Call for Papers: Nomenclature
October 7, 2009
Call for Papers:
3rd Annual GEO Conference
“Nomenclature”
University of Maryland, College Park
March 5-6, 2010
Keynote Speaker: Tita Chico (University of Maryland), Kavita Daiya (George Washington University)
The Graduate English Organization of the University of Maryland’s Department of English invites students at Washington, D.C. area universities to submit abstracts for our third annual interdisciplinary graduate conference. “Nomenclature” seeks to interrogate the causes, conventions, and consequences of the human impulse to name, label, and categorize.
The practice of naming and labeling influences, for better or worse, how we formulate identities and regulate taxonomies. According to the Judeo-Christian tradition, marking difference among groups dates back to Adam’s God-given power and responsibility to name and classify “every living creature” (Gen. 2:19). The early modern period saw the naming of an entire land mass—the New World—and Shakespeare himself has given us that time-worn question, “What’s in a name?” More recently, the remapping of national boundaries following decolonization has called into question the strict demarcation of peoples and places.
What we choose to name an individual, group, or phenomenon constitutes our own identities in relationship to people and things outside of ourselves. But what we choose not to call someone or something is equally significant. At Harvard University, for instance, the administration’s official policy mandates that “cutbacks” be referred to as “the reallocation of funds.” Here, at the University of Maryland, statements insist that budget problems are being addressed through “furloughs” rather than “pay cuts.” While we might characterize these policies as careful and prudent advertising, the phenomenon of re-naming for the sake of palatability is not new to our time. In literature departments, scholars regularly reconsider how we refer to certain fields of study. For example, the term “post-colonialism” has given way to “oceanic” and “hemispheric” studies in order to more accurately capture the reciprocal relationships among countries and people.
Heidegger suggests that language is “the house of being,” that humans require language to “dwell” and “create.” More obliquely, Lao-tsu reminds us that “the name that can be named is not the eternal Name.” If we cannot escape the inclination to name, is it possible to operate within academia and the world at large with endless possibilities for taxonomy? Must common terms for discussion be reached? How have our taxonomies been re-oriented by the recognition of categories as artificial and accidental rather than innate and essential?
The conference committee invites proposals for fifteen-minute papers addressing the conference theme from a broad range of disciplines and theoretical backgrounds. Presentations of creative work are also welcome. Panel submissions (3-4 participants) are highly encouraged. Please limit abstracts for fifteen-minute papers to 300 words for individual abstracts and 500 words for panel abstracts. Full papers may accompany abstracts. Please include three keywords at the end of the abstract to assist panel formation.
Abstracts are due December 4, 2009 and should be e-mailed to geoconference@gmail.com. Please visit our conference website, http://mediationsconf.wordpress.com, for more details.
Nomenclature: 3rd Annual GEO Conference of the University of Maryland College Park, 5-6 March 2010.
October 7, 2009
Hello! Welcome to the official home of the annual graduate conference run by the Graduate English Organization at the University of Maryland College Park. Here you’ll find any and all pertinent information as pertaining to the conference as it comes up, as well as the official call for papers (found following this post, in its own page, and as a downloadable Word file in the box to the right), miscellany, and perhaps a random thought or two.
I won’t take up too much of your time right now. However, I would like to note the existence of this site not simply for a concentrated method of information distribution, but also to promote a certain level of academic and intellectual community. All these wonderful little tools of technology shatter previous boundaries—limiting, exclusionary boundaries. So now a conference isn’t simply a two-day affair but an entity in and of itself, which builds and expands over time, existing as beyond simply the physical. Enter this website. We here on the conference board encourage interaction through the use of comments on particular posts, or by sending us via email anything you feel is relevant to our theme which we will then, assuming agreement, post here. Some further information about this can be found in the Welcome message to the right. We encourage this level of involvement even from those not participating in the conference, certainly. We all share minds.
Check back regularly, pass along and, above all, enjoy in peace.
-Daniel
Conference Schedule.
February 13, 2009
Listed below is the two-day schedule of events for (Media)tions: Translating the Body Politic. Please note that all room numbers are located in Susquehanna Hall.
Friday – February 27th, 2009
Welcome — 1:30PM (room 2117)
Coffee, registration, meet and greet
Session 1 — 2:00-3:15PM
Panel A (room 1121): Rhetoric in Circulation: Tracing the Paths of Discourse in the Public Sphere
Heather Brown (Maryland, English) – “Creating Spaces for Abortion Trauma: Genre, Testimony, and the World Wide Web”
K. Martin Camper (Maryland, English) – “Prayer and Place: Creating Sacred Places in Virtual Spaces”
Lindsay Dunne (Maryland, English) – “Public Cure/Counterpublic Cause: the Rhetoric of Environmental Hazard in the Breast Cancer Awareness Movement(s)”
Bryan Snyder (Maryland, Undergraduate, English) – “When Political Parties Change: an Examination of Changing Moral Structure in American Politics”
Panel B (room 1117): Visualizing the Body
Patricia Fancher (Georgetown University, English) – “Life through the Lens: Cyborg Subjectivity and Cinematic Hybridity”
Maria Gigante (Maryland, English) - “The Separation of Art and Text: Fitting Frontispieces into Early Modern Science”
Amy Karp (Maryland, English) – “Life and Death in the Liminal: Jenny Schecter’s Jewish Matters and The L Word“
Naliyah Kaya (George Mason University, Sociology) – “A New Deal for New Orleans: H.R. 4048: Gulf Coast Civic Works Act”
Session 2 — 3:30-4:45PM
Panel C (room 1121): Mediating Science: The Rhetoric of Scientific Discourse
Michelle Lang Boswell (Maryland, English) – “The Question of an Exclamation: Feynman’s Style in Six Easy Pieces“
Daniel J. DioGuardi (Maryland, English) – “‘Where Phenomena Tend to Collide’: Anzaldúa, Individuation, and (Sub)conscious (Border) Spaces”
Nathan Kelber (Maryland, English) – “From Archimedes to Robinson: The Rhetoric of the Infinitesimal”
Katherine Young (Maryland, English) – “Mary Anning’s Monster: Literature, Spectacle, and the Plesiosaur”
Panel D (room 1117): Pyrrhic Victories: Attempts to Narrativize the Unsayable of War
Lew Gleich (Maryland, English) – “Narrating the Simulacrum of War: Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried and Courtney Angela Brkic’s Stillness“
James Hodapp (Maryland, English) – “Making the Present Livable: Positionality and the Unsayable in David Grossman’s See Under: Love and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried“
Porter Olsen (Maryland, English) – “Interruption War Interpretation: Arresting Narratives in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Seiffert’s The Dark Room“
Keynote — 5:00PM (room 1120)
Dr. Jonathan Gil Harris, Associate Professor of English, George Washington University
Mock Turtle Reading Series — 7:00PM
A reading by Maryland MFA students at Wonderland Ballroom in Columbia Heights, Washington, DC
Continental breakfast and coffee
Panel E (room 1117): Witnessing Mediation
Alexis Chema (Georgetown University, English) – “Coleridge’s Epistemology of the Sickbed”
D. Seth Horton (Maryland, English) – “When We Pigs Awaken”
Jeremy Metz (Maryland, Comparative Literature) - “When the experience of trauma is mediated by a complicit witness: Instabilities in literary witness positions and their implications for the ethical reader”
Laina Saul (George Mason University, Cultural Studies) – “Djamila Boupacha, Terrorist/Victim/Sign: Becoming Human Through Torture, Discourse and at the Boundaries of the Nation-State”
Panel F (room 1119): Technology, Abolitionism, and the Nineteenth Century Body Politic
Meaghan Fritz (Georgetown University, English) – “Uncle Tom Mania and the Body Politic”
Stacy Nall (Georgetown University, English) – “A Government of Future Citizens: Race, Gender and the Child in The Anti-Slavery Alphabet“
Cheryl Spinner -(Georgetown University, English) – “Competing Electricities: Nineteenth-Century Abolitionism and the Politics of ‘It’”
Sarah Workman (Georgetown University, English) – “Self-Shaping and World-Making: Angelina Grimké Weld’s Performances of Suffering”
Keynote — 11:30AM (room 1120)
Dr. Zita Nunes, Associate Professor of English and Director of Comparative Literature, University of Maryland
Lunch — 12:30-1:30PM (room 1121)
Join your colleagues for a catered lunch from Lebanese Taverna
Session 4 — 1:45-3:00PM
Panel G (room 1119): Poetry and (National) Identity
Lisa Kirch (Maryland, English) – “Pain and Potential within a Female Minstrel’s Song; The Triumph of Voice in Matilda Betham’s ‘The Lay of Marie’”
Rob Wakeman (Maryland, English) – “So Little Forgetting: The Robert Burns Memorial in Albany, N.Y.”
Amy Washburn (Maryland, Women’s Studies) – “Representing the ‘Real’ IRA: The Use of ‘Shout-outs’ in Eavan Boland’s ‘A Cynic at Kilmainham Gaol’ and Roseleen Walsh’s ‘On Commedagh Hill’ as a Form of Irish Republican Remembrance”
Jennifer Williams (Maryland, English) – “A Courtly Love for the Twenty-First Century: Cyrus Cassell’s More Than Peace and Cypresses“
Keynotes Announced!
December 11, 2008
The GEO Conference committee is pleased to announce the keynote speakers for (Media)tions: Translating the Body Politic!
Dr. Jonathan Gil Harris (George Washington University) will kick-off the conference with an address at 5 PM on Friday February 27.
Day Two will feature an address at 11 AM by the University of Maryland’s own Dr. Zita Nunes.
Dr. Harris is Professor of English at George Washington University. His fifth book, Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare, was published by University of Pennsylvania Press this fall.
Dr. Nunes is Associate Professor of English and the Director of the Comparative Literature Program at the University of Maryland. Her new book Cannibal Democracy:Race and Representation in the Literature of the America was released by University of Minnesota Press earlier this year.
We here at the committee are thrilled to welcome these accomplished and respected scholars to the conference.
Call for Papers and Panels.
November 6, 2008
(Media)tions: Translating the Body Politic
An Inter-Disciplinary DC Area Graduate Conference
Organized and Hosted by the University of Maryland Graduate English Organization
Deadline Extended–Abstract Submissions Due: 15 January 2009
Conference Date: 27-28 February 2009
Keynote(s): TBA
Our conference investigates the relationship between social discourses of the arts and sciences, social theory, and the human experience:
- In what ways are we affected by our use of the arts and sciences to translate our socio-political consciousness and experiences?
- In what ways have these discourses informed our status as subjects, as citizens, as humans?
- How have new media, new knowledge, and new audiences changed the way that we perceive or experience the body politic?
- Are there ethical limits on the ways we mediate these experiences?
- In what ways has the relationship evolved between these media (broadly construed as all aspects of transmission and publication) and our experiences?
To answer these and other questions, we invite the submission of panels and papers (250-350 word abstracts) from graduate students in the DC area. All fields, disciplines, and periods are welcome, and the presentations need not be in the traditional paper format-the use of film, music, visual arts or other media are encouraged. Panel submissions (3-4 people) are highly encouraged.
Possible topics include but are not limited to:
- Media and the discourse of power
- Literature (or other media) and aesthetics of war
- The rhetoric of science in the public sphere
- Artistic scientists and scientific artists
- The history of the novel
- (Auto)biography, self as mediator
- Issues of canonization
- Identity politics: gender studies, colonial discourse, race theory, etc.
- Nationalist literatures and discourses
- Propaganda
- Censorship
- Satire and the ethics of representation
- Technology as mediator
- Social discourse in the age of globalization
- The rise (and fall?) of print culture
- Film and literature
Please submit abstracts of 250-350 words for panels and papers to: geoconference@gmail.com by 15 January 2009. Please articulate in your abstract how your presentation fits within the conference theme.
