Call for Papers:

The End: Finality and Renewal in Culture
The 16th Annual Lotman Days Conference
June 10-12, 2026
Tallinn University
Tallinn, Estonia
https://www.tlu.ee/en/lotman-days-conference2026

Deadline for submission of abstracts: February 28, 2026 (extended)

“The end” is one of the most powerful and unsettling notions in culture. Human beings are endlessly fascinated by endings, whether of life, text, or civilisations, because they entail both the threat of general destruction and the possibility of rebirth where something completely new emerges in the place of the old.

For the semiotician and cultural theorist Juri Lotman, this striving is inherent to human nature, arising from the desire to comprehend the finite nature of human life and the perceived contrasting infinity of life itself. This duality serves as a significant catalyst for cultural change, becoming most evident in moments of crisis and transformation. In such periods, imaginings of the end often intensify, giving rise to a peculiar anticipation of endings.

Yet, as Lotman also cautioned, when we watch with fascination the oscillation of human culture between finality and rebirth, we often forget that what we are rejoicing over may, in fact, be our own end, because “it is also possible for something to perish without anything new arising in its place. Especially in a world where technological development is advancing so fast, perhaps faster than our intellectual capacity to make use of the possibilities that are being generated.”

The 16th Annual Lotman Days invites participants to reflect on endings as semiotic, cultural, and existential phenomena, not only as closures, but as thresholds of renewal. How do artistic movements, political systems, religions, scientific disciplines or societies come to an end or imagine their own limits? How might we understand “the end” as a creative mechanism rather than merely a point of disappearance? What is the function and semiotic potential of narratives of “the end” in periods when endings are no longer perceived as distant, but rather as ongoing?

We welcome papers on the topics of interest, including but not limited to:

• Endings in artistic, literary, and cinematic texts
• The semiotics of death, closure, and renewal
• Cultural mechanisms of transformation
• Endings as sites of translation, explosion, and unpredictability
• Entropy, limitation, and self-restraint as cultural principles
• The fascination with apocalypse and the aesthetics of collapse
• The last sentence, the last frame: the function of the ending in artistic text
• Endings, afterlives, and renewal in folklore, myths, and oral traditions
• Cyclical versus linear models of time and history
• Endings and beginnings in scientific and philosophical thought
• The “end of culture” and “end of history” narratives
• Eschatology and the imagination of the end in religious thought
• Semiotics of extinction, loss, and regeneration in the Anthropocene
• Fear, hope, and eco-anxiety in the age of environmental collapse
• Imaginations of the end in conspiracy narratives and post-truth discourses
• The role of media in constructing and amplifying collective perceptions of endings
• The age of artificial intelligence as a new cultural threshold
• Memory, forgetting, and the afterlives of the past
• Temporalities of ending
• Digital afterlives and the persistence of meaning beyond material limits
• The end as an ethical and creative challenge

Confirmed plenary speakers:

• Stef Craps, Ghent University, Belgium
• Dolly Jørgensen, University of Stavanger, Norway
• Eelco Runia, Independent researcher, Netherlands

SUBMISSIONS

We invite proposals for individual presentations (20 minutes + 10 minutes for discussion) or thematic panels. Kindly submit the abstract of your presentation (up to 350 words) by February 28, 2026. Abstracts in English can be submitted HERE and in Russian HERE. For more information, please write to merit.maran@tlu.ee.

REGISTRATION

150 € early bird (March 1 to April 15, 2026)
200 € late bird (April 16 to May 16, 2026)

The registration fee includes access to the full conference programme, lunches on all days, coffee breaks, a digital abstract book, and the conference reception.

IMPORTANT DATES:

• February 28, 2026 – Extended deadline for proposals
• March 1, 2026 – Notification of acceptance
• March 1 to April 15, 2026 – Early bird registration
• April 16 to May 16, 2026 – Late bird registration
• June 10 to June 12, 2026 – The conference

MORE INFORMATION

More information is available on the conference website.

Call for papers in pdf format can be downloaded in ENGLISH, and in RUSSIAN.

ORGANIZATION

Organizing team at Tallinn University: Merit Maran, Tatjana Kuzovkina, Anna Simagina, Jekaterina Jablokova, Marek Tamm, Daniele Monticelli, Timur Guzairov.

ABOUT LOTMAN DAYS

The Lotman Days are an annual conference series held at Tallinn University since 2009. The aim of the Lotman Days is to provide an interdisciplinary platform for scholars who wish to examine the dynamics of our semiotic world from different perspectives and to explore together questions that were central to Juri Lotman’s scholarship. The conference is organized by the Juri Lotman Semiotics Repository in collaboration with the School of Humanities.