Call for Sessions: BABEL's 2nd Biennial Meeting

The time draws near -- December 15th, to be exact -- for session proposals for the 2nd biennial meeting of the BABEL Working Group, "cruising in the ruins: the question of disciplinarity in the post/medieval university," to be held in Boston from 20-23 September 2012, and co-hosted by Northeastern University, Boston College, and M.I.T. If you are interested in submitting only an individual paper, don't worry -- shortly after we have assembled all of the finalized sessions, we will issue another call for individual papers, to be submitted to organized sessions or just as individual papers [the next deadline for submissions will likely be in mid- to late March]. We've gathered an exciting line-up of featured speakers -- Jane Bennett, Jeffrey Cohen, Carolyn Dinshaw, David Kaiser, Marget Long, Lindy Elkins-Tanton and Sans façon -- who cover a broad spectrum of disciplines and fields, from medieval studies to physics to planetary geology to political philosophy to architecture to public art to photography, and who have been asked to consider the possibility of new friendships (intellectual and otherwise) across and within local knowledges. We are hoping for a raucous and felicitous convergence of bodies of knowledge and singular voices to help us consider: what happens both deep within, but also, beyond and after disciplines? What happens when we re-sound our disciplinary wells, while also, inevitably, bumping into each other and occasionally hooking up, like Democritus’s atoms, with our disciplinary Others? We're hoping to consider (and dream) together what the “uni-” in “university” and “universe” might mean; what the “after” in “after inter-disciplinarity” might portend; what misfit heterotopias might be possible in a new multiversity; what the “cruising” in “cruising in the ruins” might invite. For more details about the meeting, and where to send session proposals, go here: http://blogs.cofc.edu/babelworkinggroup/2011/07/03/the-second-biennial-babel-conference-20-23-september-2012-boston/ For a glance at the program, with asbtracts, from our first biennial meeting, go here: http://www.siue.edu/babel/BABELAustinConference_Program.htm Best, Eileen -- Eileen A. Joy, Assoc. Professor Dept. of English Language and Literature Southern Illinois University Edwardsville Peck Hall, Room 3206 Edwardsville, IL 62026-1431 (618) 650-3971 http://www.siue.edu/~ejoy Lead Ingenitor, The BABEL Working Group http://www.babelworkinggroup.org/