BRIDGES

The 2026 SASS conference will take place in Brooklyn, New York at the Marriott Brooklyn Bridge Hotel. This year’s presidential theme is BRIDGES.

As metaphor and monument, a bridge establishes a link that would otherwise not exist. As physical structures, both natural and constructed, bridges appear all across the world, in the smallest of villages and in bustling metropolises. They can represent progress and development as well as regress and deterioration. They have been sites of joy and protest, tragedy and celebration. Some exist hidden or unnoticed, where others have become iconic symbols – the Brooklyn Bridge, for instance, has been exalted in poems by the likes of Walt Whitman and Hart Crane.  Bridges appear in phrases such as “building bridges” and “burning bridges”; in concepts such “bridge translation” and “bridging visa”; in slogans such as “build bridges, not walls”; and in idioms like “a bridge too far,” “bridge the gap,” “water under the bridge,” “to sell the Brooklyn Bridge,” and more. Even the very word metaphor is a bridge, etymologically meaning “carrying over.” Bridges are also essential to artistic creation, formally (as in the bridge of a song) or thematically (for instance, Faroese musician Eivør’s 2015 album Bridges or the Danish-Swedish crime show Bron). Suffice it to say, bridges are everywhere.

The organizing committee encourages submissions that explore bridges of all sorts—and, by extension, other forms of transit, traffic, movement, and dis/connection—in Nordic culture, film, history, language, and/or literature. Other topics and approaches are also welcome.