comparative Literary Studies and teaches Ecocriticism and Creative Writing. His interests include Contemporary Poetry and Poetics; Ecocriticism and Environmental Studies; Small Press Culture; Sound Studies; Critical Theory; and Translation. He is founder and editor of ecopoetics, a journal which features creative-critical intersections between writing and ecology.

CFP 1: Time, Memory and Forgetting in the Western

“There will come a time when you believe everything is finished; that will be the beginning.”— Louis L’Amour, Lonely on the Mountain.

The Western functions under great temporal pressure: it is a historical genre untethered from history; a compendium of stories of personal struggle that insists on the mythological interchangeability of their characters; a mythological cycle that purports to stand for the legal basis of a nation. The Western’s myths take place at the end of time, at the start of time, upon a timeless and momentary temporal plane. How can we catalogue the types of time in the Western?  How can we theorise their interrelation? What durational spaces do other voices open up in the monolithic clock-time of the official Western? What time is High Noon?

This two-day symposium aims to bring together scholars working across literature, film and media studies, history, Indigenous studies, gender and sexuality studies and the environmental humanities to explore how time and memory structure the Western as a genre and cultural formation. We are especially interested in work that approaches the Western as a mutable form, continually revising its own histories through formal experimentation and political critique.

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

• Transnational, comparative, and global Westerns and their distinctive approaches to temporality
• Remembering the West in Essex: Edward Dorn and Gunslinger in Colchester
• Memory, recollection and forgetting in Western narratives
• Flashback, retrospection and unreliable testimony
• Time pressure, deadlines and constrained temporal frameworks
• Historical rupture, revision and counter-history
• Speculative, non-linear or alternative temporalities
• Indigenous and decolonial approaches to time and history
• BIPOC re-tellings and revisions of the Western
• Women’s Westerns and feminist temporal critique
• Representations of gender variance and queer memory
• Nostalgia, anti-nostalgia and settler-colonial memory
• Contested Western histories and archival practices
• Landscape as temporal archive or mnemonic space

We welcome papers on literary and cinematic Westerns, as well as work engaging television, digital media, graphic narratives and cross-cultural or transnational approaches to “the West.”

Further details regarding submission guidelines, presentation formats, and venue information will be circulated in due course.

The event will be held at the University of Essex on the 10^th and 11^th of September, with options for virtual participation.

Fifteen-minute paper proposals, panels, five-minute position papers and creative interventions are all welcome; we encourage experimental approaches to conference presentations. 

We invite abstracts of 250–300 words, along with a brief biographical note (100 words), to be submitted by the 29^th of May 2026. Please send proposals to richard.parker@uc.cl.

CFP2: Dorn in Essex

(Photo credit: Ira Cohen, New York Times, 2007)

Ed Dorn arrived at the University of Essex in 1965, at the invitation of Donald Davie, immediately after spending the summer on the Reservation in preparation for The Shoshoneans. The sudden move east and the connections it brought with the ferment of experimental poetics in the UK at the time would lay the foundations for Dorn’s great work of western achronology Gunslinger (1968-75). This conference invites papers on the work of Edward Dorn, with particular attention to his time at the University of Essex and its broader intellectual, cultural and political contexts, as well as thought on Dorn’s American West and his temporalities.

We welcome contributions that explore Dorn’s poetry, including Gunslinger, in relation to his teaching, transatlantic networks, and engagement with countercultural and anti-establishment movements. Papers might consider Dorn’s understanding of and representations of the American west, his position within the Black Mountain lineage, his dialogue with British and European literary traditions, or his role in shaping the intellectual climate of the University of Essex during its formative years.

Gunslinger is as temporally slippery as any western ever made and its germination in Essex and its calcifying look westward from the misty estuarine marshes of Wivenhoe makes “Dorn in Essex” the perfect partner to the Time, Memory, and the Western in which this Dorn event will unfold.

 Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

•  Dorn and Essex
• Dorn’s West
• Gunslinger’s Temporalities
•  Idaho Out
• Dorn and Indigenous voices
• Dorn’s teaching practices and pedagogical philosophy at Essex
• Teaching at Essex in the 1960s and 1970s
• Transatlantic poetry, comic books and movies in the 1960s and 1970s
• The relationship between Gunslinger and the British poetry scene of the 1960s–70s
• Dorn and Prynne
• J.H. Prynne and American poets/ poetry
• Poetry and the library/ library studies
• Dorn and Olson
• Dorn and Raworth
• Transatlantic literary exchanges
• Poetry and the university as sites of resistance and critique.

The event will be held at the University of Essex on the 10^th and 11^th of September, with options for virtual participation.

Fifteen-minute paper proposals, panels, five-minute position papers and creative interventions are all welcome; we encourage experimental approaches to conference presentations. 

We invite abstracts of 250–300 words, along with a brief biographical note (100 words), to be submitted by the 29^th of May 2026. Please send proposals to richard.parker@uc.cl.