8 December 2025

The Centre of Excellence for the Study of Cultural Identity (CESIC), The British Cultural Studies Centre (BCSC) of the University of Bucharest and New Europe College (NEC) invite proposals for a conference dedicated to MA students, PhD candidates and young researchers on

Are We Still Allowed to Laugh? Uses and Abuses of Humour in British Culture and Cultural Studies

to be held at
New Europe College (21 Plantelor St., Bucharest)
on Monday, January 19, 2026

Since Aristotle’s Rhetoric, the tragedy/ comedy dichotomy has been a constant of culture, also designating a hierarchy between elevated topics and mundane ones. However, humour has always also been a powerful strategy to address difficult issues in society, due to its capacity to take the edge off difficult subjects of conversation and thus make them easier to tackle. In the Renaissance, humour was a proof of wit, as in Ben Jonson’s and Shakespeare’s comedies. Later it came to be perceived as a defining characteristic of the human species, as in Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). It also became the subject of philosophical and psychological approaches, as in Henri Bergson’s Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic [Le Rire. Essai sur la signification du comique] (1900) or Sigmund Freud’s Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious [Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten] (1905). More recently, Trevor Griffith’s play Comedians (first performed 1975) situates humour in a complex relation with nature, ethics and politics. Literary and cultural criticism not only examines humour, but also uses it as a rhetorical strategy (for example Oscar Wilde’s employment of witty paradoxes in “The Decay of Lying”, 1891). Most often, humour is taken with a grain of salt, since, in good Aristotelian tradition, the possibility of laughter was always considered a danger that deviated the audience’s attention from the seriousness expected from respectable cultural discourse. However, it has been precisely this quality of humour to take the edge off the seriousness of certain matters that has made it a highly effective political discourse and tool for criticism. As a powerful social force, laughter may be liberating and progressive, but it is not always benign. It may have a controversial role in contemporary culture by potentially reinforcing/ normalising prejudice and facilitating the spread of extremist ideas (as analysed by Nick Butler in his 2023 study The Trouble with Jokes: Humour and Offensiveness in Contemporary Culture and Politics).

We invite proposals for 20-minute presentations from MA students, PhD candidates and early career academic researchers whose work is relevant to the conference focus. Researchers in the fields of literature, film, music, theatre and performance arts, popular culture, media studies, history, politics, gender studies, intercultural and interdisciplinary communication are welcome. Papers may address issues such as (but not limited to):

– evolutions of the tragic and the comic in cultural studies
– the subversive power of humour: laughter as resistance/ criticism
– the therapeutic power of laughter
– serious laughter, black/ dark humour
– humour as a political force
– the ethics of humour
– types of humour in film
– laughter in/as criticism
– rhetorics of humour
– humour and/in popular culture
– humour and philosophy
– laughter and creativity
– laughter as truth-telling
– uses of humour in minority cultures.

Please submit a 200-word abstract with a title, 5 keywords and a 100-word bio note attached as an MS Word file to sabina.draga.alexandru@lls.unibuc.ro. MA students are required to also mention the name of an academic advisor who has agreed to supervise their writing of the paper and preparation of the presentation. Please include your contact information (name, affiliation, phone number and email address).

Deadline for submissions: Tuesday, December 23rd, 2025.
Notifications of proposal acceptance: Monday, December 29th, 2025.

For any questions, please contact dr. Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru (sabina.draga.alexandru@lls.unibuc.ro).

A selection of articles based on papers presented at the conference will be published in the peer-reviewed journal Limbă și cultură.