University of St. Thomas English and Art History graduate programs will hold an interdisciplinary conference

Call for Papers
University of St. Thomas
English Graduate Conference
Friday, April 25, 2014

Please forward this message to your graduate students – a CFP poster is attached. Thank you,

The University of St. Thomas English and Art History graduate programs will hold an interdisciplinary conference on Friday, April 25, 2014.

While papers addressing any aspect of literature, visual arts, and culture will be considered, we particularly welcome proposals for papers exploring the topic of Visualizing the Past/Imagining the Future.

·         How do conceptions of the past or future inform and/or constrain the process of literary or artistic production?

·         How have artists and writers imagined the future in utopian or dystopian terms?

·         In what ways have literary or historical eras (e.g., the “dark ages” or Romanticism) been idealized or demonized by writers or artists of later eras?

·         In what ways is the practice of literary or art history promoted and/or constrained by conceptions of “truthiness” or other aspects of postmodern culture?

·         How are historic conceptions of time (e.g., apocalypse, millennialism, geologic time, periodization) created and/or expressed in literary and artistic texts?

·         How might non-human and manufactured environments of the future construct or be constructed by literary and visual texts?

·         In what ways does the narrative of memory affect the construction of language, communities, societies, and cultures?

·         How do digital technologies [re]shape conceptions of the past and/or the future?

·         How may literature and the visual arts mold the future concept of the human in the wake of social, cultural, and technological transformations?

We encourage analyses of literary, artistic, architectural, cultural, cinematic, digital, and/or other textualities.

Email two-page (maximum) proposals for individual presentations or for panels of three to all members of the conference program committee:

Alexis Easley, maeasley@stthomas.edu,

Heather Shirey, hmshirey@stthomas.edu,

and Marty Warren, mlwarren@stthomas.edu,

by March 15, 2014. Final papers should take 15 minutes (20 minutes maximum) to present.