Call for papers

Sensation: The Sounds, Visions, and Words of David Bowie

Academic conference, University of Agder, Norway
29. – 30. September 2026

David Bowie (1947-2016) is one of the most influential and visible artists in the history of popular culture. Through six decades he worked and evolved as a songwriter, musician, producer, actor, and painter. Being a keen observer of contemporary Western culture, Bowie managed to create new constellations of experience and significance across different genres, art forms, and social practices. His breakthrough came with the 1972 album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from Mars, followed by a world tour where rock music, theatre, fashion, masculinity, and femininity were combined in new, spectacular ways. In January 2016, at the end of his long and varied career, the jazz-influenced album Blackstar once again hit the charts.

Ten years after his death, interest in Bowie’s work is stronger than ever. The journalistic and academic literature has grown extensively. Bowie festivals and fan conventions are arranged in Europe as well as in America, and in 2025 the Victoria and Albert Museum in London established its own David Bowie Centre.

This conference draws attention towards the sounds, visions, and words of David Bowie. We invite scholars from various disciplines to an exploration of his work, including those working with music, literature, linguistics, film, theatre, design, art history, media, and fashion studies.

Bowie’s career is an extravagant testimony to the riches of art, drawing upon the diverse aesthetics and techniques of not only music but also design, fashion, poetry, and theatre, as well as the visual and other arts. This immense multimodal variety of expression is such that no single field of academic enquiry can claim a full overview; his accomplishments represent a challenge to both disciplinary and interdisciplinary rigour. In this conference, we particularly welcome scholarly engagement with the materiality and “stuff” of Bowie’s output, engaging in detail with the riches of his oeuvre.

As a singer, musician, and producer, Bowie is renowned for the intrepid spirit of his contribution to popular music. On the one hand, his willingness to warp and challenge convention points beyond the traditional limits of popular music, evoking the category of art rock or even the avantgarde. This is evident in the Station to Station album (which has its 50th anniversary this year), where he confounded expectations and ushered in a series of experimental albums that distinguished him as a trailblazer for new wave music. On the other hand, his work is also inextricably wound up with those very traditions that he challenged, through his love for and willingness to appropriate the signatures and idioms of the rich diversity of genres and traditions with which he engaged, from music theatre to soul and rock ‘n’ roll. Even the unique sound of his final Blackstar album would have been impossible without Bowie’s familiarity with jazz and his collaboration with excellent jazz musicians.

Bowie’s accomplishment is however not isolated to musical form but also participates in the visual and the visionary. Throughout his career, he was acutely conscious of the visual presentation both of his albums and himself as a performer. This tied in not only with his work as an actor and fascination with the cinema, but also with a long-lasting appreciation for the visual arts, evident in his strong attachment to Expressionism, as well as his championing the Young British Artists – making their controversial Sensation exhibition available online on his own website in 1999. His fascination for the possibilities and stakes of new media was ahead of his time, as recorded in a famous BBC Newsnight interview with Jeremy Paxman. An album such as 1. Outside shows however clearly that Bowie was aware of that this new information highway was shadowed by potential pitfalls, in a way echoing the dystopian and apocalyptic strains that are a mainstay of his entire career.

Bowie’s lyrics frequently draw upon emancipatory narratives linked with modernity, envisaging for individual, generational, and sexual emancipation. “You know, I’ll be free / Just like that blue bird / Now ain’t that just like me”, he sings in “Lazarus”. At the same time, Bowie reacted early on against the naivete of 1960s ideals, and the apocalyptic and critical themes of his songs often address how modernity’s dreams can beget monsters and totalitarian oppression. As a voracious reader, he made lyrics that were rich in allusion to a wide range of literary and intellectual sources. Vivid imagery, catchy one-liners, paradoxes, half-spoken narratives and unexpected turns (sometimes due to cut up techniques) are poetic qualities that elevate the experience of the songs and challenge the listener. Thus, we also welcome papers that engage with the literary execution of his works.

The keynote speakers are:
Jonathan Barnbrook, award-winning graphic designer, film maker, type designer, and typographer based in London. He designed the cover artwork of Bowie’s Heathen (2002), Reality (2003), The Next Day (2013), and Blackstar (2016), and was also artistic consultant and identity designer for the David Bowie Is exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Dr. Leah Kardos, senior lecturer in music at Kingston University, director of the Visconti Studio, composer and artist. Her 2022 book Blackstar Theory. The Last Works of David Bowie has been much acclaimed, and she is the editor of the forthcoming Bloomsbury Handbook to David Bowie.

Sigbjørn Nedland, music journalist, writer, and producer based in Kristiansand. For five decades he has produced records, written books, and introduced Norwegian radio listeners to popular music, roots, and world music in programmes such as Pop Special and Pandora’s Jukebox.

The conference will take place at the Kristiansand campus of the University of Agder. This campus holds the largest collection of Beat art outside the USA, and Kristiansand also is the venue for Kunstsilo, a new museum of modern Scandinavian art, which has won favourable acclaim since it was opened in May 2024. Although no guided tours of the Beat collection or the Kunstsilo will be provided, visiting participants are encouraged to explore these resources in their spare time.

We invite abstracts of 250 words – accompanied by 50-word bios – for 20-minute conference paper presentations (which will be followed by 10 minutes of discussion). Abstracts are invited on, but not exclusive to, the following topics:

- Bowie’s music and voice
- Bowie’s lyrics
- Bowie, theatre, and film
- Bowie, fashion, and design
- Bowie and art/aesthetics
- Bowie and multimodality
- Bowie and temporality
- Bowie and media
- Bowie and modernity/modernism
- Bowie and the concept of the self
- Bowie and ideology
- Bowie’s career: decisive divisions and turning points
- Bowie’s relationship to the Beat poets
- Bowie’s influence on other artists and bands
- The Blackstar album

Conference fee: 1500 NOK + 600 NOK for dinner 29. September.

Please email your abstract (250 words) and bio (50 words) to bowie2026@uia.no for consideration no later than 1. April.

The conference is arranged by Research Group for Song Lyrics, with support from the Faculty of Humanities and Education, University of Agder.