The International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature and Media (IGEL) and its journal, The Scientific Study of Literature

There are news from the International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature and Media (IGEL) and its journal, The Scientific Study of Literature. The International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature and Media is aimed at the advancement of empirical literary research through international and interdisciplinary cooperation. The principal duties of the Society are to support scientific projects through information and cooperation, to further personal contact in all areas of research supported by the Society, to support students and junior researchers in the field of empirical literary research, to press for the application of empirical results, and to organize international conferences.

The journal The Scientific Study of Literature (SSOL) does very well, in terms of readership and the quality of the submissions. However, at the moment it is aiming at an extension of the group of authors that publish in SSOL, as well as a wider range of domains represented in its articles. SSOL publishes empirical studies that apply scientific approaches to investigate the structure and function of literary phenomena. The journal welcomes contributions from many disciplinary perspectives (psychological, developmental, cross-cultural, cognitive, neuroscience, computational, linguistic and educational) to deepen our understanding of literature, literary processes, and literary applications. The journal offers a forum for this interdisciplinary research to be collected, read, referenced and published.

Also, the IGEL website has been redesigned: http://www.igel.uni-goettingen.de/. On the new webpage you now find information about several upcoming events: a workshop on literature and empathy this summer, and the 2016 biannual conference in Chicago. IGEL now has its own account on Twitter: https://twitter.com/IgelSociety – @IgelSociety. For more information about the journal, see: https://benjamins.com/#catalog/books/ssol.3.2.01edi/fulltext.

(Content adapted from a text by Frank Hakemulder)