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Yeats’s Locations

The 2026 Conference of the International Yeats Society

3 December to 5 December | The University of St. Thomas, Houston

Call for Papers

During his 1920 tour of the US, Yeats gave a lecture on “Friends of my Youth” at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, where he was billed, along with former US President William Howard Taft, as one of the “First Big Guns of the Baylor Diamond Jubilee.” The invitation suggested that Yeats would appeal to anyone keen on “world affairs,” while the student newspaper, The Lariat, promised that this lecture by “the foremost English man of letters now living” would mark “a great day in Baylor history.” The event, however, elicited mixed reviews, with Yeats’s autobiographical reminiscences about the 1890s “tragic generation,” appearing, in the estimation of the local press, “to pass over the heads of most of the audience.” The pre-event hype points explicitly to the varied and often contradictory ways that global audiences located Yeats in place, here as an “English” writer trafficking in “world affairs,” and it points implicitly to how Yeats’s self-presentations of identity and heritage were always changing relative to his actual and imagined audiences. 

The reference to “history” reminds us of Yeats’s ongoing attempts to locate his personal life within and relative to broader historical metanarratives, including for example Ireland’s national history or modernity writ large, and it calls to mind the literary history of Yeats Studies, where important new readings are frequently based on locating Yeats within new contexts, such as the postcolonial, the global, and the oceanic. Finally, Yeats’s retrospective regrets about a lecture that was, itself, a retrospective account of the friends of his youth highlights the complex temporal signatures which persist throughout his writings—his (sometimes strategic) reimaginings of Irish heritage, of historical figures, and of prior eras, his thoroughgoing sense of belatedness, his fascination with moments when a present “self” reckons with a past “self,” and his reliance on autobiographical speakers who gesture toward a future-present of “coming times” when his efforts might be properly understood or might be subject to further misrecognitions. 

“Yeats’s Locations” welcomes papers and panels on all Yeats-related topics, but we are especially interested in those that explore Yeats’s locations in place, history, and time. Topics might include:

• • Yeats’s American lecture tours.

• • Explorations of how Yeats’s contemporaries understood his identity relative to nationhood, heritage, literary eras and cultural movements, religion, or social class.

• • Yeats’s self-presentation for different audiences and / or in different genres (e.g., poetry, drama, autobiography, folklore, criticism, occult writings).

• • Yeats’s historical sensibility, responses to historiography, and productions of history in his writings.  

• • Reception history and perspectives that respond to, build upon, or introduce new contexts for “locating” and analyzing Yeats’s works. 

• • Time and temporality in Yeats’s writings, including how he locates speakers relative to human and / or otherworldly temporalities, as well as the aesthetic effects he generates by combining multiple temporalities in his works. 

Keynote lectures will be given by Dr. Richard Russell of Baylor University and Dr. Julie McCormick Weng of Texas State University. 

The organizers invite proposals of no more than 250 words for twenty-minute papers, three-paper panels, or discussion roundtables on the topic of “Yeats’s Locations.” In keeping with the International Yeats Society’s general practice, proposals are invited on other aspects of Yeats’s work as well. Please also include a brief biographical sketch of up to 50 words for each speaker. Proposals should be emailed to irishstudies@stthom.edu with the subject line “IYS Proposal.” The deadline for early acceptance is June 30th. The final deadline is September 30th.

We offer a limited number of graduate student bursaries to assist those who could not otherwise afford to attend. These funds are awarded following the deadline for submission. Bursary applications should be submitted via this form:

Bursary Application Form – Fill out form