Seventeenth International
Robert Graves Conference

Palma, Mallorca, Spain, 7th – 11th July 2026

Organised by the Robert Graves Society with the Fundació Robert Graves and Sheffield Hallam University

Plans are becoming advanced for the Seventeenth International Robert Graves Society Conference, 7th – 11th July 2026. The theme will be: ‘Robert Graves: Times and Places’

The conference will explore Graves and his contemporaries in relation to Times and Places. This might include significant locations and periods in Graves’s life: for example, the Somme in 1916, Mallorca in 1929, Devon in the 1940s, Mexico in 1968, or the importance of Wimbledon, Harlech, Oxford, both as formative experience and subject matter. There may be a focus on time, place and their interrelation in his imaginative and other writing: whether Claudius’s Rome (in this, the 50th anniversary of I, Claudius, the famous BBC TV adaptation of Graves’s historical fiction), the extensive mythical vistas of The White Goddess, or in any other aspect of his life and work.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Proposals are invited for papers (20 minutes) on relevant topics relating to Robert Graves and/or his contemporaries. These could include but are not limited to:

  • Graves and the significance of specific locations and/or times
  • The interrelation of history and geography in Graves’s work and life
  • Correspondences between times and places evoked poetically, fictionally, autobiographically
  • The intersections of time and place
  • Graves and the transhistorical and/or universal (or their opposite)
  • Graves and culture rhymes
  • Time passing, arrested, or reversed
  • Graves and memory
  • People-in-Place
  • Graves and mobility: exile, travel, displacement, belonging
  • Graves and landscape / ecology
  • Places, times, people

    • Critical responses to recent works on Graves, papers on research in progress, on recently discovered archival material of interest to Graves scholars, on digital collections or on exhibitions of Graves’s work, and on the comparative European engagements of Graves’s contemporaries, are also welcome. The conference will take place at La Caixa, Palma, Mallorca, Spain, which is the former Gran Hotel, where Graves and Laura Riding stayed on their arrival in Palma in 1929, and at Deià, where they lived until 1936. Graves returned to Mallorca in 1946 with Beryl Pritchard Graves and their family and lived in Deià until his death in 1985. Robert Graves conferences traditionally embrace the creative in addition to the critical, and the conference will also host musical and literary events to be announced in due course, along with keynote speakers. There will also be a daytrip to Deià and to La Casa de Robert Graves: https://www.lacasaderobertgraves.org/en/ Please send an abstract (max. 250 words) by 15 March 2026 to the conference organiser and President of the Robert Graves Society:

    Professor Charles Mundye, FEA
    Sheffield Creative Industries Institute
    College of Social Sciences and Arts
    Sheffield Hallam University
    City Campus
    Sheffield S1 1WB

    E: c.mundye@shu.ac.uk

    President, Robert Graves Society
    http://www.robertgraves.org

    Fellow, English Association
    http://www2.le.ac.uk/offices/english-association

    PARTICIPANTS

    The conference is open to all. It will be of interest to academics, teachers, research students, and anyone else who is interested in the life and writings of Robert Graves and his circle. The series of Robert Graves conferences have built up a reputation for their scholarly excellence and their friendly dialogue among participants from a wide variety of backgrounds, both lay and academic, and the Graves family itself.

    To register an interest in attending the conference as a non-speaker, please email Julian Bastida: julian@fundaciorobertgraves.org