November has been a busy month for me! One of the highlights of this busy time of year has been running and participating in the inaugural DLC+ mini conference.
Digital Literary Cultures, or DLC+, is an open-access research network and resource for scholars of digital literary culture broadly defined. I’ve been a member for a few years and last year became a co-director of the network. One of our goals for the 2025-2026 school year was to host a mini conference on current keywords in digital literary culture.
These mini-conferences are intended to be intimate, safe, and collaborative spaces to think with others about what we see emerging, as it is emerging. To that end, we spent half a day exploring two thematically-linked keywords actively shaping digital literary culture in the very online, very present moment: smut and lore.
Papers were circulated ahead of time to registered participants and speakers. We sought to keep the conference small so that we could invite conversation across the papers and across the keywords through a day spent reading and thinking together.
The conference was a huge success! We had 15-20 participants (presenters and attendees) and we spent a few hours engaging deeply with each others’ interesting work on and across the keywords. You can take a look at our lineup of great speakers here.
We’re hoping to share news on our next mini-conference in the new year, so stay tuned!
Kiera Obbard 