Cirrus@Austlit

'On the first of December 2022, the Australian University Heads of English (AUHE) hosted a short conference at the University of Melbourne as part of the inaugural Congress for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences. Academics and postgraduates from across the country gathered to reflect on the value of literature and its various embodiments in their professional activities of research, teaching, governance, and public engagement. From the bar table benches at The Curtain on Lygon Street, the day was hailed a great success, and a similar event reprising the conference theme promised – or wassailed – for 2023. It is the intention of AUHE to convene a small annual conference exploring the challenges we face as literary studies academics seeking to realise the core tasks of humanities education and research. Plans will go ahead while there is human capital to sustain them, though hopes remain high that an annual AUHE short conference on the state of literary studies in Australia will soon be a fixture on the academic calendar. The 2023 conference, ‘The Future of Literary Studies’, will be held at the University of Sydney, with plans for the 2024 conference at the University of Western Australia underway. A commitment to publish papers from annual proceedings is a goal of the current conference committee (Anthony Uhlmann, Ann Vickery, and myself), though one that remains contingent, like the proceedings themselves, on the availability of key individuals. On behalf of the committee, I’d like to express my sincere gratitude to colleagues from across the country, whose peer review of submissions on a tight schedule made this year’s special issue possible. The collegial response to our call out was a further expression of the scholarly consensus regarding the urgent need to meet the decline of the humanities in Australia by professing the value of literature across the range of its social, political, pedagogical, and private benefits.' (Introduction)