Image: See page for author, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons*

"Stranger, it is not right for me, even if one worse than you came, to dishonor a stranger. All strangers and beggars are from Zeus, and a gift, though small, is welcome."
—Odyssey 14.56–58, Murray translation

“Non nobis solum nati sumus.” —"We are not born for ourselves alone."
—Cicero, De Officiis, I.22

Hospes venit, Deus venit. "A guest comes, God comes."
—Latin proverb

What does it mean to think, research, and create together with openness? The conference explores hospitality as both an ethical gesture and a practice: an ongoing effort to create spaces of exchange that remain porous, attentive, and responsive. It asks how we receive ideas, disciplines, and perspectives that challenge our own — and how this act of reception transforms both host and guest. To practice hospitality is to allow our research to be unsettled by what it encounters, to open our methods and vocabularies to the presence of the other, and to cultivate forms of collaboration that resist closure.

Organized by doctoral students, the event offers a space to cross departmental and institutional boundaries — to share ideas, exchange experiences, and find new interlocutors. It aims to foster a form of intellectual exchange that is open, reflective, and grounded in dialogue.

Submit your paper for the conference

We invite abstracts for papers that engage with the multifaceted dimensions of hospitality — philosophical, political, aesthetic, and cultural — and its role in shaping social and cultural encounters across time and disciplines. The conference seeks to create an interdisciplinary forum where doctoral and postdoctoral researchers in the humanities can cross boundaries and generate new intellectual exchanges.

Papers may engage with the notion of hospitality in its multiple dimensions, including but not limited to:

• Hospitality in thought: What does it mean to welcome an idea, a concept, a text? How do relationships between different intellectual traditions, genres, and disciplines take shape?
• Hospitality and foreignness: How is the figure of the other constructed in literature, history, philosophy, and politics? What forms of inclusion and exclusion operate within cultural and academic institutions?
• Hospitality and displacement: How do language, translation, travel, and exile redefine spaces of reception?
• Hospitality and resistance: To what extent does hospitality also imply a form of conflict, a tension with normative systems? Can there be a subversive hospitality?
• Hospitality and culture: How has the concept of hospitality been shaped and reshaped across time, cultures, religions, and languages? 

Guidelines to submit a paper proposal:

Deadline for submissions: 30 November 2025
Abstracts: Submissions should include a title and an abstract of 250–300 words (the word count applies to the abstract text only, excluding title, keywords, and references).
Keywords and references: Please provide 5 keywords and a maximum of 5 references.
Short bio: A brief biographical note of up to 100 words should accompany the submission.
Submission email: Please send your proposals to hospitality.romklass@su.se

Conference details

Hospitality: Concept, Practices, and Tensions

Date: 11-13 March 2026
Location: Stockholm University, NILAS Library

Keynote Speakers

Christophe Premat (Stockholm University - Department of Romance Studies and Classics)
Jón Viðar Sigurðsson (University of Oslo - Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History)

Round Table

Participants would be announced.

Comité scientifique

Anna Jörngården Galili (Department of Culture and Aesthetics)
Beata Megyesi (Department of Linguistics)
Kathrin Kaufhold (Department of English)
Malin Roitman (Department of Romance Studies and Classics)
Maria Koptjevskaja Tamm (Department of Linguistics)
Maria Olson (Department of Teaching and Learning)
Mattias Frihammar (Department of Ethnology, History of Religions and Gender Studies)
Olof Sundqvist (Department of Ethnology, History of Religions and Gender Studies)

*Image: See page for author,(wellcomecollection.org)CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons