CFP 2023: Coast to Coast Connections
University at Albany 20th Annual EGSO Conference
April 22, 2023
Keynote Speaker: Claire Donato, author of Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts (Archway Editions) and Woebegone (Theaphora Editions)Conference co-directors: Kayla Adgate (UAlbany, [email protected]), Stacey Baran (UC Davis, [email protected])
This one-day hybrid/virtual conference provides a direct platform for students to engage in interdisciplinary work and shared research alongside their peers on the theme of "Connections." The event uniquely offers an opportunity for students to collaborate across departments and campuses from the East to the West Coast and beyond, allowing for more expansive and diversified thinking with one another.
The conference additionally brings together graduate and undergraduate students, who often remain separated within the institution, to present their work in a cooperative environment. Coast to Coast Connections aims to forge solidarity across the country, allowing students to interact with and experience a larger and more varied collection of research and creative writing than an exclusively local symposium traditionally allows.
We welcome undergraduate and graduate student proposals for both critical and creative projects from literary/cultural studies, creative writing, rhetorical/composition studies, and other adjacent disciplines. Potential topics on the theme of connection may include (but are not limited to):
CFP 2022: Encountering the Other(s)
University at Albany 19th Annual EGSO Conference
April 2, 2022
Keynote Speakers: Professor Cary Wolfe (Rice University),
Imani Elizabeth Jackson (Poet)
The University at Albany’s 19th annual English Graduate Student Organization Conference, “Encountering the Other(s),” seeks out papers, projects, and creative works that explore the association between humanism and posthumanism. We encourage a great range of perspectives engaging with or
responding to the moments in which human subjects encounter the Other(s). Although in “Letter on Humanism” (1946), Heidegger’s vision of humanism still attests to human exceptionalism by arguing that the human is a shepherd of being, it is important to note that he introduces the standpoint of being
precisely to break with the tradition of metaphysics whose use of language is incorporated into the logic of the subject/object distinction. As noted by Tony Davis, from the Heideggerian legacy of antihumanist humanism, to Foucault’s humanist antihumanism, and to Haraway’s posthumanism, there have been
attempts to deconstruct and reconstruct the notion of the human being rooted in liberal humanism. In literary texts, as well as in our social circumstances, what prompts the contemplation of what it means to be human is the Other(s) the humanity encounters.
The conference will be held virtually via Zoom. We will schedule approximately 15 minutes for each presentation. All proposals should include your name, affiliation, e-mail address, the title of your proposed paper, and a short bio (100 words max). For critical presentations, please submit also a 250-
word abstract; for creative presentations, please submit a 250-word description of your presentation.
The deadline for submissions, which should be uploaded to our outlook form, is March 13, 2022. Responses to submissions will be sent out soon after March 14th. Please direct any queries to the conference chair, Minji Huh ([email protected]). Link: https://forms.office.com/r/V2RAqCpBU7.
Some questions that presenters might want to consider include: How have liberal human subjects responded to Otherized people based on race, gender, nationality, sexual orientation, and more? How are new and more capacious forms of identity are forged through encounters with the Other(s)? How
have humans related to nonhuman agency?
CFP 2016: Crisis and Recovery
University at Albany 14th Annual EGSO Conference
April 1 - 2, 2016
The Syrian Civil War, climate change, and the Great Recession are ongoing crises requiring our critical and scholarly attention. In the midst of these global developments, the theorization of crisis becomes imperative for understanding the ways in which current events replay critical moments of the past while forcing us to rethink our present notions of crisis and recovery. How do diverse disciplines such as art, history, literature, philosophy, and the sciences identify and respond to these challenges? What are the consequences when the exceptionality of crisis becomes normalized, as exemplified by the sensationalization of natural disasters or the increased reliance on contingent labor in academia? At what point do we cease to recognize crisis as such? For our 14th annual conference, the English Graduate Student Organization invites graduate students of all disciplines to submit critical papers and creative works that address these breakdowns, impasses, turning points, ruptures, and traumas and the potential for creativities and new beginnings.
Our conference will be held April 1 and 2, 2016. We schedule approximately 15 minutes for each presentation. For critical presentations, please submit a 250-word abstract to [email protected]. For creative presentations, please send an email with a small sample of your creative work (.mp3, .jpeg, .tif, .avi, .mp4, or .doc files), as well as a 250-word description of your presentation to [email protected]. We are particularly interested in creative works that are complemented by an explanation of how the author/artist sees his/her work contributing to critical discussions about crisis and recovery. Submissions are due by January 22nd, 2016.
Scholars might consider the following areas of interest, although they should not feel limited by them:
CFP 2015: Vision
University at Albany 13th Annual EGSO Conference: Vision
March 27-28, 2015
Keynote Address: Ulrich Baer (NYU) ; Dawn Lundy Martin (University of Pittsburgh)
For our 13th annual conference, the English Graduate Student Organization invites graduate students of all disciplines to submit critical papers and creative works that address vision both literally and metaphorically. Beyond the literal act of seeing, vision connects to a desire to foresee the future and look back to the past, whether politically, economically, or aesthetically. These seemingly competing modes of vision are intrinsically related as optics both enable and limit our ability to conceptualize a future beyond what we can immediately see. Humanities scholars might consider vision in terms of visual culture, visual literacy, visual rhetorics, and/or the role of vision within classroom settings. Vision could also invite scholarship investigating the biological and social practices of sight, as well as scholarship that engages various genres of literature and artistic practices that invoke and employ sight or foresight. Finally, vision provides inroads for graduate students who examine and articulate visions of the future, including our own futures as scholars and teachers.
We schedule approximately 15 minutes for each presentation. For critical presentations, please submit a 250-word abstract to [email protected]. For creative presentations, please send an email with a small sample of your creative work (.mp3, .jpeg, .tif, .avi, .mp4, or .doc files), as well as a 250-word description of your presentation to [email protected]. We are particularly interested in creative works that are complemented by an explanation of how the author/artist sees his/her work contributing to critical discussions about vision. Submissions are due by January 16th, 2015.
Scholars might consider the following areas of interest, although they should not feel limited by them:
--Optical schemas and subjectivity: psychoanalysis, theories of color, scopic regimes
--Futures of pedagogy and teaching practice
--Reflection, opacity, translucence, transparency, screen
--Photography, film, painting, and the visual arts; analog vs digital; indexicality, the ‘pose’
--Embodied sight and blindness
--Visual representations of gender and body, objectification
--Prophecy, speculation, revelation, beatific vision
--Futures of scholarship and professionalization, Corporate University, adjuncts
--Image vs. text, imagetext, multimodality
--Technologies of vision, methodologies of visual analysis
--Seen vs. unseen, visible vs. invisible, blindspots
--Hoax, disguise, costume, mask
--Iconology and iconography
--Landscapes, cityscapes, topologies of space, frontiers
--“Reality” of vision: dream, intoxication, hallucination, illusion, mirage
--Look, glance, gaze, perspective, viewpoint
--Witnessing, trauma, the unrepresentable
CFP 2014: Transaction
University at Albany 12th Annual EGSO Conference: Transaction
March 28-29, 2014
Keynote Speakers: Anna McCarthy (NYU) and Myung Mi Kim (University at Buffalo, SUNY)
Transactions are generally thought of as financial exchanges between two parties, but transactions can also be considered more broadly as any interaction between people, documents, ideas, and forces. In academic studies, transaction is a multidisciplinary concept that provides different areas of study for individual disciplines. From scholars in business who may be concerned with contracts, to students working in English studies who might concern themselves with the exchange that occurs between text and reader, from historians who may concentrate on the nuances of a type of transaction in a particular time period, to artists working toward formal innovations enabling new modes of transaction, the term “transaction” can provide a bridge between disciplines. For our 12th annual conference, we invite graduate students of all disciplines to submit critical papers and creative works that address transaction as a broad concept, considering both its ubiquity and its discipline-specific areas of study.
We schedule approximately 15 to 20 minutes for each presentation. For critical presentations, please submit a 250-word abstract to [email protected]. For creative presentations, please send an email with a small sample of your creative work (.mp3, .jpeg, .tif, .avi, .mp4, or .doc files), as well as a 250-word description of your presentation to[email protected]. We are particularly interested in creative works that are complemented by an explanation of how the author/artist sees his/her work contributing to critical discussions about transactions. Submissions are due by January 15, 2014.
Scholars might consider the following areas of interest:
--Commodity: market exchange, deals, contracts, negotiations, capital, e-commerce, value and labor, surplus
--Space: marketplace, online spaces, contact zones, ecology, private and public spheres
--Emotion and Affect: interpersonal exchange, trauma, community and rupture
--Psychology: analytical models; psychoanalysis: drives and desire, ideal-ego, ego-ideal and identification, jouissance, transference and intersubjectivity, gaze
--Body, Gender, and Sexuality: pornography, prostitution, disability, virtual bodies, gender performativity and social activism (trans-action)
--Medicine and Biology: genetics, immunization, transplantation, prosthesis, contagion, euthanasia, commodification of medicine
--Rhetoric and Communication: transactional rhetoric; translation; dramatic and theatrical transactions; relationships between author, audience, and text
--Textuality: print culture, intertextuality, publication, circulation, culture of letters
--Globalization: global English, languages of cultural exchange, cosmopolitanism and cross-cultural transaction, global scholarship
--History and Records: colonial and postcolonial transactions, inheritance and genealogy, memory and its media, promises and temporal transactions
--Subjects and Objects of Transaction: power structures, slavery and trafficking, animals and animality, marriage, transaction as tool
--Artist and Audience: collaboration, confession, expression, directionality of transaction, aesthetics in cross-cultural transactions
--Exclusion and Excess: leftovers, transactional gains and losses, black market, accessibility
CFP 2013: Considering Relevance
SUNY Albany 11th Annual English 2013 Graduate Conference: Considering Relevance
March 8-9, 2013
Keynote Speakers: Ashley Dawson (CUNY Graduate Center), Jill Magi (Goddard College, Columbia College Chicago, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago)
When we are confronted with questions of “relevance,” we often make quick evaluations about the timeliness of a particular mode of thought or approach as it relates to the work we do today. Concepts of relevance not only play a major role in the way we conceive of and practice academic inquiry but also function as wider and more fundamental elements of political, ethical, and historical discourse beyond academic and institutional venues. While the increasing specializations of disciplines encourage us to consider relevance as already evident, this conference invites participants to think of relevance as a normative and historically determined concept. Changes in relation to crises and contradictions are often seen as occurring beyond the accepted boundaries of relevance as a particular field of study has constructed them. This conference invites scholars and students to explore this—often unstated—relation between crisis and relevance with an eye to further defining and extending the current interdisciplinary trend in the humanities and social sciences. We aim to encourage an open articulation and theorization of the notion of relevance that is both imaginatively and historically informed and that self-consciously accounts for its own relevance inside and outside the current fields of academic inquiry and artistic production.
Multiple crises relating to education, economy, ecology, and the political climate, among others, press us to consider the role that conceptions of relevance—new and old—play inside and outside of our academic communities. With these particular crises in mind, we hope to build on previous theories which allow us to examine, critique, and recognize the stated and unstated constructions of relevance as having both a history and a (precarious) future. We hope, by bringing together the threads of this conversation, to outline the historical and intellectual conditions required for a realization or articulation of new conceptions of relevance. Therefore, this conference aims to increase interdisciplinary collaboration and speak to broader crises and concerns in the world at large. We envision a collective rethinking of the notion of relevance and its connection to crisis in direct relation to the work we do. We are specifically interested in presenters and scholars who invest in the stakes and crises surrounding their work and its larger impact in professional and public discourses. In this way, this conference is a step in trying to assert the relevance of relevance itself as a normative category that continually establishes grounds for the work we do as both scholars and citizens.
For our 11th Annual Conference, we invite graduate students of any discipline to consider the applications and effects of relevance. We schedule approximately 15 to 20 minutes for each presentation. For research or critical presentations, please submit a 250-word abstract to[email protected] by January 18, 2013.
We are also seeking graduate student artists to submit proposals. The conference will offer an opportunity for presentations from creative writers, visual artists, performers, audio/video or digital artists, and any students actively engaged in other creative media, which would ideally include discussion about how your work deals with issues of relevance. We schedule approximately 15 to 20 minutes for each presentation. Please send an e-mail with a small sample of your creative work (.mp3, .jpeg, .tif, .avi, .mp4, or .doc files) as well as a 250-word description of your presentation to [email protected] by January 18, 2013. Video projectors, computers, speakers, and other technologies can be arranged to supplement presentations.
Possible considerations might include:
• Body, Sexuality, and Gender: changing notions of normalcy and deviance
• Image and Text: visual representation, changing nature of advertising
• Reading, Writing, and Teaching Practices: texts read and written in and outside the university classroom, pedagogical concerns
• Critical Methodologies and Specialization: academic jargon and mainstream language
• Canon and Value: dictating high literary value or "truth"
• Creative Arts: art in culture and academia, marginalizations, categorizations and genre
• Art Markets: commodification of art, institutionalization of creative art, the “Program” era
• Theory and Relevance: frames and the identification of importance
• Scientific Relevance: paradigms and scientific crises; science il/literacy and its accessibility to the public; public, private, and government
• Technology: history and practice
• Interdisciplinarity: finding legitimacy elsewhere, corporate model of the university
• Eco-relevance and Environmentalism: global warming and its effects, shifting conceptions of the natural, humanity’s relevance to its ecosystem
• Geography and Borders: art crossing borders, uneven development, spatial negotiations
CFP 2012: Waste
March 30th and 31st
The University at Albany English Graduate Student Organization presents its 10th annual graduate conference: WASTE
Keynote Speaker: Thierry Bardini, Université de Montréal
There are as many ways to conceptualize waste as there are ways in which waste permeates our world. It is ubiquitous; it figures into existence at every level. The history of waste is a history of equivocation, affirmation, disavowal, subsistence, persistence, inconvenience, differentiation, destruction, and decay. From the pragmatics of city sanitation to the logistics of disaster relief, from the remainders of mathematical equations to the emotive excesses of sentimental novels, the problem of “what remains” is central to the practice of academic inquiry.
For our 10th Annual Conference, we invite graduate students in any discipline to consider the challenges and productive yields of waste. Presentations are expected to be approximately 15 to 20 minutes. For research or critical presentations, please submit a 250-word abstract to [email protected] by February 15.
We also invite graduate student artists to submit proposals. The conference will offer an opportunity for creative writers, visual artists, photographers, sound artists, digital artists, and any students actively engaged in other creative media to present and discuss how their work deals with waste. In what ways is waste encountered in the artistic process? How do you materially, thematically, or conceptually address waste? Presentations are expected to be approximately 15 to 20 minutes. Please email a small sample of your creative work (.mp3, .jpeg, .tif, .avi, .mp4, or .doc files) as well as a 250 word description of your proposed presentation to [email protected] by February 15. Video projectors, computers, speakers, and other technologies can be arranged to supplement presentations.
Possible avenues for exploration may include:
-ruins and fragments, relics, monuments, artifacts
-ecology, environmentalism, conservation, recycling, reusing, eco-terrorism
-surplus value, wasted labor; toxic assets, ponzi schemes, hostile takeovers
-mathematical remainders, repeating series, infinite decimals, fractals
-the nonhuman and things; nature and matter
-bio-waste: feces, vomit, phlegm, bile, pus, dismemberment; evolution and vestigiality
-theological waste and apocalypses
-natural catastrophes, plagues, and “acts of God”
-historical and political devastation: industrialization, war, terrorism, genocide, post-colonialism
-bad tastes: camp, kitsch, porn, pop, sentimentality, pulps, and other aesthetics of “trash”
-editing and revision: new editions, unfinished works, and translations; cast-offs of canon formation and literary leftovers
-aural matter: noise, static, feedback
-figures of waste (grave-diggers, collectors, corpses, cadavers, and the undead); ruined women, prodigal sons, wayward youths and other literary archetypes
-collage, bricolage, detournement, found art, sampling, palimpsest, and other artistic recyclings
-differentiating waste: garbage, trash, refuse, debris, rubbish, jetsam and flotsam, leftovers
-waste sites: heaps, landfills, dumps, attics/basements, catacombs, battlefields, abandoned areas, fallout zones
CFP 2011: The Outlaw: Trespass, Disfigurement, Domestication
April 1-2, 2011
Keynote Speaker: Wai Chee Dimock (William Lampson Professor of English and American Studies at Yale University)
Creative Keynote Speaker: Doug Rice (Associate Professor of English at California State University, Sacramento)
“The lyricism of marginality may find inspiration in the image of the “outlaw,” the great social nomad, who prowls on the confines of a docile, frightened order.” —Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish
What is the outlaw? Today, the outlaw presents us with a number of paradoxes: politicians identify as “going rogue” while the U.S. engages in war with “rogue states”; atlases seem rigidly divided into “friend” and “enemy” while everywhere signs portend the collapse of foreign wars into the everyday by imploring their readers to “Report Suspicious Activity.” The outlaw–and its pseudonyms and cohorts: the bandit, the brigand, the criminal, and the terrorist–circulate in complex, and often contradictory, ways. For instance, the outlaw threatens the sovereign and yet is sovereignty’s possibility. Simultaneously alluring and terrorizing, the outlaw realizes and reorients desires while giving shape to national nightmares and personal terrors. What may be deviant to one is prophetic to another; while silenced as heretic and dismissed as irrational, the outlaw is also the opportunity for cultural, political, and scientific revolutions.
For our 9th Annual English Graduate Student Conference, we ask for submissions that address several trajectories. First, papers that consider how the outlaw appears thematically, figuratively, and/or historically in literature, cinema, and other media. Second, papers that renegotiate conceptual relationships of inside and outside as well as papers that address theories associated with or condemned as “outlaw.” A special panel will seek to theorize the outlawing of disciplines and provide responses and/or innovative solutions to what has been called the “crisis in the humanities.” Finally, we also are planning a creative portion of the conference and encourage creative submissions from graduate students that respond to the theme, particularly those that challenge notions of genre, performance, and poetics.
We encourage submissions from graduate students working in any field, historical period, genre, or scholarly discipline. Critical abstracts should be limited to 250-300 words; creative abstracts should include a 150-300 word description and a 2-3 page sample. Submit abstracts to: [email protected] by February 14, 2011.
Possible areas of inquiry may include, but are not limited to:
•Prostitution, outlaw sexualities, and the prohibited body
•Institutional and commercial appropriations of the outlaw
•Psychological, sociological, and statistical analyses of criminality
•The populism of the outlaw–public identification with outlaw figures
and/or the romance of the outside
•Gender: transgression, plurality, and representation
•Cultural practices of “inherent transgression” (Zizek)
•Law, legality, and legal literacy
•Sedition, exile, state subversion, and treason
•Sovereignty, animals, and technology
•Prison writing; representations of incarceration in art and literature
•The subaltern as outlaw; identity politics in relation to the law
•The rhetoric and sociology of civil disobedience
•Popular culture and spectacle
•Object-oriented philosophy and other ontologies
•Rebellion in, beyond, and across states
University at Albany 20th Annual EGSO Conference
April 22, 2023
Keynote Speaker: Claire Donato, author of Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts (Archway Editions) and Woebegone (Theaphora Editions)Conference co-directors: Kayla Adgate (UAlbany, [email protected]), Stacey Baran (UC Davis, [email protected])
This one-day hybrid/virtual conference provides a direct platform for students to engage in interdisciplinary work and shared research alongside their peers on the theme of "Connections." The event uniquely offers an opportunity for students to collaborate across departments and campuses from the East to the West Coast and beyond, allowing for more expansive and diversified thinking with one another.
The conference additionally brings together graduate and undergraduate students, who often remain separated within the institution, to present their work in a cooperative environment. Coast to Coast Connections aims to forge solidarity across the country, allowing students to interact with and experience a larger and more varied collection of research and creative writing than an exclusively local symposium traditionally allows.
We welcome undergraduate and graduate student proposals for both critical and creative projects from literary/cultural studies, creative writing, rhetorical/composition studies, and other adjacent disciplines. Potential topics on the theme of connection may include (but are not limited to):
- identity and place-making through kinship
- affinity, relationality, communication, or networking
- interspecies and other posthuman relationships
- intertextual connections across literature or other media
- deconstruction and decolonization of borders and other boundaries
- transportation and passage
- physical, spatial, or topographical relationality
- virtual or nontraditional forms of connection
CFP 2022: Encountering the Other(s)
University at Albany 19th Annual EGSO Conference
April 2, 2022
Keynote Speakers: Professor Cary Wolfe (Rice University),
Imani Elizabeth Jackson (Poet)
The University at Albany’s 19th annual English Graduate Student Organization Conference, “Encountering the Other(s),” seeks out papers, projects, and creative works that explore the association between humanism and posthumanism. We encourage a great range of perspectives engaging with or
responding to the moments in which human subjects encounter the Other(s). Although in “Letter on Humanism” (1946), Heidegger’s vision of humanism still attests to human exceptionalism by arguing that the human is a shepherd of being, it is important to note that he introduces the standpoint of being
precisely to break with the tradition of metaphysics whose use of language is incorporated into the logic of the subject/object distinction. As noted by Tony Davis, from the Heideggerian legacy of antihumanist humanism, to Foucault’s humanist antihumanism, and to Haraway’s posthumanism, there have been
attempts to deconstruct and reconstruct the notion of the human being rooted in liberal humanism. In literary texts, as well as in our social circumstances, what prompts the contemplation of what it means to be human is the Other(s) the humanity encounters.
The conference will be held virtually via Zoom. We will schedule approximately 15 minutes for each presentation. All proposals should include your name, affiliation, e-mail address, the title of your proposed paper, and a short bio (100 words max). For critical presentations, please submit also a 250-
word abstract; for creative presentations, please submit a 250-word description of your presentation.
The deadline for submissions, which should be uploaded to our outlook form, is March 13, 2022. Responses to submissions will be sent out soon after March 14th. Please direct any queries to the conference chair, Minji Huh ([email protected]). Link: https://forms.office.com/r/V2RAqCpBU7.
Some questions that presenters might want to consider include: How have liberal human subjects responded to Otherized people based on race, gender, nationality, sexual orientation, and more? How are new and more capacious forms of identity are forged through encounters with the Other(s)? How
have humans related to nonhuman agency?
- Potential approaches to our topic may include, but are not limited to:
- Postcolonial Studies
- Critical Race Theory
- Gender Studies
- Disability Studies
- Animal Studies/Plant Studies
- Deleuzoguattarian Becomings
- Queer or Trans Theory
- Encounters with Aliens, Cyborgs, Vampires, etc.
CFP 2016: Crisis and Recovery
University at Albany 14th Annual EGSO Conference
April 1 - 2, 2016
The Syrian Civil War, climate change, and the Great Recession are ongoing crises requiring our critical and scholarly attention. In the midst of these global developments, the theorization of crisis becomes imperative for understanding the ways in which current events replay critical moments of the past while forcing us to rethink our present notions of crisis and recovery. How do diverse disciplines such as art, history, literature, philosophy, and the sciences identify and respond to these challenges? What are the consequences when the exceptionality of crisis becomes normalized, as exemplified by the sensationalization of natural disasters or the increased reliance on contingent labor in academia? At what point do we cease to recognize crisis as such? For our 14th annual conference, the English Graduate Student Organization invites graduate students of all disciplines to submit critical papers and creative works that address these breakdowns, impasses, turning points, ruptures, and traumas and the potential for creativities and new beginnings.
Our conference will be held April 1 and 2, 2016. We schedule approximately 15 minutes for each presentation. For critical presentations, please submit a 250-word abstract to [email protected]. For creative presentations, please send an email with a small sample of your creative work (.mp3, .jpeg, .tif, .avi, .mp4, or .doc files), as well as a 250-word description of your presentation to [email protected]. We are particularly interested in creative works that are complemented by an explanation of how the author/artist sees his/her work contributing to critical discussions about crisis and recovery. Submissions are due by January 22nd, 2016.
Scholars might consider the following areas of interest, although they should not feel limited by them:
- Refugee Crisis, Immigration Crisis, War, and Terror
- Ecological Disaster and Climate Change
- States of Emergency/States of Exception
- State-Sanctioned Violence
- Mass Incarceration and Police Brutality
- Sovereignty, Power, and Authority
- Security, Privacy, and Surveillance
- Gun Violence and Mass Shootings
- Poverty, Economy, and De-Regulation
- Redistribution, Accumulation, and Inequality
- Solidarities, Resistances, and Revolutions
- Epistemology, Ontology, and Critique
- Crisis of Literature and Crisis Literature
- Narrative and Poetics
- Race, Gender, Sexuality, Class, and Religion
- Healthcare, Education, and Unemployment
- Mental Health, Anxiety, and Affect
- Prevention, Management, and Containment
- Redress, Reconstitution, and Reparation
CFP 2015: Vision
University at Albany 13th Annual EGSO Conference: Vision
March 27-28, 2015
Keynote Address: Ulrich Baer (NYU) ; Dawn Lundy Martin (University of Pittsburgh)
For our 13th annual conference, the English Graduate Student Organization invites graduate students of all disciplines to submit critical papers and creative works that address vision both literally and metaphorically. Beyond the literal act of seeing, vision connects to a desire to foresee the future and look back to the past, whether politically, economically, or aesthetically. These seemingly competing modes of vision are intrinsically related as optics both enable and limit our ability to conceptualize a future beyond what we can immediately see. Humanities scholars might consider vision in terms of visual culture, visual literacy, visual rhetorics, and/or the role of vision within classroom settings. Vision could also invite scholarship investigating the biological and social practices of sight, as well as scholarship that engages various genres of literature and artistic practices that invoke and employ sight or foresight. Finally, vision provides inroads for graduate students who examine and articulate visions of the future, including our own futures as scholars and teachers.
We schedule approximately 15 minutes for each presentation. For critical presentations, please submit a 250-word abstract to [email protected]. For creative presentations, please send an email with a small sample of your creative work (.mp3, .jpeg, .tif, .avi, .mp4, or .doc files), as well as a 250-word description of your presentation to [email protected]. We are particularly interested in creative works that are complemented by an explanation of how the author/artist sees his/her work contributing to critical discussions about vision. Submissions are due by January 16th, 2015.
Scholars might consider the following areas of interest, although they should not feel limited by them:
--Optical schemas and subjectivity: psychoanalysis, theories of color, scopic regimes
--Futures of pedagogy and teaching practice
--Reflection, opacity, translucence, transparency, screen
--Photography, film, painting, and the visual arts; analog vs digital; indexicality, the ‘pose’
--Embodied sight and blindness
--Visual representations of gender and body, objectification
--Prophecy, speculation, revelation, beatific vision
--Futures of scholarship and professionalization, Corporate University, adjuncts
--Image vs. text, imagetext, multimodality
--Technologies of vision, methodologies of visual analysis
--Seen vs. unseen, visible vs. invisible, blindspots
--Hoax, disguise, costume, mask
--Iconology and iconography
--Landscapes, cityscapes, topologies of space, frontiers
--“Reality” of vision: dream, intoxication, hallucination, illusion, mirage
--Look, glance, gaze, perspective, viewpoint
--Witnessing, trauma, the unrepresentable
CFP 2014: Transaction
University at Albany 12th Annual EGSO Conference: Transaction
March 28-29, 2014
Keynote Speakers: Anna McCarthy (NYU) and Myung Mi Kim (University at Buffalo, SUNY)
Transactions are generally thought of as financial exchanges between two parties, but transactions can also be considered more broadly as any interaction between people, documents, ideas, and forces. In academic studies, transaction is a multidisciplinary concept that provides different areas of study for individual disciplines. From scholars in business who may be concerned with contracts, to students working in English studies who might concern themselves with the exchange that occurs between text and reader, from historians who may concentrate on the nuances of a type of transaction in a particular time period, to artists working toward formal innovations enabling new modes of transaction, the term “transaction” can provide a bridge between disciplines. For our 12th annual conference, we invite graduate students of all disciplines to submit critical papers and creative works that address transaction as a broad concept, considering both its ubiquity and its discipline-specific areas of study.
We schedule approximately 15 to 20 minutes for each presentation. For critical presentations, please submit a 250-word abstract to [email protected]. For creative presentations, please send an email with a small sample of your creative work (.mp3, .jpeg, .tif, .avi, .mp4, or .doc files), as well as a 250-word description of your presentation to[email protected]. We are particularly interested in creative works that are complemented by an explanation of how the author/artist sees his/her work contributing to critical discussions about transactions. Submissions are due by January 15, 2014.
Scholars might consider the following areas of interest:
--Commodity: market exchange, deals, contracts, negotiations, capital, e-commerce, value and labor, surplus
--Space: marketplace, online spaces, contact zones, ecology, private and public spheres
--Emotion and Affect: interpersonal exchange, trauma, community and rupture
--Psychology: analytical models; psychoanalysis: drives and desire, ideal-ego, ego-ideal and identification, jouissance, transference and intersubjectivity, gaze
--Body, Gender, and Sexuality: pornography, prostitution, disability, virtual bodies, gender performativity and social activism (trans-action)
--Medicine and Biology: genetics, immunization, transplantation, prosthesis, contagion, euthanasia, commodification of medicine
--Rhetoric and Communication: transactional rhetoric; translation; dramatic and theatrical transactions; relationships between author, audience, and text
--Textuality: print culture, intertextuality, publication, circulation, culture of letters
--Globalization: global English, languages of cultural exchange, cosmopolitanism and cross-cultural transaction, global scholarship
--History and Records: colonial and postcolonial transactions, inheritance and genealogy, memory and its media, promises and temporal transactions
--Subjects and Objects of Transaction: power structures, slavery and trafficking, animals and animality, marriage, transaction as tool
--Artist and Audience: collaboration, confession, expression, directionality of transaction, aesthetics in cross-cultural transactions
--Exclusion and Excess: leftovers, transactional gains and losses, black market, accessibility
CFP 2013: Considering Relevance
SUNY Albany 11th Annual English 2013 Graduate Conference: Considering Relevance
March 8-9, 2013
Keynote Speakers: Ashley Dawson (CUNY Graduate Center), Jill Magi (Goddard College, Columbia College Chicago, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago)
When we are confronted with questions of “relevance,” we often make quick evaluations about the timeliness of a particular mode of thought or approach as it relates to the work we do today. Concepts of relevance not only play a major role in the way we conceive of and practice academic inquiry but also function as wider and more fundamental elements of political, ethical, and historical discourse beyond academic and institutional venues. While the increasing specializations of disciplines encourage us to consider relevance as already evident, this conference invites participants to think of relevance as a normative and historically determined concept. Changes in relation to crises and contradictions are often seen as occurring beyond the accepted boundaries of relevance as a particular field of study has constructed them. This conference invites scholars and students to explore this—often unstated—relation between crisis and relevance with an eye to further defining and extending the current interdisciplinary trend in the humanities and social sciences. We aim to encourage an open articulation and theorization of the notion of relevance that is both imaginatively and historically informed and that self-consciously accounts for its own relevance inside and outside the current fields of academic inquiry and artistic production.
Multiple crises relating to education, economy, ecology, and the political climate, among others, press us to consider the role that conceptions of relevance—new and old—play inside and outside of our academic communities. With these particular crises in mind, we hope to build on previous theories which allow us to examine, critique, and recognize the stated and unstated constructions of relevance as having both a history and a (precarious) future. We hope, by bringing together the threads of this conversation, to outline the historical and intellectual conditions required for a realization or articulation of new conceptions of relevance. Therefore, this conference aims to increase interdisciplinary collaboration and speak to broader crises and concerns in the world at large. We envision a collective rethinking of the notion of relevance and its connection to crisis in direct relation to the work we do. We are specifically interested in presenters and scholars who invest in the stakes and crises surrounding their work and its larger impact in professional and public discourses. In this way, this conference is a step in trying to assert the relevance of relevance itself as a normative category that continually establishes grounds for the work we do as both scholars and citizens.
For our 11th Annual Conference, we invite graduate students of any discipline to consider the applications and effects of relevance. We schedule approximately 15 to 20 minutes for each presentation. For research or critical presentations, please submit a 250-word abstract to[email protected] by January 18, 2013.
We are also seeking graduate student artists to submit proposals. The conference will offer an opportunity for presentations from creative writers, visual artists, performers, audio/video or digital artists, and any students actively engaged in other creative media, which would ideally include discussion about how your work deals with issues of relevance. We schedule approximately 15 to 20 minutes for each presentation. Please send an e-mail with a small sample of your creative work (.mp3, .jpeg, .tif, .avi, .mp4, or .doc files) as well as a 250-word description of your presentation to [email protected] by January 18, 2013. Video projectors, computers, speakers, and other technologies can be arranged to supplement presentations.
Possible considerations might include:
• Body, Sexuality, and Gender: changing notions of normalcy and deviance
• Image and Text: visual representation, changing nature of advertising
• Reading, Writing, and Teaching Practices: texts read and written in and outside the university classroom, pedagogical concerns
• Critical Methodologies and Specialization: academic jargon and mainstream language
• Canon and Value: dictating high literary value or "truth"
• Creative Arts: art in culture and academia, marginalizations, categorizations and genre
• Art Markets: commodification of art, institutionalization of creative art, the “Program” era
• Theory and Relevance: frames and the identification of importance
• Scientific Relevance: paradigms and scientific crises; science il/literacy and its accessibility to the public; public, private, and government
• Technology: history and practice
• Interdisciplinarity: finding legitimacy elsewhere, corporate model of the university
• Eco-relevance and Environmentalism: global warming and its effects, shifting conceptions of the natural, humanity’s relevance to its ecosystem
• Geography and Borders: art crossing borders, uneven development, spatial negotiations
CFP 2012: Waste
March 30th and 31st
The University at Albany English Graduate Student Organization presents its 10th annual graduate conference: WASTE
Keynote Speaker: Thierry Bardini, Université de Montréal
There are as many ways to conceptualize waste as there are ways in which waste permeates our world. It is ubiquitous; it figures into existence at every level. The history of waste is a history of equivocation, affirmation, disavowal, subsistence, persistence, inconvenience, differentiation, destruction, and decay. From the pragmatics of city sanitation to the logistics of disaster relief, from the remainders of mathematical equations to the emotive excesses of sentimental novels, the problem of “what remains” is central to the practice of academic inquiry.
For our 10th Annual Conference, we invite graduate students in any discipline to consider the challenges and productive yields of waste. Presentations are expected to be approximately 15 to 20 minutes. For research or critical presentations, please submit a 250-word abstract to [email protected] by February 15.
We also invite graduate student artists to submit proposals. The conference will offer an opportunity for creative writers, visual artists, photographers, sound artists, digital artists, and any students actively engaged in other creative media to present and discuss how their work deals with waste. In what ways is waste encountered in the artistic process? How do you materially, thematically, or conceptually address waste? Presentations are expected to be approximately 15 to 20 minutes. Please email a small sample of your creative work (.mp3, .jpeg, .tif, .avi, .mp4, or .doc files) as well as a 250 word description of your proposed presentation to [email protected] by February 15. Video projectors, computers, speakers, and other technologies can be arranged to supplement presentations.
Possible avenues for exploration may include:
-ruins and fragments, relics, monuments, artifacts
-ecology, environmentalism, conservation, recycling, reusing, eco-terrorism
-surplus value, wasted labor; toxic assets, ponzi schemes, hostile takeovers
-mathematical remainders, repeating series, infinite decimals, fractals
-the nonhuman and things; nature and matter
-bio-waste: feces, vomit, phlegm, bile, pus, dismemberment; evolution and vestigiality
-theological waste and apocalypses
-natural catastrophes, plagues, and “acts of God”
-historical and political devastation: industrialization, war, terrorism, genocide, post-colonialism
-bad tastes: camp, kitsch, porn, pop, sentimentality, pulps, and other aesthetics of “trash”
-editing and revision: new editions, unfinished works, and translations; cast-offs of canon formation and literary leftovers
-aural matter: noise, static, feedback
-figures of waste (grave-diggers, collectors, corpses, cadavers, and the undead); ruined women, prodigal sons, wayward youths and other literary archetypes
-collage, bricolage, detournement, found art, sampling, palimpsest, and other artistic recyclings
-differentiating waste: garbage, trash, refuse, debris, rubbish, jetsam and flotsam, leftovers
-waste sites: heaps, landfills, dumps, attics/basements, catacombs, battlefields, abandoned areas, fallout zones
CFP 2011: The Outlaw: Trespass, Disfigurement, Domestication
April 1-2, 2011
Keynote Speaker: Wai Chee Dimock (William Lampson Professor of English and American Studies at Yale University)
Creative Keynote Speaker: Doug Rice (Associate Professor of English at California State University, Sacramento)
“The lyricism of marginality may find inspiration in the image of the “outlaw,” the great social nomad, who prowls on the confines of a docile, frightened order.” —Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish
What is the outlaw? Today, the outlaw presents us with a number of paradoxes: politicians identify as “going rogue” while the U.S. engages in war with “rogue states”; atlases seem rigidly divided into “friend” and “enemy” while everywhere signs portend the collapse of foreign wars into the everyday by imploring their readers to “Report Suspicious Activity.” The outlaw–and its pseudonyms and cohorts: the bandit, the brigand, the criminal, and the terrorist–circulate in complex, and often contradictory, ways. For instance, the outlaw threatens the sovereign and yet is sovereignty’s possibility. Simultaneously alluring and terrorizing, the outlaw realizes and reorients desires while giving shape to national nightmares and personal terrors. What may be deviant to one is prophetic to another; while silenced as heretic and dismissed as irrational, the outlaw is also the opportunity for cultural, political, and scientific revolutions.
For our 9th Annual English Graduate Student Conference, we ask for submissions that address several trajectories. First, papers that consider how the outlaw appears thematically, figuratively, and/or historically in literature, cinema, and other media. Second, papers that renegotiate conceptual relationships of inside and outside as well as papers that address theories associated with or condemned as “outlaw.” A special panel will seek to theorize the outlawing of disciplines and provide responses and/or innovative solutions to what has been called the “crisis in the humanities.” Finally, we also are planning a creative portion of the conference and encourage creative submissions from graduate students that respond to the theme, particularly those that challenge notions of genre, performance, and poetics.
We encourage submissions from graduate students working in any field, historical period, genre, or scholarly discipline. Critical abstracts should be limited to 250-300 words; creative abstracts should include a 150-300 word description and a 2-3 page sample. Submit abstracts to: [email protected] by February 14, 2011.
Possible areas of inquiry may include, but are not limited to:
•Prostitution, outlaw sexualities, and the prohibited body
•Institutional and commercial appropriations of the outlaw
•Psychological, sociological, and statistical analyses of criminality
•The populism of the outlaw–public identification with outlaw figures
and/or the romance of the outside
•Gender: transgression, plurality, and representation
•Cultural practices of “inherent transgression” (Zizek)
•Law, legality, and legal literacy
•Sedition, exile, state subversion, and treason
•Sovereignty, animals, and technology
•Prison writing; representations of incarceration in art and literature
•The subaltern as outlaw; identity politics in relation to the law
•The rhetoric and sociology of civil disobedience
•Popular culture and spectacle
•Object-oriented philosophy and other ontologies
•Rebellion in, beyond, and across states
