“Consider coal and steel. There is a place where they meet.” (Gravity’s Rainbow)

Indeed there is, and this is also the place where the international community of Pynchon scholars meets next: the Ruhrgebiet, the heart of continental European industrialization where capitalism, technology, humans, and nature converged to help create modernity itself—along with its dialectic of liberation and oppression, individualism and totalitarianism, peace and war, and many other aspects that are central to Thomas Pynchon’s works. Now postindustrial but still a central node of transnational migration, exchange, and industry, the place is many, many places at once, perhaps not quite the heterotopian Zone but a diverse and storied site nonetheless, and thus the appropriate site for discussions of Pynchon’s stories and everything around them.

The American Studies team at TU Dortmund University invites scholars and students, amateurs and novices, fans and critics to get together for a five-day event of presentations, translation workshops, conversation, and general Pynchonian fun. We especially invite papers that address Pynchon in translation or the publication history of his works outside the US, and of course readings of the 2025 novel Shadow Ticket, but there are no thematic restrictions: Anything Pynchon is welcome.

If you want to present a paper at the conference, please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words along with a bio statement to burak.sezertu-dortmundde and sascha.poehlmanntu-dortmundde by November 15, 2025.