Australian Association of Jewish Studies (AAJS) Conference 2027
A joint initiative of AAJS and the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation, Monash University
Between Haunting and Humour:
Spectral Afterlives and the Comic in Jewish History, Culture and Thought
Dates: Sunday 7 – Monday 8
February 2027
Location: Melbourne, VIC, Australia – CBD-accessible location – TBA to all registered
participants
Conference Committee: Professor Rebecca Margolis, Dr Anna Hirsh, Dr Simon Holloway, Dr Yu Wang
Call for Papers
This conference explores the dynamic relationship between haunting and humour across Jewish history, thought, and cultural expression. Jewish experience has often unfolded between solemnity and satire, memory and irony, mourning and laughter. Across time and place, Jewish communities have grappled with loss, displacement, and rupture while also cultivating traditions of wit, critique, and comic imagination. These impulses do not stand in opposition; they frequently intersect and inform one another.
Between Haunting and Humour invites contributions that examine how Jewish individuals, texts, and communities inhabit this space across diverse contexts. We welcome papers that engage religious traditions, philosophical reflection, historical experience, literary and artistic production, communal life, public discourse, and contemporary media. How have Jewish traditions negotiated the spectral afterlives of the past alongside practices of humour? In what ways do remembrance and laughter function within Jewish sacred texts, literature, film, and popular culture across different periods, geographies, and settings?
This conference invites contributions from all disciplinary perspectives and methodological approaches.
We encourage applications from academic scholars and professional practitioners from all areas of Jewish Studies and related fields, including (but not limited to):
• Tanakh, Biblical and Talmudic
Studies
• Antisemitism, Holocaust and Genocide Studies
• Memory Studies
• Cultural Studies, including the Visual Arts and Literature
• Philosophy
• Theology
• Jewish and/or interreligious Education
• Gender Studies
• Screen Studies
• Israel and Diaspora Studies
• Museums, Architecture, and Arts Professionals
Please send an abstract of no longer than 200 words and a short bio of 100-150 words to Professor Rebecca Margolis (Rebecca.Margolis@monash.edu) by 30 August 2026.