Shifting Spatialities: The Dynamic Boundaries of Place and Space

Rice Graduate Symposium
October 2-3, 2009
Rice University, Houston, TX

Call For Papers
Submission Deadline: July 1, 2009

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Sharon Marcus; Professor of Literature, Columbia University

As the citizen of the nation becomes the consumer of the multinational corporation, our roles as inhabitants of space become increasingly complicated. Our literature, our faith, our bodies all speak to the different ways that we find to occupy the shifting territories of the postmodern landscape. Looking both to the past and future can help us to discover the real and imagined ways our cultures can develop in more richly and defined ways.

We anticipate work that looks at the connections between spatialities and a broad variety of disciplines, including feminism, sexuality, gender, literature, anthropology, philosophy, architecture, performance, political science, linguistics, history, physics, and mathematics.

Possible paper topics might include, but are not limited to:

• Community planning
• The role of the global corporation
• Reconfigured national boundaries
• Real and imagined communities created by literature
• Bodies, sexuality, and limits
• Performance studies and the fourth wall
• Disciplinary spaces of the academy
• Travel narratives
• Ethnic and racial boundaries
• Topologies

Keynote Speaker, Professor Sharon Marcus. Sharon Marcus specializes in nineteenth-century British and French fiction, and has taught courses on the novel, Victorian genres, narrative theory, Oscar Wilde, theories of gender and sexuality, the city in nineteenth-century literature, and the year 1857 in England and France. Her first book, Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London (University of California Press, 1999), won honorable mention for the MLA Scaglione Prize for best book in comparative literature. Her second book, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton: 2007), is appearing in French and Spanish translations. She has published articles on Trollope, Charlotte Brontë, comparative sapphism, same-sex domesticity in Victorian England, Victorian fashion plates, Rosemary's Baby, sentimentality and cosmopolitanism in the writings of Anne Frank and Hannah Arendt, and the theory and practice of rape prevention, as well as overviews of the state of the three fields in which she works: queer studies, feminist criticism, and Victorian studies. She is currently writing a book about Oscar Wilde, Sarah Bernhardt, and theatrical celebrity in the nineteenth century.

Please send proposals for panels or individual paper abstracts of 250 words or less to rice.symposium@gmail.com.