Annual English Graduate Conference (GradCon)

Where and how does one experience wonder? At the Met Cloisters, the twelve-foot tall tapestry, The Unicorn Rests in a Garden, elicits wonder from afar. The textile’s marvelous content, observable and laborious process of creation, and its relation to its physical environment all invite encounters with wonder. Since Greek antiquity, wonder has been concerned with developments of knowledge and artistic production; associated with philosophical traditions of teaching, learning and writing; applied to objects and treasures; linked to response and affect; and depicted as curiosity, awe, uncertainty, astonishment, disgust and horror.

If wonder can be object and response within a larger network of knowledge production, how do objects of wonder fit into networks or webs of the wondrous? In Wonders and the Order of Nature Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park write, “…the early modern culture of wonders, serv[es] as the nodes of a thickly cross-hatched network of commerce, correspondence, and tourism” (265). Virginia Woolf envisioned wonder as natural and material: “Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.” These frameworks of wonder are both present in the tapestry; its vibrant intricacies are developed from a single thread into a complete scene, exemplifying the endless ways in which wonder is process, affect and object.

The Latin root of text comes from textus, meaning “style, tissue of a literary work, lit. that which is woven, web, texture.” Again, this metaphor connects writing, thinking, and teaching to a material, physical act, or object. Further traces of this idea can be found in disparate topics such as Indigenous spirituality, Greek mythology, and literary criticism. The spider’s web, the World Wide Web, and theories of intertextuality help visualize the often-invisible systems of creation that produce wonder.

This conference welcomes projects that engage with conceptions of webs and wonder, including interdisciplinary studies of networks, matrices, and patterns across media. Other projects may cover mobility and movement (environmental, national, physical, virtual reality– who and what can be moved) or historical studies of and/or representations of urban development and migration. Additionally, wonder as a cognitive or emotional response and wonder as physical and tangible objects of connectivity are also appreciated. We further invite studies of genre/style, sequels/prequels, disciplines/fields, and/or canons, the life of a text or object/circulation of knowledge, work on the archive, the whisper network, or #MeToo movement.

Keynote: Kyla Wazana Tompkins, University at Buffalo

Date: February 28, 2025

Location: Stony Brook University (Main Campus)

Enclosure is as much origin-story as it is globally contested condition. Critical accounts positioning the act of enclosure as integral to the root-systems of global capitalism, environmental catastrophe and precarity often refer to the historical effort by landowners to do away with the commons in favor of legally and politically recognized enclosures. Transforming sustainable agricultural practices into sites of energy-production primed for capital development, the early-modern enclosure movement gave rise to what Robert P. Marzec characterizes as “a model of the human that took as its direct enemy an environment thought to be threatening because it had yet to be properly secured, privatized, and cultivated” (18). To be enclosed, however, need not be a foreclosure of the subject, a point which Saidiya Hartman emphasizes in her 2019 book, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. An exploration of young Black women’s experiences in early twentieth-century cities such as New York and Philadelphia, Hartman argues that, accompanying the surveillance, criminalization and stigma attendant to these “new enclosure[s]” opportunities emerged for revolutionary modes of intimacy (24).
 
Such an insight exemplifies the ambiguous character of enclosure within modernity. Whether placing emphasis on the more potentially redemptive aspects or hewing nearer to its corrosive effects, enclosure’s appearance within a diverse range of critical accounts and artistic mediations speaks to its staying-power as a relevant line of inquiry.
 
This conference welcomes presentations interrogating the definition, demarcation, and disintegration of enclosures. How does one approach spatial, temporal, aesthetic, or figurative enclosures? In what ways can resistance to enclosure preserve other forms and frameworks of community? How have global discourses of enclosure influenced the politics of mass incarceration and the carceral-industrial complex? How are non-human agents engaged in, resistant, or subjected to issues of enclosure? How can art bolster or undermine the act of enclosing? How might we examine the relationship between enclosure, excess, and alienation? In what ways are exile, communion, and/or re-entry bound to ideas of enclosures? How can we employ concepts of enclosure to think through issues of the nation-state, displacement, colonization, migration, and refuge? How have global discourses of enclosure influenced the politics of mass incarceration and the carceral-industrial complex? How might technology both reinforce and destabilize material and metaphorical examples of enclosure?

Keynote: Rachel Adams, Columbia University

Date: February 23, 2024

Location: Stony Brook University (Main Campus)

While attention is aspirational for some, it can be destructive for others. The practice of attending suggests the purposeful direction of the mind in an effort to attract, call, draw, arrest, or fix the object of attention. Narratives of seeking, evading, obtaining, rejecting, and desiring attention are pervasive in the study of literature, gender and sexuality, race, history, sociology, psychology, media, communications, philosophy, ecology, disability, class, art, and more. From Winston’s interactions with the surveillance state and subaltern resistance in George Orwell’s 1984 to the flourishing of a viral social media lexicon of terms and hashtags — Karens, OK Boomers, #FreeBritney, #Metoo — bids for visibility have resulted in fame, notoriety, infamy, or, when such bids fail, anonymity.  How can scholarship in the fields mentioned above help us contend with these multifaceted narratives of attention?

This conference welcomes presentations that interrogate positive, negative, and ambivalent associations of what it means to give or elicit attention. What does it mean to pay or be paid attention? What happens when we pay attention to something new? What happens when we stop paying attention? What effects result from one being aware or unaware of the attention one receives? How do/can/should we think about the relationship between the observer and the observed? What characteristics, actions, and ideas have garnered attention in various contexts? How do we define fame? How have online personas and personal “brands” changed the way we seek and receive attention? How do we define privacy? Is privacy a privilege, a right, or something else? How can one preserve privacy in the information age?   How do channels of communication influence attention getting and attention spans? Who wants attention? Who does not want attention? Who gets it, and who does not? 

We invite abstracts for papers that explore the tensions and contradictions within narratives of attention, fame, notoriety, and privacy. Presentations are welcome from but not limited to the fields of literature, critical studies, art, history, film, theatre, music, philosophy, and the humanities broadly. 

Keynote: Will Scheibel, Syracuse University

Date: February 17, 2023

Location: Stony Brook University (Main Campus)

Memory is often hazy, complex and difficult to define or describe. Yet memory is ever shaping our pasts, presents and futures on individual and collective levels. From Barbra Streisand’s performance of the hit song from the musical Cats to the device you are reading this CFP on, memory is embedded in everything that we do and encounter.  Narratives of mythic or even imagined pasts may serve as the basis for exclusionary rhetoric and policies, creating new, often violent memories, particularly in times of heightened political and social tensions related to race, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, and disability, to name a few. However, attending to memories—be they collective or personal, partial, recovered, or obscured—has become an essential part of rerouting/rerooting prevailing mythologies and inspiring change. Memory allows for grappling with the past, and offers paths to alternative futures that imagine a more inclusive and sanguine time to come.  How can literature, philosophy, film, television, media, and the arts help us to confront the different  concerns and dimensions of memory?

This virtual conference welcomes presentations that interrogate contours, definitions, and experiences of memory. How does memory shape the world and our relationships with it? What are memory’s mediums and conditions, its costs and its risks? What are the ethics of memory? How do memories and time interact, and how do we differentiate between past, present, and future? What influence do former dreams or ideas of the future have on culture? What are the ways that individuals and communities embody memory (or forgetting)? How are collective memories shaped and understood?  What histories can be crafted from memory and how might memories resist history? To what extent has technology shifted or altered the way we interact with memory?

We invite abstracts for papers that explore memory, forgetting, and futurity in all of their formulations and proposed reformulations: cultural, social, individual, cognitive, technological, political, and beyond. Presentations are welcome from but not limited to the fields of literature, critical studies, art, history, film, music, philosophy, and the humanities broadly.

Keynote: Edgar Garcia, University of Chicago

Date: February 24-25, 2022

Location: Online